virissimo

His likelihood of re-offending is low because he now has a near universally bad reputation and so is much less likely to be trusted with other people's money in the first place.

Whether that means he should have a shorter sentence depends on the purpose of criminal sentences. If the purpose is punishment or deterrence, re-offense probability isn't as relevant, but if it is merely to protect others while he is put away, it is the most relevant consideration.

There absolutely is a tradeoff between defense and civilian spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model

The books of Samuel and Kings from the Hebrew Bible predate Herodotus' Histories by quite some time.

This scenario is most commonly found in prison.

The principal-agent problem is a fully general problem and is not unique to the USA.

Almost the same fraction of people speak English at home in Canada as in the US.

ChatGPT (at least earlier versions) was deliberately fine-tuned to strongly favor one side of the American culture war. See this paper for an attempt at quantifying its political bias: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/3/148.

> No self-censorship.

This is a very common belief, but I don't think it's strictly true. Sometimes people inadvertently speak what they're thinking, so an even surer way to prevent being punished for your ideas is to prevent yourself from even thinking them in the first place. It's a kind of defense-in-depth against wrongthink punishment and one I think most people understand intuitively.

Yes, the veil of ignorance (original position) is a very important idea. It doesn't come from Rawls though. Both Vickrey and Harsanyi wrote about it earlier (and perhaps better, since they didn't introduce implausible assumptions like infinite risk aversion).

Possible, but improbable, since some attributions (approximately) agree across independent sources like Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, etc...

> Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.

I think it unlikely that Ancient Athens was heavily influenced by US culture on the topic of free speech as an ideal: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/The-Athenian-i...

Discrediting Joseph McCarthy is another example of a CIA internal operation: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....

AFAICT, the author nowhere advises anyone to call themselves by the archetype names, nor do I have reason to think that it was their intent for the reader to do so.

And yet, the percentage of the population with a bachelors degree or higher isn't much different between the US and EU.

> No inflation is bad because the economy stops.

How much net inflation was there in Europe between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of WWI? Do you think "the economy stops" is a fair description of this time period?

Our nations were far less wealthy when the existing stock of nuclear power plants were built, the technology available for building them have improved since then, and the raw resources needed as their inputs aren't a constraint, so why have costs risen so much relative to what we are willing to spend on it?

Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).

On the contrary, requiring the addition of a disclaimer containing an overall evaluation of an author before correcting someone's misleading caricature of their work would be an extremely tedious community norm.

Let's be brief and accurate instead.

You contrast Rand's heroes with those of Vonnegut as if they are all CEO-types, but they also include sculptors, architects, engineers, composers, and philosophy professors. IMO, Rand and Vonnegut are much more similar than their fans would like to admit.

Not only that, but most philosophers who specialize in the philosophy of mathematics are Platonists: https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Target+facul.... IME, this is also true of working mathematicians, but much less true of physicists.

It should be noted that the veracity of that quote is contested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote

Good point. The same thing definitely happens in physics too. For example, people attributed important advances in mathematical physics (such as the mean speed theorem) to Galileo despite them having been already developed extensively in the middle ages.

> As your kids get older, it is harder and harder to give them a proper education. By the time your kids are in middle-school, subjects get harder for a parent (or pairs of parents) to cover in a way that does each subject justice.

As a kid, I attended mostly private school, but when public school-educated parents express concern that they wouldn't be able to competently teach standard middle school subjects, that sounds much more like an indictment of public schooling than of the at-home variety.

How do you know whether people you've "had to deal with" were homeschooled or not? Might that method result in selection effects?

IMO, this entire essay is misguided. There isn't anyone going around practicing Stoicism as it was practiced in Ancient Rome. Instead they take their psychological techniques (some of which are shared by Buddhism, Christianity, and cognitive behavioral therapy) such as the dichotomy of control and negative visualization and reject some of the other parts of the overall philosophy (mostly the metaphysics and similar).

Either those techniques works or they don't. If they don't work, then they should be abandoned for that reason. If they do work, the fact that Seneca had a disciple that turned bad as an adult or that Aurelius wasn't an abolitionist doesn't do anything to change that.

This is just the genetic fallacy in essay form.

On the other hand, unemployment is consistently higher in Europe than in the US (and wages are lower), so pick your poison.

The hardware exercises expect you to use a simple HDL, you write an assembler in your language of choice (I used Ruby, but others have used Python or JavaScript), and you write programs for the computer you "built" in earlier chapters using Jack (a language with Java-like syntax).

What EU country are you from where someone would be confused by another saying a proposed EU law is "unconstitutional" in the native language?

Per the first line from the "Treaties of the European Union" wikipedia article:

  The Treaties of the European Union are a set of international treaties between the European Union (EU) member states which sets out the EU's constitutional basis.

This phrasing sounds totally normal to me in English and its Portuguese equivalent.

The obvious thing you are missing is that many Europeans refer to the collection of EU treaties as a whole as a "constitution" and that most EU member states themselves have written constitutions, so there are many ways in which a proposed EU-level law could properly be said to be "unconstitutional".

The code is open source, you can find it here: https://github.com/jaysonvirissimo/os-lusiadas. Feel free to fork or just use for inspiration. My email is in the footer of the website if you'd like to discuss further.

Ah, this looks like a generalized version of a tool I made specifically to learn The Lusiads (a Portuguese epic poem). It's called MemorizeOnline and you can find it here: http://memorize.online.

Very cool project btw.