wesselbindt

I haven't. Could we fast forward to the part where you explain why you think it's not a good proxy measure?

To me it seems like a perfectly sound proxy measure of reliability. Why do you believe otherwise?

Agreed, the quality of the product should speak for itself. We've got people saying they're unreliable, and we've got people saying they're reliable, and that's true for literally every car manufacturer on the planet, so this doesn't tell us much. Anecdotal stuff aside, there's studies done on these things, thankfully, and Tesla consistently ranks poorly. See for example this one (this is just the first one that popped up when I googled "car reliability study", it's probably better if you find your own sources):

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...

> governments can handle long term thinking and capitalists can't

I don't think anyone is arguing against the long term planning capabilities of capitalists. The disagreement is about whether their plans are beneficial to society.

For example, take the case of the aggressive marketing for baby formula that nestle carried out in the third world. Very forward thinking long term strategy, and innovative too: Other baby formula vendors were not focussing on these nations. The outcome was twofold. On the one hand, higher profits for nestle, and on the other, increased infant mortality in the targeted nations.

Now, whether that outcome was desirable is entirely up for debate. Me, personally, I'm not a huge fan of infant mortality, but to each their own. What is not up for debate is that nestle engaged in some effective long term strategizing.

I can't speak for the parent post of course, but what I think they might mean is this: social democracy eventually devolves into neoliberalism (or worse), which, as you rightly point out, is geared towards making life much, much worse for the many to the benefit of a shrinking few.

To see some examples of this, look at the arguably social democratic Keynesian US from the fifties, and where they're at now. Similarly for the United Kingdom. Labour used to fight for social democratic policies, and since the advent of "New Labour" (Thatcher's greatest victory), they're essentially a right wing party. For a much more harrowing example, look at Allende in Chile and the US sponsored coup by Pinochet.

In general what you see is that the social democratic status of a state is an unstable one. Roughly speaking, the people who would benefit from neoliberal policies happen to have a lot of money with which they can and do influence politics. There's campaign funds, lobbying, but much more importantly owning the media[1]. Propaganda is incredibly powerful (we are not immune), and it has been used successfully time and again to get people to vote against their own interests, such as abolishing social democratic practices.

[1] In the case of Chile, and for example Indonesia, the mechanism is much more violent, but the principle the same. Capital is spent to successfully influence politics in favor of capital.

Since you're asking, yes they are. Johnson is a right wing populist, and Liz Truss recently spoke at a far right conference, complaining about the deep state thwarting her plan. They're Trump without the funny accent.

This happens in the US too [1,2,3]. In fact, regarding freedom of the press, they rank 55th in the world, well behind the UK, which ranks 23rd [4]. And if you think Trump is anything but the standard neoliberal order accelerated, I've got a bridge to sell you. For example look at the Laken Riley act. A blatant and complete teardown of judicial order (punishment for being _suspected_ of crimes), and 58 democrats helped pass it. Trump is par for the course, he's just a bit rude about it.

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/10/texas-ut-lecturer-ar...

[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240425-more-than-100...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

Ah yep, of course! Thanks!

> you find out you need some caching here, then there

Forgive my ignorance, but how do ORMs help with adding caching? Or are you implying they obviate or reduce the need for caching?

I'm kind of wondering where the "mixed experience levels" part comes from. What is it about more homogeneously skilled teams that makes them less susceptible to the productivity boost that statically typed languages give in large code bases?

> Where are the Democrats on all this?

It's a big club...

> LGBT ideology

You sound like you like this digital book burning.

Alrighty. I'm still really keen to find out what metrics you personally care about.

> It produces steady progress on most any important metric

Some metrics I care about are income equality, homelessness, school shootings, level of education. What are the metrics you care about that you see improving?

> Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior.

I'm sure it's also superior to the feudal system and hunter-gatherer systems. The Soviet system has been gone for three decades, I don't see why we would care to compare the current system to the effects of a system operating in a vastly different economic and political reality, more than 30 years ago.

> Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is.

Well sure, that's a truism. That doesn't preclude the existence of realistic more effective or healthy systems.

Do you consider the current state of things healthy? By what metric?

Unless they get bailed out by the government, or get tax breaks, or do mass layoffs. All of which seem to happen a lot.

That's a fair point. But I do think it's worth acknowledging this: When the output of a LLM coincides with the views of the US state department, our gut reaction is that that's just what the input data looks like. When the output of an LLM coincides with the views of the state department of one of the baddies, then people's gut reaction is that it must be censorship.

When ChatGPT first came out I got a kick out of asking it whether people deserve to be free, whether Germans deserve to be free, and whether Palestinians deserve to be free. The answers were roughly "of course!" and "of course!" and "oh ehrm this is very complex actually".

All global powers engage in censorship, war crimes, torture and just all-round villainy. We just focus on it more with China because we're part of the Imperial core and China bad.

I wish they would elaborate a bit more on each single point. I'm quite happy about docker, so I'm especially interested when someone has a negative opinion about it. But here I feel like there's no meat to this article.

He is not stupid, and operates within the same broad cultural framework as we do. It's the latter.

Not me, I wasn't born into wealth.

It's entirely anecdotal, but in my experience in academia (which consisted of 4 years of post-master's PhD), I've seen this happen exactly 0 times.

For profit? I don't understand what's complicated about this.

The question this article seems to ask is "is the world becoming insurable while maintaining a profit margin?", not "is the world becoming uninsurable?" These are different questions, with different answers.

Just because a bus stop already has a broken window does not make it ok to smash in another.

> If Israel were acting like the Nazis, there wouldn't be any Palestinians left in Gaza.

This is literally the "if the holocaust were a genocide, how come there's still jews" take. Please go and get a grip.

> If genocide was a goal of any of the Israeli leadership, they abjectly failed

This take is incredibly callous. Suppose 8% of everyone you gets killed. This is a shockingly brutal thing to happen to a population. Aside from that you're wrong on a factual level. The "in part" part of the '51 convention is there precisely so people don't say "there's still Jews left so technically the Holocaust wasn't a genocide". The holocaust was a genocide, and this is a genocide (yes, "is", they're still dropping bombs on a population half of which is under 18). There's a reason the relevant cases haven't been thrown out of the ICJ and ICC.

By conservative estimates (see the 2024 Khatlib paper in the Lancet), roughly 7--9% of the population of Gaza will perish as a result of the actions of Israel on the strip. Many more will flee. According to UN, clearing the rubble in Gaza will take 15 years. That's just clearing the rubble, not rebuilding the damaged buildings, which is about 66% of the total.

There are some clear indications that the intention of the Israeli government is to destroy in whole, or in part, the Palestinian people, for example by killing members of the group, or inflicting upon it conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.

There's a wealth of quotes from high ranking officials, going all the way up to the Knesset, stating almost exactly that. One quote I think of from time to time is "Erase them, their families, mothers and children." given in a motivational speech directed at the IDF.

Given that this is their intention (and I have every reason to believe it is), I'd say that this has been a pretty successful affair for Israel. Sure, Jews worldwide (including Israel) are much less safe now than they were two years ago, but the Israeli government does not give me the impression that this is at all their goal.

So I know he's the CEO at SpaceX, but doesn't that just mean he pays people to do the engineering? In my view this makes someone about as much a genius engineer as hiring a plumber makes me a master plumber.

> his engineering genius

I'm not being argumentative, but I've never really seen this sentiment before. What has he done to make you feel he's an engineering genius?