Hayvok

> This article assesses whether Hellenistic war-elephants were given alcohol before battle…Unfortunately, despite the recent rise in scholarly interest on war-elephants, this issue remains overlooked.

This is the best abstract ever.

FoundationDB was originally a startup, purchased by Apple in 2015.

Sadly —

> "The number density of primordial black holes with a mass above this cutoff [MP BH > 1.4×1017g] is far too small to produce any observable effects on the human population."

Ideally, trying to reform the government & its activities shouldn't require a team to burrow all the way down to the literal payments system & call individual balls and strikes.

But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.

I thought the article was pretty level headed. Here’s the status, here’s the future, here’s what AUKUS is doing, here’s what China is doing and is capable of doing. What smugness or jingoism were you referring to?

I actually found it refreshing to not have a “journalists’” opinions and world-view slathered all over the article. I’m smart enough to form my own opinions about things, thanks.

This is the way.

Married, 4 kids, she’s stay at home mom.

Joint checking, savings, investments, home ownership, cars, everything. I do most of the account management and planning because she hates doing it.

We have no concept of fairness in spending. If she wants something truly expensive we talk about it and how it fits in our budget. I do likewise, but in general we both kinda know what the boundaries are, and there’s zero score keeping. She probably spends 3x on herself compared to me, and I’m fine with it. I know she has the best interests of the family at heart.

Large purchases like cars are the result of weeks of research, discussion, planning, budgeting, etc.

If you mean the subsequent detonation of an ICBM in the atmosphere, I think we are in uncharted waters there. The expert discussions of what effect the atmosphere-EMP would be is fascinating/horrifying to read.

In your water example, perhaps that liter of water used to cool the datacenter is offering software to a hospital that offers life saving treatments. How will you measure the trade-off of a liter of water used one way vs. another?

Likewise, how can we distinguish between a ton of carbon emitted in the datacenter vs. a ton of carbon emitted by an airplane? Again, you might train an AI and emit one ton of carbon and that AI a save a million lives. Contrast that ton of carbon emitted with any number of frivolous airline flights by rich talking heads.

It may sound like I'm being deliberately difficult/obtuse, but this is exactly why regulation is so difficult to do well, especially in such a rapidly innovating space.

> I think we need better regulation of these companies to prevent them from doing actual damage rather than trusting them to self-regulate against hypothetical ones.

What is the actual damage you are concerned about and determined to regulate? Simply saying "environment, workers, and the economy" is so broad I can't imagine what an effective regulation would look like. How would you even word the regulation?

I think the unspoken assumption here is that China is already producing at near-maximum capacity, while the United States is barely trying and has lots of headroom.

Is the assumption correct?

I haven't been able to find a study on America's plan for local naval production capacity given such a conflict, which is kind of stunning to me. Perhaps there are classified studies.

This conflict (assuming it lasts multiple years) would play out across the Pacific, possibly offering replays of old Pacific battles from WW2. Large numbers of naval assets and expeditionary forces squaring off across millions of square miles of blue-water ocean. Lots of naval tonnage attrition.

America is either guarding it's planned production capabilities close to the chest, or they anticipate winning such a conflict quickly without the tonnage attrition I just referenced.

Or my searching skills are weak.

Population is a single, low-resolution parameter into a theoretical ship-building-capacity equation, which really needs a basket of parameters. Raw resource availability, fuel capabilities, naval training, coastline details, etc.

Great Britain historically had a fraction of the population of France and other European powers, but consistently out-produced the rest in ships and projecting naval power.

American, yes.

Can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Midwest, rural community I grew up in, people had a “better safe than sorry” attitude, and would call police on mere suspicion that you were up to no good or that something was amiss.

Even told them afterward how wrong they were, they’d probably shrug and say it was still good for the police to check.

We did night CTF (~9 pm) at our local grade school campus. Easily 40-50 kids. We just rode our bikes to the gathering. Similar rules to what this article had, except no out of bounds. We had kids making huge circuits around a nearby corn field to evade detection.

It was indeed someone of my best childhood memories.

Unfortunately it was all brought to an end because people kept calling the cops. They’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good. No property was ever damaged, the principal knew what we were up to, etc. Wholesome fun.

After the fifth time of coming home with a “the cops showed up” story, our well-meaning parents asked us to please find another game to play.

> We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

> Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%) > Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%) > Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

As someone who has lots of friends in conservative circles, these sentiments ring true. (I am surprised "health decisions / vaccine mandates" aren't in the list.)

A lot of my wife's friends are choosing to homeschool, and #2 on that list is their primary reason. They acknowledge its likely a minority of teachers engaging in that behavior, but their feeling is "it only takes one" to ruin the entire school experience for their kid, and create a ton of problems for them to deal with at home.

(Disclaimer: we homeschool for reason #1 and because my wife was homeschooled and it's a comfortable way for her to run our schedule and home.)