HourglassFR

I don't get what the author is trying to do here. I mean he complains that talking about the limit of a sequence is too asbstract and unfamiliar to most people so the explaination is not satisfaying. But then names drop the notion of an Archimedean group and introduces with a big ol' handwave the hyperreals to solve this very straightforward highschool math problem…

Now don't get me wrong, it is nice and good to have blogs presenting these math ideas in a easy if not rigorous way by attaching them to known concept. Maybe that was the real intend here, the 0.99… = 1 "controversy" is just bait, and I am too out of the loop to get the new meta.

Have you met humans?

> Melenchon […] started as a Trostkist

So did more than half of the socialist party elit (elephant du PS), even freaking Cambadelis, are you suggesting he’s far left to ?

> against the capitalist system

Well yes, almost by definition of being on the left I would argue.

> So if you think Le Pen is extreme on one side then Melenchon has to be equally extreme on the other side.

No, this is a false equivalence. I mean the far-left as a political position does exist in France, but it is not represented by Melenchon who is still largely a socialist, although the actual socialist party has significantly shifted rightward in the 10's so there is a perception issue there.

Elections are not, and should not, be the be-all end-all of a functionning democraty. Otherwise you just have an elective aristocracy.

And to be clear, I'm not saying pure polling driven policy is the solution, but saying politician should outright ignore them because not legally binding is a very weird stance.

> You are attacking the wrong target. You are missing the big picture.

This is rich comming from someone putting Melenchon, basically an old school socialist (in the werstern Europe sense), in the same bag as Le Pen and Zemmour who are as far-right as it gets in Europe.

I agree that the situation is not very readable, but at least let's try to have a point of view consistent with the political history of the last few decades.

I would ass a fourth reason: health is a very much a public (as in collective) issue, not a sum of individual medical problems. Something that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant ethos of how to deal with problems in america in the past 50 years or so.

> So, he is an author that has a track record of understanding a thing or two about money.

On the contrary, while he is indeed a good author and has written highly enjoyable fictions (well, heavy on the nerdy side but this is HN after all so I think a lot of us have no problem with that), his understanting of how money and knowledge work on a societal level is quite frankly laughable. It is deeply rooted in the californian ideology and very naïve. But it still good fun, and it doesn't take itself to seriously.

> I’d much prefer the free market approach where there are multiple actors each making different bets on future demand than some overarching rule about how future demand should be planned for (thats how we get famines).

Interestingly, food production is heavely planned through regulation, subsidies and incentives in most countries precisely because the free market cannot be trusted with such a sensitive matter. Famines cause riots and that's bad for buisness.

To be fair, being considered a threat to national security and held as a pariah for having communist ideas is hardly a recent development in the US.

Not quite 2022, but yeah I was maintaining a token ring based network for some subway at my last gig in 2019. As far as I know, no work is done on it now but the subway-car using the system are schedule to run for at least another decade so another bugfix release of the networking firmware is not entirely out of the question.

> I couldn't shake the feeling that I was picking up the check for everybody else. I was paying very high taxes to essentially finance crazy government overreach, only to later lose the value of what's remaining to inflation due to all the money printing.

But you just said that the job you had overpaid you anyway so I don't really understand your point here.

I have absolutly no inside knowledge but my guess is that the loop and the vehicules inside it are more akin to a mini railway network with weird trains than roads with cars. As such the regulations are not the same and in particular the automatic features of the cars are not considered railway safe.

That's not ironic at all. There are less inequalities in Europe than Asia, at least in this century.

The more radical theory I've comme across is that Capitalism is always in crisis. It is not bad step or a shortcoming of some kind but rather a fundamental feature. Capitalism works best in crisis because it is more inventive an flexible, it re-invents itself to endure the chaos it creates, may that be social unrest, environmental degradation, financial collapse, wars, etc.. This was Marx mistake (well, one of them at least), Capitalisme will not crumble because of its internal contradictions. The contradictions lead to crisis which only gives it more strength.

In that sense, finance is but one of the problem, which might have a central position in the current run of crisis in technical terms but only insofar as that it is the the most powerfull tool the capitalist has to extend its reach. Even if the financial system were to be sanitized overnight, it would not imply the end of crisis for Capitalism.