Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
Say more about this please
Comment · 2 years ago
they’re junk food-y visuals too. i don’t know how to describe it beyond looking like a cross between fisher-price and a light dose of shrooms.
Comment · 3 years ago
why'd this get downvoted? at least some of the countries there have populations who are vastly less values-compatible with Good Things we believe in. ceteris paribus we should expect more good from the marginal person being born in Europe or the Americas rather than the global south or many parts of Asia. most of the countries in those areas who are friendly to America and our principles have declining birthrates too so we should exclude those and hope they continue to grow. we also want to ensure that America remains the 800lb gorilla in terms of both military and economic power and population growth is a pretty good way to do that.
Comment · 3 years ago
this wouldn't actually fix anything because that's not how politics works. politicians set constraints that maximize their PR points then the job of everyone with a brain is left to scramble for a solution. they also don't actually care about preserving encryption and they generally don't care about collateral damage unless said damage has enough clout to make trouble.
Comment · 3 years ago
Neumann still retains an incredible level of confidence and respect from many of the people who know him. never met the man personally but it's kind of a trip. even from people who i suspect are less clouded by whatever world-class charisma he works. i'm not sure what's true and not but i'm also not surprised he's the keynote.
Comment · 3 years ago
scale. producing that level of return on that amount of capital is nigh on impossible. this makes them structurally worse investors, combined with a fixation on bubbles and unfortunate timing.
Comment · 3 years ago
i'm glad they're happy but that sounds actually terrible. infinitely worse than living on a large plot of land with trees and a garden, having a nice shop to work in, a comfortable home office, a spacious kitchen, plenty of space for cars. i honestly can't see how people prefer this; i am assuming at this point it's cope and/or people who are trying to gaslight everyone into preferring it for policy/environmental/political reasons.
Comment · 3 years ago
not particularly, no. while the "boomers ruined the economy" trope isn't all right, neither is it all wrong. they effectively mortgaged much of the future value of the country and extracted it.

now "old folks" in question are demanding a lavish retirement at the expense of me and those who are currently young despite the fact that when they funded something similar for their grandparents, the proportional burden was radically lower. a society that would significantly burden the future of its young (and therefore its own future) to cash out the olds smacks of a ponzi scheme and is hideously distorted.

what's more, elder care sucks dollars from investing in interesting industries (colonizing space, growing our industrial base, new computing technologies) to mindless nonsense. instead, those dollars will go to building bingo halls.

Comment · 3 years ago
you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false. sometimes it's for the better (in America, we have many well-educated immigrants from India and China). sometimes it's for the worse (see Europe's struggles with uneducated muslim immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East).

importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.

it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.

Comment · 3 years ago
this is probably half of what shodan is used for lmao
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Theoretically could be considered union-busting. But since the company was just acquired (likely sold due to poor performance and almost certainly being reorganized) there is very good plausible deniability.
Comment · 3 years ago
productivity is what feeds and powers the country. it's amazing how many people forget that no amount of financial engineering will permanently abstract the physical output of goods and services countries produce. there's a line between PE vultures juicing the marginal penny and just totally discarding productivity.
Comment · 3 years ago
no, this is a lousy analogy because there is a clear harm to others in the case of theft. we've tried regulating other difficult to regulate things where the harm is unclear or indirect (drugs being a good example) to no avail.

your piracy example is better. consider that it's the rise of more convenient options (netflix and spotify) not some effective policy that curtailed the prevalence of piracy.

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