bbctol

I've always read Hamlet as very much about the gap between internal activities and the way they are recorded or remembered. The big joke of Hamlet is that from the outside, his story would have looked like a young prince going insane and impulsively murdering his uncle; it's only the audience that gets to hear Hamlet's soliloquies, and understand him as a sensitive, indecisive, deceptive, and patient person, who's been carefully building a case and means of revenge.

That's why his last lines are all about his fear that everyone will misinterpret what has happened, and regret that he doesn't have enough time to tell Horatio the truth. "O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,/Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!" and "So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less,/Which have solicited. The rest is silence." and so on. (or, for that matter, his whole speech about "I know not “seems.”")

So I think it's less that we're meant to doubt Hamlet's sanity, and more that Shakespeare deliberately set up a weird scenario so that only the audience can understand that Hamlet is sane.

I see. Did you read the article?

Of course there's a need to make that calculation. The military's calculation is based on people's willingness and reluctance to work for them, and they offer to pay because they have to. The military would be happy to have you work for them for free, if you think what they do is so important.

Your point is that working with the military is good, because being ruled by China would be worse than the current situation. So the moral benefit you're proposing extends insofar as we prevent China from taking over the US. How much do you think Silicon Valley needs to cooperate with the military to prevent replacement by the Chinese?

How much collaboration from private tech does the US military need to maintain global dominance? Where does this line of reasoning end? How much of your day, specifically, should you instead be spending supporting the armed forces?

It blew my mind when I first realized why pigments were so valuable in the ancient world: before modern mass-production of countless different mixable pigments (and now, digital displays that can render almost any color the eye can see) a person would literally not be able to see a certain shade their entire life except on a certain material. The distinct color of royal purple would have been an experience to see, in the same way we react to rare colors like Vantablack or International Klein Blue today.

de Grey seems like a great guy; he's a fantastic speaker, I generally agree with his vision of humanity, and this proof is impressive. I haven't attacked his character, nor do I plan to.

With respect to his work on resisting human aging, he hasn't produced anything of value.

There's also the tiny issue that he hasn't produced anything of value.

No large cities?

Unrelated, but it's fascinating to see an article from 2013 reference Andrew Auernheimer as a benign hacker. That's turned into a hell of a story on its own, huh.

He is neither.

Should be noted, on the subject of easily verifiable facts, that DeLong is not a leftist.

Sure, but you don't have to design your platform to incentivize making people angrier.

...unless it violates someone else's property rights. The point of capitalism is that people can own things, and you can do what you want as long as you don't violate that system of ownership. The point of anarchism is that you can basically do what you want.

Bitcoin's caused some hilarious lessons in what "decentralized" actually means. Bitcoin isn't controlled by some nasty evil central bank; it gets to be controlled by a mostly random collection of maybe intelligent and definitely lucky people with no oversight whatsoever.