gampleman

Doesn't this just prove the OP's point? The government gets as much money from the top 0.1% as it does from the bottom 50% means that it is getting a lot of their money from the wealthy.

Above we are counting them. This about ~10000 people total, most of them abroad. We are not counting military since these are civil servants, but neither are we counting military today.

Except this tends to only get really "interesting" at the top. That's because the middle layers can call on their peers or even on their superiors in times of crisis. Hence peasant rebellions basically never succeed, since their aristocrats will simply apply to the king or to their peers to help them crush it.

But the king has no superiors and even his peers are not quite as much available, so the politicking at that level gets much less stable.

Generally speaking countries that have tried to do something about their abysmal birth rates (Hungary, Czechia, etc) by putting in substantial economic incentives (i.e. 4 years of maternity, free accomodation, etc), have found that it moved the needle very little and certainly there can't be much talk of reversing the trend.

Also, I believe that our culture of over-parenting (and therefore many of the associated costs) is a _consequence_ of having fewer children, not the cause. If you put all your reproductive eggs in one basket, you are motivated to overprotect them. That makes a culture of (at least from a historical perspective) insane parenting demands that simply don't scale.

The problem with the "richer countries have fewer kids" correlation is that it implies causation, but I think it's more sensible to say it the other way: "having fewer kids makes you richer" (at least temporarily, before the demographic collapse makes you poor again, but that will likely not be your problem).

Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light.

For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc.

So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse.

Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher).

So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.

An obvious example is if my product has an SDK and I'd like my customers to be able to script my product via their LLMs then I want to make my docs as AI-friendly as possible, since if their LLM picks my product's SDK rather than the competition, I make $$$.

Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.

Anyone know where to put the policy file on MacOS? And can you do this even on a corporate machine?

Cerebras capacity was pretty much entirely bought out at some point. We needed it and couldn't get it.

Some interesting features here:

- sum types/ADTs have been long missing from database data modeling and this is welcome change. It's not entirely clear to me how the migration strategy here will work with things like removing a variant, etc.

- first class enforced RLS - this seems like a fantastic way to ensure safety/security guarantees. Secure by construction is always preferable to bolt-on security controls.

- composability with a strong module system. I think this will work well in ensuring large schemas can evolve over time. I wonder if there will be package manager in the future.