gottorf

Sunny sixteen!

> the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t

In fact, this condition might be the cleanest definition of "bloat".

Or maybe, every tech company is still shedding the overhiring they did during the Covid years.

The homicide rate is a clean way to compare the criminality of different populations, because it's easy to define and hard to hide. That way you don't get lost in the details of what's a crime in one country and isn't in another.

Given that America has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries, it stands to reason that its overall criminality is higher, and therefore we can expect to see more people imprisoned per capita than in those other countries.

> There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial

I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.

> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative

I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.

It's widely known that drug offenses are easier ways to stick criminals (who perpetrate crimes other than drug offenses) in prison, analogous to how in the end they convicted Al Capone of tax evasion. There is no epidemic of mere consumers of controlled substances going to prison, at least not in the past decade or longer.

Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!

Not only that, a cleaning crew that I'm explicitly paying for via the cleaning fee. It was ridiculous, and I'm sure it drove a lot of people to choose hotels over an equivalent Airbnb.

Our jails are full, relative to other developed countries, because we have vastly higher rates of crime. Our laws, by design, hamper the ability of the state to "harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves". Talk to any cop in any metro area of note; everyone knows who the criminals are by name and face, but they remain largely out there to offend and reoffend because it's hard (again, by design) to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

> the grift of for-profit prisons

Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.

For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.

Two out of 122 Prizes in literature. Punching quite above its weight!

> companies like Vercel and Heroku shouldn't exist at all

Crazy that Heroku with its head start has become abandonware. Goes to show that no incumbent is immune to change.

Hallucination is accurate for what I'm seeing -- e.g. it's making up information about the 2nd gen Toyota Tundra that has no basis in reality. When challenged, it corrects itself.

My experience with Gemini 3.8 Flash has been awful; it gives me the most hallucinations out of the major models. I'm not using it for coding, but general research on different topics.

Isn't that similar to how Emirates is profitable (~16% before tax as of the last fiscal year) while providing a more luxurious service? For both, the line between state and corporation is blurry enough that you could argue both are subsidized to starve out international competition.

Emirates claims no subsidies at all; BYD's disclosed direct grants alone are about a third of their cumulative lifetime profit, let alone indirect subsidies.