kingofmen

And the civilian bombings, explicitly named "morale bombing" (we called it "terror bombing" when the Axis did the same) were later found to be completely inefficient; a waste of trained crews and expensive bombers that did not contribute to victory at all. Or in other words,

YES.jpg

True, but that is plausibly covered by existing precedent: If a discovery is "obvious to one skilled in the art", it can't be patented. IANAL but this seems to me easily extensible to "if you can do it in two five-minute prompts you can't patent it".

Separately, land grabs are not necessarily economically bad. The land being grabbed gets into productive use fast, and the grabber is hardly going to get all the resulting value. Especially not when the monopoly is temporary, as with a patent.

Yes, but the discussion was about patents.

The purpose of intellectual property is to give an incentive to produce new knowledge (and art) by giving the inventor a way to monetize their work. Arguably this does not particularly work; but if you accept the argument then it seems to generalize fairly cleanly to AI. It's giving people an incentive to point their AIs at problems they're familiar with, and do the work to publish a solution for everyone, not just a hacked-up fix for themselves.

No worries, obviously the AI will cure aging so we will be able to run civilisation with the current experts forever.

...at least, until they accumulate enough stocks to retire on.

...however, for each one that retires and cannot be replaced due to the no-upcoming-juniors problem, evidently, the value of the companies they own goes down. So they won't be able to retire, or at least not all of them. So there's no problem!

Is there any infrastructure of which this is not true? Every country, not just the Great Powers, has a large amount of installed plant which is the result of decades, in some cases centuries, of capital accumulation. And which modern weaponry can destroy in a matter of minutes. It's just easier to destroy than to build, and literally no industry has the capacity to rebuild as fast as a war breaks - if they did, most of those workers would be sitting idle in peacetime.

Compare the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2: Germany was trying to destroy merchant shipping faster than the Allies could build it, and failed; not because the subs were hunted down (though they were) but because the US refocused a humongous amount of industrial policy on building Liberty ships in a matter of days per hull. That was a massive national mobilisation, it would have been impossible to do so for more than a handful of capital plants, and it certainly wasn't going to be maintained in peacetime.

Edit to add: Though to argue a bit against my own point, satellites are perhaps uniquely vulnerable, even to nonstate actors. Lasers get better all the time and a satellite inherently needs to pass over other countries to do its job. Much easier targets than, say, electrical grids which can be defended by the internal-security garrison.

We've got one. It's called impeachment. Unfortunately the system wasn't originally intended to have parties and party loyalties, and assumed that Congress would never have a majority to give a free pass to a corrupt President because he was their guy.

Even a fairly corrupt politician might believe that they are less corrupt than the other guy, and would be able to use the law as a weapon to get an even bigger slice of the cake. Or, still more likely, they would believe that "I get my fair share, you're a petty self-dealer, he is blatantly corrupt" and that the law would not be used against their perfectly open and above-board win-win deals, only against that other guy's filthy looting.

But that aside, as noted upthread, it doesn't actually require an amendment, it just requires the existing Congresscritters to do their dang jobs. Not holding my breath.

To be fair the Antichrist, being a prophesied entity from several millennia ago, is probably not super up to date on twenty-first-century business best practices. They probably still use waterfall.

> If you can afford to pay an army you can afford to pay the opposing side instead.

Aside from all questions about how such an agreement is to be enforced once you no longer have the money but the invaders still have their weapons, the article shows very clearly that this is not true. Early states are seriously cash-strapped, and rarely pay their armies in easily portable goods. They can "afford" to raise armies consisting of soldiers who bring their own weapons and, by-and-large, their own food. That does not make for good tribute and so, in fact, they cannot afford to pay off an invader.

Excellent work, very nice!

One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.

Points for effort, but this will do literal nothing to appease the opposition, since the "water use" thing is a myth anyway. It's probably good, it sounds like it will be more efficient and efficiency saves resources for other uses, but politically it's completely useless.

Indeed they do. And as a result they have rather more of it than European busybodies. :)

> the r>g observation (due to Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century) is that both historically and recently the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy.

They do if you cherry-pick your economies, starting points, definitions of "capital" and "growth", and cutoff points, yes.

Not OP, but why draw a line for WiFi names at all? Do you think an actual terrorist goes around drawing attention like that?