mpax

Get out.

> The idea that "life is meaningless" means that society cannot rely on you, because you'll do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever the consequences.

How does "life is meaningless" imply "life is useless"? Also, why would nihilism entail radical individualism? The core of nihilism is that since the indifferent universe is without meaning humans have to give it meaning, quite the opposite of what you're implying.

You might do well reading up on the last couple of centuries of Greek history...

The fact that expected utility theory isn't nearly as scrutinized as the labor theory of value, whilst being at least as flawed, tells you something about the "value free" nature of modern econ.

Depends on how you look at it.

Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.

What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.

It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a socialist community with a capitalist mode of production.

The way new capital reaches the third world can be attributed to globalization of market circuits, for instance, China is currently investing into Africa much like the first world did to China in the past.

Of course, if you define the terminology differently, say you’re an Austrian Economist, the above explanation might appear unintelligable.

What’s the proper game-theoretic equivalent of this situation?

Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu? I imagine with the right datastructure you should be able to do pixel/line intersection tests in the pixel shader?

Please keep such madness out of the EU...

On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining.

They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selection) which I find just as interesting. Diamond seems pretty controversial among anthropologists, likewise multilevel selection is topic of debate among evolutionists. I don’t know enough myself to make an informed judgement in these matters.

They can just sit there in perpetuality, there’s no swat team going to bust in the door because one leg of government lent to the other.

The national debt can wait, the private sector is more indebted than at any point in recorded history, and getting worse. In the US especially you can see the seeds of debt servitude being sown.

They’ve always been decoupled, it’s just a lot more visible these days.

Facebook has been getting increasingly slugish for me for several years now. I wonder if it’s got anything to do.