pdonis

Is not a well-defined number. The number you are calculating assumes that the horizon is an ordinary 2-sphere enclosing an ordinary 3-ball [edited, see grandchild post] in Euclidean space, and divides the hole's mass by the calculated volume of that 3-ball. But the spacetime of a black hole doesn't work that way. The "space" inside the hole's horizon is not like any kind of ordinary space that your intuitions will work for.

Also, the interior of the hole is vacuum, so its mass is not something that's distributed throughout any kind of volume; it's just a geometric property of the spacetime.

I did qualify my statement with the caveat that whether people looking in from the outside, who don't have skin in the game, think there's a problem that the people who do have skin in the game can't resolve among themselves, doesn't always match whether there actually is such a problem (a caveat which I could argue that you have hand-waved away). But I am not saying that all cases are like that.

What I am saying is that, even in the cases that aren't like that, the cases where the people who do have skin in the game really can't resolve a problem by working among themselves, that does not mean that reformers coming in from outside can do any better. I think such outside interventions, through human history, have a very poor track record of working. A quick summary of my point about conservatives and reformers would then be that conservatives recognize this unpleasant truth of human history, whereas reformers don't acknowledge it and are way, way too eager to make such interventions, and end up making things even worse.

I never said that about conservatives; indeed, I said the opposite.

"Reformers", yes--but I don't think the label is one I just made up. I think what I said is true of most people that call themselves "reformers".

> Whereas for me the words describe what people are trying to do in practice, regardless of political labels.

Since this is exactly how I was defining the labels--by what the people do, not what political party they claim to belong to or support--I am confused about why you think you are doing something different.

I'm only describing that case (for both reformers and conservatives), yes. Historically, that seems to be the most relevant case, at least if we want to talk in terms of size of human impact.

To put it another way: if the problem (if there is one--see further comments below) can be solved by the people who do have skin in the game working things out among themselves, the labels "reformer" and "conservative" don't even come into play. You just have people who have to find some way of working together, doing it. So the only cases where those labels even arise are the cases where the people who do have skin in the game can't work things out among themselves--or at least that the people looking in from the outside, who don't have skin in the game themselves, think so.

The term "reformer", historically, does have another meaning: people who have some grand idea for how society should be organized, observing that it currently is not organized that way, and treating that as a Problem even if others don't agree that it is. A "conservative" seeing that would just say, look, you can't just impose your own idea of how society should be on everyone else. But historically, "reformers" in such cases have always framed things in terms of there being a Problem that isn't just "society isn't the way I think it should be"--the workers are oppressed, or the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, or whatever, and using that as an excuse to implement their ideas for the ideal society. Which has never worked out well.

No, the conservative says, even if there are problems, that doesn't mean everything is a problem, nor does it mean that you, looking in from the outside, can dictate a solution.

> the reformer says “we must change this now”.

No matter how much has to be burned down to do it. This mentality killed well north of 100 million people in the 20th century.

Conservatism is humility. Progressivism is hubris.

Unless you just, you know, don't watch. Which is what I do. I ask myself, is it even worth all this hassle to watch this stuff? Is it that good? And for me, the answer is, no, it isn't. I can find better things to do with my time. So I do.

Unless the customers are the shareholders, as in a co-op. The article's data seems to show that co-ops provide the cheapest electricity, which makes sense because the owners are the same people as the users, so the incentives are aligned.

Only in a very minimal sense. A management that is only empowered to maintain common areas of a community can't "govern" the community members except in the very narrow sense of enforcing whatever rules the community wants to have for the use of common areas. Which is just an aspect of the fact that the community as a whole owns the common areas and the owner makes the rules.

Such a management can't mess with community members about how often they cut their lawns, or what color they paint their house, etc. But that sort of micromanagement is what "governance" by HOAs ends up being when it goes beyond basic management of common areas.

No, he wouldn't, because he used "self-governance" to mean the thing that contradicts what it says on its face.

> It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.

The kind of "democratic" governance we actually have certainly comes with caveats, yes--caveats that have basically never been really dealt with. Jefferson's ideal of a "well-informed people" has never been achieved.

Jefferson did claim to believe that the US Federal government should be as minimal as possible--until he became President and found that it's actually kind of nice to be able to use that power to do things you feel like doing, whether they actually meet that minimal government ideal or not.

But in any case, none of that justifies describing the governance we actually have as "self-governance".