wbillingsley

Just removing the "another five'll be along tomorrow" effect of the way most dating apps work might help.

25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!

As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.

Profit motives in infrastructure are a bad idea. See Thames Water in the UK, for instance. It always introduces a perverse incentive where if the company in control of the infrastructure can extract an extra million in profit by making everything less efficient and costing everyone else involved a billion, it's still in that company's interest to do so.

This is a prime example of that. H&R Block, etc, benefit from there not being direct file by around $3bn in revenue or around $750m in profit. Rough sums on the time saved by direct file if everyone used it is 8h * average wage * taxpayers, which seems to be approximately $44bn. i.e. in axing direct file, it has "created" $3bn in economic activity to the private infrastructure-owner (the intermediary between you and filing your return), but at the cost of $44bn in lost time & therefore lost activity (the other things you could have been doing) to the rest of the economy.

Infrastructure is not the economy. Infrastructure is the thing the economy runs on top of / has to use. Given that it is the role of government to govern the economy, it is the role of government to ensure that the infrastructure is running well (be the custodian of the infrastructure).

Yes

What I used to recommend to my sofware engineering classes is that instead of putting large files (media etc) into Git, put them into the artifact repository (Artifactory or something like it). That lets you for instance publish it as a snapshot dependency that the build system will automatically fetch for you, but control how much history of it you keep and only require your colleagues to fetch the latest version. Even better, a simple clean of their build system cache will free up the space used by old versions on their machines.

I wonder whether future generations will be ingrained with a Truman Show fear that maybe only the few thousand people they meet are real and everything else is generated background noise.

I've never really understood the problems he had getting the Hitchhiker movie made - all the articles around before it came out talked about having to revise the script to make sense to an American audience (and the eventual movie ended up with a strangely different plot with a villain), but the original radio series is pretty much a road movie, which is almost an American trope.

Sometimes. Foals are born (almost) able to walk. There are occasions where evolution baked the model into the genes.

We use ARM. Because then we can lean on some things (e.g. the ARMlite simulator) UK schools built for A-levels.

The more obvious one is that Orion's standing on his head.

We do sometimes have an informal "Christmas in July". Which is a little odd, since 6 months on from Christmas would be June.

Sorry to see them go. I used them with students and they were always very helpful.

It depends. e.g. In Australia, the snake most people worry about (the eastern brown - world's second most venomous and common in cities) is native, so yes it's important to an ecosystem in the broader sense. But its numbers around cities have gone up because of mice, most of which are introduced, so it's a non-native part of the ecosystem that's pushing the numbers up. Doing something to bring the numbers back down around urban centres wouldn't seem like such a bad idea. Brown snakes aren't a threatened or endangered species and though cities are large human centres, they're not a large portion of the Australian geography. (And are largely artificially maintained ecosystems anyway - those houses and roads didn't appear naturally.) There are probably other ways for dealing with mice than having the world's second deadliest snake hanging around town.