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Gibbon1

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Used to be Palestinians could freely travel between the West Bank and Israel. That ended after the First Intifada when general travel permission was revoked. And you needed personal exit permits. After the second Intifada and terrorist attacks the Israeli's build walls around Palestinian areas.

It doesn't feel Palestinian supporters support for solutions via violence and terrorism has had any positive benefit for Palestinians in the west bank and Gaza.

25 years ago if you wanted to sell a product you had to ship samples to buyers who would beat the crap out of it and if they liked it they'd place orders for 100s of thousands a month.

Amazon got it's start in that world undercutting the brick and mortar stores with their carefully curated manufacturers and buyers. In the process they completely destroyed it. Which is why 80% of the stuff for sale now is shitty.

I think if you define energy as force X distance then integration alone will give you the squared term.

How I got banned from some reddit channel. Flip this around ask if a ball were fired out of a gun up into the air what height would it reach? A ball twice as fast goes up 4 times as high. If energy is force times distance it had 4 times the energy.

The later version of Wordstar had a style template system which I thought was nice. So where Word Perfect had tags and more tags. Wordstar you just applied a predefined style to a block of text. I think somewhat like CSS.

I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building.

The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.

Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.

Problems with unaligned pointers are basically a hardware defect. Signed overflow is an issue because academics are unhappy computers only can do finite math.

Issue with types and C is while the compiler knows about them the standards committees don't want you to be able to. If C had first class types more people would abandon C++ and that can't be allowed to happen.

I think housing isn't an ordinary durable good the way economists think. If there was a shortage of toasters you couldn't make money by churning toasters like you can if there is a shortage of housing. But you could make money importing toasters. With housing when there is a shortage the effective way to make money is by using access to cheap credit to bid prices higher.

So a housing price spiral is a result of a properly functioning market.

The Obelisk at the Vatican weighs in at 360 tons. And was moved from Egypt to Rome by the Romans around 40AD. And then moved to it's present location in the 1586. The Romans moved at least 8 Egyptian Obelisks to Rome and also commissioned a couple.

The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.

Yet you encourage people to start wars they can't win.

I keep coming back to the first gulf war when Bush encouraged the Shiites to ride up against Hussain and then left them out to dry.

Its what gets done to the Palestinians over and over. And the Jews aren't the enemies you need them to be because if they were the Palestinians would have been long scattered.

I read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under.

An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.

https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/

Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.

Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.

You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.

Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.

I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.

Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.

I think there are strong links between the immune system, the autonomic system, and the brain. A dysregulation immune system can seriously mess with you.

The classic psychological explanation is the patient only thinks they are sick. But the reality is their body is behaving like they are sick. Worse the classic explanation why you feel sick is 'toxins' from an infection and that is wrong. It's your reaction to feedback from your immune system.