InvisibleCities

Some models suggest we might be fairly early, probably somewhere in the first 10-25% of space faring species.

I’d like to see some sources for this, because this sounds like unscientific, unprovable drivel.

This has nothing do with people’s civic engagement levels, and everything to do with money. The semiconductor industry gets a massive subsidy because they spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying - impoverished schoolchildren get left to starve because they don’t.

Your average Roman circa 250 AD lived farther from their place of birth than your average American today.

Ever think those might not be the same people?

Your CEO brain calipers don’t need to be worth a shit in order for you to make money with them. If the market moves predictably every time you publicly announce your findings, that’s all you need.

Your advice is to be selfish and not care what anyone thinks of you?

Why are we so surprised that animals understand the concept of zero? Being hungry, searching for food, and finding nothing seems like as universal and visceral experience of zero as anything I can imagine. I don’t think it’s possible to evaluate food sources without some idea of what zero means.

Because programming languages are a public good, and public goods are fundamentally incompatible with a profit motive. A “programming language startup” would be like an “anti-poverty startup” or “social justice startup” - either an edifice doomed to fail because of its inherent contradictions, or a front for lies and grifting.

[Sober, well-researched article about the dangers of pervasive social media that calls for strong government regulation]

“This link has been associated with harmful extremist content. Are you sure you wish to proceed?”

Well that’s good. How’s the F-35 coming along?

America has a loneliness and overwork problem - the alcohol is just a coping mechanism.

Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he feels Shakespeare failed at, as if Shakespeare had a morality it was "people should be good, but not too good"

I couldn't agree more, which is why I like Shakespeare so much better than Tolstoy.

The point of Hyperloop is to provide a shiny new technology that municipalities can use as an excuse for not investing in public transportation, ensuring that America switches to electric cars instead trains/buses/trams/bikes/etc as ICE automobiles are phased out over the next 20 years.

I actually believe in the benevolence of AWS; I spent nearly a decade there. Do you?

I have no reason to doubt the benevolence of AWS at present, but how much faith do you have in the perpetuity of that benevolence? There is a tremendous power imbalance between Amazon/Google/Microsoft and the companies that depend on them for infrastructure, and the nature of capitalism and the declining rate of profitability means that eventually, the markets will demand for that power imbalance to be exploited economically.

When the Manorial system emerged in Europe, it was a largely benevolent force offering stability, security, and community in the wake of the collapsing Western Roman Empire - within a few generations it morphed into 1000 years of serfdom.

The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. ~Frank Zappa

Why should Mike have to remember this? Why should all of your infrastructure depend on Mike not getting a text from his wife while walking to the fridge for a La Croix?

At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.

Almost, but not quite. At the end of the day, there are people making extraordinary amounts of money from the status quo, and those people would rather have the general population squabbling over minutiae than demanding systemic change that would actually resolve the problem (and subsequently cause those people to lose an awful lot of money).

This is a very disingenuous comparison. For any given food, there are a large number of both perfect and imperfect substitutes, which is very much not the cases for patented medicines. It is also much easier for individuals to grow their own food than it is to manufacture their own pharmaceuticals. But beyond that, food is one of the most regulated markets in modern society. Farm subsidies, food assistance programs like SNAP, strategic food reserves, and any number of other programs function as "soft" price controls. I don't think that "changing pharmaceutical regulations to match the food industry" means what you think it does.

Cooler Master is tired of telling parents that their kids aren't Juuling (2023)

Bill Gates is the epitome of a no-talent ass-clown who owes 100% his financial success to his personal family connections (his mother was personal friends with John Akers and John Opel of IBM due to their work on the United Way board together, and she leveraged this connection to get a fledgling Microsoft a sweetheart deal to develop the OS for the IBM PC) and his willingness to mercilessly steal the source code of people far smarter than him. Seeing this vicious bastard praised on a "hacker" forum is mind-boggling to me.

The idea that the value is only defined by usefulness to capital is the most pernicious idea in all of American society.

Let’s say you worked at a profitable restaurant called SaladSpin. SaladSpin, true to its name, sells salads, and they’re pretty good. However, SaladSpin also sells pizzas, and these pizzas are absolutely incredible. People travel from miles around to eat these pizzas, and they easily outsell the salads by a ratio of two or three to one. One day, SaladSpin comes under new management who decide that they want SaladSpin to “stick to salads” and stop selling pizzas. Wouldn’t you, as a worker who both takes pride in the quality of pizzas you make and understands that pizzas are the key to SaladSpin’s popularity and profitability, try to fight this decision? Personally, I think that loyalty to SaladSpin’s customers, who love the pizzas, is more important and worthy than loyalty to these purported superiors who don’t really understand or care why anyone liked SaladSpin in the first place.

I am (was) an avid reader of Deadspin, and the non-sports content was a large part of why I read that site for 10+ odd years. The reality is that, even for people who love sports, there often isn't very much to say about them. Rather than force them to churn out the same kind of article about why LeBron James is good at basketball that you could read on any number of websites, Deadspin allowed their writers the freedom to write about whatever they wanted to, whether that was a brilliant analysis of Loony Tunes (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-wile-e-coyote-explains...), poignant commentary about the ways in which journalistic language undermines sexual assault victims (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/against-allegedly-18197033...), or tell a harrowing story about recovering from a major brain hemorrhage (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-night-the-lights-went-...). The perspective offered by Deadspin was unique, and I will miss it dearly.

When conservatives say that they think the US is too "diverse" for such policies to work, take them at their word. They think that social democracy is fine as long as the benefits don't go to black or brown people. In fact, this was the essence the "grand bargain" that FDR struck to get the New Deal passed with reluctant support from southern Democrats - FDR was allowed to create redistributive programs so long minorities were systematically excluded from them (see Richard Rothstein's "The Color of Law" for examples on how this was achieved through federal housing policy). It's also the reason why the woman Reagan chose as the canonical example of the "welfare queen" (who herself is a fascinating character, see https://pictorial.jezebel.com/the-long-shadow-of-the-welfare...) was black.

“Untitled Goose Game is a safe, socially acceptable way to relieve stress,” the Washington Post declared shortly after the game’s release. “It’s the new punching a wall. It’s the new crying at your desk.”

Likening crying at your desk to a delightful video game is exactly the kind of analogy that I would expect from one of Jeff Bezos' employees.

Fuck seed rounds. How many homeless people could be given shelter with that money? How many starving people could have been fed? How many people who died needlessly because they were unable to afford medical treatment could have lived if this money had been given to them instead? There is a tremendous moral rot at the core of American capitalism, and the story of We is exhibit A.

The questions and issues you pose are real, but they apply equally regardless of whether the decisions about research funding are made by for-profit pharmaceutical corporations or a panel of government experts. I posit that the latter is preferable because they are accountable to the public, whereas the former are accountable only to their shareholders and profitability metrics.

The big issue I see here is the proper allocation of this earmarked funding.

The overwhleming majority of exploratory, pre-clinical, and early-phase clinical research is already funded by government grants, particularly from the CDC and NIH. To the extent that this is a "problem", it is one the system already faces. Personally, I would prefer that research funding decisions are made by public officials that are at least nominally accountable to the electorate over ruthless capitalists who are accountable only to their shareholders.

I truly do not understand the purpose of a free market for pharmaceuticals. The demand for these drugs is almost completely inelastic, as it is driven by the statistical incidence of the underlying medical conditions. This makes central planning remarkably easy compared to typical consumer goods. The government already sponsors the vast majority of exploratory, pre-clinical, and early-phase clinical research; all it would take to expand that program to include later-phase clinical trials would be increased funding. A nationalized pharmaceutical industry that provides drugs at cost seems like it would be a tremendous boon to our society, only requiring the "sacrifice" of the opulent lifestyles of the executives and investors profiting off the extortionate practices of our current system.