Moissanite

I actually thought of this because of a line in The West Wing where the President is making a point about representation, then went off on a googling exploration to understand a bit whether it is a meaningful distinction - most of what I read seemed to reinforce the notion that the difference is important.

In day-to-day life it certainly doesn't matter - but when you are attempting to discuss the nature of that political system itself, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to call out the distinction and decide whether to discuss it further. No need for snide jabs.

Good; I was worried I'd stumbled into some some paleo-esque "only drink from puddles at dawn and dusk to maximize your gut flora development" nonsense.

Don’t drink more than 2 drinks in a day

Just to clarify, because this one tripped me up: you specifically mean alcohol, right?

Listen, if I had to pull the Flying Kipper up a hill with inferior non-Welsh coal, I'd be sad too.

Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up.

The parts which bothered me were the Zendaya slow-mo flash-forwards being too long and too frequent with no substance, and Lady Jessica crying far more than reasonable for the character I remember.

I should really have said "elites, including those in antagonistic countries like Russia". My main point was more about the elites than where they are from.

Yes!

I'm the OP - and it's more complicated than that. Foreign powers fermented the discord in American society (which was already there for sure, but could have been much less toxic without external influence), hence describing it as a proxy war and not a foreign-backed coup.

Do you have a promising example of where normal people were shareholders and managed to push through a decision which was against the interests of the board? Sounds from your comments down this thread like you only favour influence being accessible to those with capital, which I disagree with largely based on the fact that it is the world we live in already, and things are not trending in a good direction.

Someone has to sit at the top of the tree, making decisions whose impact has to be accepted by the people below.

Government is far (far!) from perfect, but at least it aspires in the right direction (where "right" is defined by the zeitgeist of the population, and so by definition what government will tend towards).

Companies are beholden to no-one but the markets. Markets are demonstrably not aligned with what is best for the populace, but rather what is best for owners of capital. We can't change that property of companies easily, but we can, in theory, hold government to a higher standard than "do whatever the highest bidder says". So, I'd like government to stay at the top of the tree.

I think "We bring tech jobs and tax revenue, which we will take elsewhere if you're not more compliant" is hard to label as anything other than a threat - particularly in the context of trying to play off the UK against the EU. UK politicians have made hay off the idea that being free of EU bureaucracy would make the UK a more appealing environment for companies; that was always bullshit anyway, but here Microsoft are trying to use it as leverage in the court of public opinion.

Once I get a vote on board membership for every company operating in my country, I will happily participate in that discussion.

Do you believe the appeal of Trump to disaffected Americans would be enough to win him the election, if big business (Koch et al) turned against the Republican party? Genuine question, because I feel like that is where the lever really is.

We need to go beyond stopping mergers. Any company which sees itself as large or powerful enough to make unveiled threats against a national economy needs to be broken up.

For ultra-large companies (e.g. any company with a market cap over $100B at the moment), default-deny should be the position for any mergers from this point - the burden of proof should be on them to show why the merge would not only be non-harmful, but actually benefit the wider economy.

We live in a democracy or not?

Not really, no.

Setting aside pedantry about the US being a republic and not a pure democracy, the fact is that wealthy elites decide election outcomes now. You ended up with Trump because elites in Russia wanted him elected more than elites in the US wanted Clinton. You got rid of him because elites in the US had woken up to the fact that they weren't the only player in that game anymore.

Culture wars are a proxy battlefield in much the same way that Ukraine is.

Because I hate having people behind me

Anyone who has read Dune should feel this way - leaving your back to the room/door is how the Harkonnens get you!

Seems like we live inside a self-cleaning oven.

I only read the abstract and conclusions so maybe this is covered in the paper - but based on some reasonable estimates of the damage done to organic matter by these x-ray bursts (and similar events) and of the time taken for life to evolve, I assume we could significantly improve on the Drake equation by updating terms which represent "probability of not being scoured from existence".

Paraphrasing: "In this paper, we reiterate previous assertions about how utterly boned we are as a species in the event that a nearby star has gone supernova in the last few hundred years."

Even if you didn't "consent to [the original author's] ToS," you are still going to be bound to it via the redistributors license.

In the context of the GPL, are there real examples of judgements which bind defendants to a license they never saw or knew anything about, because of the errant actions of an intermediary?

FYI, this crashed my browser with extreme prejudice; I can't remember one other time when I've had to force-stop the application. (Firefox on Android)

Mid afternoon meetings are terrible for me; I never feel like I can really settle into a difficult task unless I know that I have the option to make it the last thing I'm doing that day. As soon as I have something scheduled between 1 and 4, that day becomes a write-off and I try to fill it with other meetings and smaller, less consequential tasks.

If I could start each day with 2-3 short meetings then have the rest of the day available to get something actionable done, both me and my employer would be much better off.

There was no "free movement" beforehand either; we weren't part of Schengen.

Better than all the restagons.

EFA is not InfiniBand. It has similar goals (low latency via kernel bypass), but is implemented using AWS Nitro NICs and regular Ethernet networking.

Other providers (Azure and Oracle) do offer InfiniBand, but that creates a problem with "islands" of compute which can't be easily expanded. There are also more security considerations when using IB in a multi-tenant environment which makes it not such a slam-dunk advantage as you might first assume.

people who hold this belief fail to realize that “I don’t want to work.” ACTUALLY means “I want others to work so I don’t have to.”

No, it means "I am working to generate more wealth which flows predominantly to the owners of capital, who often do no work and sometimes have never done any work at all - can't we do something fairer than this?"

For someone with a six-figure income, the marginal utility of an extra $100 is basically nothing - but "notionally worthless" shares are a bit like getting a free lottery ticket every week. You don't expect anything to come of it, but it's nice to dream - and the regret-avoidance factor of not wanting to let go of your lottery ticket is huge. Of course none of this considers the true downside, which is the opportunity cost of working at a startup in the first place, versus a more stable or better-paying alternative.

Thanks!

Azure is indeed substantially smaller than AWS, and hides it with 365 revenue. The estimates I've seen suggest that in terms of true cloud infrastructure, the next 3 providers combined are still not quite as big as AWS.

As someone who recently had their first experience of writing unit tests and building a package for installation with pip: it would be really nice to have a concise summary of what the Python project leadership considers current official "best practice".

Any time Python comes up we have a big discussion about the tribulations of packaging and managing versions - some people advocating for Poetry, some happy with just virtualenv+pip, and everything in-between. I want to stay as close to the centre of the road as possible to minimize future surprises, but so much information on the web (Stack Overflow in particular) is very dated, and it is difficult to figure out what advice is still "current".

I'm aware that people frequently write blogs about these topics, but IMO that just adds to the problem - I want the official party line.

I think all of the cloud vendors are priced with just enough profit to make sure of it

Profit margins on cloud computing are insanely high (at least, relative to my expectations). They basically have no interest in anything with less than a 15% margin, even at the massive scale they operate at. Certain products have triple-digit margins. Even if they are the minority, I don't think we can give them a pass with claims of "just enough profit".