Prophasi

Shogun's a milestone in my reading history - it's so extraordinarily engrossing. It deflated me more than any other book as I turned each of the final, waning pages because I didn't want to leave its world behind.

I was briefly elated to see there are "sequels" but just as quickly disappointed to learn they're set centuries apart; it ended up feeling like I was clinging to the only album ever made by an amazing band. I've yet to read the other books in the saga, but I should circle back and fix that.

Sure, and I'm positive you knew which three I meant when I said it: the three that together probably comprise 4 nines of overall desktop use, and which are compared all over this thread.

UX does differ somewhat between, Linux distros & WMs (and Chrome OS, to the extent you consider it Linux proper), and between releases of all three OSes; but within families they maintain broad continuity. I use multiple variants - again daily - and my point stands that all have untapped potential.

But I doubt you supposed otherwise, nor honestly think I'm unaware of other OSes... so why take the time to ask? Pedantry? Did I slight an OS you favor?

I use all 3 OSes ~daily and have nits w/ all of them. This one's minor even as it stands, but if I can make it "click" - at least for MacOS-specific workflows - I'd love to. Each OS shines the best if I adapt to its idioms (vs. trying to make Mac feel like Win, etc.).

Same here, mostly. My laptop since 2015 has been a MBP, so I've had plenty of MacOS experience, but day to day has always been 90/10 Windows. Now that I have the M1 I'm trying to use it daily, so the little grievances are more apparent (but I also have more motivation to solve them).

I've always felt like multiple desktops (on all 3 OSes) have untapped potential, but like you its never worked for me. But hope springs eternal - I try it again every now and then. I'd like to hear more about how some people use it.

Heard good things about Rectangle. I'll check it out.

To your third point, is this a setting somewhere? I tested before I posted w/ 4 Brave windows, but they stay in the same order.

Makes sense, since cmd+~ immediately switches on key down to the next window; cmd+tab (like alt+tab in Win) lets you keep the selection open and choose an out-of-order app, which alters the MRU. How would you do that here? The only way I've affected it is creating/killing windows at points in the cycle. Using cmd+shift+~ for me just goes backward in the same static order.

I don't love it (yet). It's probably a combo of my Windows background, my ignorance of MacOS tricks, and actual limitations/flaws.

* Cmd+~ from a fullscreen window does nothing, and non-full windows of the app cycle only among each other. If I have fullscreen windows anywhere in my setup, it breaks my flow and (afaik) makes me mouse to the Window menu. I feel like MacOS's fullscreen paradigm is more to blame here, because it violates a range of other behaviors I'd expect.

* Unlike cmd+tab, cmd+~ doesn't give me a visual overview of my windows (how many? what order?). I can see why, since cmd+tab shows only icons and app names, which isn't enough to differentiate between windows of the same app (unlike alt+tab on Windows, which shows thumbnails, paths, page titles, etc.

* Cmd+~ also cycles in a static order, not most recently used. This feels like fallout from the second point, in that if you're not showing thumbnails it could get confusing.

The first one in particular took me a bit of time to realize; before I did, it just felt broken and made me not rely on cmd+~ at all.

It seems clear that a dev team could whip up a product that tested well (using folks in office, family members, friends, etc.); was trained with datasets that - for whatever reasons - weren't sufficiently varied; and hit some mark of success and pushed it out the door to refine the rest later. It also seems clear that the resulting product could do poorly when recognizing black skin, due not to ill intent but lack of polish with the resources on hand.

But something I always wonder when accusations like "white supremacy" are thrown around: is it falsifiable? What evidence would dissuade you from that?

- What if both ends of the spectrum do poorly and extremely pale people have problems, too?

- What if the threshold is dark black and lighter-skinned black people, Asians, Middle Easterners and other non-white people are able to use it successfully?

- What if only a narrow band of light levels work, making it clear their testing range was generally too narrow, not just in skin color?

- What if they took care to incorporate black models in testing, but the photo quality (and their own in-house cameras and lighting) overestimated the quality of most home users'?

And what of the myriad other things that were done poorly in the software: limited OS support, bugs, excessive memory usage, overall intrusiveness, browser limitations, disallowed mobile devices, lack of multi-monitor support? Do they likewise arise from systematic oppression of some group? What if we dig in and find that white people are more likely to use iPads, Linux, and multiple displays?

Most often these accusations flow in only one direction, and that all other flaws or problems are taken to be simply happenstance and noise. Certainly anything that impacts white people negatively will not be automatically seen as anti-white, although in a world with activist devs, such a result isn't incomprehensible.

Claims of white supremacy (among other accusations of character) are thus, to my mind, wildly speculative and carry a very heavy burden of proof.

Thanks for the links - that's interesting to consider when weighing the tradeoffs of an FDA-less country. Of course, the FDA is only one part of the story, and conceding a need for its general existence in no way means that its current purview and methodologies don't need extensive revision.

In any case, my post above was about what is (and what to properly call it), not what ought to be.

This perception of the US as having a free-market economy, particularly in the area of healthcare, is curiously persistent.

Vast sums of money are spent lobbying to distort the market in favor of particular companies and industries. The FDA has long been accused of preventing key drugs from coming to market that are available in other countries. The patent system alone perpetuates medication monopolies over decades for fabricated reasons, keeping cheap generics out of people's hands. The tax system heavily favors employer-run plans (for reasons rooted in the WWII era) that encourage overspending, tie coverage to your employer, and distort the market in multiple, deep ways.

Medicare and Medicaid are huge. The chart in the FEE link below puts US gov per capita expenditures at 4th in the world.

The below Vox article, which is otherwise anti-free-market, concedes that generic insulin providers seem too daunted by secondary patents and "extreme regulatory complexity," both of which obviously run counter to a free market.

This isn't to say a free-market system would be a panacea of all complaints (systems dealing in scarce resources will never be perfect to all participants), but those complaints would be much different than those about the layers of bureaucracy, high government spending, low competition, high time-to-market for drugs, breathtaking lobbying efforts, and overwhelming tax complexity we have now.

Maybe you think you'd prefer single-payer to the present regime, but to characterize the latter as "free-market" sets up a false dichotomy. (Note that it could logically still be "underregulated," as you say, despite not being free - not that I would agree.)

Drug patents: https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/11/drug-patent-protection-o...

Tax distortion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2017/07/30/why-ta...

Insulin prices: https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expe...

Free market? https://fee.org/articles/the-idea-that-the-us-has-a-free-mar...

I think his point about podcasts and other audio is on the money, but it undercuts his argument for VR:

They have this Bluetooth thing in their ear, and they’ve got a hat, and that’s 10 hours on the forklift and that’s 10 hours of Joe Rogan.

In other words, audio is successful because it's used as a complement to what we're already doing, not an alternative to it. We can't quit our jobs to spend 10 hours in VR, but it's easy to imagine lightweight AR HUDs for everything from entertainment (e.g. impromptu podcast menus) to specialized on-the-job uses.

Seems like AR will require inherently lower friction and less trade-off with the real world.

Agreed there's some hyperbole as to the current state of things, but the ability for new entrants to pressure the old guard in an industry and in some cases put them out of business or relegate them to the margins is paramount. It's about the system and trajectory more than any point in time.

And GP is absolutely right about some of these: it's hard to imagine bigger competitors than the likes of Sears, Walmart, IBM, Microsoft, etc. who, even if they aren't literally dead, have absolutely had their mantles of increasing dominance ripped away, contrary to the doomsayers of the past. Even if GM adapts as you say, they'll be producing electric cars with modern design at competitive prices with better features than ever, precisely because they were forced to by the market. The goal isn't to undermine any company's longevity; it's to force every company to bow to customer pressure via competition. Old or new, it's a win if products get better and cheaper.

Uber and Lyft are getting more and more regulated

This is a common thread across every industry we can discuss, and to the extent that you're correct about the same players wielding power and wealth across eras and trends, lobbying and regulation play a massive role. It's fundamentally a critique of government power, not capitalism.

Same old stuff in new clothes, with the same cast of people running the show.

I'm curious: in what sense is Netflix the same people as the cable companies (or for that matter, movie studios)? They're directly competing in many ways, run by literally different people, with different employees requiring different skills, and competing in new and different markets around the world.

There's obviously no objective truth to whether pronouns apply retroactively; it's just social convention.

Clearly, it's polite to respect someone's wishes when talking to or about them, whether it's pronouns, nicknames, personal space, or umpteen other things. If you're introducing Chelsea to another friend, it seems only civil and natural to say "she [not he] was stationed at Fort Drum!"

However, I don't think a person can unilaterally require that the world around them retroactively change all references to a historical event, particularly when it renders some of those details nonsensical or wrong. History is written: documents were released by a person calling himself "Bradley Manning" and identifying as (and meeting biological criteria of) a male. Other aspects of the story -- from Manning's all-male combat team to his quarters in the USDB -- hinge on that fact. Manning's presence doesn't imply that the military unit was mixed-gender. One version reports the story as it was known to everyone involved; the other modifies it after the fact according to the unilateral wishes of the subject being reported on. That's not a good pattern, I don't think.

As an outsize example, if George W. Bush transitions to a female this year, the US will not celebrate that we've had our first female president.

I'm completely sympathetic to interpersonal civility, but empathy goes both ways; I think it's beyond the pale to expect society writ large to scramble, under penalty of being called bigots, to conform to what's frankly an unverifiable declaration of internal personal change on the order of a religious awakening (which oddly doesn't enjoy the same umbrella of unquestioned sanctimony).

I disagree with both GP and the immigration laws affecting these people, but the term "illegals" to describe them strikes me as an innocuous shorthand for "people of illegal immigration status." It carries no implicit judgment of the people or the laws; it just states the relationship of the former to the latter.

This trend of casual libel against others, claiming intent and meaning that you can't possibly know, is worrying.

This can only be accurate for people who want literally $0 to be taken for taxes, in any form, by any level of government... and yet still expect services to be rendered.

I don't know anyone like that, and I suspect they're in a tiny minority.

For my part, I'd consider those taxes to be theft when they are used for purposes other than a strict list of constitutionally mandated purposes. The other things are services I want to neither pay for nor receive.

Some examples: unemployment (ahem, now "Reemployment") tax, social security tax, welfare, domestic spying operations, Medicare/Medicaid, public education, the Affordable Care Act, much of our military spending, corporate bailouts, lots of alphabet agencies' budgets, etc.

Note that it's not freeloading; I don't want anyone to have them paid and/or provided for by government, including myself.

The libertarian view is that pretty much everything is fine as long as everyone involved is participating willingly.

Consider the ramifications: with voluntarism as nearly the only requirement, libertarianism is a substrate for communities to layer additional rules on top as befit their values: socialist communes, gun-free zones, drug markets, shared libraries, required weapons training, a Greek-style local democracy, whatever. Two communities can be diametrically opposed in their values, sharing only the common tenet that everyone participates voluntarily.

Of course it's impossible to pull off: can kids born in each community be considered voluntary participants? Can someone revoke their rights for the rest of their life with the stroke of a pen? How does someone traveling through these places even keep track of the laws (we see this with states already)? Lots of difficult/impossible/senseless questions arise. But it's a thought experiment: absent religious considerations, is there a more moral system that allowing everyone to voluntarily interact with others in only those ways that are mutually beneficial?

Those details aside, if allowing as many people to craft their life experiences as voluntarily as possible is of merit, investing great power in a central power governing over 300 million people is an extremely poor way to achieve it.

I won't say what you should or shouldn't do, but I can give you a few reasons to care:

First, to clarify, it's not innguest's moral problem; it's a quandary at the intersection of ethics and politics. If you care about ethical questions at all, this one's meaty: it tugs at the threads of social organization, sanctioned force, individual liberty, international law, and capitalism.

Second, innguest has rationally advocated a position; that's reason enough for me, at least, to pause and consider.

Third, if you're in the US, you have something directly at stake in this argument. Sure, the politics may already be decided on party lines, favors, and lobbying, but as the citizenry we owe it to ourselves to form a coherent political philosophy to serve as the yardstick informing us just how bad the government's decisions are.

Fourth, there should be a huge bar to clear for any party looking to impose invasive rules on someone else using the hand of government. The folks writing the laws are almost uniformly not subject matter experts; they act in self-interested ways that are well known; any proposal will be highly adulterated by the time it passes; any new law becomes a precedent for the next; and unknown consequences are rife, particularly with rights and the economy. I'd be highly critical of anyone willing to advocate this without deeply considering all facets, including innguest's points.

And finally, while morals are of course subjective, they should at least be held to the standards of justifiability and internal consistency; I don't believe this net neutrality push meets those requirements. If government enforces this on cable companies, can it determine which products Walmart carries, and which go on the prized middle shelves? Maybe it's only for monopolies, though...but then, I have no fewer than 4 choices to get Internet to my house, so it's not a monopoly. Unless it's only service of a particular quality. Who sets the quality requirements? And should the provider really not have the ability to charge more for heavier usage of the pipes? You pass something like this, you better have answered all of those and literally hundreds of others, and guaranteed that in every law where that happens, most of the answers are arbitrary.

"The worst part is the thesis of [...] media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous [...] agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person"

That's not particular to conservative media; it's the same tactic used to convince whole swaths of the population that the rich, the white, sexists, racists, jingoists, big corporations, government, etc. are keeping you down.

Leveling it at only one side of a debate is falling into the trap polemicists set up. They all do this, from every angle and via all means possible. It's just propaganda, and one insidious aspect of it is that they convince people only the other side engages in it.

The question that arises for me is how the changes affected the performance of the department, however that's measured (e.g. entrepreneurs, investment, placement, grants, average graduate salaries, etc.).

The outcome, good or bad, wouldn't necessarily reflect on the changed proportion of women; it might just as well indicate something about the particular measures they took to achieve it. For instance, they shifted focus more to potential than to prior experience; were their markers for potential the right ones? Were leadership, math, and science emphases balanced properly?

Getting more women into the program is a great start, but do they go on to be successful? Is leading with gender the right way to do it?

I can see it. I've never talked to the Mormons (although I see them biking in pairs near my office most days), but I've had a number of pleasantly spirited debates with some Jehovah's Witnesses.

We don't see eye-to-eye on religion, but I admire their persistence and resilience in plugging away in the heat and cold, day after day, dealing with an almost certain high level of rejection and, often, hostility.

In my experience they've always remained respectful and polite, too, far beyond the low threshold most people seem to have. I could see that laying an excellent foundation for entrepreneurial gusto.

The government delivers citizens into the hands of private management all the time: required insurance policies, training programs, licensure, etc. Mandating that every obligatory service be not only funded, but implemented, by government would extend its rolls of employees, budgets, laws and legal complexity, competencies, and requisite voter knowledge beyond any reasonable possibility.

You seem to be ascribing a negative to the mere profit focus of a private company, rather than the outcome. We could do the same for insurance, medical practice, automobiles, plane travel, lodging, and everything else important; but we don't, because private companies in the open market perform better.

Would you then deliver everything important into the hands of government monopoly, despite everything we know about the benefits of competition, for the moral premise rather than results? And if you think the results weigh against private prison companies, might we restructure the government/private arrangement before nuking wholesale the notion of the market?

WRT the incarceration rate, I'd have to see something linking that to private companies running prisons, rather than problems with the justice system itself.

Consider the abysmal performance of government-run schools, among others, as a counterpoint.

Those incentives are often there when a private company and the government make a deal.

It's certainly not a problem with for-profit entities in general, though: Apple and Ford and IKEA and every other private manufacturer has those same incentives -- decrease cost and quality and increase price, with a corresponding interest in recidivism.

Obviously in government scenarios -- defense contracting, roads, schools, prisons, utilities -- local or regional (or temporal) monopolies suppress the competition that keeps other companies' base desires in check on the open market.

There are a lot of pressures to the contrary and obvious reasons it's the initial path of least resistance to grant such monopolies, but I wonder if there's a better way to structure deals like these to encourage competition at the same time.

Agreed that that's the basic idea behind government-run anything -- its ostensible adherence to the benefit of society. But that's the naivete I was referring to: in the end there is no "government" per se, just a bunch of self-interested individuals. They all stand to benefit from overemphasizing a need for their department, bigger budgets, better benefits, tenure, and the political clout to influence those things.

There will always be undesirable incentives. Say we reverse things and pay the company more for reformed prisoners who make parole earlier. Now the incentive is to err on the side of leniency and potentially release more dangerous criminals earlier. You might then counteract it by penalizing the company even more if one of their parolees ends up back in the tank within X period of time; that might help, but depending on the parameters it could make them so gun-shy that we're back where we started -- holding people for longer -- but with a more complex system with more opportunity for schemes and loopholes.

It's not an easy problem by any means. As I said, I want to find some studies; I'm open to what the results show, but I'm very wary of trusting government simply because their purported goal is social benefit.

That's fair, and unquestionably a conflict of interest. However, it's not an irrevocable quality of a prison run by a private company (and therefore evil "by definition").

OTOH, purchase of shares is at least an above-board, traceable interaction. Government officials have always gotten perks and kickbacks from private companies, rich individuals, NGOs, and their own budgets that are either off the books or disguised as something else, and therefore less transparent.

I haven't seen (or yet hunted for) a study of publicly run vs. privately run prisons, in terms of treatment, costs, etc.; but I'd be curious, to say the least.

By definition? That requires some justification.

The justice system still sets the parameters and manages the procedures by which sentences are handed down. If a court determines you're going to prison for 10 years, you're going -- the private company manages your environment for that time.

And given that private parties also manage your medical care, hospital stays, air travel, car manufacture, work environments, home building, and thousands of other mechanisms and environments that determine your safety and quality of living, I struggle with finding a moral difference when it comes to prisons.

You could argue that these other things are voluntary and prison isn't, but it's involuntary even if run by government; most inmates would opt out either way.

And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill. Either way you have ridiculous salaries, internal power struggles, marketing/perception, budget committees, and cynical people inured to the hard realities of the lives they affect.

Most gun stats blithely show aggregate rates of gun ownership and gun-related homicides, and the public reacts in fear; who wants to live in a country like that?

But criminal-on-criminal violence is a disproportionate share. Are we supposed to think that the presence of guns is what drives the violence, or is it possibly that you've got millions of young men with no jobs and nothing constructive to do, with parents who don't care to bring them up right (or who can't control them), running drugs and fighting turf wars, cooking up ways to make bank? There's an argument that for some people, access to guns creates an opportunity; but there's a lot more at work here than that.

There's a social rot underneath it all -- and I'd venture that gun violence in the US is a symptom of the rot rather than guns being a cause. It seems remarkably dangerous to me to demonize the mechanism by which someone murders another person in the name of progress; politicians feel like they're accomplishing something, even though we still have a bunch of people willing to kill someone, if only they had the means.

There's significant collective cognitive dissonance in American society on this topic, I think.

I'd argue this is up to the folks commenting rather than the OP, which is a link to some polling that produced a bunch of data points. It can be strictly analytical without blowing up into petty arguments.

Not that it will.

"A few gems in the credibility department from CEO Steve Ballmer: 'We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.'"

For a financial magazine, lampooning this comment shows a surprising ignorance of economics. Even 100% marketshare (which Microsoft never had) isn't equivalent to a monopoly. They'd have to be the only supplier, usually the result of significant barriers to entry (most often cost or government intrusion on the market).

Windows competed with Unixes, OS/2, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, and others. Likewise, IE had Netscape and (later) Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.

Windows had obvious usage advantages over its competitors; but feature-parity isn't something the market guarantees. Its competitors had advantages over Windows, too. In the end, all were available, each had pros and cons, and users freely chose Windows computers in far greater numbers than the alternatives.

Strategic conduct on the part of businesses isn't the same thing as smart (or ethical, or legal) conduct when it's done by governments. Everything has a context.

The very first word in the instructions, "cryptograms" -- coincidentally the entire subject of the exercise -- is misspelled. Pretty sure that will fall on them. It's not very reassuring in an agency where attention to detail is of paramount concern.

That's not what zero-sum implies; you don't have to run two browsers, or two OSes, to refute it.

The marketshare numbers you see are percentages. Say Netscape has 80% of the market of 1M people, and IE4 is popular enough that NS's share dwindles to 30% as IE's rises to 70%. If we're still dealing with 1M total users, the market is zero-sum in that NS's losses are exactly MS's gains.

My contention is that IE4 was so good for its time that it grew the overall internet market; instead of 1M casual users, we have, say, 5M. If NS's marketshare fell from 80% of 1M to 30% of 5M, their user base actually went from 800K to 1.5M. IE4 killed them in share, but helped the overall market and Netscape in particular, by users and revenue.

To assert that it was a zero-sum game is to assert that the market was inelastic relative to the available browsers, which seems ridiculous. Better browsers = more users.