Radim

Yeah ruling juntas do need to "man the fields & factories" (1st order meatware), in order to produce and maintain those drones. Or nukes, or whatever "deciding factor beyond numbers" put them in power.

But they also need 2nd order meatware to support that 1st order: teachers, doctors, merchants… You need scientists to advance your technology against other militaries… You need leaders (3rd order) to keep the first two populations quiet and productive since that turns out to be more cost-effective than fear control through extermination…

Hell you need a certain level of genetic diversity so your own kids don't come out weird.

Give evolution a little more credit. The required number of humans for the in-group to be self-sustainable is definitely not billions, plus it's been shrinking with automation. But we are where we are for a reason – lots of alternative arrangements have been tried over millenia and found wanting.

"Keep my bunker + my drone factory and some farmers, kill the rest" leaves rulers with terrible quality of life (bad) and the next-door-junta taking over pretty quickly (also bad). It is a self-defeating, poor long-term strategy.

Automation tips the power balance further: fewer humans needed, more local autonomy. Which is, I suspect, why the ruling class are so terribly excited about AI, more so than some market valuations. Fewer pesky humans across all levels. Genetic diversity of bloodline remains the primary concern (unless you manage to live forever, which happens to be another evergreen of power ghouls).

Reminds me of an "actual Dutch" AI scandal:

https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...

In 2019 it was revealed that the Dutch tax authorities had used a self-learning algorithm to create risk profiles in an effort to spot child care benefits fraud.

This was a pre-LLM AI, but expected "hilarity" ensues: broken families, foster homes, bankruptcies, suicides.

In addition to the penalty announced April 12, the Dutch data protection agency also fined the Dutch tax administration €2.75 million in December 2021.

The government fining itself is always such a boss move. Heads I win, tails you lose.

A slight elaboration from the same book, although still frustratingly vague:

"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

- God Emperor of Dune

The one that gave us the very word "slave"?

To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.

don't trust Nobel laureates or even winners

Nobel laureate and winner are the same thing.

Linus Pauling was talking absolute garbage, harmful and evil, after winning the Nobel.

Can you be more specific, what garbage? And which Nobel prize do you mean – Pauling got two, one for chemistry and one for peace.

Not something I personally would feel safe putting my family into!

From https://www.topgear.com/long-term-car-reviews/dacia/jogger/r...

The Jogger returned the equivalent of a four-star rating for adult occupant crash protection, and three stars for child occupants. Plenty respectable scores. The Jogger lost marks, however, for its lack of active safety equipment: it doesn’t offer lane-keep assist, pedestrian detection, or seatbelt warnings for the rearmost row. [0]

The overall NCAP rating is dictated by the lowest score in any individual category, hence that headline one-star result for the Jogger.

Many people actively disable gimmicks like "lane-keep assist", so YMMV on such damning "1 star Euro NCAP rating".

In addition, SEPA was never free. So OP is also wrong there.

The regulation only stipulates "equality of charges", that the bank's fees for a payment into another SEPA country/bank must be the same as into the same bank or within the same country [0]. I.e. no payment fee discrimination across SEPA: if my Czech bank X charges me Y for a local EUR payment into X, it must also charge me Y for the same EUR payment into Italy, for example.

Would any bank actually charge their customers Y>0 like that? Yes they would. For example the Bank of Cyprus (in Cyprus, which is in both EU & SEPA) will charge you 6 EUR for a SEPA payment of 1200 EUR if the sender is a physical person, and 10 EUR if legal person [1]. And 4 EUR for smaller EUR amounts. Far from "free".

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/924/oj

[1] https://www.bankofcyprus.com/globalassets/cyprus/org_methods... [PDF]

If I wasn’t clear enough I hope I am now.

I'm afraid "much about anything." is still too vague to tell :)

No need to bring out the "immoral" card – yes, there definitely exist gvt policies (incl. tax) that tip a critical number of that country's skilled workers over into emigration. We're not talking Depardieu or "laptop tourists", we're talking local construction workers FFS.

Observing the tug-of-war HN votes on my post, some people must have taken that footnote as a cue for their ideological warfare du jour. Poor-vs-rich! Pitchforks now!

- "Fixation on taxation levels"… from my "whether [tax is] 20% or 48% cannot be the answer"? How?

- "loves to see low income taxes fore them as an universal band aid for the entire economy"… from my "Clearly Portugal's problems are much deeper than that, going back to 1974 […] Portugal's bureaucracy is legendary"? How?

With all due respect I think the fixation is yours. I have lived in Austria (my sister still lives there) and I have lived in Portugal. There are a lot of issues under the surface in both. Different histories, different trajectories. No need to attack strawmen.

If you have specific insights on the situation in Portugal (beyond Rinzler89's "just create jobs and spend existing taxes more wisely" :eyeroll:), I'd love to hear them. This is a topic close to my heart, I still love Portugal.

Seeing a single number and coming to that conclusion is very reductive, imo.

That's not what the parent post was about, at all. Or did you only read its footnote?

Whether the Portuguese population "feels like they are getting value" is best observed in how they vote. Both during elections (Chega), and most directly and loudly, in how they vote with their feet. Opinions of Irishmen in Vienna notwithstanding.

Whether foreigners are income-taxed at 20% or 48% cannot be the answer¹. Clearly Portugal's problems are much deeper than that, going back to 1974 and beyond.

To name one, Portugal's bureaucracy is legendary. The Portuguese are not called "Honorary East Europeans" for nothing.

The red tape creates a complex system of inefficiency and corruption. It's like a cauldron – you (the government) plug one obvious hole, only to find the pressure found another, "unexpectedly".

And yes, young people run away in droves from Portugal, leaving entire industries back home chronically understaffed. Construction & health being two prominent examples that need foreigners to keep the lights on. This shortage of labour drives commercial prices up higher still, contributing to the death spiral.

¹ Leaving aside that both numbers are high to begin with; 48% ridiculously so (for anyone above €82k/year). That's no way to treat your productive population. And that's just income; there's additional health and social taxes, some masquarading as "insurance" or "employer contribution". Would you blame the young for leaving?

Well yes, that's my point – the process is not trivial, with surprising technical details.

For a more in-depth take on grooves – at least more in-depth relative to "concentric circles" or Lehner's "wet sand" video) check out my link above, https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/. Specifically on Petrie's testimony they offer this:

Of course, Petrie’s Core#7 does not bear any regular helices or a thread cut in granite with a fixed jewel point with a pitch of 2.0 mm, as it has been described by him. There is only a series of grooves, the formation mechanism of which is described above in detail. Their pitch, being very irregular, is not related to the advance movement of the tool cutting edge.

Most importantly, they ran actual experiments on actual stones.

And their theory for those grooves is a sort of emergent property of the accumulated effect of corundum grains falling into the same crest/trough pattern along the tube wall while drilling downward, leading to the observed series of (irregular) cut spiral grooves.

You snark, but please note the "[1983]" in the title. This article's points have since been expounded on, with new evidence both archaeological and experimental.

Namely:

The concentric lines were not always perfectly parallel.

1. What the article calls "concentric circles" are, in fact, series of spirals. That is, a cutting point ploughing through the granite, round and round.

And indeed the fine abrasive circles that this article manages to reproduce (image 7b) look nothing like the original fairly well-spaced, deep-cut grooves of the original hole (image 1a, all the way at the top).

Petrie himself documented spiral grooves that span many drill rotations, sometimes totaling over 6 metres in a single continuous groove. This is well established and not disputed because the physical evidence is so plain.

Why the OP failed to mention spiral grooves and talks about "concentric circles" instead is unclear, given they otherwise quote Petrie extensively.

[the hole] diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside.

…a tubular copper drill creates a more parallel drill hole since it cannot wear beyond the internal diameter of the drill.

2. By all accounts, the tubular drills were fairly thin. We know this because there are thin (overdrilled) circles at the bottom of discovered tube holes, up to 0.5cm in thickness of the tube wall max. There you can see the actual narrow width of the tube because the bottom wasn't sawn off as in the case of OP's particular sarcophagus.

Again well documented by Petrie and others, supported by overwhelming physical evidence, so not a point of contention.

The OP does not go into how the observed difference of 1cm compares to the wear of the (presumably thinner) "internal diameter of the drill". See for example [0] for a clearer, updated exposition.

----

To be clear, none of this is of course evidence for any "aliens". But reading your snark reminded me of those internet fly-by experts who deride honest work of others because "The science is settled bro, I saw a documentary on NBC! Aliens lol these other people are cretins!"

I'd recommend turning off sound if Youtube amateur commentary irks you, but the breadth of physical evidence (photos and videos of actual stone artefacts, not theories around them) they display is astounding. Reading scientific papers (or watching NBC…) alone won't build you enough intuition and nuance for fly-by snarks. It is a complex topic, and not all amateurs are cretins. A bit of humility helps.

[0] https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/

Because UK does not appear in the article's intra-EU groups on panel B.

And Cyprus.

And Malta.

Luckily UK is already out of the EU, or that would be another can of money-laundering worms!

has an unquantifiable non zero worth to the commenter.

Yes, that's the "other kicks out of it" above. Already covered.

More importantly:

You just provided free content (a brief opinion piece) for publication on a commercial entity (HackerNews, run by YCombinator)... ...which, according to you, is a "bad idea all around", since you exploit yourself and harm others.

If HackerNews is indeed a PR branch of some commercial entity, then people posting here for free provide value (which is not to say any of my comments do…) to that entity. Potentially harming alternative forums, whether free or commercial. The point stands.

So, why are you acting against your morals and judgement?

Good call. I guess I didn't perceive HN as for-profit. Perhaps OP's "At some point" is now, for me.

At some point you are the problem if you work for free for a commercial entity.

Sounds harsh, but this is the correct stance.

The free labour you provide is not only "your loss". There are second order effects: you effectively make it harder for others to compete with said commercial entity.

This includes salaried employees of competing companies whose wages you effectively press down. And even other volunteers and non-profits, because defending and sustaining their project in face of "free inputs, for-profit outputs" competition is that much harder. Community projects die because of this.

"Working for free for a commercial entity" is just a bad idea all around. You exploit yourself (whatever, your choice, you may be getting other kicks out of it) and harm others.

…why the 1984 movie Amadeus, which was about Mozart and his rival Salieri, was filmed in Prague…

Surely the director of Amedeus – Miloš Forman – being Czech played a role too.

It is much easier to cooperate with the local crew in their native language, relative to Hungarian / German (IIRC Budapest / Vienna were the other two options on the table for that film).

It was commonplace to see bricks made, say, in the time of Archduchess Maria Theresa

If you visit the cellar of an old house in Old Town / Lesser Town, chances are you'll find bricks much older than Maria Theresa. These cellars routinely date back to the original construction, 11-14th century (unlike the house on top, which has typically been rebuilt several times to match the latest fashion – gothic, baroque, rococo, etc).

Whether or not they let you take a brick home is a different matter :)

(It kind of begs the question of whether math follows from the axioms we want or axioms follow from the math we want). Plus perhaps some new math would start to unfold as we begin to explore the inconsistent axiom's subtleties.

Only tangentially related, but the same idea comes to mind reading Terence Tao's masterpiece on "Smoothed asymptotics" for divergent infinite sums (e.g. the infamous 1+2+3+4+… = -1/12):

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/the-euler-maclauri...

Our intuitive interpretation (Σn must be infinite! and surely positive! never -1/12) fails miserably for such infinite series, in the sense that "practical experiments" (QM) hint at reality preferring that bizarro -1/12 interpretation instead. Who is at fault here – our seemingly iron-clad intuition or the experiments? And why the disconnect?

Like you say, what new math unfolds once we accept and internalize this new interpretation and adjust our intuition? Tao's piece offers an excellent basis for that. While we may come up with any interpretations and axioms we like, experiment is the final arbiter on which of these "math worlds" are real.

To paraphrase Roosevelt: "He may be a charlatan, but he's OUR charlatan!"

what Geographical factor allowed for Industrialism to be established in Western Civilization, with all the force multipliers that Industrialism gives?

Wasn't there a whole book devoted to exploring exactly this question?

Now what was its name…

Care to share why?

I've been a Hetzner customer for nearly 10 years now. I just checked – first invoice in June 2014. And during that period, Hetzner's support – which I needed maybe 3 times since things generally just work – has always been stellar.

I've used Linode too, and their support was comparable (=also great). But Hetzner wins on pricing, hands down.

I actually appreciate Hetzner hasn't join the BS enshittification gimmick train (yet). If that's your complaint.

I don't think WP:NOTE or WP:RELIABLE as such are what ruffles people's feathers. Rather, it's Wikipedia's insistence on pre-chewed secondary sources from legacy media – the roundabout "No original research" policy – which was a questionable (and often questioned) move from the start.

Now public trust in corporate news is at a record low [0], for good reasons. Wikipedia simply hitched their "truth and reliability wagon" to a dying horse, and the chicken are coming home to roost.

[0] https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...

The OP may have – unwillingly and unwittingly – become a part of the SaaS product's testing team. This happens more often that people realize.

Behind the scenes, SaaS can be a shit show: Customer files a ticket => SaaS devs cannot reproduce (or don't bother to reproduce) but fix the presumed bug maybe => a new SaaS release => notify customer to upgrade, close their ticket => wait for response from the customer to see if the fix helped. Rinse & repeat, act aloof. Pretend it's the customer's fault all along.

Exactly right. It's playing out like a bankruptcy: "Slowly at first, then all at once".

Humans have rights insofar they're able to enforce them. Individually by withholding their labor (muscle or brain power), or collectively with pitchforks if need be.

Once labor is dime-a-dozen and pitchforks ineffective (OP's premise of "fully automated economy"), human rights and democracy go the way of dodo, inevitably. Nature loves to optimize away inefficiencies.

Although the "fully automated" bit is quite a stretch at the moment. The end-to-end supply chain required to produce & sustain advanced machinery and AI is too complex, a far cry from "LOL let's buy some GPU and run chatbots".

The "middleman" being other people, i.e. themselves from another's perspective.

"These other people are useless, let's bypass them. But not me! I simply gain the ability to get anything I want."

The lack of second-order thinking is hilarious.

You're just too old to understand! :-)

“When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *

There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.

One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.

* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law"

Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.

It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.

The long-anticipated "mental gym" industry! Where people pay to exercise their atrophied mental muscles the same way they exercise their barely-needed physical muscles now.

With all the associated bullshit and snake oil and romanticizing of the "good old natty days" too, of course.

Big $$$ industry, at least until our brave future does away with voluntary reproduction altogether, being the reason people bother to exercise in the first place.

Of course. Different levels of resolution reveal different details, and 2. was the ultimate zoom-out.

Still, I believe keeping the directionality in mind helps with perspective – even as turbulent whirls and eddies appear to float upstream, miraculously, temporarily.

I now realize I forgot another observation, closer to chongli's original slightly-beyond-human resolution of bust-and-boom economic feedback loops:

3) Most people are pliable and will do as they're told.

Even to their detriment, even all the way to their demise. And the process of human self-domestication is still accelerating.

Historical examples abound; from extremely ancient to uncomfortably recent.

I've experienced the opposite too: orgs looking at down on cloud-only devs.

The idea being that devs who lean on cloud excessively do that to masks their lack of fundamentals, which will cause costly fuck ups no matter what technology they use, cloud or on-prem.

Maybe directionally similar idea to hiring ex-Googlers? Some orgs also don't like those. Specific mindset, specific toolbox.