adamlett

There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid.

Yes, commons, rotating field systems, and similar arrangements show that.

But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today’s systems.

Not quite. Transactions existed, but they were embedded in systems of obligation and sovereignty — kings, emperors, or lords claimed ultimate rights. That’s a different structure from modern absolute private ownership.

The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries.

Those records exist, but even in Mesopotamia rulers could reallocate or confiscate land. Ownership wasn’t as secure or absolute as a modern freehold title.

Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land.

Quipus tracked obligations and allocations. Land under the Inca was held communally and redistributed, not privately owned.

Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years.

Some land was inherited and sold, but there were also systems of redistribution (for example, the Chinese equal-field system). That’s not the same as permanent, alienable freehold.

This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.

It’s not an urban legend. Property has always been a bundle of rights that varied across societies. The modern model of land as a freely tradable commodity giving the holder near-total monopoly is comparatively recent.

Possibly, but what we think of as land ownership today — land as a commodity that can be freely bought and sold, and as something that gives the owner near-total control over how it’s used — is actually a fairly recent development.

In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top: in Denmark, for example, nobles had a monopoly on hunting and timber in their forests, but peasants still had rights to gather firewood, berries, nuts, mushrooms, and so on.

Village fields were also often organized under the open-field system, where land was divided into strips. Each household got a mix of good and poor soil, and in some places those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair. It’s a very different picture from modern private property.

It's also not falsifiable. Dang can disclaim it but Gruber's next step would just be to write "of course dang would say that."

If all Dang did was deny, then yeah, it would be quite reasonable to not trust him. But presumably Dang is able to provide a reasonable alternative explanation and has the receipts to back it up.

I sometimes give to panhandlers, but it’s mostly for my own benefit. I don’t believe my actions do anything to solve a problem, but I also don’t want to desensitize myself to the misery of others so much that I can easily ignore them. As far as I know, there is ample evidence that homelessness can be solved if there is sufficient political will to implement a structural solution.

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.

We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.

That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job? How do you prevent unconscious biases from causing you to unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual?

There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity.

I think there is a very well founded belief that organisations that claim to be pure meritocracies struggle with diversity.

I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.

That’s probably true, if the hiring process truly is based on merit and nothing else. We have no way to tell if that’s the case here.

MEI has gotten us to where we are today.

Or maybe it was just product/market fit.

I read somewhere something to the effect of this: Some languages solve deficiencies in the language by adding more features to the language. This approach is so common, it could be considered the norm. These are languages like C++, Swift, Rust, Java, C#, Objective C, etc. But two mainstream languages take different approach: C and Go strongly prefer to solve deficiencies in the language simply by adding more C and Go code. One of the effects of this preference is that old (or even ancient in the case of C) codebases tend to look not that different from new codebases, which as one might imagine can be quite beneficial in certain cases. There is a reasonable argument to be made that at least some of the enduring success of C has to do with this approach.

That's not entirely true. Continental European law tends to be far more detailed than Anglo Saxon law, but still relies on precedents set in previous cases when there are ambiguities in the law, and when it comes to metering out punishment and damages.

Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers

...

Any actual lawyer would tell you

Assuming you're not yourself a lawyer, doesn't speculating about what an actual lawyer would say or do make you an armchair lawyer?

A personal anecdote: I was charged with adding a cookie banner to my company’s website after having successfully resisted having one for many years. The reason given to me by the new owners of the business being that the marketing department wanted to try some new stuff, and the lawyers told them that it required consent on the part of our users. I was also told that I shouldn’t spend a lot of time on this, and to therefore use an off-the-shelf product (OneTrust), and to not customize it any way. When I remarked that the default texts for the banner sounded very scary and implied that we did a lot of things that we weren’t actually doing, I was told to leave them unchanged, because we had to assume that they had been vetted by (OneTrust’s) lawyers, and that it would be too legally risky to change them. My argument that OneTrust’s offering was a one size fits all that had to be compliant with the sleaziest, most ad-tech compromised media sites out there, but that we were not that, failed to make an impression.

A couple of observations:

1. Players like OneTrust and the consultants who specialize in this, are highly incentivized to play up the risks of not being compliant. My layman’s estimation of the legal risks is that the risk for good faith actors is actually pretty low. If the authorities find that you are not in compliance, you will most likely get a chance to rectify this, and possibly a slap on the wrist. Those scary fines measured in percent of global revenue, is not going to be what you face for an honest mistake.

2. Those businesses that rely on invasive tracking, and therefore really must use these banners, benefit from everyone else mistakingly believing that they too must compromise their UX with these banners. It makes what they do seem normal and acceptable.

When working in an environment where there are serious consequences to being late, everyone has an easier time accepting that hard choices have to be made to get a solution out the door before the deadline. The paradigm shifts from “we want this particular solution, how long will it take?” to “we have this hard deadline, how can we solve it?”.

For Apple to be able to take a cut from other app stores, they need to have full control over said stores

No, they just need a legally binding agreement.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a long and informative reply. I found it enlightening.

It depends on individual requirements. Most Apple laptops have better battery life than all of my laptops, but current ones have less memory available to run virtual machines unless I pay a huge premium which raise would raise the price 7 x over what I paid for my current Thinkpad E580. Also the later has a matte screen which I can't have on a Macbook nor can they fold like my Lenovo Yoga to be used as a tablet and drawing board.

It's quite a requirement that to be considered overall best, a product must be best at every conceivable niche. You wouldn't disqualify Lionel Messi from consideration of being the world's best football player by saying that he is (probably) not a very good goalkeeper? Not to say that a MacBook is the Lionel Messi of laptops, but just that a laptop can overall best, while also being a bad fit for a particular role.

I also think price while obviously relevant when it comes to a purchasing decision, is irrelevant when talking about which product is better. To determine which tool is best for hammering nails, it's irrelevant that a rock is cheaper than a hammer. The only relevant criteria is which you would pick if you were free to choose. And, it would frankly be strange if the better product weren't also the more expensive product.

My personal opinion is that Apple has been killing it with their laptops since the introduction of the first M1 MacBook Air. This seems to also be the universal sentiment in the Apple community. I'm aware of no product in the PC space that seem so universally acclaimed, let alone could plausibly serve as basis for a claim that Apple is somehow behind in this category.

Which company makes better laptops than Apple?

I think you can safely assume that unless someone is part of the absolute poker elite, they are unlikely to be earning anything near the median software engineering income. It’s not impossible, but it would require access to some unusually soft high stakes games, and while such games do exist, they are typically invitation only.

The article didn't cite IEA making an argument or even presenting any facts; rather, it reported an assertion that carbon capture isn't enough.

Maybe we read different articles, because I distinctly remember reading in the article that the energy cost of CO2 capture to achieve status quo using current technology would require more energy than the world is currently producing (fact), which means the solution is unrealistic (argument).

The number one argument against this kind of doomerism is that we don't know what we don't know

If that's the number one argument, I appreciate that you don't go on to cite number two, and three, because those would have to be incredibly weak arguments.

but perhaps some technological breakthrough (genetically engineered trees? dense organic materials? who knows?) could work as soon as it is discovered.

It's also within the realm of possibilities that aliens will descend and use their superior technology to restore the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But I would advice against a plan that could only succeed if this were to happen.

Asking you to consider an analogous situation is hardly the same as claiming you said anything you didn’t.

If you can’t spot a flaw in the facts or the arguments, I guess you can always cast doubt on the credibility of organizations presenting the facts and arguments. That way you don’t have to think about something that’s making you uncomfortable to think about.

I think you are mixing things up. Apple was experiencing a sales slump but was far from dying in 1985. Jobs got ousted in a power struggle between him an Sculley who was CEO. In 1997, when Jobs returned, Apple was reportedly months away from bankruptcy, and only survived because of a cash infusion from Microsoft.

No. Two people with access to the highest level of state secrets have in public acknowledged something which although officially a state secret, has in fact been public knowledge since the Snowden revelations.

This would've been useful if you knew what kind of number it was...

JSON isn’t ambiguous when it comes to this. Numbers are arbitrary precision decimal numbers[1].

I’m guessing your issue is with how Javascript interprets JSON numbers as 32 bit floats. But that is a (mis-)feature of JavaScript and switching your serialization format to XML would not help, because JavaScript represents all numbers as 32-bit floats.

[1] https://www.json.org/json-en.html

Here are a couple of things to consider, to help you determine if you should buy $APPL or not:

* Do you think the stock is currently undervalued? If yes, at what price would you consider it to be fairly valued? Overvalued?

* Can you afford to lose the money?

* Is there another investment opportunity that offers a better risk/reward ratio?

It doesn't matter if you are correct in your assessment of Apple's continued dominance of their market if most investors agree with you, because then that assessment is already baked into the price of the stock. The only way to beat market is to take a contrarian position and be right.

If your goal is not to beat the market, then you should probably not be picking individual stocks.

People who say "it depends", without also explaining what it depends on, are not worth listening to. Someone who advocates for a silver bullet solution to a problem is more helpful than someone who won't make any recommendation at all, because "it all depends".

It doesn’t seem that difficult to me. It’s obviously net worth.

If only other countries existed that had implemented these policies, then we would have some evidence to indicate whether you were right or wrong.

Possibly, but let’s not lose sight of the goal, which is to get people to drive less. There is no solution to this problem that allows everyone to keep driving the same amount as they always have! It may seem unfair that a small number of sufficiently wealthy people do not have to change their behavior, but enjoying privileges that are not available to most people is what it means to be wealthy. And in the meantime, the rest of us can console ourselves by remembering that if only rich people drive because only they can afford it, at least they are bearing the full cost of it, and hopefully the money they pay will go to something all of us benefit from.

We should encourage less driving for many reasons, which is why municipalities should have fewer, not more parking spaces. If there aren’t enough available parking spaces, that’s a failure of pricing. Increase the price of parking to a level where there is always an acceptable number of available parking spots.

1. Corporations are not citizens.

2. From reading this thread, it seems US citizens are scared out of their minds. Scared of making a mistake, when filing their taxes. And it appears that Biden's proposed reform aims to alleviate that fear.

Why is the stylesheet single use? The classes can be used anywhere, as they should be. Make components in the CSS and call them by their classname in HTML. You are building generic components here.

The problem with reusing CSS comes, when the style you’ve previously created, is almost, but not exactly perfect for the current component. Changing it to better fit you current need risks breaking existing layouts, and so you are left with overriding it. But when you do that, you eventually end up with a lot of override classes just to change one or two things. So, what do you name these classes? If you name them for what they are intended for (ie. “semantically”), you are bound to end up with a lot of differently named classes, that all do the same or nearly the same thing, because it turns out that we commonly want to override the default styling in very similar ways. You end up with dozens of one-rule classes that all just set float to right or display to none. Alternatively, you name these overrides for what they do. This way, whenever you need to float something right, you just add the `float-right` class to the element. You can now eliminate all those redundant semantically names override classes. But if you go back to the classes you started with, it also turns out that those would have been a lot more reusable if they’d contained fewer rules to begin with. This makes sense, because more rules = more specific, and fewer rules means more general. At this point, I’m sure I don’t have to point out to you, that you’re well on your way to reinventing Tailwind.

This makes Tailwind seem like a lot of machinery (in the sense of bundle size, running code, and pseudo-language) just to avoid opening a file at dev time.

It’s not about avoiding opening a file. It’s about avoiding the risk and/or cost that comes from editing a stylesheet that applies globally. If you change existing rules, you risk breaking the layout somewhere you didn’t anticipate. Or, to avoid that, you treat the stylesheet as append-only, leaving you eventually with enormous files and selectors of ever increasing specificity.

Tailwind (or Tachyons) makes for ugly markup, but it solves a real problem, and it does it better than anything else.