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frickinLasers

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Winston's greatest pleasure in life was his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem--delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing.

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As someone who is essentially financially illiterate, what does this mean, "allocate resources efficiently?" Nobody's investing in companies that promise to cure world hunger or alleviate childhood suffering. They're investing in technologies that can extract the most wealth from the population, regardless of externalities. Is that desirable?

Then again, I can't fathom what people would be doing with their money if the stock market weren't there. I imagine they might naturally wind up with some sort of...stock market.

Yes, it probably is. Have you ever heard of the spherical cow?*

Simplifying the surface makes it possible to model the system with equations that can be solved analytically--which gives theorists something to work on. Modeling more complex systems (which often happens, eventually) typically requires lots of computing power and results in a model that doesn't generalize well.

* https://www.sphericalcowblog.com/spherical-cows

You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism.

I'd say a more overt example is playing out on the national stage, where protests in support of (murdered, raped, and starving) Palestinians in Gaza are crushed, because the alternative is to have the executive branch try to extort a $Billion dollars from the host campus, putting universities in peril, to help buy another gold-plated plane or something.

ESIM Security 1 year ago

Would be nice to have a page full of forum posts like this for various cars.

Incidentally, this link recommends termination resistors, which I think are the better answer if there's a suitable connector (which I imagine is the case for most cars). If it's not terminated, I believe it can still pick up a nontrivial signal.

ESIM Security 1 year ago

Do you have examples of cars (that aren't Teslas, perhaps, since they don't play by normal car rules) having been disabled due to lack of cell service?

This doesn't seem possible, because self interest will always lead to hacking the structure for better returns, and technology accelerates the ability to do that. It seems to me that whatever is put in place to direct selfish behavior toward good will eventually be rerouted or broken for one exceptionally selfish asshole or group.

The small fraction of people perpetrating fraud does not warrant leaving science for private corps to pursue. The end result from that is companies sitting on their IP and suing anyone who comes up with something similar--with the cost passed on to consumers, and the pace of technology development slowing.

You still haven't explained how this is biased toward people "in it for the career, not for the principle."

ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science.

What the hell are you talking about? I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses, rather than, for instance, helping some corporation abuse human psychology to sell more ads. If there is no money to do the science, I have no choice but to emigrate.

edit: And to give you an example of the science being targeted by these early moves: pulse oximeters have a racial bias leading them to overestimate the oxygen saturation of minorities, which led to deaths during the pandemic. All the work toward addressing that issue at the FDA has now been terminated, because it's related to DEI.

His manage-by-trolling technique is demonstrably effective in industry.

Or are his companies successful despite that? The impression I get is that his direct reports are exceptionally good managers and shield the companies from his dumbest moves. Except at Twitter--that's lost, what, 75% of its value? (still works as a political platform for him though)

The one case where I find ads useful, when word of mouth isn't an option, is in a static image on a site (review site, blog, whatever) where I'm researching a thing. The ad would be related to that thing, doesn't need to know a thing about me other than I'm browsing that page, and is related to the content on that page. I click on those ads sometimes.

Average rent per square foot since 2014 has increased by 42% [1]. By your unadjusted income chart, incomes have only increased by 33% in that time. In my case, existing just to the left of the income median, that's meant going from comfortably affording a 2br apartment and weekly dinner out, to barely squeaking by in a small 1br. Add in a $600 car payment (which I have managed to avoid), and it's not possible to live reasonably.

[1] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea...

Why are "running a business" or "holding a regular job" the options? That's the most mundane description of making a living I can imagine. What about "extend laser emissions to a new part of the spectrum to enable new imaging modalities" or "found a nonprofit focused on addressing the coming water crisis," or "teach gifted kids what they're capable of accomplishing"...anything less boring than "run a business?" They should have exposed you to the wider potential you had available and tried to find your motivation.

I went the way the article discusses--stopped doing homework, finished high school on schedule with a C average. I found my motivation ten years later, and I guess I should be grateful for that, but it's been a long road to recovery. My best years were squandered drinking and fighting pointless wars, and I resent that.

Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.

If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.

I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved...

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill