hn0

I’m of libertarian persuasion but it has to be noted that periods of human history where one faction was souvereign over it’s dominion, were generally more peaceful and conducive to trade and human cooperation.

Empirialism, dispite all of it’s atrocities, have resulted in more stable and peaceful periods during which cultural and technological progress is made.

Personally, I believe it might be better to have a single source of coercion, which is transparent and democratically scrutinized, than to have those dispersed in order to diffuse influence. Many nowadays will argue for more distributed government, taking hints from the apparent successes of “coopetition” in the marketplace. But that space was carefully constructed over millenia of trail and error by governing bureaucracies. It works well because there’s a leviathan that took away every individual’s opportunity for coercive action AND instituted a justice system to distribute justice in a controlled fashion. It also enforces property rights so you don’t end up with robberies out of spite. Without it you get people distributing justice among themselves, resulting in bloody family feuds and cycles of revenge killings.

I feel people arguing for anarchism (and I like anarchism in theory) typically do not seem to appreciate just how violent most of human history has been before highly centralized state and justice systems.

I’m not even sure competence is the right term here. People have different inate characters which will trust them into different positions. There’s also plenty of incompetence by a good portion of those at the top of hierarchies. Those usually do not get replaced because of network effects, parasitism, coercion, etc.

So it’s a propaganda piece?

I read it as an evolutionary biology/psychology explaination for much of human political sentiment. It’s well established that hunter gatherer tribes (the predominant mode during most of human evolution) are very egalitarian.

It’s insurance against life events outside one’s control. Anyone can end up poor or disabled at any time.

I expect this would be the case with alpha compositing at least...

Afaict subpixel rendering is supersampling width with multiples of 3, then modulo via the horizontal coordinate into rgb triplets and divide by supersampling factor. I guess if kerning and position are also subpixel it might become more tricky to cache results efficiently.

I must be the odd one out in that I actually prefer my fonts to look “soft”?

The more frameworks, the more there are to learn. The more effort required to learn all frameworks, the more appealing it becomes to roll your own.

(The combination of choice paralysis and opportunity cost analysis are a powerful motivator, especially when one comes to the budding realization that even the mightiest frameworks are full of irks. More fun in being a total NIH control freak.)

When I open this page on my phone I am greeted with a privacy modal that blocks the entire screen, with a consent button below the fold, which I cannot reach because scrolling appears busted. (Mobile Safari)

Or, Shakespeare was completely consumed by it, to his detriment, and did not wish the same for his children.

The older I get the more I appreceate that passage from Keynes.

Most annoying brain virus at the moment are the walking libertarian cuckoo clocks that appear to have infested every online comment section. The contemporary version of the new age hippy marxism of the sixties and seventies, just on the opposite side of the spectrum. Much like the Marxists, they’re completely impervious to the facts, and you’ll get the exact same excuses (“that’s not real capitalism!”). And then there’s blank slatist culture warriors vs biological determinists, techno utopians vs climate defeatists, ...

It would certainly be good for the planet, but since petroleum is an input early in the production chain, that would cause price inflation, resulting in higher costs and lower demand, e.g. 70’s stagflation. Also black markets and resource contention.

Non-paywalled tldr plz

(One could probably make a comedic genre out of the type of comments that get voted to the top of the average hn thread...)

"opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others" almost sounds like that other -ism...

Talk about socialist nightmares, look at the sun, all that energy hitting earth, and no one's paying for it, no one's responsible, and it's got nuclear power! We should nuke it!

It doesn't fully offset it. Avoiding debt by not investing leads to lower future growth prospects, resulting in opportunity loss. Debt is contractual and can be restructured.

Try to understand their point of view. Maybe he/she hates your guts, but I doubt it.

I’d ask something like:

“I’m certain you have your reasons about not wanting me to attend the conference, but they aren’t clear to me. I have the best interests of the company in mind, but from my point of view this feels like a unduly limitation of my personal liberty. I do understand there’s not always the time or energy to explain yourself to those you manage, and I don’t want to question your decisions. But I wish you would explain your reasoning about why you feel I should not attend the conference. And maybe see if there is a possibility of a compromise? I hope you try to understand my point of view here, I do not want any sour feelings to develop between us.“

Also, give people time to change their minds. Just gently asking a few times a couple of times in advance, preferably during downtime or when your manager is in a relaxed state if mind. It might help them reconsider the idea, even if it feels like nagging. Just be wary that you don’t come off as “not listening” or questioning their authority. If you manager is really difficult you could ask a superior, but be very careful, you can be certain they won’t like you going behind their back.

Can we have a comedy section for spam like this?

Not sure why sans-serif minimalism should be considered soulless. I don't think I'll ever tire of solid no-nonsense Swiss design, but variety is the spice of life for sure.

Forced OOP model [1], lack of types, highly redundant syntax (ES6 whyyyy). After years I’m still fighting with the language, not to mention the browser with it’s frankensteinian api.

Browsers should have just created a Lua dialect, which is like a more sane version of JS, and throw JS back into the nineties-fads hellscape that spawned it. Perhaps in an alternate dimension Eich will have done a non experimental port of Scheme or would just have done WASM from the start. I’m pretty sure at least there every PC would just boot into Netscape by now.

It’s true that the infrastructure around JS has gotten a lot better, but that’s despite the language. If anything I should thank it for popularizing FP which will hopefully eventually slay the chimera that is OOP.

[1] Or, more specifically, “POOP” to emphasise its prototypical nature.

On the other hand, MMT is deeply concerned with institutional arrangements in the banking system, and still elides central banks and governments in its explanations of how the system works because doing so avoids the inconvenience of explaining that the main reason budget deficits result in long term repayment obligations for governments under current institutional arrangements is because central banks fundamentally disagree with MMTers that systematically buying up all newly emitted government debt and pushing interest rates down to permanent zero is compatible with low inflation.

I’m not sure what MMT books you’ve been reading...

Neoclassical economics still has no plausible answer for the Anything Goes theorem:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu_t...

Decades after the findings were published.

I find it hard to conclude this would be the method of a established science.

Not to mention that many of “mainstream” economics is at odds with accounting principles.

This misses THE central point of MMT, the fundamental difference between currency issuer (souvereign authority) and currency user (households, firms, regional governments, etc).

Richard Werner did empirical tests of the theory you describe, and found it to be false:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

And

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

Economists at the Bank of England re-ran these tests in an attempt to disprove the above theory and found themselves reaffirming it:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/banks-are...

It has since been reaffirmed by other central banks, including the Bundesbank

https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Veroeffentl...

There’s a problem with this approach, which I found out about the hard way.

Like you I thought I should keep my html “semantic”. The problem with this approach is that you end up tightly coupling the stylesheet and the html, because it requires you to recreate the html’s tag structure using contextual selectors.

Besides becoming very complex this means that every time you need to change the html you also need to change the css.

The other major downside is that all those mixins end up generating a ton of duplicate rules in the stylesheet.

Note that if you define everything using classes and then put those classes in the html you have none of these issues. The coupling is much more straightforward and the stylesheets can be much smaller. Besides that, contextual selectors are many times slower than a single classname.

The inline styles thing I can’t agree with, classes are much more DRY.

I found the methodologies outlined by Harry Roberts to change the ways I structure my css for the better. (www.csswizardry.com)

Economists generally follow the idea that all trade is barter trade and that money is just an indirection layered on top the “real” economy, which alleviates some of the issues with bartering goods.

That’s all fine, but historians and anthropologists have found zero edvidence that the monetary system developed out of barter.

Rather, banking seems to have co-evolved alongside interpersonal informal credit systems (contract based, not spot-trade) and religious practices in early agricultural city states. The first written records are bookkeeping documents of grain supplies and outstanding debts between citizens. In time, people started trading these documents against each other.

E.g. If you need to pay Garry for fixing your plumbing, but Sally still needs to pay you for the 8 eggs she borrowed, you can just tell her to pay it to Garry instead and you’l be even.

What coins are in this model are abstract tokens representing the ledgers inside the third party’s accounting table which denote the debts and credits people hold against eachother. In other words, it’s all about accounting. Economics courses do not include accounting, generally.

The real issue economists fail to “get” it is that it invalidates many of the axioms on which they construct their theory. Economics is still very much a deductive science. Because there is such a large hivemind around these fundamental founding myths the field has been able to get by with simply ignoring outside criticisms, this includes a number of “own goals”.

If you have some econ 101 knowledge you might want to look up the “anything goes” theorem. Many nobel prizes can be thrown out of the window.

I found Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics” and Phillip Mirowski’s “More Heat Than Light” to be very revealing.

There is no such thing as “fractional reserve banking”, the textbook models on banking taught in schools across the globe are dead wrong.

See:

Richard A. Werner, A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

Richard A. Werner, Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

Zoltan Jakab and Michael Kumhof, Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds - and why this matters https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/banks-are...

German Bundesbank, Die Rolle von Banken, Nichtbanken und Zentralbank im Geldschöpfungsprozess https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Veroeffentl...

Piti Disyatat, The bank lending channel revisited https://www.bis.org/publ/work297.pdf

Beardsley Ruml, Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/542134

The difference is, at least in theory, that boom-bust cycles from bank-fuelled speculative frenzies could be controlled.

I hate the one-dimensional taxonomy generally used. I wish one of these would be adopted in the media:

https://www.politicalcompass.org https://8values.github.io

(there’s more)

Classical Liberalism is sometimes considered left wing because it originated as a response to aristocracy, and alongside their preference for free markets (which originally meant markets free from economic rent, not free from regulation) over the rigidly hierarchical model of feudalism with it’s caste system, some founders were broadly socialistic in their thinking.

It’s somewhat ironic capitalism emerged in England where it began as a massive social engineering effort by the central authorities, putting large parts of the population in precariousness and poverty. “Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not.” To quote economic historian Karl Polanyi.

“Capitalism” is nowadays often conflated with “markets”, which can be found in about every agricultural society. Capitalism was coined by Marx and he meant basically a society where the population can be divided in two classes: those who own capital (capital = means of (industrial/mass) production = machines, factories, things-that-make-things, etc) and those who don’t. Those who own capital make their income out of profit, those without have to sell their labor for a wage to the capitalist. Remember that mass production dropped the prices of goods considerably, so artisanal production went out of the window. Basically the inequality in potential to make money resulted in a strong reduction in individual freedom for large parts of the population. This is where the paradoxal dichotomy of liberty and equality becomes clear, where equality in it’s purest sense can be considered the maximum amount of individual liberty for the materially worst off in society — freeing the individual from the constraints put upon him by his environment. That’s the same as saying everyone gets exactly the same. Wonder how well that works in the real world...

Note that “Socialism” is often equated with Marxism, which actually came rather late to the party.

Many new school “Classical Liberals” were created by marginalist economic theory, which was a response to the rising popularity of Marxist justifications for wealth distribution. It’s just as nonsensical, sadly, and it seems we’re stuck with it.

“Keyensianism” is another horribly misunderstood term. Keynesianism as historically known was actually developed by Paul Samuelson, and is based upon economic models that were published by him before Keynes published his major works. Keynes was a classical liberal with a streak of conservatism which despised Marxism. Keynesianism is nowadays equated with “money printing” which is not at all what he argued.

I also recently read Harari’s Sapiens, where at one point he makes the following distinction, which I thought was neat:

* Liberal humanism which holds that the individual, and liberty of the individual, is the most important priority.

* Socialist humanism which holds a notion of humanity as collective and for which equality is the main priority.

* Evolutionary humanism, which holds that Sapiens might either degenerate as a species, or evolve into “super-humans”

Calling Nazi’s “humanist” might seem strange, but in some wicked sense they were, they cared for humanity as some kind of meta organism that could evolve or devolve. Thankfully modern biology put all that to bed.

It’s interesting to note that humanism is based on the notion of “natural rights” which is another way of saying “rights given by God”. People often don’t realize just how religious the axioms of their preferred moral framework are.

(Bit long and tangential probably...)

Antitrust to break up monopolies?