jvmboi

around here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

Yeah, thanks for this run of the mill communist bullshit that doesn't have anything to do with what I said. "Oh yeah, pay for work is EXPLOITATION guys, guys, guys, the only ETHICAL way is for daddy government to force people to work at gun point".

You are entitled to your view but I think it is a little unempathetic to be unable or unwilling to put yourself in the shoes of entrepreneurs when the topic is how attractive a place is for them. Of course, all things being equal, a business wants to pay as little for labor as possible.

Speaking as a German, wrt pay I think this topic is not quite so simple. Germany doesn't have particularly high wages and one of the reasons for that is that labor costs are so high. How can that be? Simple: all labor protection that we have is, at end, simply a cost. Yes, we have payed sick leave. Very civilized. But German employees call out sick, on average, 11 days a years. That's almost two weeks pay for no labor. In a global, competitive labor market that cost isn't coming out of the profits of the company. It's coming out of our wages. And so it is with all the other "goodies" that we get.

Btw, our cohesion isn't really what it used to be either.

You might enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3W2v7LN-88

I, Pencil by Leonard E Read

There was no conceivable version of a road system where that behavior would ever be okay. However, it's not only conceivable but, apparently standard practice in systems programming, to "Try and Fail" instead of "Only Proceed if allowed".

So, if we want a tortured metaphor what JVM is doing is like trying to pass a turnstile to see if the pass is still valid so that on the happy path it saves the extra check. Now Apple decided that instead of just showing a red X and letting you buy a new pass, in the future you get shot in the back of the head if you try with an invalid pass.

What do they (we?) have to say that you'll believe that we just don't like the puzzle for the non-intelligence related reason we stated?

It's not clear at all and you can read comments here to find that out.

I don't know the game designer especially but what I actually think is that the system (ie org+people) that produced this puzzle is much smarter than I am. I just don't think the puzzle design is appealing and I gave an impersonal argument to that effect. You have a duty on this side to take comments in good faith. If I give you a factual argument about why I dislike a puzzle you don't just get to accuse me that it's really about intellectual girth.

you have to connect the fork with the goal and then use the curves to connect the rest. https://io.google/2024/puzzle/share/0b110/

No, I don't think it wouldn't seem like that to any reasonable person. What makes you say otherwise?

One unstated rule is that you have to use all pieces. Number three can already be solved with two pieces and that also doesn't count. I strongly dislike this kind of puzzle.

The presentation is nice but the content of the puzzle put me off. I think if you suggest a physical puzzle by presenting it as a rolling ball then you should honor correct physical intuition such that a ball isn't going to turn left by itself as it does in puzzle three. I'm interested in testing my wit, and I am fine with losing, but I am not interested in just finding the correct way to clap like a seal for the puzzle designer.

It makes sense that the engines would be heavy and they are heavy on the launch vehicle. I am not sure how the ratios come out there but I'd still expect the fuel to, by far, take up most of the mass. Then engines for maneuvering in space and to land on the moon don't have to be very big. I looked up the figures for Apollo and found out the following:

"The Apollo's "lunar module descent engine" weighs a mere 180 KG vs the approx. 4200 KG of the rest of the craft (dry mass). Just the fuel for the descent is then roughly 8000 KG."

I could easily be wrong and I am very open to learning as what I wrote is just my intuition developed from playing KSP.

The Apollo's "lunar module descent engine" weighs a mere 180 KG vs the approx. 4200 KG of the rest of the craft (dry mass). Just the fuel for the descent is then roughly 8000 KG.

Obviously, landing on the moon is possible but I do think that the inherent requirement to have engine(s) and fuel tanks below the payload makes landing in a vacuum a bit of a challenge.

Some "insights" from this mediocre KSP player:

a) for launch you want your rocket to be slender and tall. For a stable landing you want your vehicle to be broad and flat.

b) The engine is at the bottom (moon-wards), by definition. The fuel is above the engine. As you land, the fuel tank depletes significantly which shifts the center of mass towards the top of the vehicle which makes it less stable.

c) The lunar (mun-ar?) surface is really uneven and gravity is low. What you want to land is a steamroller but what you actually have is a springy, ultra-light, top-heavy contraption that's more likely to bounce off of then to flatten moon rocks.

I don't understand the word "we" in your comment. Obviously, some specific people do the actual work of caring for disabled people. Most people don't do that work.

The point of "Zivildienst" which translates to "civil service" as opposed to "Wehrdienst" "military service" was to make conscientious objectors contribute to society in-lieu of serving with a weapon. So, once you came of age you had to do one or the other.

I think within this previous paradigm of a citizen army, as opposed to the volunteer army of professional soldiers we have now, this was a good way to make sure you'd still have recruits while not forcing anyone into the military that really didn't want to be there.

This was a real test. They have done this 192 times. It failed two times. The last two times. So it's not that this is inherently impossible, it's just that they can't do it anymore. I think, given the stakes, it's probably best not to just give them a pass.

Source for the number of tests: https://news.sky.com/story/trident-missile-misfired-and-cras...

well it's very easy for them to say that, right? Because they'll never have to prove this in detail to anyone that could hold them accountable because SECRETS and COMPLICATED TECHNOLOGY.

I don't understand your motivation to type this many words in order to make, what amounts to, generic excuses (1) for people that take a huge chunk of your paycheck in order to balance the world on the knives edge of nuclear deterrence and somehow managing to fuck up the one thing that is the whole point of the exercise.

Mind you, I am not even taking a moral stance here, I am just saying that if we have nuclear weapons can we please not lower the bar on competency in their handling.

1) maybe the reasons you give are plausible but they are essentially based on no real information about what happened here

The Ministry of Defence said the "nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective".

The test that we did to show that it would work, didn't work but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Of course!

I am erring on the side of durability because I'm not really into new gimmicks but it's a daunting proposition to buy the "good stuff". A low stakes example is my Miele dishwasher that I bought when I was outraged at my previous Siemens/Bosch one breaking due to a very simple part that just can't be replaced because of the way the machine is (deliberately?) constructed. Just getting to that place can slice your hand open if you are not careful. So this is all just to say: I get it and I am in. BUT. There no reliable way for me to know that that if I pay 4x as much as that I'll get 4x as much durability. For all I know, my Miele could also break in a year and then what?

proto-humancentric thinking

I think that it's actually your perspective, which I think is essentially a sci-fi perspective, is deeply human biased. You think space is cool because you evolved under an open sky that rotates to show you "the universe" roughly every 12 hours. But most stars are red dwarfs and any planet with water they have would be tidally locked. I have my doubts that sky watching is a thing on such a planet given that the flares probably mean you have to live underground. Other places never show you the sky at all. For example, any species evolved in the oceans of Enceladus would have to through hundreds of kilometers of ice before understanding that there even IS a universe. Similarly for species evolved on clouded worlds like Venus or Titan. Their mythology and psychology would not resonate with space at all. Earths moon is also quite ridiculous. We don't see anything like it anywhere else. Now, would we all be so fascinated with space if we didn't have that moon and the eclipses to go along with it? I don't think so.

This is all done via AI and automated factories that terraform planets into Von Neumann manufacturing hubs

But it is, very obviously, not done. And this is why I call yours a "sci fi perspective" because you hand wave away huge scientific and engineering challenges that might never be overcome. We have five (5!) probes that sort of accidentally left the solar system. We have 0 probes that we deliberately sent to other stars. We have 0 AI systems that can run factories. We have 0 autonomous factories. We have never made anything that ever extracted in-situ resources to be used by itself. We have 0 self-replicating machines. We have 0 self-repairing machines. We have grown human in-vitro 0 times. We have very little technology that can even survive a hundred years.

You have to understand that when Von Neuman talks about these probes it is little more than a doodle that illustrates a neat idea. There is nothing about reality that dictates that machines like this must be possible.

Why did Europeans colonize the entire earth?

They did? Maybe you from an alternative earth but on my earth we (humans) haven't even colonized the poles, most deserts or oceans, all of which are magnitudes more habitable then anything we see in the night sky.

Life is a virus that spreads without limit.

Von Neumann probes are lines of pencil on paper and nerve signal in brains and nothing more. But even if they existed they wouldn't be life.

Do you not understand why people invested in early merchant ships in like the 1500s?

Yes, YOU invest, YOU get the spices. When you send for other stars you won't get anything back in your or your children's or your grandchildren's lifetime.

So the starting point of this conversation is the Fermi paradox. Your line of reasoning has a very long line of necessary assumption. I only show that how they might not be warranted.

Not much more progress is necessary.

The more plausible you make the technology the more you have to explain why we aren't doing these things. We might go back to the moon soon but beyond that we don't have any plausible plans to do anything noteworthy in space, let alone activities that would be detectable from other star systems.

Huh? Who has that idea?

You. Everyone else who holds up the Fermi Paradox. The further we look into space, the less we understand but somehow you guys are so very sure that we aren't seeing aliens.

It just requires that some fraction of people are interested in it.

I don't know how this relates to the Fermi paradox. Is the argument that "as long as some people are interested there will be a Dyson swarm"?. I don't think that follows.

but you can't even understand that some of your fellow humans might do 'pointless' things?

I can absolutely understand that. What I don't agree with is that we are on an inevitable path to a Dyson swarm (or similar scale engineering).

I don't buy your argument. Aliens can't magically escape thermodynamics, even if they were super quirky and 'alien'.

That wasn't my argument but I don't know what aliens can do. They might be able to do things that look a lot like violating thermodynamics to our incomplete understandings of physics. They might be engineering on a scale that is so fundamental that we can't currently recognize it. They might just be on their planet(s) with eternally stagnant technology. The point is, we don't know. We don't have data. We won't be able to draw valid conclusion from almost total ignorance.

We don't see these 'infrared stars'.

It was a hypothetical. But let's say we don't see dyson swarms, which I am not even sure of, then proper conclusion is that nobody builds dyson swarms and nothing else.

See how fast technology is developing, and especially the decreases in the cost of rocket launches.

The past century of rapid progress is anomalous in human history. We made do with stone tools for 100k years. In the middle ages basically nothing technological happened for a 1000 years. Consequently, this view of eternally ongoing progress is an artifact of the specific time and place we find ourselves in and not something that really has to happen. While we had some good results from semi-conductors I see our progress as already slowing down. Most of our science doesn't reproduce. Our cosmology is in shambles (more on this later) and our engineering is surfacing issues around putting the correct number of bolts on airplanes.

Within the next few hundred years humanity (or our drones) will have spread to countless habitats around the solar system.

Why? What is there beyond the gravity well that isn't on earth? Maybe there are some substances, such as deuterium, that we can exploit remotely but this idea of "space habitats" is just romantic science fiction. Maybe someone will make it happen but only because we humans are in love with space, not because it makes rational sense.

Within a few thousand years, we will have started building a Dyson swarm that will obscure a measurable fraction of the light of our sun.

Again, why? Fusion and fission can supply all the energy we want. If we want to do mega engineering for more energy we could just bore down to the earth's core. I'd bet that's what intelligent aliens on Enceladus would do. Regardless, it's completely useless to predict the future a thousand years out. We simply don't know and we have no data to anchor our fantasies to reality. From this initial starting point, nobody ever made and predictions worth anything.

We don't need any new science for this, nor radically new engineering.

So why don't we do it then?

For this confident prediction, we only need a few key ingredients: * Humanity doesn't blow herself up completely. (Civilisations blowing themselves up is one way to resolve the Fermi paradox.)

Like I showed, you are baking in more and more assumption. Basically every sentence of yours is one more huge assumption.

Even today's technology could detect the humanity of 3024 from countless light years away: just point a spectroscope at the star and notice a vast excess of infrared (the waste heat of our solar collectors has to go somewhere) and an corresponding deficit of shorter wavelengths.

Some SETI and Fermilab people looked already back in 2006 and found 17 candidates. There is this flawed idea that we already have detected and interpreted everything that there is. But JWST is showing us right now that we don't know anything. Every piece of our cosmology is currently under reexamination because wherever we point JWST we see stuff we can't explain. Even just the question of cosmic distance measurement isn't simple and clean cut.

All our space science is based on the premise that we are doing natural science where natural things exhibit regular patterns that we can describe with laws. If the universe were to contain ubiquitous mega engineering we would, by definition of the science we are doing, not recognize it. For instance, your Dyson spheres detection assumes that we see an abnormal spectrum. But, abnormal compared to what? If the universe was full of Dyson spheres we would say that there are "infrared stars" and then we would hypothesize how these come about naturally until someone can crowbar in an explanation that sort-of-kinda could work. Cosmology is full of these kinds of after-the-fact explanations btw, just look at Tabby's star or Oumuamua.

So again, we end up at a place where the Fermi paradox isn't very impressive. If the aren't building (arguably pointless) mega structures, we won't see them. If they all are doing mega engineering we wouldn't recognize it. For us to see them the aliens must be doing things that are very 20th century western hemisphere human things.

If the universe is Einsteinian, I don't think "colonizing" the stars is a thing that makes sense. We might do it once because we are sentimental like that but maybe that's owed to unique psychology owed to unique circumstances on earth.

I don't see how you could rationally justify spending this stupefying amount of resources on sending people into the void where, even if all goes well, you can barely talk to them, have no trade and no social contact with them at all.`

Basically you are paying to split off a one-way branch of the species. Just consider that if we could colonize Alpha Centauri that means that each message has a 8 year or 1/10 of a human life span roundtrip. What would you even talk about with that kind of latency?

But you still have to explain the observation that the night sky is empty of signs of life.

It's really not that hard to explain. The last time I looked into this it was the case that we wouldn't be able to detect ourselves more than a light year out. The closest star is the red dwarf flare star Proxima Centauri at 4.2 ly. So, the question really isn't "where is everyone?" but "why is no one doing active SETI right now in a way that we can detect?".

That's exactly OPs point, we are heaping assumptions upon assumptions and most people discussing this topic don't even know how mind bogglingly huge those assumptions really are.

Do you mean that the landlord is instructing the employees of it's tenants to RTO so that he can keep his income and property value? How does that work?

"Hello CEO of Awesome Inc, it's me CEO of Rentalz Co. Your people have to return to office so that I can keep collecting the rent".

CEO of Awesome Inc: "No."

CEO of Rentalz Co.: "shucks!"

Twinery looks neat. Thanks for the tip.

That's a good point. For a business owner that has to decide right now, it's little comfort to know that the market will sort it out. I'd guess that big corps are most affected here. SMB owners probably know exactly what they need.

Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.

Your situation is very tough because you want to encourage this but also you have to be realistic and that's what your kid probably doesn't want to hear.

I always try to get across to my daughter of seven that you can't scale a mountain in one step just as you can't eat a cake in one bite and that trying to do that is guaranteed to be a miserable experience that's going to put you off the activity forever.

I don't think I've quite managed this yet but if I was you I would try to convey that a 3D game is a master level achievement that, while totally possible eventually, you simply have to work up to. And then maybe somehow pivot him into Scratch, Gamemaker or other such tools where he can start learning in a playful and fun way.