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kingofmen

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If you can afford to pay an army you can afford to pay the opposing side instead.

Aside from all questions about how such an agreement is to be enforced once you no longer have the money but the invaders still have their weapons, the article shows very clearly that this is not true. Early states are seriously cash-strapped, and rarely pay their armies in easily portable goods. They can "afford" to raise armies consisting of soldiers who bring their own weapons and, by-and-large, their own food. That does not make for good tribute and so, in fact, they cannot afford to pay off an invader.

Excellent work, very nice!

One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.

Points for effort, but this will do literal nothing to appease the opposition, since the "water use" thing is a myth anyway. It's probably good, it sounds like it will be more efficient and efficiency saves resources for other uses, but politically it's completely useless.

the r>g observation (due to Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century) is that both historically and recently the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy.

They do if you cherry-pick your economies, starting points, definitions of "capital" and "growth", and cutoff points, yes.

This appears bugged:

A Minsky program that adds register A into register B looks like:

1. DEC A; if A == 0 goto 3 else goto 2

2. INC B; goto 1

3. HALT

If A initially equals 1 it will be decremented and hit zero; the conditional triggers, and the program halts without ever incrementing B.

...which suggests that Jira is a Turing tarpit in which even the simplest programs are immensely difficult to implement correctly. Who knew?

What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.

He has represented [Oldham] ever since.

Politically, [Churchill] is a Liberal-Unionist, and he has held office as Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and for Home Affairs.

This is a weird selection for a 1930s knowledge cutoff, if that's what's intended. Churchill was elected from Manchester North West in 1906, was Undersecretary for Colonies in the government that resulted, and more to the point held the posts of First Lord of the Admiralty and then Minister of Munitions during WWI. There's no time at which he would have been both a current Member for Oldham and a past Undersecretary for Colonies.

I have renamed the "endreleg" since the article release to "låst" and "open".

I like that - much shorter and also the two keywords are the same length, which is always nice when you're making a list. I have to say I would prefer 'åpen', though, just to make extra trouble for people who don't have a keyboard with Correct letters on it. :D

A further thought on `alltid` - you could add the keyword `aldri`, which makes it a runtime error for the variable to take that value. Maybe add ranges as well, for easy bounds checking, e.g.

``` en peker er aldri = null en indeks er aldri > 5 ```

What the devil kind of "Nynorsk" allows "kalkuler" in place of "beregn"? And as the other poster pointed out, 'endre' does not actually take the '-leg' ending to make an adjective; not in the written language at least. Your dialect may allow it but that hardly matters. Try 'foranderlig', although I do like the idea of using articles. However, as we have three articles but variability is binary, I suggest we assign 'en' (masculine, firm, rigid) to constants, 'et' (neuter, indecisive, wibbly-wobbly) to variables, and of course 'ei' (feminine) as referring only to collections, into which things may be inserted. That does leave us with the difficulty of how to declare a collection as constant; I suggest

`ei fylke er alltid ["Vestland", "Rogaland", "Troms", "Finnmark"]`

which on second thought suggests that we can just have `alltid` as a const-modifier on `er`. Simpler.

Another point to note is that Norwegian does not allow the Oxford comma; correct grammar is "Johan, Fredrik og Martin". To follow this rule you should require the last separator of a list to be 'og':

`ei fylke er alltid ["Vestland", "Rogaland", "Troms" og "Finnmark"]`

If people are getting what they want

"If".

It appears (from this article, I haven't done any exhaustive research) that when the Ghanaians have the option of hiding money from their families and from the funeral expenses, they exercise that option with flair and alacrity. That suggests that they are not getting what they want out of this whole digging activity. And while we cannot read off what is best in life from the stars or the mountains, we can have a look at what people do when they are free to choose without social pressure. It does rather appear that most humans who are free to choose would rather have washing machines and cars than elaborate funerals. Were it not so, then presumably the funerals of the West, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, would drastically outshine what the poverty-stricken Ghanaians can manage. Where are our burials IN SPACE? Our cremation rockets fired into the Sun, "from stardust you came, to stardust your return"? Why do we not hold weeks of elaborate mourning, with professional poets (or rappers if you prefer) hired to extol the virtues of the deceased and laws about "funeral leave" allowing us to sit idle?

A herd of goats and an apple orchard both exhibit exponential growth in production, to the limits of the supporting land (which admittedly may be reached rather quickly). Indeed this is the origin of interest: I lend you my goats for a season and expect to get back a larger herd. The argument that non-capitalist economies can't have exponential growth from investment is a non-starter.

China and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.

China's GDP (PPP) is somewhere around $30k, depending on whose numbers you like, which does beat such lighthouses of Western capitalism as Albania ($25k) and Ukraina ($20k but they also have a good excuse), but isn't in any obvious danger of "blowing past" the likes of Serbia ($35k) and Bulgaria ($45k), much less the USA ($90k).

Additionally, this is pretty much the paradigmatic case of that criticism frequently heard on the left in any other context, that GDP is not the same as quality of life. Indeed in this case it's apparently measuring the quality of death.

Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!

If the local businesses were instead being hired to dig holes and fill them up again... oh wait, they literally are, except they're also instructed to make very elaborate artworks and put them in the holes before shoveling in the dirt. Anyway: Can you please examine the movement of real resources rather than pieces of paper? No society gets rich by making art which is immediately destroyed.

X% of net worth is still a bigger deal to someone with a net worth of $20 than to someone with a net worth of $20M, even though the latter may get some sticker shock. And it's possible (if rare) to have a reasonably middle-class lifestyle and an actually negative net worth. Presumably you would not make it possible to pay off student loans by repeatedly violating a red light, although it would be very funny.

That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.

I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.

President Trump announced the Iranian leader's death on social media, saying Khamenei could not avoid U.S. intelligence and surveillance. A source briefed on the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran told NPR earlier Saturday that an Israeli airstrike killed Khamenei.

This does not seem to me like very strong evidence? Trump just says whatever, and "a source briefed on [the attacks]" just means at least one person in USG thinks Khamenei was in whatever house they blew up. Am I missing some other confirmation?

This is not my experience at all. I have never received an informal email like this from a manager; even chat threads at my job are generally correctly spelled, grammatical, and fully professional. Maybe I'm not talking to sufficiently exalted leadership?

For some given task, perhaps; but the AI only consumes power while actively working. The human has to run 24/7 and also expends energy on useless organs like kidneys, gonads, hopes, and dreams.

Forms of retirement that don't have the force of law can be adjusted on the fly to match the available resources. When the government forcibly requires that each elderly person be paid a fixed amount of resources yearly, it's possible for there to be literally zero surplus for the young people making the resources. That can't happen under systems where the transfers are voluntary.