kogus

Suggestion: Add an "I don't know" button. If I don't know a word, I can admit it - but if I have to guess, then I have a 1/4 chance of getting incorrect credit.

  quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes

If this is the Trump Administration's "punishment" for "disloyalty", then we are in for a treat. Hopefully US forces can also be withdrawn from Japan, Iraq, Italy, Guam, and the other 180 locations where they are currently unnecessarily stationed.

I'm pretty sure you are right. Or to emphasize the devaluation, "$100 today would be worth only $3.05 in 1914."

I think it is astonishing that we accept that in a best case scenario of sustained 2% inflation, we are literally planning for the value of the dollar to be cut in half every 36 years.

Ah, that makes sense.

Slightly tangential, but why is the first diagram duplicated at .1 opacity?

I have very fond memories of working with Delphi 5 and 2005 in the early 2000s. Both the language and IDE were a real pleasure to work with, and they were head and shoulders better than anything from Microsoft at that time. The community was small but enthusiastic and supportive as well.

It would be hard to justify Delphi in a new project today - not because of the tooling or language, but because of the prohibitive license costs.

I love the ingredients for this project:

    made with spite and web audio api. do whatever you want with it.

I don't think I understand what you are trying to say.

Are you suggesting that if a technological advance is sufficiently important, that we should ignore or accept security threats that it poses?

That is how I read your comment, but it seems so ludicrous an assertion that I question whether I have understood you correctly.

I posted this as a top-level comment, but for up to date info you might try this:

https://www.vesselfinder.com/

I have no affiliation with that site, I just enjoy it.

This is beautiful and well done. For realtime shipping information, may I suggest this:

https://www.vesselfinder.com/

As an American, I am also gratified to see the EU take steps toward independence from US foreign policy. Independence doesn't mean enmity; it just means that the EU and US should both be adults in the room, reaching decisions on equal terms.

If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral destruction. There is no intrinsic reason that the US should take the lead on, say, policy toward Russia. Quite the opposite.

Assuming that these claims are unsubstantiated, as the article indicates[1], what is the motivation for the Trump administration to put forward this bogus assertion?

[1]From the article:

A Kenvue spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that "over a decade of rigorous research, endorsed by leading medical professionals and global health regulators," shows there’s no credible evidence linking acetaminophen to autism.

Wake Forest University is a fairly prestigious private research university in Winston-Salem, NC. The costs of attendance (without financial aid) are normally almost 100k / year.

I had to read Neuromancer twice; once to learn the world, then once to actually enjoy the story.

I am not an expert on SQL/PSM, but I have worked in an Oracle shop before, and used PL/SQL extensively. In SQL Server, the equivalent is T-SQL. T-SQL procedures can do pretty much anything (assuming it is executed by a user with sufficient privileges), including creating and altering tables, creating and executing other procedures, running dynamic sql, as well as ordinary CRUD style operations. The "no side effect" limitation applies specifically to SQL functions.

I'm not sure what database platform they used, but in SQL Server, functions cannot have side-effects.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/u...

To be fair, if you imagine a system that successfully reproduced human intelligence, then 'changing datasets' would probably be a fair summary of what it would take to have different models. After all, our own memories, training, education, background, etc are a very large component of our own problem solving abilities.

I personally would not be able to sleep well with earplugs. The feeling of pressure in my ears, combined with the 'pushing' of the earplug if I rolled over to lay on my side would be very uncomfortable.

Not related to the original post, but I have been visiting your site for 15+ years now, and it's one of my favorite online art sites. Really grateful for your many years of beautiful work.

In principle, I do not think the income tax should be replaced by anything at all. Most federal spending is either unnecessary or actively harmful. But practically speaking, I'd suggest a federal sales tax combined with a Universal Basic Income subsidy to all citizens (e.g., everyone gets a check for $X every month). The subsidy would cover the increase in prices for anyone below a certain income level - it would effectively produce a progressive tax structure without the privacy infringement. There would be no loopholes or exemptions to think about either.

I'm going to be that guy and just say that one of the many many harmful side effects of income taxes is the kind of social engineering power it gives politicians, who are neither qualified nor properly motivated to make good decisions with such tools. Income taxes are an unethical pollution to our society and government.

The article suggests that someone from Maine would be reluctant to ask Mississippi for advice, given the stereotypes and biases that all Americans have absorbed over the years.

If the Maine Secretary of Education overcame his or her reluctance and did in fact ask Mississippi for advice, imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math".

Do you have a source for your response? I'm genuinely curious about what they changed to achieve this level of success. I'd be interested first for the actual educational methods, and secondarily I'd be interested in relating it to the idea of organizational changes that can produce relatively rapid reversals of a long term trend.

This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.

I think we need to consider what the end goal of technology is at a very broad level.

Asimov says in this that there are things computers will be good at, and things humans will be good at. By embracing that complementary relationship, we can advance as a society and be free to do the things that only humans can do.

That is definitely how I wish things were going. But it's becoming clear that within a few more years, computers will be far better at absolutely everything than human beings could ever be. We are not far even now from a prompt accepting a request such as "Write a another volume of the Foundation series, in the style of Isaac Asimov", and getting a complete novel that does not need editing, does not need review, and is equal to or better than the quality of the original novels.

When that goal is achieved, what then are humans "for"? Humans need purpose, and we are going to be in a position where we don't serve any purpose. I am worried about what will become of us after we have made ourselves obsolete.

Debt as a % of GDP is not constant, and is on track to grow "far beyond any previously recorded level", according to the Budget Office. [1]

[1]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61187

That's a flavor of trickle-down economics that I would like to see research around. If the state borrows $100m to widen a highway today, versus $100m to widen it five years from now without borrowing - then do those extra lanes really bring in tax revenue equal to the interest on $100m within five years? Will the government responsibly retire the debt using the extra tax revenue, plus the money it was going to have to save anyway? Or will politicians just approve another round of borrowing, let the interest accrue, and spend the collected tax benefit from the road on some other project?

Your point about the government being 'we the people' is fair, but the general population experiencing increased economic activity does not pay off the debt unless the government is disciplined enough to use that activity toward that purpose. Also I'll quibble that the phrase "We the People" in the US Constitution is a statement that We, the actual humans of this country, are deciding to create a government to serve us. The government is a creature created by the people, but it is not the people.

I agree with you. To just offer a counterpoint, I sometimes see quotes like this one:

  But plenty of economists looked at the economic hole left by the 2008 financial crisis,
  and concluded the stimulus policies on the table weren't nearly big enough to fill it.
  The size of the hole is all that matters.
  Whatever level of deficit spending is required to fill it is the right level of deficit spending.[1]

  We need the government to be out there borrowing money because of the long-term investments it's making in our economy[2]

1) The government is special because it can go to extreme measures to repay loans if necessary (i.e., print more money or raise taxes)

2) The reliability of the government means that it can borrow at a low rate (say, 3%) and make investments that are worth far more than that (say, 10%).

Put those together, and the government's borrowing amounts to a net benefit to society.

This argument reminds me of the 'then a miracle occurs' comic [3]. It doesn't hold water because

1) The extreme measures are very harmful - they cause high inflation and hardship amongst taxpayers.

2) Even if we accept that government investment makes a good return (a highly questionable assertion), that return does not go to the government. If the government borrows money to build a new road, then there is no doubt some economic benefit, but the government does not receive that benefit, and they are on the hook for the repayment anyway. So government spending does represent a pure cost - not an "investment". And in any case, interest payments represent investment that can no longer happen.

I would also point out that back when we ran briefly ran a surplus in the late 1990s, economists were not exclaiming about how terrible this was, or how paying off the debt represented a missed opportunity or a catastophe in the making. Everyone agreed at that time that surpluses were good, and that paying down the debt was good. The current "this is fine" thinking smacks of economists who have a predisposition to accept and justify the status quo, whether it is objectively good or not.

So all of that is to say that I'm with you - government debt is bad. We are in danger of some combination of insolvency, default, or very high inflation. And once we enter that spiral it will be impossible to get out of it without permanent damage to the economy and the global standing of the US (such as it is).

[1] https://theweek.com/articles/618419/why-americas-gigantic-na...

[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/us-debt-econo...

[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sidney+Harris+comic+miracle+occurs...

That's a good distinction. A knife maker should not be liable for the serial killer who used their product. But they probably should be liable if the knife explodes when used to cut a piece of cheese.

I'm sure there is a whole library full of legal precedent around "who is liable, and when". My earlier point was really that "Machines are not accountable" does not mean "Machines cannot make decisions". It really means "We need to think about who is accountable when this machine makes a mistake.

This is pithy, but wrong. Management decisions are not the only important decisions. Also, the whole point of computers is to crystallize human thought into action, and take that action on a larger and faster scale than people can achieve. Airplane autopilots make many important decisions.

I'd suggest a lesson that might be less agreeable to IBM, Microsoft, Google, et al:

"The makers of software must be accountable for the mistakes made by that software."