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vk23

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I agree that at some point there will be a decrease in risk taking and investments but I don't think that risk and investments are inherently more important than all other factors.

I am also not arguing for 1000:3 or any other specific ratio. The only reason I brought his net worth up is to show the ratio that we have right now (not even including the ratio compared to amazon workes which would be even higher). And even if he doesn't do anything evil with his money its money that other people dont't have. People that could use that money to provide for their families or put their kids through school. People that could have the potential to create something new or come up with new ideas who never get to do it because they barely make enough to get through the month. For Bezos it is indeed just a number but for others it could mean a lot more.

For all of those people it suddenly doesn't matter how hard they work or how skilled and talented they are. We do not live in a meritocracy and its probably impossible to achieve that so the only answer can be a more socialized system.

You are right in that it would not help to just split the money up my point is that we should not allow this to happen in the first place. As for prices increasing - If our system only works if a few have a lot and a lot have very little I think we should think about the sustainability of this system. If we do nothing things will get out of hand sooner or later (if they are not already).

People wont stop investing or taking risks just because they cannot reach bezos levels of wealth. Bezos has absolutely no reason to aquire another dollar but he still keeps going. Again I am not arguing for 1000:3 the number can be a lot higher but there needs to be an upper limit.

So in Bezos case with his estimated net worth of 205B USD and assuming a average net worth of an american family of 750k (not sure how accurate this number is it was the first thing on google) this comes down to Bezos owning 266666 Apples for every apple a "normal" famliy owns. Noone would complain if it was a 1000 to 3 ratio.

Almost noone argues that we should take all his apples away but I think there is a lot of room before he has to feel like his risk is not worth it anymore.

The only issue Amazon would have in a more socialized society is that it would be way harder to exploit poor people that have to take up with their working conditions and wages because they rely on those jobs. And if your business cannot survive without exploitation it should not exist in the first place.

Renewable energy sources needs to be supported by power plants that can produce constantly.

Do you have a source for that claim? Keep in mind that there are also renewable energy sources that do not rely on weather events (water and biomass).

In combination with energy storing and a reduction of the total energy needed it is afaik considered possible to go fully renewable [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

EDIT: I misread your comment. I thought you were arguing that "unclean" power plants are nessecary. However my point about not needing nuclear still stands.

Radioactive waste is doing real damage to the planet. After decades of evaluation storage facilities germany has no option that is considered safe. We have a responsibility towards the following generations. This includes not warming the planet beyond no return and not polluting it with deadly waste. Both can be achieved with a shift towards renewable energy sources.

Given that you feel like the Pareto distribution can never be wrong I propose that we model all taxes accordingly. After all it should be natural that very few people pay most taxes while most pay almost nothing.

Nothing about wealth distribution is natural. With the help of the Pareto distributed political power that installed the system in the first place wealth is controlling itself.

The point of distinction is that EU internal immigration and the refugee situation are entirely different things. Refugees leave there home countries because of war and terror. Members of the UN are obligated [1] to give shelter to those people. Inside the EU there is indeed some welfare migration. This is however not only driven by social systems but also by available jobs.

[1] https://www.unhcr.org/1951-refugee-convention.html

What Makes a Hit 8 years ago

I never understood why people care how many people are part of the creation of music. The overall product should be better if every part of it (writing, producing, perfoming, ...) is executed by an expert in the field and not by a single person.

How is Google holding consumers hostage and not Apple?

It does not matter what Apple is doing this is about Google. I would expect that there are ongoing investigations against Apples practices regarding similar issues too.

Honestly, for the value that Android gives phone manufacturers I am surprised that Google's requirements were so low. Android gave the phone manufacturers a platform and asked for little in return.

Not being allowed to release competing OSes / forks and other software is more than a "little" in return. Google does not give android away "for free" because they want to help others they do it because they want to help themself get into everybodies smartphone.

1 and maximizing time spend in the app (see sibling comment) seem like a good explaination for this. I'm not sure about 2 but it might be true aswell.

3. You'll use the service regardless of whether they offer it, because network effects

Actually I stopped using Facebook for that reason. The feed just didnt provide any value to me anymore. Also I never really got into Twitter because of it. I don't see the value in following people if I cannot see their posts without hours of scrolling through retweets.

It's like watching a goddamn movie with scenes shuffled randomly. It makes no sense.

Have you seen Memento?

Jokes aside I never understood why twitter does not allow the user to choose the sort order of the feed. This is a reoccuring theme for social networks (facebook feed, youtube subscriptions etc) so I guess there is some kind of motivation behind it.

If anticheating techniques really require root access, then people that care about competitive gaming should have an option to consider this trade-off and turn the anticheating pieces on if they think this has a better reward/risk ratio than not giving root access to a game.

In CounterStrike (Global Offensive) this is already the case. The official Valve anticheat is not as intrusive as the anticheat provided by external services like Esea or Faceit. If you choose to use such service they basicly take your system apart. It turns out that in order to get good results this is needed.

I think you underestimate the impact massive cheating can have on a game. Even casual players will leave games that have cheaters in every other lobby.

For me it works well to listen to music with lyrics that I know so well that I dont even really listen to the lyrics anymore.

In general I feel like music works better if I know it well.

I like to listen to more distracting music though when doing a "boring" task that does not require that much brain processing itself.

For the vast majority of users git is bug free. If there is an issue with git nowadays its highly specific and well suited to be handled in a mailing list.

This also makes it easier for the git devs to focus on actual development and not explain git to people unwilling to use google (the same people are to lazy to use email).

As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.

"low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding.

Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question.

If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)

I know about the phrase I just felt like giving an equally vague answer to your comment.

To stay on topic what makes you think that the comparison is flawed?

What makes webpack uncomparable to make?

How can android / browsers not be compared to windows / linux?

Why can't make be used to pack web applications?

...

Afaik, chess AI (I mean, modern ones like deep blue) had little to no wide impact on AI.

Apart from the pure technical side (which I am no expert in so you might be right) the impact on public attention and awareness for AI was huge for those projects. It's important that "normal" people get a feeling for AIs and what they are able to accomplish.

You can't get much more scouting than that because there is a cost associated with scouting, either because you lose a worker's time or because you spread out your army.

I agree but I was mainly talking about the time it takes to perform the scouting. A AI could scout 5 different places at the same time which is pretty hard for a human to do without falling behind elsewhere. I know SC pros are really good at multitasking but at some point the AI is just superior. If this gives the AI a significant advantage is a different question.

Then you can deduce if he has something hidden somewhere or in production. Of course this is impossible to do for a human, but really easy for a computer.

This is definitly not impossible for humans. High level SC players are able to keep track of the mineral and gas spendings of their opponent in the early game (After the early game there is usually no complete information to calculate this). Just seeing the timing of taking the gas geysers gives you information about the earliest possible time a certain unit/building can be produced.

Of course a AI can scout more and take more variables into account but humans are surprisingly good at this too.

Imho, beating humans to StarCraft isn't a big deal in itself, but it would need a lot of work to build the AI to deal with the game's complexity. But it's merely domain specific work that has little to no interest on AI in general.

The same thing was said about early chess AIs and the Alpha GO project. In the end both lead to major advancements in AI. If you solve the domain specific problem starcraft you could easily apply the gained knowledge to similiar problems.

Conway's Law 8 years ago

What do you build when everyone talks to each other over Slack?

This should be pretty obvious. You build all systems around a single messagebroker and each service/unit uses a chrome browser to connect to it.

I would argue that git at its core solves the problem of handling a shared verifiable state. The history of a git repository is build on the same hashing principles as a blockchain to ensure that history cannot be changed. The main difference to a blockchain is that in order to change the state you have to convince other humans that your change is valid.

In my understanding the main selling point of blockchains is to outsource the accepting of state changes to a consensus protocol which does not involve human interaction/interference. And just as git a blockchain still works if only one or few actors are involved.

You are mixing things up. While it's true that Cryptocurrencies try to solve a different problem than BitTorrent, Git and Email neither of those applications rely on a single centralized server owned by a single company.

As for your question regarding practical purposes I think that a blockchain run by multiple banks or states can provide the same benefit for people as a fully decentralized system. I get that this is where censorship and control comes in but do you really want to live in a world where value can be moved around arbitrarily without regulation?

Also, while the blockchain itself is run decentralized the development is still somewhat centralized and most folks do not have the understanding or interest to investigate changes being made to the source that powers such blockchains.

I dont understand why this gets downvoted. While all those things might have happend without social media its pretty obvious that targeted advertisment and "social media bubbles" push people into more extreme positions.

Blockchain implementations in centralized black boxes are more likely than not the future of blockchain. As soon as regulation gets rolled out usable blockchains will be controlled by governments and/or private companies that comply with the rules. Not that I'm not in favor of a truely decentralized solution but I doubt "they" will allow this to happen.

You can either pass a commit id to git blame to see changes before the reformat happend or you can use git log like this:

git log -L0,10:file.txt

If you rely on dependencies that are not maintained you are already in trouble. Being the author/maintainer of a package comes with a responsibility. NPM already showed us what happens if you just let people do their thing.