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I'm sure some smart people could come up with a SQL-esque language that is even more readable to non-technical folks than programming syntax.

And somehow, none of the thousands of very smart mathematicians have done that, or if they had, it has not seen wide adoption. I recommend contemplating on this: if math could be made easier by changing notation, why hasn't this already happened?

Gas prices have barely changed in inflation adjusted terms over last 50 years, and if anything, the trend is slightly downwards. At the same time, inflation adjusted incomes went up, and cars became significantly more fuel efficient.

This is literally opposite of the truth. In almost all businesses, the wages constitutes higher share of revenues than profits.

It's probably easier to understand this concept if you forget about tech, and think about something like steel mill, or a mine. If you want to make money as a worker making steel, if you just start doing it in your backyard by yourself, you'll produce very little steel in an hour of your labor. If, instead, you obtain access to enormous, capital-intensive machinery, by joining a pre-established company that owns a blast furnace, and has pre-existing business relationships with ore and fuel suppliers, the hour of your labor will be made much more productive. You will be producing a lot of value by working in a steel mill, but only because the pre-existing capital investment, and process organization will enable you to do so. Therefore, the business will contribute to your productivity in an enormous way, making the idea that the profits are entirely your own contribution just silly.

The same is, of course, true about Google or Apple. Working at Apple will make it much easier for you to be productive than working at your own company. The nice thing about our industry is that the latter, while more difficult, is actually possible -- unlike steel mill workers, software engineers don't need as much capital investment, and can run highly successful companies that employ just one or a handful of people. It's just hard and risky to try that, hence people prefer to pretend that the productivity enabled by working as part of established, successful company is entirely due to their own merit.

Dividing profits by employee count and calling this "fair share" is ludicrous. It exhibits a childish understanding of the world and the economy. If you believe that you're cheated, and you are creating significantly more value than you're paid, start your own single-person company and sell your services to others.

The truth is that by working for a company, you get access to environment that makes you much more productive than you'd otherwise be on your own. You also are not on the hook for most of the risks. It is patently unfair, and extremely short-sighted, to claim that investors deserve no compensation for their investment.

We spend only 5% of our GDP on food, which is much lower than other OECD countries. Does it mean we are starving?

For the stuff I do, I rarely use signed types. I find the example of finding difference between two numbers to be really silly. I don’t recall ever having to do anything like that, for a simple reason: I design my code so that I always know which number will be larger than the other.

Let’s actually talk more about this max - min example. Let’s say you calculated this delta. What is it useful for in your code? Typically, in real algorithms, what you want is to not only know the delta, but also which number is larger.

Both of them have to be completely rewritten to make use of multiprocessing, so what exactly is the advantage?

What is creepy about Anduril? Anduril simply sells weapons. There's nothing mysterious or nefarious about it. European countries want to buy weapons too.

Yes, that's my point: if you're next to the ocean, disposing of brine is extremely easy.

Exactly. If you subsidize the abundance for everyone, the effect will just be raised expectations floor.

If you read the article you sent me, you'll learn that, just as I said, you don't use sodium chloride, aka table salt, aka sea salt, for these purposes.

It’s about thermal storage, you don’t use table/sea salt for that, and you don’t need a lot of salt, because the salt is in a closed loop; it’s not being consumed.

Brine might be bad to the place you dump into, but crystalline salt is even worse.

Overall though, it’s just such a tiny concern. Ocean is huge. If we kill everything in a 100 foot radius, that’s 0.0000000008% of the ocean being destroyed. Less than a drop in a bucket.

Maybe, but dumping crystalline salt is even worse to the spot you’re dumping it on.

Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.

How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime.

It's very easy today to transcribe and summarize every call that you have.

Yes, and by shifting the labor supply curve you can make the laborers worse off, because it will often shift the supply curve of the product they’re making. If labor unions make you pay your workers more, you might need to raise the prices, which will make you less competitive, and reduce your sales, which can result in layoffs, or in preventing new workers from gaining employment.

None of what you said responds in any way to the arguments made in the post you are responding to.

Sorry, I’m not chilled at all by the prospect that the court can subpoena my data from Goole. It can already issue a warrant to arrest me, and to search my actual home.

I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me.

Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.

No, they totally grew enough calories for themselves. My grandparents lived like that. They farmed around 15 hectares, which was actually quite a lot. You can easily grew enough calories for your family on 5 hectares, or even less if you have access to modern cultivars and artificial fertilizer. It’s just even poor people like variety, and will trade some of their crops for stuff they cannot make at home efficiently, like sugar, fish, or candy.

Prior to Industrial Revolution, nobody could go hunt in the woods, because the woods were King’s, and poaching King’s game carried death penalty. Situation was similar on the continent: the tiny slivers of remaining wood lands were off limits.

Granted, things were different in the New World, as a result of mass depopulation event following the Columbian exchange. But even there, the megafauna was hunted to extinction soon after the humans first appeared there.

Anyway, the point is that no, prior to Industrial Revolution, the world was of full of scarcity, not abundance.

The research shows that the tests are predictive almost precisely to the extent they test “meta skills”. We can even measure how much individual questions test meta skills vs specific skills. You can learn about this by searching for the terms “factor analysis” and “g-loading”.

Obviously, yes. This is not circular: it is by no means tautological that people who did well on test X will do well on a completely different test Y that tests different knowledge and skills. The fact fact that it does gives strong evidence to the value of using these tests for admission.

All scientific research on this topic points to the conclusion that standardized test results are the single best predictor of subsequent academic performance. Some studies suggest that using GPA in addition to test results improves the prediction accuracy, but the marginal increase is very small, and it increases variance.

Everyone is well familiar with the downsides of standardized tests, but so far, nobody has proposed any alternative that better. Learning to the test is not great, but what’s the alternative? It’s not like anyone knows how to teach things that results in more actual knowledge and skills being attained despite lower test results.

If this is the case, then why doesn’t everyone get the top a score? The answer is, of course, that it’s not so simple, and you can’t just learn to the test.

That’s just like with sports: anyone can learn how to train himself, and anyone can improve with training, but in the end, some people will end up faster, and some people will end up slower.

Traditional defense contractors have low profit margin because of the cost plus pricing on the contracts. They literally are only allowed to charge the cost they incur plus some fixed profit percentage. As such, they have incentive to drive up the costs, so that their profit, while low percentage, is on high base.

SpaceX wouldn’t need to so that. Companies like Anduril already are trying to win contracts on fixed price model, and if they succeed, they’ll have much higher profit margins than Raytheon et al.

His political goals seem to align pretty well with the goals of the democratically elected governments, which are perfectly happy to buy products and services from him. You might not agree with their goals, but it’s absurd to suggest that this should make him ineligible for clearance. Clearance is not some kind of a “good boy with right politics” certification, it’s rather “is this person trustworthy enough to depend on in the matters of national security”.