Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?
Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.
I feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves".
Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.
Yes! I meant local issues that don't concern 100M people. Local issues that concern a few thousand people can be (and often are) resolved by direct democracy.
I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.
Personally I've always appreciated talking to nurses I know.
The respectable ones know they aren't doctors, but they've seen a lot more recoveries and cases where minimal intervention was required. As some people have said some surgeons like to cut people up.
I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
Also so that it can make the retailer money. The studio might not want to piss off the retailer, which they would do by pulling the physical copy (or selling it at the OEM price directly). There are cases where retailers will de-list some products in retaliation.
What's interesting to me is that game studios have less to loose here than other OEMs. With equipment like shoes, outdoor gear, or cars, having the physical product out in stores does a lot to sell it: you have to try on shoes, driving a car builds attachment, it's also nice to check the build quality of your tent or whatever.
With games, you generally just have to play it / read the reviews, and you can trial it directly at home in a lot of cases.
In the opening scene a scientist argues once the ambient temperature of some region is 37°C we'll all get eaten by fungus. It will evolve to live at body temperature.
There are some precedents for this: hibernating bats lower their body temperature to that of a moldy environment, and are getting infected with a fungus which kills 90% of them in some cases [2]. Logic goes that raising the ambient temperature could be the same (with some evolution thrown in) as lowering our body temperature.
Is it credible? No idea, not that kind of scientist.
Isolationist is an interesting way to describe Switzerland: economically they're probably one of the most internationally integrated, and thus dependent, countries in the world.
I'm probably missing something. This would seem a bit problematic for some organizations that put Switzerland on the world stage, e.g.
- The UN
- CERN
- The Red Cross
- The WHO
- The World Economic Forum
- ETH Zurich
There are probably a lot of others I'm missing.
I'd imagine international banks also benefit from recruiting foreign nationals to do business with their home countries, and not just because there's a shortage of domestic labor.
The whole point of these organizations is to be the headquarters of a much larger international project.
I guess maybe there will be a lot of weird exceptions if this were to go though. Otherwise, good luck sourcing your diplomats from entirely Swiss people.
When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.
My understanding is that Civil Law (most of the world excluding UK, US, AU) is like a program: you feed it a situation, it outputs a decision, every once in a while you edit it.
Common Law (UK, US) isn't really a program, but you could stretch and say it's a state machine that has been running since the country started. Every interaction sets a new precedent and changes the state. But the programming analogy falls apart because no one in the right mind would design such a program.
LLMs might actually be the best example of such a program though: Common Law is basically one long chat with an LLM, hundreds of years long.
Before LLMs came along, a Common Law system seemed to have a finite time limit before it's co-opted by wealthy people with the resources to read the whole history. Now I think maybe can push it a bit further.
Imagine the headlines though! (says your will boss, or bosses boss)
It's still stupid, but they are imagining the news:
> This guy said "it's probably fine" right before Flight 1337 explodes over the Atlantic.
Now personally I'd actually be willing to take that risk: the odds are so overwhelmingly in favor of it being a dumb prank; you might as well refuse to take a shower for fear of slipping on the soap.
But all it takes is one person up the chain of command to say "this would be bad PR" and you've lost your job.
That Amazon releases this seems to be consistent with the trend the original linked article mentioned: these big tech companies are happy to warn people of the apocalypse they are causing.
It helps not to think of corporations as a single coherent consciousness: hypothetically everyone who works there, from top to bottom, can believe that what they are doing is harmful, but also feel powerless to fight the hand of the market.
In practice I doubt the entire management structure agrees on that, some honestly believe they are doing good, but there's nothing stopping EvilCorp from emerging from a bunch of perfectly good people who are "just doing their job".
I think the point is that AI was here 40 years ago [1].
LLMs/RAGs/Transformers are the newish thing that's here to stay.
I've seen my colleagues vocabulary regress from "training transformers" to just "using AI", without clarifying if are using claude or actually building a network. I was recently told that no one says "vibe coding" any more (now it "agentic AI", I was told). My colleague who does ML research was told he was the only one at his workplace that wasn't doing AI.
So the problem isn't the technology (a lot of the technology is great), it's that the discussion around it has been dumbed down by hype.
Estimate as water and fudge it a bit. Conveniently the fudge factor is just the specific gravity and is already tabulated as such in a lot of fields.
But it turns out that water is a pretty good bet most of the time:
- Settled snow is around 0.25
- Dried wood is around 0.5
- Soil is around 1.2
- Rock is around 2.5
Which is pretty good if you want to answer "how much does that truck / ship / mountain / lake weigh?".
Of course there are some anomalies: Tungsten is around 20, but it's not like imperial units help here, and the name literally translates to "heavy rock".
I'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.
The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.
You hit the nail on the head here though:
> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.
It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.
Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.