Empirically, places that focus on "collective actions" and "society-level solutions" tend to be worse than places that allow that power to be bestowed in response to capital flows.
It's not merely predicated on a utilitarian ethical viewpoint, it assumes that we've accurately accounted for costs of the options (eg, second and third order effects) when deciding rather than merely justifying our preferences with biased models.
Empirically, the second (biased models) happens considerably more often than the first (accurate accounting) -- to the point that even if you're a utilitarian, you have to admit it doesn't work in practice. You simply can't make the required benefit calculations for utilitarianism.
This is something businesses get wrong a lot: their numerical justification is actually a reflection of the biases of their staff, rather than an accurate accounting of the options.
They're not going to have to re-issue shares at a lower price; they're going to get bailed out by the taxpayers.
The conditions for government money should be:
1. All current debt is converted into shares, erasing payback preferences and on-going payments to creditors.
2. Companies must issue new shares as collateral to the government at current market rate, in exchange for the money.
3. Rather than repayment, the government will sell the shares on the open market in years 2-6 (a 5 year window).
4. All share buybacks at the company are banned for a period of 10 years.
It's okay to nationally support critical businesses, but make the shareholders take it in the wallet for their reckless business practices leading up to this.
They took a gamble by buying shares instead of saving -- let them take the hit for losing.
The RNA-world hypothesis conjectures that life started via a chemical soup developing things similar to viroids.
These early RNA-based replicators would go on to become more complicated, first developing a protective barrier and then specialized organelles.
As a byproduct of that process, viruses developed which could interact with organelles (or just the soup inside a cell) to reproduce themselves without being part of the host "genetic code".
In approximate complexity order:
- self-replicating compound, in solution with precursors
- viroid
- virus
- bacteria
- archaea
- eukaryota
From that perspective, hiding viroids (or similar simple replicators) in comets and boosting them into other systems would be a relatively efficient way to "seed" life around the cosmos.
> In particular, Eastern Europe of all places is relatively egalitarian in men-vs-women in programming.
Why doesn't that suggest the reverse -- that women only have equal rates of programming in societies where they feel the need to accumulate power, and when left to their own choices (eg, when they have more freedom to choose), they choose careers at a different rate?
That is, what's your evidence that it's not Eastern Europe where we're witnessing societal pressures and other areas where we're witnessing biological variation?
To me, it looks like when absent coercion (or a need to accumulate high prestige for safety), such as Western Europe or the US, women have a different distribution of preferences than men, and choose different career paths.
I had similar problems, and resorted to just declining meetings that interrupted that work block. I didn't even mark it on the calendar, I just declined any meeting before 11a.
I actually was more aggressive than you were: mornings were never for meetings, until 11am standup; after lunch I gave up getting work done and packed it with back-to-back meetings and (when there was gaps) working on quick things -- reading docs, comments on design docs, code reviews, small experiments, etc.
We've seen from CNN and Google that their views don't match society at large, and they're happy to use their positions of influence to "correct" society.
That's what caused CNN's ratings to collapse, and Google to face both a lawsuit (PragerU) and investigation (from Congress).
Did either stop them? Of course not -- they know better than you!
(If anyone wonders why my posts are dead -- it's because HN employs the same kind of Overton censorship, under the guise of policing tone.)
Math isn't a science, and some quantum physics is regularly chided for being more philosophy than science, because it doesn't make testable predictions.
> "Quantum Supremacy" is a technical term, not a colloquial one. It refers to showing that there exists a problem that a real, physical quantum computer can solve quickly that a classical computer cannot.
So my bath tub full of water has "quantum supremacy" over any super computer, because measuring the result in 1 minute at high fidelity would be much, much harder to do on a classical computer?
IBM's claim is Google has a very expensive bath tub of water.
Setting aside the morality -- which is its own reason to treat people well -- it's damnably effective.
Something I got from a book on negotiating:
It doesn't matter how good of a negotiator you are, if you develop a reputation for being a jerk, you're going to fail.
Why?
Because for every room you're in being the best negotiator, your reputation is in ten, negotiating the other way and talking you out of deals you didn't even know about.
Conversely, if you develop a reputation for being a reliable partner and a fair dealer, then your reputation will do the hard work for you. People will talk you into deals without your input, because they want to work with people like that.
If we know you can build quasiparticles and non-local effects out of braiding/knotting dynamics -- wouldn't the minimal assumption be that other things that can be explained by the same mechanism at a different resolution are?
Perhaps I don't understand the distinction between say, string theory and loop quantum gravity.
Canada only accounts for 0.5% of the world population and about 1% of internet users (total Canadian population / total internet users) -- and I think it's telling that you didn't mention a bigger country, like the US which accounts for under 5% and under 10% respectively.
Your point doesn't refute the GP: if we're spending a lot of expense to support fractional or even single-digit percentages of the population, it doesn't necessarily make sense.
> we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest
> For example, there is social interest (the sort of thing that leads to celebrity gossip).
> These things all have their place, but not here.
I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest or that it belongs here.