Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.
Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.
Consumers are not part of the problem. There is literally no action a consumer can take to ameliorate this situation because there are no tires produced that don't have this problem, and many consumers need to have a car to live.
It’s not remotely true that prices are capable of transmitting all the information required to reproduce society.
This is for the simple reason that prices more or less only communicate information about the amount of labor required to produce a thing[0].
Therefore prices on their own are, for example, incapable of transmitting information about what action needs to be taken to correct the relationship to the biosphere. Information about the state of the biosphere will only enter into prices to the extent that things start taking more labor to produce. But there’s no market mechanism that would then cause that to direct action towards stabilizing the climate.
[0]: This is because cost resolves into business owner’s cut + labor cost + cost of inputs, and the inputs can recursively be split into the same until you’re left with the amount owners take, the amount paid to workers, and the amount paid to owners of natural resources.
The business owner’s cut and the amount paid to owners of natural resources are socially determined and bear almost no relationship to the physical world or reproduction of society.
I think there are a few errors here. First there is afaict no reason the image of phi has to break up into power-of-two cyclic groups.
Second and more importantly, it seems very difficult to start with the decomposition into cyclic groups and then choose a map from the multiset group into the permutation group that corresponds to the given decomposition in a good way.
Relatedly, the isomorphism between the image of phi (i.e., the action of accumulating hashes) and the decomposition into cyclic groups may be difficult to compute, which can make finding collisions infeasible for an attacker when they could do it easily if given the explicit representation.
So overall the conclusion that “you might as well make this forced structure explicit, and just pick the block structure you want to use in advance” seems incorrect.
The blog post someone linked on multiset hashing with elliptic curves proves the foregoing points. The cyclic groups do not have power-of-two orders and the group action is very complicated even though the description in terms of elliptic curve addition is quite simple.
The set of sequences of length n ending in HH (and with no earlier HH) and beginning with a T are in bijection with the set of sequences of length n-1 ending in HH (and with no earlier HH) by the bijection
Horrifying to see open and talk of war with China with no shame whatsoever. Not only is there 0 reason for such a war besides providing a market for these stupid murder gadgets, the human toll of such a war would be unthinkable.
A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war.
To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to punish the people and weaken the government.
Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government.
This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.
For what it's worth, I tried Spain Spanish afterwards and had no issues at all. My accent is pretty good (not native but grew up hearing and speaking Spanish as a kid, can sometimes pass for native if we don't talk enough that they hear my poor vocabulary).
Mexican Spanish didn't work at all. It asked me "Como te llamas" and I replied, "Me llamo Isaac", which got speech-recognized into some French sentence. I tried again saying "Si, me llamo Isaac" and it got recognized as some gibberish like "C. Mi anno E Sack" or something.
Hebrew is a much broader linguistic phenomenon than just modern Hebrew. Hebrew existed as a spoken language thousands of years ago and has existed continuously since then in many different forms in different Jewish communities primarily as a liturgical language.
Modern Hebrew (or probably “Israeli Hebrew” would be more accurate) was then constituted as a vernacular fairly recently as part of the Zionist project of creating a new national identity, distinct from the existing identities of the Jewish populations would emigrated to Israel.
Sounds interesting. It‘s cool they found an OK way to approximate the assembly index given that it sounds like something uncomputable (will have to read the paper but it sounds like computing something like Kolmogorov complexity in some model of computation).
That’s just a story told by employers. The reality is the very nature of being an employee in most cases is to be exploited and expendable, last in line and first on the chopping block.
Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.
I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista