The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve.
Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).
The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.
This is one of the reasons weapons and technology development overall explodes during wartime. Desperation is the cure for risk aversion.
It's also a reason to be skeptical of a military spending a bunch of money developing technology during peacetime. In reality the expensive stuff they went into the war with is always going to be less effective than the cheap stuff they came out with.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.
It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:
- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.
- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.
- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.
- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.
- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.
- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.
A lot of where they are getting water from right now is an ancient underground aquifer - there's not a lot of water there though, so the plan was it was a stopgap while the water recycling plan comes online.
Although the aquifer water plan itself is largely failing. The underground water was much more saline than they originally thought, so from space you can see lots of failed irrigation circles.
He quite often gets into problematic areas of many projects - see his series on Billionaires row in New York.
There's just an exceeding amount of signal to noise ratio when it comes to big projects. Criticism of foreign projects comes out of the woodwork by non-local sources, and yet we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel. Him taking a neutral tone and accepting source materials at face value is fair.
Mega-projects have been a defining feature of human civilization since its inception, so there's ultimately not a way to cover them that is not either glamorizing or unbearably self-loathing.
I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.
We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.
In contrast, Nintendo's idea to sell physical games that are essentially transferrable keys seems like a much smarter compromise.
Part of the appeal for the Switch and Switch 2 is the stability of their resale market. It's easier to pay for a new game when you know you can get 50% of your money back on the used market.
Just to add to this, women make up 20% of the Army, but only account for 2% of ground combat units (even less during the period this data was taken).
Women in the Army were disproportionately less likely to be at risk of combat. So the comparison about being "less likely to be killed by enemy combatants" is itself incredibly clickbaity.
In the long run, green energy and data centers are ultimately going to be complimentary.
One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.
Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.
Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.
I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress.
Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.
Unit cost on labor has increased at a more or less steady pace this whole time. Ergo, it's not so much that labor is decreasing as other things are increasing faster.
It's hard to argue that technology is increasing labor productivity an order of magnitude faster than it was in the 50s. It's more likely something else in the dataset (returns on capital/rent) is exploding in value.
People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not.
The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.
- this article is out of date. The market has changed a lot since the AI boom.
- That's a 10%ish of all housing in the city. Right now, of available units SF has one of the smallest vacancy rates in the country right now. The difference is (as the article alludes), apartments that are undergoing renovations, not currently permitted, etc.
It's kind of insane that you look at a city like San Francisco that's on a tiny bit of land in a desirable location and they absolutely refuse to build up.
I get that their Victorian houses are pretty, but they're only about a 100 years old and they are now crammed full of people and cars. It's too young of a city to be sycophantically in love with its past self.
We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.
The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.
Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).
The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.