iguy

95 ms·

361.
by iguy 7y ago
It's been done! An interestingly (IIRC) they had amazing memory for boards which were actual states of play. But if the pieces were arranged randomly, they were little better than beginners.
362.
by iguy 7y ago
Maybe not such a stretch. The nation wants aircraft carriers, and ideally wants other countries not to have similar ones. The nation also wants vaccines, but if the rest of the world gets to copy them, so much the better! Then perhaps the p
363.
by iguy 7y ago
But how do you tell what is "actually creating value"? For instance, do movie producers do this, when they construct whole buildings and then knock them down a week later?
364.
by iguy 7y ago
Not quality goods, you are buying a label. Its value is all perception, and part of that perception is exclusivity. Should we be concerned with what proportion of the price is spent on advertising, on fancy materials, on renting a store on
365.
by iguy 7y ago
But IIRC there were dramatically more strict restrictions during WWI. Certainly in all the european countries busy fighting. (Famously, Bertrand Russell got himself locked up for six months for giving a lecture about whether the US should e
366.
by iguy 7y ago
What's the time-period for the firebreaks? I mean when these skills last used, even if on a smallish scale? OK, ritualising a "how to ride a bicycle dance" seems like it could be a way to pass more information than a perfectl
367.
by iguy 7y ago
That's interesting. Does the budget count these free samples at retail price? If most of that is in turn advertising, then a lot of the money never existed?
368.
by iguy 7y ago
But where does this stop, legally? (Really asking, I don't know.) If you immediately used these bills to buy a different car, then I imagine that could be reversed. But if you (say) paid your laundromat repair-man his salary with these
369.
by iguy 7y ago
No, the point I was trying to make is that even with absolutely perfect transmission (which is the best they could hope for) it can be very difficult to translate words back into actions. It's also hard to learn golf or dancing from a
370.
by iguy 7y ago
Agree that oral transmission was an important & practiced skill. But I do wonder about how well it let you transmit "technological" knowledge, in a manner that could be turned back into practice. Do we have any examples of peo
371.
by iguy 7y ago
Which is precisely what the first sentence of TFA discusses.
372.
by iguy 7y ago
It's helpful to think about pure forms, sometimes, even if you completely understand that the real world is all shades of gray. You don't have to be wielding them as "the enemy of the good", just trying to understand the
373.
by iguy 7y ago
I think the charitable reading of GP is that revenge/rehabilition/removal are the three possible objectives, for which the purest forms would be something like torture / re-education / exile. Every real system is some mi
374.
by iguy 7y ago
> suppose one mugging gets you $100 ... cost of keeping someone in prison ... around ~$630 per week These aren't useful numbers to compare. Even if the criminal gained zero material value from his crime (say he just enjoys setting c
375.
by iguy 7y ago
Would have guessed the opposite, FWIW, on the grounds that the bad stuff is hard materials (like mine dust). But if anyone actually knows that would be interesting. How good a measure is total PM2.5 or whatever, without asking about what it
376.
by iguy 7y ago
Or just that being close to a highway is often unpleasant, so those who can afford more pleasant parts of town have already done so. Surely they tried to control for wealth but it's easy to do so imperfectly. (Haven't read the pap
377.
by iguy 7y ago
Thanks, and good point. It might not be very hard to reduce brake dust dramatically, just put a vacuum cleaner in your frunk right?
378.
by iguy 7y ago
And weight, presumably heavy vehicles wear through more rubber, and batteries are heavy.
379.
by iguy 7y ago
Right, always easy to see the good sides of other systems, but much harder to anticipate their failure modes. Besides the one you mention (of politicians being pawns of a party boss -- they owe their local seat only to their place on his li
380.
by iguy 7y ago
This was less likely for two reasons. First, the old world had dense concentrations of people for much longer, which domesticated many different diseases, making them childhood annoyances. And second, we spent much longer living in Africa,
381.
by iguy 7y ago
There were parts of the world earmarked for white settlement, like the Kenyan highlands, and of course Australia & the Canadian prairie. But I've never heard of India making this list, everyone thought it was too hot. To the extent
382.
by iguy 7y ago
> so genetically different Well, it seems likely they were less-well adapted to local diseases than the locals. But I'd guess that childhood exposure may be enough to explain this, plus cultural adaptation? They certainly died in la
383.
by iguy 7y ago
If you have links to well-informed disagreements with that, I'd be interested to read them.
384.
by iguy 7y ago
Of course. Although I'd say it differently: pre-state people probably practiced some amount of farming, and niche-creation. But what we call a primitive state is precisely the superstructure needed to gather lots of them and make them
385.
by iguy 7y ago
These seem to define writing to mean only things with which you can write sentences, which is fair enough, but excludes earlier use of symbols for counting (of taxes!). I have in mind things like [1], or this from [2]: "The original Su
386.
by iguy 7y ago
> doesn't "numbers were kept in check" mean "surplus people starved Not so obviously. Would you argue this for (say) lions or eagles? Few adults starve, when times are lean there is less breeding, and fewer kids who s
387.
by iguy 7y ago
> it would have cost them nothing to do proper crediting How much does this matter? (Really asking, I know nothing of this industry, nor film.) What I mean is, beyond enjoying seeing your name, does it make a big difference in landing su
388.
by iguy 7y ago
> true in some sense. In the sense that the diets & health of ordinary people were much worse under early agriculture. This appears to have been true for a long time, maybe until a few centuries ago. People ran away if they could. Ea
389.
by iguy 7y ago
Which is why hunter-gatherers tried hard not to rely on a single source of food. The places which supported the highest densities of them, like river deltas, were places with many different ecosystems in close proximity. I guess it's h
390.
by iguy 7y ago
But writing didn't (IIRC) start with writing down speech. It started with accountancy, with recoding taxes payed and owed. So it arises with agricultural states, it's part of what lets a king rule so many peasants that merely havi

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