iguy

52 ms·

511.
by iguy 7y ago
> Which countries are you referring to? It's the next sentence: Germany, Austria. Belgium indeed went on a bit of an exploitation spree. But it's never been notably wealthier than its neighbours. (Of course the king got some ni
512.
by iguy 7y ago
> Sweatshops and slavery and cheap mass transportation of goods make our lifestyle possible. One of these things is not like the others! Cheap sea transport is a triumph of engineering. Sweatshop is just a term for a factory which the sp
513.
by iguy 7y ago
> It was the only country in Africa to resist the Scramble for Africa Indeed. In many ways you do better to think of Ethiopia (of that period) as a colonial power. Although there were no sailing ships involved, a fairly small center conq
514.
by iguy 7y ago
Also, people associate neighborhoods in which there is lots of new luxury housing with neighborhoods in which prices rise fast. And they are not wrong, there is a correlation. Nobody builds new luxury housing in dying towns! But the causati
515.
by iguy 7y ago
How financialized are mines, for want of a better term? i.e. Are people buying the mining company's shares assumed to be taking the gamble on what prices will be in 5 or 10 years, or do mining companied buy a ton of futures to try to e
516.
by iguy 7y ago
Absolutely we should expect them to solve easy/valuable problems first. Maybe that's fancy organic vegetables in a greenhouse, which certainly sounds much easier than 5-foot weeds growing in a thousand acres of deep mud! But we fa
517.
by iguy 7y ago
> * lithium market is opaque. No open market and all contract based Interesting, I didn't know this. Do you know why? Are other metals mostly open (like gold) or mostly like this?
518.
by iguy 7y ago
Since others may be curious, what the UK received under the Marshall Plan looks to be about 3x what they paid back under Lend-Lease. (Which in turn was maybe 10% of the cost of what was shipped.)
519.
by iguy 7y ago
But in the days of de Havailland & McD-D, there were maybe half a dozen companies which made airliners. That's a much more Adam-Smith world than when there are exactly two.
520.
by iguy 7y ago
Except that, unlike de Havailland, Boeing is too big to fail. There's just no way the US will allow it to keel over, and leave Airbus the sole supplier. And as with the banks, you can bet that this implicit guarantee gets figured into
521.
by iguy 7y ago
Maybe I the buyer am willing to pay 150% in the store compared to on your website. I need to find my credit card, to trust one more random website with it... I have certainly decided not to buy things for this reason. And if I don't kn
522.
by iguy 7y ago
There's also a precedent for preventing companies with a monopoly in something from expanding into other businesses, like Bell. Clearly facebook isn't a recognised regulated monopoly like that, but there are similarities.
523.
by iguy 7y ago
Thanks, that's an interesting take. Some were sane! But the power was all on the other side then, I think. High modernism, central planning, creating the new man, etc.
524.
by iguy 7y ago
One solution is just to stand up, and wander over to the counter where the credit card machines live. This always gets their attention, and it's quicker for everyone.
525.
by iguy 7y ago
When I'm king this will count as false advertising. The biggest printed price must be the price you pay, by default, unless you specifically ask for something unusual.
526.
by iguy 7y ago
Crap restaurants certainly exist everywhere. But it's hard to argue that service is overall dramatically worse in Europe. There is generally less fawning & begging, which some people prefer.
527.
by iguy 7y ago
Maybe the solution is a truth in advertising law: the headline price always has to be the complete total, unless you intentionally add unusual extras. Restaurants are in one physical place, taxes aren't a mystery, there's no real
528.
by iguy 7y ago
What you describe is pretty much exactly parallel to the automation of physical work. Having a steam engine gets you a long way, then the first few robots a bit further... there's no particular reason to want a factory with zero employ
529.
by iguy 7y ago
Exactly. > they tend to follow brownian motion in 3D Well, their entire neural system exists to make deviations from Brownian motion. That's the whole point of being an animal not a plant. And doing it well is very very subtle. Firs
530.
by iguy 7y ago
Right. I think they failed to imagine how big the local disruption would be. Especially since they were busy demolishing & re-planning districts anyway, replacing slums with big block projects. They clearly had no idea how awful these n
531.
by iguy 7y ago
> macleginn's complaint was that we haven't even modelled simple behavior No, the complaint was about modelling the behavior of simple organisms . Certainly we can model some of their behaviors, many of which are highly s
532.
by iguy 7y ago
The more charitable reading is "became safe over the course of the 90s". The huge decline was late-90s, although as you say the peak was early-90s.
533.
by iguy 7y ago
Well, I'd argue that they didn't need to travel, because their world was set up for people who couldn't. The spacing of villages most places was set by how far you could walk to the fields & still do a good day's wor
534.
by iguy 7y ago
There's about five centuries in there between the renaissance and steel-framed buildings! But of course cranes existed (on building sites, and in factories) since approximately the day after we invented the rope. But an elevator safe a
535.
by iguy 7y ago
Right, that's how you could plausibly have made one or two, as a palace amusement, or a circus act. It's a little surprising this didn't happen (as far as I know). But efficient enough to go some distance, reliable enough not
536.
by iguy 7y ago
[comment moved]
537.
by iguy 7y ago
Only 50% if you count walking around carrying a table as 100% the same as just walking :) That said, my non-expert opinion is that a penny-farthing without ball-bearings would probably still work OK; a rover-style bike with a chain would be
538.
by iguy 7y ago
But early wheeled luggage didn't have casters, just straight wheels. And those wheeled carts that you see old people dragging home from the supermarket (in some cities) existed long before -- metal frame, sagging canvas bag, works grea
539.
by iguy 7y ago
6x6 film captured much more detail than 35mm film. But modern digital cameras of "35mm frame" are way beyond this, that's why nobody uses them with lenses from last century. So it's not crazy to hope that using one as a
540.
by iguy 7y ago
Even away from the mountains, I know they did this in Allahabad (according to Fanny Parkes) which must be only barely cold enough. Compared to that, lots of places in Iran should be easy, lots of it is quite high. You can go skiing for the

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