iguy

60 ms·

601.
by iguy 7y ago
In the West the previous system was not arranged marriages, it was just monogamy. If the "top 20%" (in the example above) married the opposite "top 20%" and this permanently removed them from the pool of available young
602.
by iguy 7y ago
Presumably the beam is focused on the target, and then if you're far behind it, the energy will be spread over a much larger area than on the missile.
603.
by iguy 8y ago
Because I think nearly everyone involved in attempting to change how things work was sincere in their hope that this would only lead to improvement. Yet on some pretty important measures, like the proportion of lower-class kids who get to g
604.
by iguy 8y ago
Mathus didn't quite predict that, he was smarter than that. The fact that exponential growth of population was a rare and short-lived phenomenon in world history (he had numbers from new england or quebec, and knew they were highly unu
605.
by iguy 8y ago
But the discipline to stick to such a solution is difficult. Bending the rules just a little more to spend more money this election cycle is always going to be extremely tempting. In addition, the situation is a bit better in this regard fo
606.
by iguy 8y ago
I'd be curious to hear more precisely what you'd propose here. My impression that, unfortunately, many such attempts to (essentially) make life better for working mothers appear to have pushed us away from families-with-kids, and
607.
by iguy 8y ago
And IIRC was largely responsible for getting people to read Beowulf in particular as literature. I mean to appreciate the work of art, as opposed to dissecting it as evidence about language etc.
608.
by iguy 8y ago
I believe that the cathedral is owned & maintained by the French state, not by the church. Whether they scrimp on the cost of repairs I don't know; it certainly always looked to be in quite good shape to me.
609.
by iguy 8y ago
But for caves this is easy, you just add a door. Notre Dame is the grand centerpiece around which Paris has been built and re-built. There is no way it's going to be encased in a warehouse with bus tours to a replica somewhere.
610.
by iguy 8y ago
Here's a great blog post about San Clemente https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/ (in which Freud battles his vertigo...)
611.
by iguy 8y ago
Or else the cost of producing a relatively small number of phones inside India won't be as cheap as the global HQ operation. If import taxes were the only consideration, you might expect them to open a new small factory when the extra
612.
by iguy 8y ago
Many do. The downside is that a heavy import tax makes whatever is being imported more expensive for local consumers to buy. In some sense this makes them poorer. The goal is usually to encourage local firms to grow and compete, and sometim
613.
by iguy 8y ago
But Brazil is larger than Canada by most measures. It has a larger population, and a higher GDP, and is 85% of the land area (but 0% frozen).
614.
by iguy 8y ago
The word is occasionally used to mean gay, although the meaning of small imaginary creatures is still much more common.
615.
by iguy 8y ago
This is also why being an aspiring actor comes with terrible pay, hours, conditions. And it doesn't seem likely to change. There's a long line of people who dream of trying, and they bid down the price at the auction.
616.
by iguy 8y ago
Because whether or not something could have been designed and made differently is a difficult, subjective, decision. We're not talking about the need to have cops decide whether 71MPH was too fast or not. We're talking about wheth
617.
by iguy 8y ago
Can humans work nearby? For example, is it sufficient that the pallet it sits on is bright orange & has warning signs to stay 3 feet away, or do you need something more elaborate?
618.
by iguy 8y ago
This is all true, my point was just that there's a lot of cutting-edge stuff here solving a solved problem. The arm itself may be great. If you need it to be mobile, then there are much lower-tech solutions to that part of the puzzle,
619.
by iguy 8y ago
Right, but how about a stationary arm mounted on the back of a pickup truck? Or something. It does seem like a lot of the hard work here (balancing, not running out of space to zig-zag...) isn't obviously needed for the task.
620.
by iguy 8y ago
Well the labor market was certainly less free, for one :) It's worth knowing that the south was once considerably richer than the north, but industrialisation changed things in the 19th C, by the end of which the north was vastly riche
621.
by iguy 8y ago
Yes I got that. But my point is that this involves second-guessing every design decision. You propose some new design which is more compact / easier to manufacture / more reliable because it has fewer connectors, and then you take
622.
by iguy 8y ago
No, I disagree. The money represents the real output of the economy. This can be moved around to some degree (switch a bicycle factory to making surgical tools, etc) but fundamentally only so much stuff is produced. Printing more money does
623.
by iguy 8y ago
But who decides? There is going to be a ministry of "did it need to be so compact?" staffed by disinterested experts? I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
624.
by iguy 8y ago
Other thought experiments are certainly possible, but mine is about the stated gamble, in which you cannot predict. That's what's meant by "unshared environment", it's poorly named, the environment you talk of is &q
625.
by iguy 8y ago
As you say, this exists with real humans too. Not just caretakers, but psychologists, talk therapy. Seems like a similar thing, except that instead of the product being hand-crafted one-on-one by someone with a PhD, now it's mass-produ
626.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed, there is some health tourism, but much less than I would expect given the prices. I can't imagine that setting up a "Department Of Prosecuting New Parents" would go down well. Or even be possible. For example, most fi
627.
by iguy 8y ago
> the point about 'affecting all descendandts' is wrong because if we have a technology to make a change we can easily reverse it too If we had perfect editing technology (even without perfect knowledge of effects) then as you
628.
by iguy 8y ago
The point of my thought experiment is to imagine that these are the same genes. Remember that about half of population variation is "unshared environment" meaning noise in the translation of DNA into an adult: genes will never a
629.
by iguy 8y ago
Here's a different take, on a different sort of diversity: Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potentia
630.
by iguy 8y ago
IIRC this has already happened with Tay-Sachs, although not by editing, just by testing (either before marriage, or of embryos). I think the disease is now more common among non-Ashkenazim, who are unlikely to be tested. Seems like a useful

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