jltsiren

54 ms·

931.
by jltsiren 2y ago
What you call "far-right" is not a unified movement. Nationalism is one of those ideologies where ideological alignment can make you just as easily allies as enemies. If the US wants to work with European nationalists, it must sim
932.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Trump is wrong in that. Europe relies on the US, because the American world order is built that way. That's what the US has traditionally wanted. They are the hegemon that maintains the world order and pays for it. Europe usually suppo
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by jltsiren 2y ago
That's what the previous generation said in the 90s. They could afford that choice, because they knew they would likely be dead before climate change started really affecting everyday life. Our generation – those who are not close to r
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Those are local administrative areas, not cities. Using any reasonable functional definition of a city, the number of cities with a population >1 million is around 50.
935.
by jltsiren 2y ago
In Europe, "right" usually means EPP, or center-right. Their member parties may call themselves conservatives, christian democrats, the national coalition, or something like that. They tend to be economically similar to US Democra
936.
by jltsiren 2y ago
When I play Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 Max, the fans get loud. You need a workload that is both CPU-heavy and GPU-heavy for that. When you are stressing only the CPU or the GPU but not both, the fans stay quiet.
937.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Finite-state machines are a limited model. In principle, you can use them to model everything that can fit in the observable universe. But that doesn't mean they are a good model for most purposes. The biggest limitation with the curre
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by jltsiren 2y ago
It's easy to find new uses for technology. The hard part is turning the new idea into a commercially viable product. And it's even harder to find a business model that doesn't destroy the product in the long term. The whole i
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Technically it's been possible for a decade. Back then, it was kind of big news when people were using an earlier version of the device for sequencing in the field during the Ebola epidemic. Of course you still need some training to do
940.
by jltsiren 2y ago
In my experience, it's slow to charge. I've been using the Magic Mouse for many years, because I otherwise like it. But charging it to last the rest of the day takes long enough that I lose track of whatever I was doing. And the l
941.
by jltsiren 2y ago
When I moved to California some years ago, I also found the default combination of political positions weird. The best half-serious description I could come up with was that California is a country of conservative libertarian social democra
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by jltsiren 2y ago
You are placing too much weight on constitutions. They are just temporary documents a sovereign state can rewrite at any time for any reason. Either by the process established in the existing constitution. Or by having a civil war or a revo
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by jltsiren 2y ago
That's something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Outsiders may have opinions, but they cannot override the will of the people who have a legitimate standing in the matters of the state. And note how I includ
944.
by jltsiren 2y ago
The legitimacy of Indian courts is something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Other people may have opinions, but they are more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the fundamental issue here is that domestic rulings often
945.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I agree on Medicare. But it's plausible that the Supreme Court could find government meddling on Social Security unconstitutional, because similar decisions have already been made in other countries. In Finland, the mandatory pension s
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by jltsiren 2y ago
It doesn't capture the width of views precisely because of the "big tent" parties. When a political party is united and effective, it functions as a weighted average of its representatives. When it's not, it loses power
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by jltsiren 2y ago
The academia is not the real problem. Once you pass the initial filters, you will be judged by other academics, who are usually pretty reasonable. (For every reviewer 2, there is also a reviewer 1 and a reviewer 3.) They may not always noti
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Indonesia was a democracy in name only. It had no tradition of peaceful transition of power. Sukarno became an increasingly authoritarian strongman, who tried to balance power between various anti-democratic factions.
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by jltsiren 2y ago
And those would have all been in the "one oppressive ideology replaced another" category. In wealthy countries, the most effective antidotes to communism were social democracy and social liberalism, which gave the working class so
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Successful communist revolutions don't happen in wealthy countries. Every single attempt at a revolution in even a moderately wealthy country failed, because people opposed the revolution. They were only successful in countries that we
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by jltsiren 2y ago
The same way as in any other business contract. How much the government is willing to pay, how much they expect to benefit, what other uses they have for the money, and so on. In practice, the company will likely get a bit more profit from
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by jltsiren 2y ago
One model is that a government pays a license fee that allows them to produce the drug in unlimited quantities for their country. (In practice, they could buy the drug from the manufacturer at the marginal cost, or they could use another ph
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Now you are assuming that rigidly defined science is a useful category. I'm less sure about that. It's certainly not a universal category, as the concept does not even exist in many European languages. Instead of "science&quo
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by jltsiren 2y ago
If you define science in terms of the scientific method, you make it a fundamentally useless hobby that can never produce anything of value. If falsifying hypotheses is all you can do, you can never create the kind of knowledge others can b
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by jltsiren 2y ago
I like the Rust approach more: usize/isize are the native integer types, and with every other numeric type, you have to mention the size explicitly. On the C++ side, I sometimes use an alias that contains the word "short" for
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Nuclear may not be competitive for electricity, but it could be a viable option for district heating. If you ignore electricity generation completely, you could make small simple low-pressure reactors and hide them underground. There is a s
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by jltsiren 2y ago
You have a short-term perspective. All kinds of governance structures can work for a single human lifetime, if they manage to get the right people to the right places. But those people will eventually retire and die. Good institutions make
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by jltsiren 2y ago
First, because the "self-educated" part is irrelevant here. But more importantly, the difference is in the degree. Generalism is a matter of interests and focus. A Renaissance person is an ideal and an outcome. The Renaissance ide
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by jltsiren 2y ago
A "Renaissance person" is not a self-educated generalist but an old person who has had diverse interests and the motivation and the opportunities to pursue them. If you work on something full time for five years, deliberately chal
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe. Medieval Europeans saw Christ

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