jltsiren

12 ms·

211.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
My point was that an oppressive government cannot appear out of nowhere in a free country. The citizens must abandon constitutional values first. If an oppressive government remains in power and maintains its popularity long enough, it will
212.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
How does written law enforce itself if the police and the judges are compromised? Everything is ultimately enforced by people. If people stop believing in something, the government will eventually follow suit. And not just the handful of to
213.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
But what happens if your neighbors no longer believe in that? Does a constitution still matter, if its values are no longer the values of the people? Who will enforce the constitution, if the people who are supposed to do that no longer wan
214.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
As a citizen of a small country with decently long democratic traditions, I've always found American attitudes like that weird. From my perspective, if you live in a free country, any government you have by definition reflects the will
215.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Infrastructure construction is more about administration than engineering. If the people in charge have not administered similar projects before, they will make mistakes. Public insight, health, worker welfare, and environment are pretty un
216.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
There are estimates that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived a few thousand years ago. Isolated peoples are almost never fully isolated, and all kinds of rare events can happen in 100+ generations. Andamanese peoples in pa
217.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail. If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn b
218.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
I haven't read much from Reich, so I don't know his position. But I've understood that the current best practice in human genetics is to explicitly justify the population descriptors chosen for each study, rather than using a
219.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional.
220.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Bioinformatics is an outlier within HPC. It's less about numerical computing and more about processing string data with weird algorithms and data structures that are rarely used anywhere else. Distributed computing never really took of
221.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
A shortage can also be physical. The fuel you already bought (and possibly paid for) cannot be delivered. Maybe the actual delivery is the issue. Maybe a government confiscated it for other uses. Or maybe the fuel doesn't exist at all,
222.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
Economic growth has been slow in the EU, but it's mostly a demographic issue. There are too many retirees, too few children, and the size of the workforce is stagnant. Measuring economic growth in someone else's currency can be mi
223.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
I guess it depends on what you are used to and what you have grown to expect. Life is not fair, but you can learn to accept what is expected from you by the circumstances of your birth. I had to serve in the military, because I was born a m
224.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The data behind the graph is probably from OECD, which does not use a public/private classification. Mostly because in many OECD countries, "public" healthcare is largely funded by private insurance. According to OECD data, U
225.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
It's the natural way commodities are priced in the market. Those large industrial customers often also end up selling the electricity in the market. Power companies need multi-decade commitments before they are willing to build anythin
226.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government. Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would re
227.
by jltsiren 6mo ago
The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong. In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And
228.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Governments provide services to all kinds of people. Some services exist to help people with specific needs, while others just try to make everyone's lives a little bit nicer. Public libraries are in the latter category, at least in Fi
229.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Russia had two revolutions in 1917. In the first one, pretty much everyone who mattered was unhappy with the regime. After some clashes between protesters and internal security forces, the emperor abdicated. A provisional government formed
230.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
The critical reality to understand is that people have always used violence. If they don't believe that they live in a successful society, or if they believe that the success of the society is not distributed fairly (or in a way that b
231.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
It was part of the elementary school curriculum in Finland in the 90s, and it sounds like something that would have been in the traditional curriculum for earlier generations. The Finnish term translates as "Avignon captivity" rat
232.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
I don't think the issue is the lack of good leadership. Europe, and particularly the EU, is effectively governed by people who think like administrators. In politics, in business, and in the actual administration. On some level, this i
233.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Not really Malthusian. Agricultural societies had adapted to keep the population stable during normal times and bounce back in a generation or two after bad times. Those cultural adaptations stopped working when childhood mortality declined
234.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
I think it's the opposite. Rust encourages you to use usize everywhere, because most interfaces use it and you need explicit casts between integer types. In C++, you typedef custom integer types everywhere and rely on implicit casts to
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by jltsiren 7mo ago
The first time I saw a graph describing relationships between various factions in the Middle East was probably in the late 90s. I remember being amused by it. It turns out that if you are a region full of conflicts, the ally of your ally is
236.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Winning a war means achieving your political goals while preventing the enemy from achieving theirs. Most of the time, you've won the war when the enemy effectively admits they lost. The lack of will to use sufficient force to win a wa
237.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Wasm is in an awkward place, because Memory64 is widely but not universally supported. Which means that if you want to support Wasm, you probably have to support 32-bit environments in general. Depending on the project, that can be trivial,
238.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
They will probably go to prison instead, like some of my friends did. Giving military training to people who definitely don't want it can be a bad idea for many reasons.
239.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Because citizenship is a commitment, not merely a set of privileges. If you obtain a citizenship (or have it imposed on you upon birth), it comes with a set of duties other residents and visitors do not have. The duty to defend your country
240.
by jltsiren 7mo ago
Without knowing anything about that particular case, I would assume that the person was initially hired as an F-1 student and later changed to OPT status. University IT tends to hire students to entry-level positions all around the world. A

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