pasabagi

76 ms·

841.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I don't really get this. Surely the problem is you're handling lead in a home context? That's never going to be safe, since unless you're very careful about cleanup, you're going to get lead in your food. To me, all
842.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Intuitively, a state with a dictator should be more chaotic than a democracy, because the decisiveness mentioned in the grandparent comment would result in a loss of coherence in policy, since all the interest groups in the government would
843.
by pasabagi 6y ago
On the other hand, it's very clear about what's actually happening when you delete an element of an array. I'm not a C guy, but I figure doing this in C would involve several lines of mmemove, with loads of error checking[1].
844.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think wealth is essentially a means of distributing, directing and exchanging social power. So wealth and scarcity are not necessarily cruel, unless you feel like cruel deprivation is necessary to maintain social power. Then the question
845.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think this very much depends on where you are. In england, culture has always been a dirty word, so second hand bookshops have the kind of books english people read, which are dismal. In germany, I've had much better luck - packed sh
846.
by pasabagi 6y ago
From personal experience, what has made me rarely go to second-hand bookshops (or bookshops of any kind) is they typically have a really bad selection. The amount of trash printed is insane, and not only do people tend to keep the gems, but
847.
by pasabagi 6y ago
The problem is, shareholders can do something cooperatives cannot - they can operate at a substantial loss, effectively indefinitely, with the knowledge that they can get their profit by selling the share. Amazon, for instance, ran at a net
848.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Doctoral students are absurdly good value for money, especially in nations that have a high density of high prestige universities, and they both train the workforce, and are trained. So I think it's an obvious move for states (especial
849.
by pasabagi 6y ago
> This is really rather shoddy guilt-by-association - and second degree association at that. Really? I was always told that the Futurists tried to position themselves as the official artists of Fascism (but they were sadly not conservati
850.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Well, the question is not 'when did Britain let go of its territories'. The question is 'when did Britain lose the kind of involvement you need to get into low-level building regulation?' Near as I can find, they never h
851.
by pasabagi 6y ago
>concrete blocks since fairly early in the 19th That's the thing. I don't think that's the case. I think they are a 1900's-earliest, 1930's mainstream kind of thing. So by the time they became mainstream, the UK
852.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I'd genuinely like to see a reference. I don't know of any concrete-heavy building styles before the development of reinforced concrete in the late 19th century. It would have also been pretty cutting edge until maybe halfway thro
853.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I grew up in a house built out of 'wattle and daub', with a thatch roof. I wouldn't have called it a mud hut, but it was definitely a mud cottage. That is also the typical house of rural people in England in the colonial era.
854.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I don't think the war aim was the defeat of japanese fascism - perhaps, japanese militarism. After all, the basic element of japanese fascism (the Zaibatsu) essentially persists today. It's also notable that japan, while technical
855.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I dislike the BBC as much as anyone, but I think the fact is, they are neither anybody's mouthpiece, nor do they have any particular agenda. Simply, it is staffed by well connected, wealthy people who live in and around London, and as
856.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I'm aware of this, which is why I said 'about as independent', rather than 'independent'. I think the point is, the BBC is representative of a certain group of people, many of whom are from the same milieu as parts
857.
by pasabagi 6y ago
To be fair, the BBC is about as independent as your average non-state media company, and definitely less entangled with the past five governments than anything owned by Murdoch. That said, it is a bit awkward, given the UK's own underc
858.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Crowds are pretty good at that kind of thing already - for instance, I remember some protests a few years back where the protestors responded to the common police tactic of 'kettling', by just running like hell and scattering ever
859.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I liked Ocaml last time I had a go, but after getting to the point I could fumble my way around (can write a toy ray-tracer level proficiency) I couldn't really work out what I was supposed to do with it. The reason why a lot of peop
860.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I also like the grandparent post, but I'll take a crack at presenting an opposing side. The idea of a lopsided trading relationship, with the US being the losers, and China the winners, seems a bit dubious to me. Chinese companies wo
861.
by pasabagi 6y ago
As somebody who also struggles with math, I feel that the problem is it's extremely unforgiving. For instance, when I was trying to write some simple 3d rotation matrices in lua, I kept on getting crazy results just because I'd in
862.
by pasabagi 6y ago
That's pretty scary. An interesting thought experiment: given a disease that was asymptomatic but after some time, deadly, do you think it would be possible to contain given current technology/social situation? An interesting asid
863.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think there were a number of factors. Widespread instability led to people clustering in densely packed cities, where you could live behind walls. This was obviously good if you want to avoid being sold into slavery by a roving gang of ba
864.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I remember thinking when coronavirus was a new thing that it was an almost perfect mix of harmless and deadly, harmless enough that most people would carry it asymptomatically, deadly enough that it would reliably kill the vulnerable. I fig
865.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think the precondition for stability is a strong civil society, and clear traditions about what constitutes legitimacy. Democracy fosters both of these. Dictatorship can foster both in the case of an 'enlightened despot', but it
866.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Democracy developed in a world of totalitarian regimes, and mostly thrived because having officials vulnerable to election cuts down on corruption and incompetence while building government legitimacy and stability. Totalitarian states ten
867.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Kind of annoying 'hoax', though. Obviously you can publish garbage in fringe journals if you leverage pre-existing prestige and position like Sokal did. Doesn't really say anything about the social sciences. You can also publ
868.
by pasabagi 6y ago
This seems like a typical outcome of Germany's approach to welfare in general - everything is extremely granular. Depending on what you're paid, how you work, and how long you've been working, you can expect utterly different
869.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I don't really see a hard distinction between meat memory and silicone memory, so I've never bothered to memorize stuff that I could simply lookup. To me, it seems almost ridiculously inefficient to carry around large amounts of i
870.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Isn't Rc<T> essentially garbage collection though?

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