pasabagi

11 ms·

91.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I guess the difference is it's a normal position to be supportive of the IDF, or Israeli policy in Gaza. That's one side of the debate. It is absolutely not a normal position to be supportive of Hamas amongst pro-Palestinian voice
92.
by pasabagi 3y ago
It's really nice in Across Realtime. I'm not really a big believer in the 'science' part of 'hard science fiction' - for me, you can basically divide sci-fi into two traditions. The first is based on the old sc
93.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Mmm, not sure those stories match your idea. The only story I can think of that involves a single change in science is Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime (which is very good). I think an Expanse author once commented that he'd never
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by pasabagi 3y ago
I was thinking of coercion in the sense of, normally market actors are also vulnerable humans, who need various things from their communities to survive, and if you don't behave in certain ways (selling your labour, etc) you cease to g
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by pasabagi 3y ago
Guess one! I guess taxes are coercion, but when I think of coercion in economics, the fact that even pretty well off people generally spend the meat of their adult lives doing stuff they would rather not, because of the coercive power of ec
96.
by pasabagi 3y ago
The downside of studying economics in Diablo II is that it's an entirely non-coercive environment, whereas real-world economic behaviour is essentially defined by coercion. That said, many economists are fully capable of ignoring the c
97.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I tried doing this by just assigning the points to [-inf, -inf, +inf, +inf, +inf, -inf], and I quickly ran into many, many NaNs, and was quite sad that it didn't work. It would be cool if floating point infinite numbers actually worked
98.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Was the US the first nation with a Bill of Rights, though? (I'm aware there are many medieval documents that could be construed as such, but I'm talking about universal rights in the modern sense).
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by pasabagi 3y ago
I bet this article will get far more imprints than yet another picture of a dead Palestinian baby. The Gaza strip has an median age of 18, and collateral damage is non-discriminate by nature, so it's not like it's plausible to i
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by pasabagi 3y ago
Does anybody else feel strange about the reemergence of this particular debate as a sort of fetish object of our time? There's the venue (Oxford), a weird place for two American intellectuals to have it out. There's the framing (a
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by pasabagi 3y ago
> in basically all western countries there is support structure in place to feed the poor, so that no one should go hungry. There is no such support structure in the UK. There are the informal 'food banks', but they are overst
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by pasabagi 3y ago
Do you consider the right to property as more fundamental than the right to life? If not, then it must sometimes be moral to steal.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
Easy for whom? If you were a politician and said what I said, you would be called a communist. You'd be demonized in the media. You'd never get a ministerial position for the rest of your life. Yet, it's still obviously true.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
I don't care what other people think about it. The moral argument is unambiguous, and that doesn't change because assholes take one side or the other.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
I see it as simple moral calculus. The right to eat is prior to the right to property. I don't see how any other position is morally defensible.
106.
by pasabagi 3y ago
It's a cool idea, but where do you draw the line? Where do you place something like microcode? Depending on how you design a computer, you can have software almost all the way down.
107.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Hey, this looks really great, but I couldn't really see anything in the docs about robustness (how you handle floating point inaccuracy, etc) - what approach did you use?
108.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Yeah, the 'non-profit library for the curious' strapline made my blood boil. Every time I want to read some papers, I come up against a paywall maintained by these ghouls.
109.
by pasabagi 3y ago
In very broad strokes, the problem with institutions is often that they don't have the option to act in good faith. A good example is the question: should you talk to police? A lawyer would say no, absolutely never talk to police. The
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by pasabagi 3y ago
Work does not guarantee the right to a good life. Rather, it is political power. Nobody is saying 'AI will automate landlords out of a job', because everybody knows that's nonsensical. Being a landlord is primarily a right to
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by pasabagi 3y ago
> consensuses That's not true. You're describing instrumental reason. That's not the totality of intelligence for anybody except a certain breed of economist.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/United%20States.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/United%20Kingdom.pdf here, sorry.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
> It's silly to claim British companies were flouting employment law on a massive scale j 1. I wasn't claiming that. 2. It's not silly at all. British companies were and are flouting employment laws[0]. 3. If the plura
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by pasabagi 3y ago
It wasn't free between 2014-2017. They changed the law to make it cost about a thousand bucks, then the highest court struck the change down as unlawful.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
That depends on the kind of contract you have. Comparing different legal systems and different practical implementations of those systems is hard - but I think the basic claim, that there's a inverse correlation between employee's
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by pasabagi 3y ago
I'm not sure about your 'iniquitous postulate'. If such a correlation existed, you would expect all countries with weak employee protection to enjoy economic growth that is better than their peers. That doesn't seem to
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by pasabagi 3y ago
My guess is that it's mostly economics, not culture. Japan has lifetime employment (you generally work at the same firm until you die) so a lot of the incentives for quick, flashy, shoddy work are not there. Second, they have a export
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by pasabagi 3y ago
The US basically didn't have a military until WW1 and it did just fine. It's surrounded on two sides by ocean, and its neighbors are very friendly.
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by pasabagi 3y ago
I guess one way to go about it would be to try and decompose the entire paragraph into testable fragments: 1. Just before WW2 the Haber Bosch process ... was invented 2. for fixing atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizers/explos
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by pasabagi 3y ago
Well, the Haber process does fix atmospheric nitrogen to make fertilizer. So that description was correct. They could have said it fixed atmospheric oxygen, or something.Or it was invented by Kim Jong Il.

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