pdonis

30 ms·

571.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people. No, tradition is ways of living that have stood the test of time. They might not be perfect, but the idea that you can just reinvent all that stuff and do it better than tradition is
572.
by pdonis 2y ago
> you mean desktop Linux users Obviously, since that's what the article and this discussion is about. > there aren't "a lot" of those Depends on what you consider "a lot", I guess. The article that th
573.
by pdonis 2y ago
If you mean, do we want desktop Linux to have distros, that ship sailed several decades ago. Yes, you don't need a distro to run Linux (as I said before), but most people who run Linux use one. However, Linux distros, while they play a
574.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Apps should be responsible for their own updates, not the OS. Distros are not quite "the OS". You don't need a distro to run Linux. The role distros play as far as Linux applications are concerned is more like an app s
575.
by pdonis 2y ago
> This purist vision you have of Linux doesn't exist. It does on my computer, and I suspect on a lot of Linux users' computers.
576.
by pdonis 2y ago
To the extent binary distribution is "unstable" on Linux, it's because users aren't expected to just download random binaries from wherever, as is normal on Windows (and Mac, for that matter). Users are expected to eithe
577.
by pdonis 2y ago
> this scalar field would manifest differently in the equations It shows up in the Einstein Field Equation as part of the stress-energy tensor. That is not a problem at all. > and basically be something that enters alongside a cosm
578.
by pdonis 2y ago
> it could potentially cause some real trouble not just for our models of the universe but for the basic mathematics of relativity if it is changing. The Einstein Field Equation can accommodate models in which the density of dark energ
579.
by pdonis 2y ago
Thank you for linking to this paper. It looks like a very comprehensive review of the "theory space", so to speak, that's currently being explored.
580.
by pdonis 2y ago
I don't know that I'd say I was "emotionally stunted" when I was younger. I still felt emotions strongly then; I just often didn't know what to do with them.
581.
by pdonis 2y ago
My experience has been the opposite: my emotions have gotten deeper as I've grown older, and I feel more bonded to the people I'm close to now than I did when I was younger. Part of it is probably that I'm better at relations
582.
by pdonis 2y ago
Yes: the definition of "coercive" used in those texts is an example of what I described at the end of my post, the inability to imagine any concept of "liberty" that is not "do whatever I feel like"--or in this
583.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Hard to tell what those people would report if we had a time machine and could go and ask them. Yes. Which means it's impossible to use such reports to make general claims about what kind of government is better. > if a sys
584.
by pdonis 2y ago
> empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness Are subjective. People's responses will be relative to what they're used to and what possibilities they see for their lives. These studies give no evidence at all that yo
585.
by pdonis 2y ago
> What's your empirical evidence What if you gave the same happiness survey to people in Saga period Iceland, which had no government at all? Or to people in some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early 1700s, such as
586.
by pdonis 2y ago
> If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights I made no such claim. Of course any right can be violated, since rights aren't laws of physics, they're agreements that citizens of a civil society make with each o
587.
by pdonis 2y ago
> the right to "freedom from harm" immediately conflicts with speech, gun ownership You don't have a right to "freedom from harm" if that means not hearing any speech you don't like. You do have a right no
588.
by pdonis 2y ago
Last I checked that wasn't a documentary.
589.
by pdonis 2y ago
It's true that, once you make a specific choice, other choices that you could have made in its place are gone. Once one possibility becomes actual, the other possibilities that could have taken its place are gone. But some possibilit
590.
by pdonis 2y ago
> with reduced life expectancy. Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.
591.
by pdonis 2y ago
> Therefore your claim is wrong. No, it isn't. You are simply giving evidence that a market with any government intervention is not a free market. Which is perfectly true. Whether the particular interventions governments make are
592.
by pdonis 2y ago
> if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree. Only if you take "written" literally, as in, he didn't do the actual writing, he just told the st
593.
by pdonis 2y ago
Ah, I see, I was parsing the sentence wrong.
594.
by pdonis 2y ago
In the GR model of black holes, the singularity is at the end of time inside the hole, not the beginning.
595.
by pdonis 2y ago
> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist. This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be
596.
by pdonis 2y ago
> If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. Historically, if there is government intervention, then monopolies--created by governments--incumben
597.
by pdonis 2y ago
To the extent that the character of "Feynman" as he appears in books like Surely You're Joking is different from the real historical person, I think the difference is due to Feynman himself--the way he told the stories orally
598.
by pdonis 2y ago
I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century. What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he
599.
by pdonis 2y ago
> American libertarians The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, f
600.
by pdonis 2y ago
If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in t

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