Sure, but that's also the point: the current status quo is/was mostly good, especially for Europeans and North Americans, but the multitude of global crises - the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, the Trump administration's (and the far right's in general) war on sanity, the AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes), not to forget the climate crisis - might just induce you to worry how long this status quo can be upheld.
> AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes)
If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Also learn to choose your battle. If you focus on everything that's going wrong in the world and spend all your energy on that, you're gonna have mental problems.
"The ones who pay will pay" is always true (from people using public transport without a ticket to "normal" tax payers having to shoulder the losses caused by loopholes and "incentives" for the upper 0.1%), but resigning to it so explicitly is rare.
Yeah. My impression is, small players exploit the loopholes like there's no tomorrow, big players hire external consultants to give them least-effort playbook and take over liability, as anything more clever is exponentially more expensive.
One of the funniest ideas I heard was that we in South Asia do corruption properly, because unlike the West, even the poorest person gets to be corrupt while in the West you have to have money and know people. Democracy!
It's just not true at all though, and I don't get where the meme comes from other than the politicians pointing their fingers at the rich so we don't look at them. If there wasn't incentive to be homeless, we wouldn't have so many.
How is creating your own ETFs to avoid paying taxes low effort?
I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.
You'll see a load of people on benefits being tax-negative, though. If paying taxes is your measure, then an honest assessment of who pays taxes wouldn't land you at the ultra-rich.
Self-employed electricians don't have enough money to need Cayman Islands accounts (many software engineers on FAANG salaries, on the other hand, do, and plenty are already experts in "corporate" tax optimization). Self-employed electricians instead do half their work for cash, and procure materials from untaxed sources.
While the origins may be religious, I'd say the high taxes on alcohol and most alcoholic beverages only being available in state-run shops (Systembolaget/Vinmonopolet/Alko/Vínbúðin) is by now a 100% Nordic phenomenon.
The most interesting situation is actually in Iceland: full prohibition introduced 1915, wine legalized 1922, all other beverages legalized 1935 except for (of all things) beer with more than 2.25% ABV, which had to wait until 1 March 1989 (since then celebrated as "Beer Day") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Iceland
Ah, ok, that's interesting! I have been to the US three times, and was aware that there are still some counties with complete prohibition, but wasn't aware of this particular quirk. But, even from that list, it's hard to tell which states sell alcoholic beverages only in state-operated stores (similar to the Nordic states), and which license private stores to sell them (which is common throughout the world, but of course more restrictive in some places than in others).
Most states still have very strange laws around alcohol due to the aftermath of prohibition.
I grew up in NY where beer cannot be sold in liquor stores, but can be sold in grocery stores. But grocery stores can only sell beer that is less than 6% ABV so any beer that is higher ABV can only be sold directly by breweries or by beer distributors.
Right next store in NJ, beer is only sold in liquor stores and for the longest time breweries could not legally sell you beer for on-site consumption so a bunch of breweries got around this by offering a $5 tour and as a part of the tour you were given a glass of beer.
I live close to a city that only allows city-owned liquor stores, Eden Prairie MN. But it's trivial to drive to the next city over and shop wherever you want.
The only place where the illuminated part of the moon points straight down, as the article expects, is also the only place where the sun moves perpendicular to the horizon when setting: if you're at the equator.
To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...
And you can't read long texts if there aren't that many to begin with. But it raises a question - why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
> why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
Moveable type was invented in the 11th century [1]. Kublai Khan moved in in the 13th. Then the Mings spent a couple centuries being autocratic menaces, Qianlong went on a pogrom of China's scholars and Europe caught up.
By the 13th century, China–uniquely–had both moveable-type presses and joint-stock companies. A combination of bad luck (the Mongols) and a tendency towards political shitshows squandered that lead.
Yeah, in Ancient Rome, the typical unit of writing was a scroll, not a book. Books (codices) only came to be widespread by 300 AD, and "widespread" still means "quite rare and expensive, but not totally unheard of".
I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "
Public signage with words was basically nonexistent in the pre-modern era. Why bother? The overhead of getting literate people was reserved for the stuff that couldn't be communicated in symbols, like keeping records for the taxman or contracts to prevent future land disputes.
Even if it's AI generated (or AI "improved"), I'll comment on the content:
> The learning loop got tighter. Ask a question. Inspect the answer. Run the code. Break it. Read the implementation. Correct the assumption. Try again.
This assumes that you have the resources (time and money/AI usage budget) and the interest/motivation to do that. If you do programming as a job rather than as a hobby, the time you can spend on things like this and the budget you can spare for it will be severely limited. Also, after you have finally coaxed the LLM into generating something that fits all the requirements without breaking in new and surprising ways, has code that's not ridiculously overengineered (that's probably the real reason behind vibe coding: as long as you don't look at the horror beneath the hood, you can tell yourself everything's fine), doesn't break some convention of the codebase and has the required test coverage and other metrics, you're not only out of time for the task at hand, but also more than ready to move on to something else.
Google Street View used to be a time capsule for Germany until a few years ago: they started gathering data around 2007-2008, then there was huge public backlash (something about invasion of privacy - sure, they only photograph from public streets, but the cameras are placed much higher than an average person walking or driving, so could "look" over fences that would otherwise be too high etc.), so the government decided that anyone living in a building could request their whole building to be blurred in StreetView (with an exception for storefronts IIRC). So Google kinda just lost interest (or decided to wait for the negative sentiment to die down), and for the few larger cities that were already captured, you could always take a look at how a street used to look back in 2008.
> It's much easier for Russia to destroy data centers in orbit.
Nope. Depending on the number of satellites in the constellation, it could be very hard or impossible. Russia has only so many orbital-class interceptors.
You may want to read up on Kessler syndrome more if you think a few anti satellite hits would start it, or that it would be quick. (Hint: the original paper postulates decades.)
reply