Ok, but the simulation could easily have been written to include an adjunct professor at UBC’s much-less-well-known Okanagan campus who isn’t actually that great at Gödeling.

Bravo!

tl;dr: might be a good time to learn Mandarin.

> These policies created real prosperity for million[s of pounds that moved to overseas tax havens].

FTFY.

You wouldn’t make it to a response… current leader of the free world would sit down for Bun Cha Ha Noi, ask for ketchup, and immediately get stabbed through the neck with a pair of chopsticks by a righteous Anthony Bourdain.

Secret Service would, of course, try to intervene… Secret Service would rapidly learn that no force on earth defeats a Vietnamese grandma with access to hot oil.

> Comparing these with contemporary forecasts […] shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

Funny how polities keep underestimating the damage caused by shooting oneself in the foot (UK) or the head (US, twice).

Well, “saved” until the airframe was lost a few weeks later in an unrelated incident.

I think it literally every day… and with literally every day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets, again very literally, further away.

The odds are pretty damn flat.

If we launched today, 1% faster would be enough.

If we launched in a hundred years, 1% faster would be enough.

And going faster is downright easy. We can beat Voyager's speed significantly any time we want (plus or minus ten years for planetary alignment).

You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass.

We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling wherewithal, resources, and attention span.

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I am a realist… and the real odds decrease with every passing moment.

We keep sending out probes. Another fast one gets cheaper over time, even. One random billionaire or less could fund one.

If and when a random N-ionaire actually does so, and their probe is both actually moving faster and resilient enough to be responding long enough to track, we’ll talk.

The odds we could surpass Voyager aren’t shrinking, the odds we will are.

You don't think getting cheaper increases the odds?

To me it seems like the odds are close enough to 100 that it's hard to claim a trend. If you asked me mid cold war I might have said there's significant risk we all die first, but not so much now.

I don’t think it’s actually getting cheaper, in real terms, and if it were and there was a financial incentive to go we’d have gone. There’s no financial incentive to go where the resources aren’t, and humanity is a long way from being able to visit the interstellar medium and be able to send anything but information back.

Also don’t know how you’ve missed it, but we’re actually in a more globally precarious position today than we were during the vast majority of the Cold War. But let’s see where we are in 2030.

Hands down the funniest thing I ever saw, live and in person, was Anthony Bourdain staring with naked, enraptured joy at the woman doing the American Sign Language translation of what he’d just said, then stopping just after she did to let us all know that “I just had to know what it looks like to sign ‘felching Mrs. Butterworth.’”

Thank you, Tony, wherever you are… if for nothing else, then for the Pho Chay I the Lunch Lady made just for my newly vegetarian self in Saigon.

I went to the 'Obama restaurant' in Hanoi for bun cha (not vegetarian) more so because Anthony Bourdain. Like a good American I smoked a Cuban cigar afterwards in a cigar bar under an image of Che Guevara I passed on the way back to the hotel which was out of the way likely guided by Tony's spirit if such things exist. Nonetheless, the Bun Cha up in the mountains of Sa Pa is better as are Dominican cigars.

I’m a local from Hanoi, always surprised with Bourdain picking that place to eat with pres Obama (I still believe because of presidential food safety standards). I’d not pick that place any day of the week. Having lived in Singapore as well, RIP Anthony, but your picks aren’t that great.

They picked it because it was a spur of the moment decision -- not planned. Their concern according to Boudain was not having the president in line of sight from the outside of the building.

Where would you go instead? Have a few favorite spots for Hanoi/Singapore?

It's honestly hard to think of a better title for the definitive Anthony Bourdain biography then "Felching Mrs. Butterworth"!