Think of Musk what you want, but SpaceX had to slog through quite a few setbacks as well before hitting success. The russians do luckily have the additional disadvantage of limited resources and some kinetic sanctions against their space infrastructure.
I assume we don’t teach kids to be like psychopaths because the system only can take so many. Unlike the image portrayed by propaganda, even American life doesn’t mainly consist of competition but of cooperation. There is competition to fill roles in companies, sure. But once in a role one is supposed to cooperate with coworkers to achieve something larger than one could alone.
If everybody saw life through the lens of a psychopath I guess we’d end up in a Mad Max scenario. Modern cooperative society with a system of division of labour simply wouldn’t work anymore.
On the other hand I’m morbidly curious how a society entirely without psychopaths would look like. Would it be better or worse? (And for wich definitions of “better” and “worse”). I can only assume we’d have much less wars, for one.
Sounds like they are reinventing the main frame, just without the specialized hardware support that guarantees things go right.
Any IT device can be hacked. We completely missed the evolutionary opportunity to have secure computing devices. Proper object capability machines would make it possible. But quick and dirty and by Friday is what we got instead.
Huh, good job they developed that Rusty Dagger for Ukraine then. They could make a few for themselves on the quick.
No need to be Putin’s lackey. They are a consolidated industrial concern with famously greedy executives. They could put in effort to develop lower cost munitions, increase manufacturing capacity or let other people join in production. But why? The incentives aren’t there. They make money hand over fist as is. What are people going to do? Buy some competitor’s system? That’s not like going to the big box shop and getting some new kit. And it’s not like their competitors could pump out gear, largely operating on the same model.
I wasn’t trying to call you out for it, just throw it out there. It’s the same for all of us. I’m especially dismayed by European state agencies and governments using AWS.
Well, you probably do use Amazon services without realising. The only really valuable part of the company is AWS and it far from obvious which services run on that. So in our case it would be less about the warehouses and more about the data centers. But the principle should hopefully make the right people nervous and get them to do something about it.
China still calls itself “communist with Chinese characteristics”. They quite openly gave their companies strategic goals to fulfill.
It’s all the dorks thinking they could get hold of that sweet big market if only they gave China enough concessions. And there it was always only for the bosses and owners to participate in the windfall, employees be damned. They were played big time and payed themselves huge bonuses in the mean time for selling us out.
As much as that’s good news for anyone opposing Russia’s invasion, it really should give our planers pause. Have we become just as reliant on single points of failure as well? Is there something we could do to prevent the same happening to our Amazon fulfillment centers? Would it have the same or at least similar impact on us? And sadly “us” doesn’t even have to be particularly specified, as I believe it includes just about everybody except China these days. And in China’s case you probably just sub in a different companies name.
Edit for spelling
And this I believe is where public and corporate interests diverge.
Corps like the current situation of boutique production. Nice margins, easy to manage processes and they can selfimportantly hobnob with politicians and military brass. Apparently a lower cost to produce patriot variant was cancelled. I can’t see how corporations want something like that.
I believe easy and cheaply mass producible munitions need to be engineered differently. But why develop such munitions, if the old paradigm produces so much gravy and influence?
Next Monday.
If he’s found dead or unable to conduct his duties before then, there’s a special election. If that happens after Monday, the seat simply remains vacant until it’s filled January with whomever wins the regular election.
But it very much depends on what you count as a language. German used to be a dialect continuum. People could understand their neighbors and a village or two over, but became mutually unintelligible pretty quickly. Transportation was slow, so populations just didn’t mix as much and language was more local. Latin used to mostly be the language of a single city.
Most of this entire discussion is missing the point. On the one hand a variety of views and/or options for political representation are needed. This is where first past the post utterly fails. It devolves mostly to a two choice system, as is becoming painfully obvious in the US. Or it might become unstable/unpredictable as seen in the UK where alternative parties are emerging, but probably to the detriment of the old parties. In the end it might well devolve back to a two party system, just two other parties. This is where some form of proportional representation system comes in. More than two parties are viable. But at the cost of stability. Back in schooly politics teacher liked to present Italy as the poster child for why (simple) PR doesn’t work well. Though in recent years the Italian government has proven quite stable. Also, in Italys Case I’d love to run the experiment how they did with nothing changed except for organized crime being eradicated. Alas, in humanities controlled experiments like that aren’t possible. But I’d not be surprised if spectacular corruption wasn’t the bigger problem.
So what could the solution be? First I’d like to see corruption stomped out completely. I know, that’s almost like wishing for world peace, and come to think about it, it’s mostly the same characters that are in the way. Second, the solution is likely to be neither a simple majority system nor a simple proportional system. Ranked choice? My teacher was taken by the German system (a mixture of both), but that has it’s own problems. Or something entirely different, like completely independent publicly funded media. Print, audio and audiovisual. And that media could run regular polls to publicly show which topics are important to people.
I think our problems stem more from the influence on populations rather than the actual modality in which our representation is formed. In Israel you have the corruptive influence of ultra-orthodox and nationalist hardliners mixed with some run if the mill corruption, in Italy you have a gigantic organized crime problem, with some rich people problem, in Germany the Springer group is trying to set up a Fox news situation and in the US you have the Fox/Heritage Foundation/billionaires and general corruption through money problem.
They have for decades been at the forefront of cheating. Which party broke into their competitors offices to so on them? Who used the supreme court to stop the count in Florida, where after the fact it was found out they would have (narrowly) lost?
They know they cheat at every opportunity, so they need to accuse their opponents of the same.
More combined starches: Verheiratete (German, something like “married couple”) are a kind of dumplings with potatoes together with diced fried bacon. One of my favourite local foods.
Only if there are ways out for the elite. Otherwise it’s essentially a defense co-op. If you believe your country is using the military in ethically wrong ways, that’s the actual problem, not the draft.
It’s not really even about being a democracy. Kommunist East Germany with one of the most formidable surveillance systems to date could only look on when a sufficient percentage of the population rose peacefully.
I believe the plumbing for democratic change is still present in the US. What is preventing change is people doom scrolling on the couch.
Will there be a special song? “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” is Thatcher.
No, really in large groups too.
What I believe is rather, the larger the group, the larger the chance to get a few psychopaths in there that screw things up for everyone. Psychopathy seems to have a prevailance of about 1% in the population.
Btw the division of labour economy we all live in is cooperative in nature. You might compete for roles in it, but the output of those roles is supposed to be cooperative. Anyone who’s work is purely competitive is basically someone who works solely to take something away from someone else. So essentially something akin to a thief in function. I consider that part of the problem, not part of the normal economy.