Viewing profile — mpax

Get out.

> The idea that "life is meaningless" means that society cannot rely on you, because you'll do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever the consequences. How does "life is meaningless…

You might do well reading up on the last couple of centuries of Greek history...

Those data on poverty are a joke! Read for example: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/4/27/200-years-to-end-... It's basically the World Bank covering its ass for its own spect…

The fact that expected utility theory isn't nearly as scrutinized as the labor theory of value, whilst being at least as flawed, tells you something about the "value free" nature o…

Depends on how you look at it. Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recur…

It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a …

What’s the proper game-theoretic equivalent of this situation?

Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu? I imagine with the right datastructure you should be able to do pixel/line intersection tests in the …

Please keep such madness out of the EU...

On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining. They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nati…

They can just sit there in perpetuality, there’s no swat team going to bust in the door because one leg of government lent to the other.

The national debt can wait, the private sector is more indebted than at any point in recorded history, and getting worse. In the US especially you can see the seeds of debt servitu…

They’ve always been decoupled, it’s just a lot more visible these days.

Facebook has been getting increasingly slugish for me for several years now. I wonder if it’s got anything to do.

I think historians will look back on this era and point society’s decline towards two companies, they both start with “Go”.

I’d rather shoot the horse and get a cab.

One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski Often gets low ratings because people mistake it for an educational book. It’s a mix of history, biographies a…

Laws of power is nice but what always bothered me about it is that there doesn’t seem to be a system to the laws, it merely sums up a bunch of them without investigating underlayin…

A Brief History of Time, by Hawking

> 70 mph is not fast if I am leaving adequate distance between me and everything else. The problem then becomes others tailgating and driving into the space in front of you, effect…

I very much share this sentiment, I often think of prisons as quarantine. But that’s the descriptive dimension, not the normative. Crime victims seem to crave “revenge”. It’s a ver…

Well... sure, but it depends on how you look at it. In a monetary society (as opposed to credit or barter (intermediary like you suggest) — monetary circuitist terminology), money …

Wait, you mean privatized prisons are a moral hazard? /s

We have research publishing requirements in academia these days, which puts quantity over quality of research. I think we should swap those with required replication studies of pub…