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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

erikmcclure.com

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Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#181

Post by stale2002 »

maxbond wrote: post #118
throwaway290 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrorist attacks are defendable against. But anyway, you don't need to defend against terrorist attacks as much if you convincingly show terrorists you can come to their home and blow it up if they try.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the strategy of terrorists. They are looking to provoke a violent overreaction in order to radicalize the populace. It is a response to our ability to blow them up, and not one we have developed an antidote for.

> They are looking to provoke a violent overreaction in order to radicalize the populace.

A radicalized population that has had their infrastructure and military destroyed isn't much of a threat.

Sucks for them, but the problem is still solved for other nations.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#182

Post by Fbnkigffb66tfbj »

grecy wrote: post #38
kevmo314 wrote: post #23

> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal: > I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. The problem isn't painful enough. Have you…

> the question is at what cost? The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets. The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2] [1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar [2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...

> $8,000,000,000,000

It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#183

Post by stale2002 »

maxbond wrote: post #135
throwaway290 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but those rich elites themselves like to live well and somehow it turns out they when it comes to their own they really don't like to die or see their big prosperous families die. You can't rule radicalized impoverished populations if you yourself are dead. Letting them see that their target can retaliate in this way is not cheap.

Given current events, I don't understand how you can hold this view? We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect. Surely the people who planned and executed it knew that better than we do, since presumably it's their business to know such things. Surely that's a constructive proof that this notion is mistaken?

> We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect.

Indeed. And the reason why such an attack happened is because the people who did the attack were the ruling government body of 2 million people for almost 2 decades, and were left to their own devices to build up a large scale attack, involving 1 thousand+ combatants.

And in a few months, those combatants and military infrastructure will be destroyed and not much of a threat.

It turns out that killing your enemies leaves them no longer able to attack you. And leaving them alone and in charge of a psuedo country, lets them built up the capacity to harm you.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#185

Post by marcus_holmes »

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

I've lived in a few places around the world. By far the best-run one was the Isle of Man, which (when I lived there) had a population of around 30K. It has an independent parliament (Tynwald, the oldest continuous parliament in the world), and it makes its own laws.

The government has very little graft. Politicians seemed to genuinely work for the benefit of their constituents [0]. I always attributed this to the fact that they lived in the communities they served, and the people they socialised with were affected by the decisions they made.

The UK has the problem that the politicians are insulated from the people they ostensibly serve. Especially the Tories. They have displayed contempt and arrogance beyond belief.

This is all, as you say, a problem of scale.

[0] One illustration of this is the Manx implementation of social security vs the UK. When the Manx government set up national insurance contributions, they paid them into a separate fund (https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/the-trea...) which is under control of the treasury. The UK just poured the national insurance contributions into the general taxation pool.

The Manx fund (and by extension their health service) is rolling in money. The UK NHS is broke. The Manx system is proof that there were more than enough contributions to the NHS to keep it adequately funded. But the UK politicians spent the contributions on other things, because they could.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#186

Post by Etheryte »

Towaway69 wrote: post #145
RangerScience wrote: post #75

Increasingly, I suspect the real value of type systems is that they force slower, "more correct" development, allowing you to "win the argument" with Management over taking the time to Do Things Right. They put a floor on code quality (albeit, IMHO, a pretty low one - you can also royally fuck up a type system) - preventing the worst excesses of rushed development.

If your neighbour is using a type less language and is making more profit than you, then your boss will question the choice of language. Development pace is set by the competition. Edit: and if there is no competition, the longer it takes, the longer it will take to be profitable.

This is a common misnomer, writing more code faster doesn't mean you get more product or value faster. It can look like it at first, but you'll quickly come to find you're actually producing more bugs and vulnerable surface faster instead. More code is not good, it's the opposite of what you want.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#187

Post by michaelmrose »

ip26 wrote: post #94
jnsaff2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Is it though? Or is it that there is not enough profit for someone to make from running fiber to every home? To be clear I’m not trying to lead with the question but actually ask something and that the difference might be useful.

Some small towns have started building fiber to every home that want it, as a public utility. It has confirmed cost is the only question that voters care about. In one example it cost something like $200M for a population of 150,000. That’s $1.3k per person. Good luck getting the taxpayer to sign up for that without a clear revenue model. It’s being done, but not as some kind of blind “hey you know what would be grea…

Wouldn't the revenue model be something like $50-$100 per household for the next 20 years to cover principle and interest?

Assuming 50k households and 85% uptake and 50 per month is 510M 100 is about a billion.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#188

Post by pompino »

cbozeman wrote: post #87
kevmo314 wrote: post #23

> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal: > I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. The problem isn't painful enough. Have you…

This post is mind-boggling to me... > > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. > That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to peop…

Personally, I don't find it "mind boggling", but rather in-line with reality. Large mega-projects usually suffer major delays, massive cost over-runs, complications due to unforeseen events, and are at a high-risk for corruption. It is hard to believe we now have a handle on what it takes to do accurate costing of such large ambitious public infrastructure projects.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#189

Post by anonyme-honteux »

Many people here comment on the title rather on the substance.

The title is indeed clickbait, but it is not scambait. Clickbait is when you want the reader interested in reading things, which is normal, scambait is when you do that but you have no points behind made after that.

Here are the points made by the article and what I think of them :

- Much more things can be improved than we think possible (100% true - obviously we can't to them all at once, but we don't need to.)

- We don't need a new plan, we already have plans (True, for example you can take the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations as a starting point).

- Coordination matters (And is possible, the UN had lead the historic achievment to eradicate fucking polio)

- We have enough resources to act in the real world, but the way we make decisions is broken (True, Elon Musk spent an insane amount of money to make a dumb website worse, while US Foreign Aid #1 top priority is to help the government of Israel commits more crimes with no accountability)

- Things will not change until a determined group of people take action (100% true, this is how every progress ever has worked out)

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#190

Post by bluGill »

jwiz wrote: post #163
smsm42 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are implying the cause of illiteracy is the lack of funds. It is not so - in fact, the very worst schools often spend per pupil the same as the very best ones, or at least very close to it. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution - it would cause the worst schools spend even more and keep churning out ignoramuses. The bad schools are bad not because they can't find money to become good but because the w…

Well, as my highschool friend said 30 years ago, "I think teachers should be paid more...just not these teachers." If they paid teachers more, they'd have better teachers, though.

Not really, bad teachers often start good. Then after getting senority\tenure they ??? and become bad. But the rules don't allow you to get rid of them. Even if you could, they stick together.

of course I write the above as if we can objectivly evaluate teachers. I'm not sure if we can. I had my share of what I thought were good and bad teachers: in the end I'm a successful engineer which matters far more than how I felt about any teacher. What we really know is overall they were good enough, but not how any individual played a part

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