Zeihan:

US good demographics via immigration, shielded by deep water, internal water ways... fortress america. Shale revolution for energy autarky. Food security. PRC not.

Reality:

PRC growing from current roughly parity to 2x-3x larger skilled workforce vs US in next 20-30 years... who will be in workforce 2060/70/80s (this is already baked in from past 25 years of births), i.e. medium/long term of our and most of our children's lifetimes, long enough that hard to extrapolate after. Also the highest concentration of automation in the world. Maybe this is gap AI can plug, but in absence US with even immigration cannot come close to PRC simply minting roughly OECD combined in just STEM. Meanwhile PRC pop trending to 800m by 2100, i.e. 600m less mouth to feed and fuel but remaining 800m mouths that's 60/70/80% skilled workfroce vs current 60/70/80% lowskilled/peasants is a complete different strategic competitor. PRC declining population, but better workforce = most optimal competitive demographic trend to compete with US. Reminder that JP/SKR increased economy 10-20x post <2 TFR simply by upskilling their workforce. PRC current "only" has 20% high skilled workforce, them moving to 60%+ of advanced economies = decades of stupendous amount of high skilled demographic divident to extract.

PRC dredges shallow shores to build plurality of most high performing ports for global trade.

PRC infra/waterworks connecting internal waterways gives it highest utililized internal water transport system in the world.

PRC capacity for renewables has higher ceiling than US shale, cheap shale is not endless, extracting tapped out permian is projected to increase, $70-80 breakeven in 20 years might kill economic competitiveness vs other producers, vs hard to project anyone competing with PRC on industrial renewables.

PRC developing global strike to pierce fortress america... which really is misnomer for expeditionary america, i.e. technology that forward deploys advanced military (relative to others' projection powers) to bottle up others within their shores so they can't reach US. Remember how the US experiment could have ended off CONUS shores by wooden british boats if it wasn't for French intervention. Vunerability of CONUS is product of geography mediated by technology. Right now tech balance vs adversaries = CONUS leans fortress, but advances in gunpowder made fortresses irrelevant. PRC global strike with conventional ICBMs in a few energy distribution nodes and US is no better than Saudi refineries vs Yemen - it doesn't matter if US have resource autarky if you cannot protect vunerable extractive infra, which has knock on effects to everything, including (fertilizer for) modern agriculture. Even JP pierced CONUS with fugo ballons in WW2, of course it was ineffectual, but modern guided munitions are likely to be. Ask how much US preeminance is built on CONUS serenity, and what happens if that is threatened, like US can threaten everyone else with relative impunity. How many students can US brain drain in shooting war with mutual homeland vunerability, what happens to US global hegemonic framework when Boeing plants, SaaS/payment data centres, tech campuses, F35 production lines can be distrupted. Like Trump doing fine dismantling a lot of that without PRC help, but postwar US order/strength is built on the fact that US can hit others while homefront sustains the expeditionary hitting. Once homefront gets disrupted, that model stops working.

Zeihan focuses on the geo and forgets the politics, or conveniently uses biased politics for geopolitical analysis to sell chicken dinners to US supremacists. Granted a lot of PRC military / tech developements happened after his books, but anyone with half a brain cell can project 20-30 years and realize the conditions he builds off was unlikely to be the balance in the future. PRC political advantages negate a lot of geographic disadvantages... meanwhile PRC geography actually pretty favourable... there's a reason it sustained largest civilization for 1000s of years. Also reminder PRC actually per capita calorically self sufficient, use to be net fertilizer export via coal gassification (which PRC has unlimited in reserve, and only scaled back due to enviroment), increasingly energy independant via domestic renewables... and declining net population will only reinforce their domestic autarky - which will still remain vunerable to US strikes, but the equation changes when there is mutual homeland vunerability. Then equation shifts to attrition... who can hit more, who can endure more... and let's just say PRC with 4x more population, has 4x infra to degrade. Maybe currently US can project >4x fires at PRC mainland... but maybe in 5/10 years maybe not. Maybe PRC A2D2 enough to dismantle most of US security architecture in region, and US hedge on exquisition expensive munition delivery platforms (carriers, b21s) is less survivable than PRC brrrrting conventional hypersonics that can hit CONUS from 1000s of survivable land based fortifications. There is a lot of uncertainty in the tech stack. This not mentioning US MIC isn't calibrated for adversary size of developed PRC. Took 5 carrier groups + regional basing and multiple weeks of not sustainable high tempo operations to dismantle Iraq that's (generously) 1/100th PRC in industrial capability, all of which is deployed in PRC theatre and explicitly designed to counter US MIC.

TLDR is Zeihan makes many invalid points, some points that maybe valid 10-15 years ago, but wouldn't have really stood test of time, even then.

(I'm not the person you were replying to.)

> "was impeached, not convicted" you're being pedantic and you know I meant convicted. Yes, he was impeached... but not convicted so that's the end of it. A democrat house impeached and a republican senate found him not guilty.

Mostly true, but since we're discussing his second rather than first impeachment trial, it was not a Republican Senate that found him not guilty - it was a Democratic Senate, specifically one split 50-50 but with Democratic President of the Senate (VPOTUS) Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker. Also he was acquitted only due to the supermajority required - a majority of senators, including 7 Republicans, did vote to convict.

Plus, even though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he voted to acquit based on his interpretation of the Constitution - I think this was about whether a former president could be impeached and convicted at all - he also said that Trump was "practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of" January 6.

> "his own lawyer" lawyers talk shit... we now know, per SCOTUS, the correc tpath.

We know the path that SCOTUS has made legally binding on lower courts, but it was not handled in a way that gives most Democrats faith that it was a fair ruling. In particular, I have zero confidence that they would have ruled the same way if the defendant had been a Democratic former president rather than Trump.

I'm going to use a word you used in your comment and say that most Democrats feel the judicial system is heavily weaponized by Republicans against Democrats, not by Democrats against Republicans.

> Remember... Trump said "lock her up". Then didn't. (and yes, she's not the POTUS - thankfully - but my point stands).

I have no idea what point this is supposed to represent.

> For example... he was charged with and became a "felon" for misdemeanor charges (no clue what those were) bumped up to felonies for "election interference".

You're referring to the NY case here, which is actually the least severe of his four cases. But sure, it's the only one where he's been convicted so far.

He was indicted by a NY state grand jury, at the request of a NY state district attorney, of falsifying 34 business records (about the hush money payments to Stormey Daniels) with intent to defraud, where the "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof". Without that extra intent regarding another crime, this would just be a misdemeanor under NY law, but that extra intent makes it a felony.

The 12-member NY state trial jury could only convict Trump if they found unanimously that this was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

What "other crime" were they asked to find in this case that Trump had the intent to commit or to aid or conceal the commission thereof?

Again, the 12-member NY state trial jury could only convict Trump if they found unanimously that the intent to commit this "other crime" was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The "other crime" in this case was NY state Election Law section 17-152, which is basically about two or more people conspiring to affecting the result of an election "through unlawful means".

What unlawful means? The prosecutor listed three possibilities: a tax crime, falsification of bank records, and a federal campaign finance violation. The jurors in this case all had to find unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt that the intended conspiracy to affect the result of the election involved one of these unlawful means, but they did not all have to agree unanimously on which unlawful means was involved.

> Meanwhile: Hillary was charged with and actually convicted of those things - misdemeanor charges that she paid a $130k fine for (if I'm not mistaken). Doing stuff to influence an election. The exact thing that should have been turned into a "felony" per the law as being used by Democrats.

Not true. Hillary's campaign and the DNC paid civil penalties ($8k for the campaign and $113k for the DNC) to the Federal Election Commission to settle an investigation, with no criminal charges or convictions and no criminal fines, no involvement of the judiciary or the DOJ at all, no finding by any judge or jury that the FEC's allegations were true, and with Hillary's campaign and the DNC still denying the accuracy of the allegations.

Also, while the FEC is evenly divided between the parties and not especially partisan, these actions which you found serious enough to call charges and convictions happened under the current term of President Biden, after the underlying complaint had been received under the Trump administration. Seems pretty non-weaponized to me.

What's more, even if that had been a criminal investigation, there's no way a federal prosecutor can charge the same statutes as NY prosecutors can charge, and vice versa - two entirely separate criminal systems. So what works in NY state criminal law and what works in federal criminal law are not always the same. There are other examples of NY state law being stricter than federal law, such as in securities fraud.

> We are at this place, arguing about presidential immunity, which we haven't been to before because one side is actively persecuting a rival who they LITERALLY wouldn't be persecuting if he wasn't running for office again.

To be honest, the NY case would probably have gone forward even if Trump weren't running again, simply because it would still be good politics for the prosecutor involved. I am opposed to prosecutors being elected for exactly this reason, but that isn't specifically a Democratic problem: most US states elect their local prosecutors, including most Republican states.

And as much as I said it was the weakest and least important case of those being brought, keep in mind that the group of people who ended up convicting Trump was neither the elected prosecutor nor Judge Merchan: it was 12 ordinary New Yorkers, including at least some of whom (I forget how many) support Trump in the political or policy context, who unanimously decided after hearing the evidence that the criminal charges had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The case was still strong enough to convince them of that. Plus the entire 34-count indictment could only get brought in the first place after a NY state grand jury decided that the prosecutor had presented enough evidence to constitute probable cause for the indictment.

That isn't very weaponized. It wasn't a partisan or even elected judge convicting Trump, it was a jury of his peers. Note that Judge Merchan is not an elected official, unlike a few NY judges and unlike most judges in certain other states. He was first appointed to the bench by former NYC Mayor Bloomberg, who was registered and elected as a Republican at the time, and was appointed to his current position by an appointee of an appointee of a former Democratic NY governor.

Also, the just-as-elected NY statewide Attorney General Letitia James declined to bring certain criminal charges against Trump (I'm not sure exactly what they would have been), because she felt she couldn't prove them to the high criminal standard of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt. I think she did bring similar charges as a civil lawsuit with the usual "more likely than not" standard of proof, but that's a Democratic elected NY prosecutor responsibly avoiding an unjustified witch hunt even where it might be good partisan politics to go overboard.

Last thought - the classified documents case is one where Trump has gotten extreme leniency compared to what an ordinary defendant would get, not extreme weaponized prosecution. If a nonpolitical government employee with a security clearance had kept classified documents after leaving their employment and had refused to return them after the government had noticed the situation and requested their return, they would have been physically put in jail, and probably also convicted, long ago. There is no real way to call that one weaponized.

> So the "the president isn't presumed immune" was never tested because the Justice System was never weaponized before.

It wasn't tested before because Nixon was pardoned, period. A draft grand jury indictment against Nixon was unsealed in 2018, and Ford's pardon is very likely the only reason those charges didn't go forward - at the very least, a prosecutor thought the situation justified enough to present to a grand jury.

Besides Nixon and Trump, are you aware of any former presidents where a prosecutor concluded that criminal charges were warranted under the usual standards of evidence and proof underlying charging decisions? I'm not. All the other cases that get widely discussed either didn't involve former presidents, didn't involve violations of criminal law, or didn't involve the required evidence and proof for prosecutors to expect that they could successfully obtain a conviction.

Hell Joseon strikes again.

For context, the legal situation of network usage in South Korea is something akin to Ajit Pai's wet dream. Network operators are legally empowered to charge troll tolls on both ends of any connection they want. Infrastructure costs are to be borne by literally anyone BUT the network operators.

To compound this, South Korea is economically an authoritarian hellscape. Large megacorporations[0] own everything and the government is just a clearinghouse and mediator for their interests. Corruption is so rampant that even administrations run by ardent anti-corruption activists wind up being toppled by rampant and widespread corruption.

I guarantee you that not one SK Telecom executive will spend time behind bars for this blatantly illegal conduct. Anyone with the power to put people behind bars in South Korea will be unmade if they touch a chaebol.

[0] These are specifically called chaebols and the group includes LG, Hyundai, Samsung, Lotte, and a few others. Japan used to have something similar, but they ate their rich... and then brutally invaded and colonized half of East Asia.

South Korea information technology (as distinguished from hardware-related technology) is unbelievably bad. Much of it is purely technical: domestic firms like Naver are simply not as good as global incumbents like Google, but also they are terrible compared to other regional players (The Kakao chat app is vastly inferior to Zalo, a Vietnamese chat app). However, just as much is due to poor cultural and interpersonal decisions. This news case highlights such a cultural factor.

Note that KT, while relatively recently privatized, is still a national corporation that is considered a critical national asset under the law (thus if the North attacks, KT towers are first priority to be protected by the South's military). So, it is not as if some rogue SME infected its users with malware; it's a national corporation infecting its users over and not even be sorry about it (as in the article).

Plenty of other comments detail the strange Active X requirement: The national law had dependency on Internet Explorer/Active X. (I do not know of any developed nation having a national legal dependency on a specific corporation's consumer technology at this scale.) Also, many comments on South Korea's purportedly great infrastructure (albeit two decades ago). There is more to this.

Interestingly, if you ask an average Korean, he would say Korea is literally the best nation in IT/internet technology, topping or at least on par with the US. The national propaganda effort that went into forming this collective conscious should not be understated. Even many of the top programmers in South Korea I met strongly believe in this superiority. I wonder if this strong sense of superiority is both (1) preventing SK from improving its actually-lagging tech and (2) act in Dostoevskian-Raskolnikov manners thinking that it is above the law and consensus ("the best can break the rules and set new ones"). Whatever the underlying reason may be, there is a serious techno-cultural issue going on in the country.

One of the biggest banks in South Korea blacklisted Amazon as a financial scammer because it's Prime subscription renews monthly and customers complained after seeing the renewal charge on their credit cards. The ban was national -- no customer of this bank could buy a product from Amazon unless he calls the bank personally and ask the charge to be approved. Again, the issue wasn't technical. It was cultural.

Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of them are actually related.

It's because the syllable is restricted in the number of possible forms, in a similar way. (And they all have approximately five vowels. And a pitch accent.) In Hawaiian, nothing but consonant + vowel syllables are possible. Swahili and Japanese allow an optional final n sound. Finnish is a little more flexible, and syllables can end with an n, r, l or t. No consonant clusters, in any of the languages. No syllables ending with consonants outside the restricted set (if any), in any of the languages.

This results in a lot of syllables of the form: i, a, ne, na, ka, ta, po, to... "Pokatokaino". I just made that up and it's probably not a Swahili, Finnish, Hawaiian, or Japanese word -- but it could be.

This basic pattern (consonant + vowel + maybe limited option for final consonant) is very common; it's the most common arrangement among the worlds languages. Far more common than languages like English which allow monstrosities like "strengths" (which is 6 consonants and one vowel).

But this is kind of my point. Capital gains tax is a dumb tax, it mostly screws middle class people and creates several perverse incentives, and we'd be better off to use a simple consumption tax instead. The argument against this is supposedly that "rich people" are the ones who pay capital gains tax, but in practice "rich people" are the ones in the best position to avoid paying it using fancy accountants and cross-border shenanigans. The middle class people actually paying it wouldn't be any worse off with a consumption tax that lacks all of those perverse incentives, and might even end up paying less because then the super rich would pay the same rate as they do instead of a lower one.

LVT ignores that there are other resources that may be hoarded. In particular, companies can hire all the employees with the skills necessary to build a competitor and have them do busy work to avoid having to innovate or compete on the merits of their products.

This is essentially the same thing as buying up land and leaving it fallow, but with human resources instead of land. In some ways this is worse, as society has already invested in training those workers.

> Consumption tax screws the working and middle classes the absolute most because they consume the most as a % of their income.

This is the rich corporation PR that I'm talking about.

So here's Richie Rich not spending most of his income, but also not selling any shares unless he wants to buy something. In fact, he doesn't sell shares even then, because instead he borrows money to buy things, so there are never any capital gains. Without a consumption tax he pays no tax at all.

But you're saying we need this tax, whose practical effect is to tax middle class people on the inflationary component of asset price increases, because they spend more of their income. Instead you want to tax middle class people on their income. But then what benefit do they receive by using an income tax which immediately taxes all of their income?

- The ability and want to learn. I offer the following advice to every firefighter I teach: the day you think or believe you know everything, is the day you quit. (I'm a software dev. by trade with fifteen-odd years experience as an operational firefighter (and still am to this day)).

- Find a domain or two you have an interest (better yet, a passion) in, that isn't IT, and pair your IT skills to it. My day job is (more generally) emergency management, so I pair my geospatial analysis and programming skills to solve problems within the emergency management domain.

I don't think AI will completely take over, simply because of [1], though it will somewhat remove or reduce the need for 'generalists', where much of the workload is handled by AI, at the prompting of a software developer or engineer, much like how many farm hands were replaced by farming machines when they became a thing. That said, I think we're still half a century off AI truly replacing most software developers.

Humans will still be required to 'know what 'good' looks like' and ensure that whatever slop AI spits out actually fixes the problem. This is where domain-specific knowledge is incredibly valuable. See how you can apply your skills to make your interest or passion field better, using AI to your advantage, by exploiting your technical skills with domain-specific knowledge.

Most people think of firefighters as just that - putting out fires. That's only partly true though. We use a shiny, and fast, red toolbox on wheels to solve the problems of others, whether that be (actual) firefighting, rescue, first aid, replacing smoke alarm batteries, engaging with the community, even fixing things. Firefighters now days are closer to problem-solvers than they are firefighters. We just happen to respond to emergency calls too.

Be the problem solver in your domain. AI, in my opinion, won't be able to truly problem solve, or think outside the box, for many decades to come.

[1] https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...

I can leave my iPhone on the table in a food center to “chope a spot”

Not yet seen the drawbacks of the cameras - certainly prefer the situation to SF where leaving your bluetooth enabled notebook in a car trunk is “asking for it”

I can leave my door unlocked, my parcel can be dropped off at my porch without porch bandits (lol) and car theft is non existent.

One can jog at 2am in any park at night wearing an expensive phone and earbuds and feel perfectly safe.

There’s no active shooter drills in schools, no need to clutch your handbag for it to not be snatched away by an errant bike, no drug zombies inhabiting specific areas of town. We go have dinner in the red lights district because food is great there and can leave the car unlocked.

There is no “no-go” zones or ghettos. No harassment on the subway apart from the occasional phone creep who invariably gets arrested.

So pray please, why is safety in quotation marks? Singapore absolutely delivers value for the tradeoff of cameras in practical, real world fashion and people absolutely understand that - so selling them abstract concepts like “real western freedom” falls short because they see the tradeoffs in every other country when they travel.

My son lost it at 7 years of age when we went to London and he experienced the authentic subway with belligerent drunks, homeless sleeping on the ground and shouting sports fans accosting a woman all in one ride - all things he’d never seen before.

Rich Americans pay for this “freedom” by their gated communities, Lake Tahoe retreats and corporate modes of transportation. In Singapore, every resident gets it.

Having lived here for a while, it stuns me how reflexive and ideological the conversation is about these tradeoffs and how misguided people’s perceptions are.

Most think Singapore is a Capitalist wonderland, not seeing the housing market is centrally run, the majority of locals working for the government in one form or another (GIC/Temasek Crown Companies/PSD)

Singapore defies western ideological expectations, it’s not neatly divided into left and right, capitalist vs socialist, western vs eastern societies, it’s 35% immigrants, 4 major races and religions, it controls racial composition of housing blocks and the nuance required to understand the country and the outcomes it produces, for better or worse is lost in the desperate attempts to make it fit into those narrow definitions.

It’s not a paradise, it’s not an utopia, there’s crime, there’s scams, there’s human vice, it’s election districts are more like Alberta or Bavaria or Texas but it does have safety and safe housing for every resident in a way no other country has and without the immediate tradeoffs western narratives are so hard on. Sure heroin trafficking gets you killed, but on the backdrop of the Opium wars or the US drug crisis, their strategy, whether killing or not is key to that, actually works in measurable outcomes for everyone. It’s been, well forever, since an addict stole a thing from me - a regular occurrence in SF id you visit into a few times a year. It’s western perspectives that try to “frame that” - it’s clear this strategy isn’t gonna work for the US.

But that doesn’t stop either side of the western debate from framing Singapore within their ideology, a kind of constant colonial mansplaining you get here - condescending explanations and quotation marks aiming to reassure Western audiences that their societies tradeoffs are the right ones.

Questions not asked by the very people who should:

- “Why don’t the cameras work in London?”

- “Why does gun control work for every developed country but the US?”

- “How did these guys pull of country level SSO that works”

- “How were they able to switch to remote work and learning without as much as a hitch”

- and my favorite.. “how do they manage world class public service, transportation and a government employing half a million people more or less directly with a progressive tax rate where most people pay lower single digit percent and the top end is not even 25%”)

all deserve to be examined holistically for the nuanced, multi-layered background of those policies executed by what I would consider the worlds most professional public service.

But especially for former colonial powers, this is really really tough and so escapism in form of slogans like “authoritarian” and “it’s just a city” are paraded 59 avoid them.

Reading the western coverage always reads like Singapore’s mere existence and choices are an affront to the the west because they point out that ideology had limits.

But Singapore doesn’t exist to prove hard on drug crusaders or believers in technocracy or authoritarian government right - it exists purely out of its own right and the sheer will of Lee Kwan Yew to think outside the box, to not accept prevailing narratives and choose the right solutions for the unique location and situation rather than the east ones.

I wrote Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly, I've managed hospital systems and group practices, I've been a patient with a life threatening illness. This is a really low effort article, it doesn't even really define what it considers "healthcare". In the US healthcare is 1/5 or more of the entire economy, so who profits from 1/5 of all US economic activity is a silly premise.

The US doesn't have one healthcare system, it has 50+ (or 51, ...59, is healthcare in Puerto Rico part of the US healthcare system?, how about American Samoa?). Contrary to many peoples opinions the "healthcare system" is not operated or overseen primarily at a federal level. The federal government is one of the largest buyers of healthcare as an insurance provider, that is true.

Comparisons to other countries that are much much smaller than the US are sort of silly to me. Europe does not have one healthcare system. Subsidized education and price controls in foreign systems also make comparisons excruciating. I think it is usually a canard. OECD data is, in a word, "garbage", as it relates to healthcare. Just one example: In the US, eyewear for seeing purposes is healthcare. In almost no other countries do you need a prescription for eyeglasses. Prescription eyewear in the US is a 20-30 billion dollar market, depending on how you want to count it.

I think the mechanisms for paying for healthcare in the US are really inefficient and involve too many intermediaries. This is a result of a lot of accidents of history. America is a very physically large country with a lot of people all over it, we expect very high standards of care, we consume a tremendous amount of pharmaceuticals, we have wildy abundant and relatively inexpensive food that seems to be correlated to our being much more overweight than a lot of other peoples, we engage in a lot of dangerous activities at a rate that far exceeds what a lot of other peoples do that seems to correlated with our culture, on and on.

Instead of hand wringing about differences between ourselves and other cultures we would be better served looking at boring things like medicares 3 million pages of medical claim guidelines, clearing house operations and conflicts of interest, better incentives for state level responsibility, antitrust litigation, lots of practical things that don't make click bait headlines.

> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.

Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite.

How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.

My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all.

If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.

I know that this article is talking about a lower level of "convenience", but I have to say this about .NET and C#: it's probably the most "convenient" platform and language at the moment.

Around 2020, I left a company that was building .NET Framework and barely started transitioning into .NET Core.

Then I spent two years working at various startups doing full-stack, primarily TypeScript on Node on the backend. And within the last year, spent a stint at one of the very few SV, VC-backed startups using .NET Core and came away pretty convinced that .NET Core and C# are what most teams want when they want some non-Node platform alternative.

    1. C# is syntactically very similar to TypeScript so it's not difficult to pick up.  Generics, try-catch, async/await, type inference, Array ops vs LINQ, etc.  It means if your team is already doing TS, it's easy to pick up C#.  If you're hiring, it's easy to train TS devs for C#
    2. It has a nice mix of OOP + functional programming support owing to F#.  Pattern matching, lambdas, records, tuples, destructuring, etc.
    3. Entity Framework Core is arguably the best, most mature ORM out there.  It supports a variety of backing stores and programming styles.
    4. The language and platform are foundationally sound and stable.  Go just got generics within the last year.  Async Rust is still evolving.  .NET and C# are 20 years old at this point and very stable.
    5. Building .NET micro-apps now is so simple with the out-of-the-box templates.  `dotnet new webapi -minimal` and you get an Express-like web API without needing to add any imports or do any additional setup.
    6. Whether you want to believe the TechEmpower benchmarks or not, it is decidedly higher throughput than Node which translates to real $ saved on runtime costs at scale.
    7. .NET and the large corpus of first-party libraries are maintained by an army of professional engineers at Microsoft that are constantly monitoring and patching it.  You reap the benefits.
    8. Platform tooling is really good.  Builds are fast.  Hot reload works reasonably well.  Cross platform support for most common use cases is really good; I've been doing all of my .NET work on an M1 Mac for almost 2 years now and deploying into AWS and GCP on x64 and Arm64 targets.

I've interviewed with some teams that ended up investigating Go and Rust once TypeScript and Node became cumbersome -- always end up skipping .NET and C# for some reason. It's odd because these same teams embraced TypeScript, VS Code, and GitHub but then give C# the side-eye.

Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. Other commenters have mentioned that usability extension issues but I wanted to discuss my experience as someone who maintains their own wayland client (for drawterm: https://github.com/9front/drawterm).

There are plenty of technical differences between how KDE, Gnome, and Wlroots that just cause more work for me. Perhaps most popularly Gnome is dying on the hill of "client side decorations", meaning that without mostly Gnome specific code you will get no title bar. KDE and Wlroots do upscaling different, KDE upscales with video in mind, Wlroots upscales with text in mind. There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done, so to get consistent display you have to do the upscaling yourself. Some other minor annoyances include having to implement key repeat yourself, and no standard way for programs to cause a mouse movement.

Like this article mentions I use wayland because it's the "only game in town", but after porting drawterm I became fairly unimpressed with the technical design.

Here's my free advice on the internet (aka worth nothing). Don't be productive, be accumulative.

If every day you do one thing that makes thing easier going forward, gives you another option, makes a job easier in the long term, adds a skill, gets you a reference or a connection, pay a dividend or royalty, etc.. in the long run you will be fine.

The parent may be referring to Peter Attia's talk with Dr. Rick Johnson in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbSic4Oo8ME

Dr. Johnson doesn't mention what organ in the body performs the conversion, but he does mention that high serum sodium activates an enzyme which converts glucose to fructose.

Fructose, in high amounts, causes high uric acid, leading to inflammation, insulin resistance, and causes the body to switch from fat-burning to fat storage (bears and migrating birds will increase their fructose consumption before hibernating/migrating).

According to Dr. Johnson, if you eat some food and feel thirsty, that indicates that your body has already started converting glucose to fructose internally. Drinking enough liquid to keep the serum sodium from increasing will prevent this conversion.

from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3833672/ (Dr. Johnson is a co-authour of this article) "... activation of aldose reductase in the liver with conversion of glucose to fructose"

Then I found this article, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijn/2011/392708/, which states that "The increase in dietary fructose intake stimulates salt absorption in the small intestine and kidney proximal tubule through coordinated activation of PAT1, NHE3, and Glut5. We propose that reducing dietary intake of fructose and salt, as well as maneuvers aimed at inhibiting fructose absorption in the intestine and kidney tubules, could have profound beneficial effect on controlling blood pressure in patients with metabolic syndrome."

More & more I find that with money theres growth mindset & scarcity mindset and few who have both. Some people are great at making more money, some people are great at spending as little of their money as possible. Few thread the needle on a little bit of both.

So if you come from a scarcity mindset family, it's incredibly hard to do anything with them with money if you yourself ended up in more of a growth mindset.

It is what it is.

We visit France every year-ish and French automakers [1][2] vastly undercut long-term rentals from rental agencies by selling you a car with your promise to sell it back to them at nearly the same price (difference is the rental price). You are only ever out the actual rental price. We regularly save 1-2k EUR on a 3+ week rental unless we book the rental literally 6m+ beforehand. Kicker is that $0 deducible CDW is included, and the terms are quite generous.

The only downside is last-minute cancellations will cost a non-trivial fee, but even those can be mitigated through insurance.

[1] https://www.ttcar.com/en/ttcar [2] https://www.autoeurope.com

This is a really great writeup! I was using Rust as my main programming language from some months before 1.0 up until maybe early 2019. I have only written somewhere in between 100 and 1k lines of Zig, but generally feel that I agree with most of what's being brought up here.

Here's a mind dump:

> Zig manages to provide many of the same features with a single mechanism - compile-time execution of regular zig code. This comes will all kinds of pros and cons, but one large and important pro is that I already know how to write regular code so it's easy for me to just write down the thing that I want to happen.

This is a huge one for me, and I really don't understand why Rust didn't jump on this earlier. Using the programming language for configs, generics, macros, and anything else that you'd want at compile time just seems like such a huge win, instead of having weird preprocessors-like systems, some config file format with arbitrary limitations, and weird marcro-like systems that either have crazy syntax (like `macro_rules!` in Rust), or that are way too limiting (like `const` functions in Rust).

Jon Blows language seem to take a similar stance as Zig; let's see if it ever hits public beta.

> On the other hand, we can't type-check zig libraries which contain generics. We can only type-check specific uses of those libraries.

This is definitely a concern I have about this "C++-like generics". My experience with C++ suggests that this is bad, but on the other hand, improving even just error messages would be such a day-night improvement, that I don't really trust my judgement on this one.

> Both languages will insert implicit casts between primitive types whenever it is safe to do so, and require explicit casts otherwise.

Is this really true? I seem to recall having to have plenty of `as usize` in my code when using smaller integer types for indices, but maybe this has changed (or maybe I'm misreading what's being said here).

> In rust the Send/Sync traits flag types which are safe to move/share across threads. In the absence of unsafe code it should be impossible to cause data races.

This is probably Rust's main selling point, because as far as I can tell, no other mainstream language comes even close to getting static thread safe guarantees (up to your definition of mainstream). As time goes on, however, I'm getting less and less excited about this, because most of my programs are not multithreaded, and the very few times that I need multiple threads, there is often very obvious and small boundaries in between the threads. It's just not very interesting to me that I _could_ be writing programs with thousands of threads all jumping around without having to worry about data races, because I don't really worry about it in the first place. But still, I as a Rust programmer, have to pay the price for this option being available.

> Undefined behavior in rust is defined here. It's worth noting that breaking the aliasing rules in unsafe rust can cause undefined behavior but these rules are not yet well-defined.

I'm not sure what to say about this, except that it's surprising that there seem to be a lack of voices about this in the Rust community. How can anyone comfortably write `unsafe` code without knowing what the rules are? Especially when the compiler is so "good" at depending on the "rules"? I don't understand. I have pretty limited experience with unsafe, but I have written some, and was often confused about which bugs were my logic bugs and which were the compiler assuming I didn't break some rule I didn't know about. Combine this with a poor debugging story overall, and you have a pretty miserable experience programming.

Maybe this isn't a problem in practice, or maybe all people succesfully writing `unsafe` code for libraries are also `rustc` veterans?

> @import takes a path to a file and turns the whole file into a struct. So modules are just structs.

This is a very nice approach! I remember from earlier Rust that the module system was a real pain point for beginners, and can also remember really struggeling with it. Curiously though, I also remember looking back, not understanding why anything was confusing about it. This was also redone(?) at some point, and I think it's nicer now.

> In rust my code is littered with use Expr::* and I'm careful to avoid name collisions between different enums that I might want to import in the same functions. In zig I just use anonymous literals everywhere and don't worry about it.

I've always been bothered by Rust's inability to infer the `enum` type in a `match`; in other places Rust has no problems being automagick, and this is really very annoying to go around, either with `use Foo::*` before each match, or having it in file scope and hope for no collisions. Zig seems to take exactly the approach I'd go for.

> Re allocators

I think Zig's stand on explicit allocators is very good; I've seen enough bad code in other languages that allocates here and there for things that, very clearly, doesn't need to be there. Having the language be explicit about allocations makes it easier to stop and say "hey wait a minute, is this realy the way I'm supposed to do it?", but without having to jump through hoops if you _just_ want to allocate something somewhere (define a global allocator yourself). And, as a bonus, it's easier to handle the allocations of other peoples code.

> Zig has no syntax for closures.

I definitely need to write more Zig to find out whether this is a problem or not. I've written a lot of C++ lately, and while there _are_ closures available, I think I've only used them once. Maybe the reason for my comparatively heavy closure usage in Rust was that so many methods in the standard libray took closures that you're shephearded into making similar methods for your own types.

> Zig's error handling model is similar to rust's, but it's errors are an open union type rather than a regular union type like rust's.

I really think the error story is why I prefer Zig to Rust now. The giant error `enum` in Rust is definitely what I'd go with because it's simply not feasible to manually track which functions return what errors and making individual enums yourself, even though this is super easy for the compiler to do, like Zig shows.

Not to pick on anyone in particular, but sometimes it feels like many programmers think that a program only consist of the happy path and that errors are somehow rare and not worth dealing with properly. Both Rust and Zig are huge helps to combat this mindset, but I do think that Zig comes out ahead, simply by being less annoying to work with. Also, while some people might say that `Result` just being a part of `core` and not a magic special language thing is cool, I do appreciate Zig's usage of `?` since it's way less typing for something that happens _all_ the time.

> Zig's compilation is lazy. Only code which is actually reachable needs to typecheck. So if you run zig test --test-filter the_one_test_i_care_about_right_now then only the code used for that test needs to typecheck.

I didn't know this, but this is awesome!

> Zig has absurdly good support for cross-compiling.

I've never understood why cross-compiling isn't an out-of-the-box feature in all languages. Don't you basically just have to target a different instruction set? Well, and a different executable format. But still, compared to all of the other crazy things compilers are doing, this seems very straight forward in comparison.

> Zig has an experimental build system where the build graph is assembled by zig code.

See above. I really really really don't understand why all languages doesn't do this already.

> In rust, blocks are expressions.

This is something I really like about Rust and a pattern I've used a lot, where I'd say

    let some_thing = {
        let foo = ...
        let bar = foo.baz() + quiz();
        ...
        foo
    };

to avoid accidently using `bar` somewhere else. Granted, since Rust allows shadowing this isn't really a problem most of the time, but it's definitely something I miss when writing C++. Zigs version is somewhat verbose, but I'll manage.

> There is an in-progress incremental debug compiler for zig that aims for sub-second compile times for large projects. Based on progress so far, this is a plausible goal.

Andrew's work on binary patching executables is really cool. I hope we'll get to compile times this low, even for moderately sized projects.

> real 23m27.475s

This is just sad. Despite all the work the contributors to `rustc` are doing, it just seems that they are in a completely different league with respect to compile times than what I'd like. I hope the steady progess they're making will either make some jumps, or continue for a while :)

> Main points so far:

This is a great summary, and I think people reading it (or the whole post) will have a pretty good idea of where they stand re. the two languages.

Haven't we learned anything from the Trump era? People like you continue to give people like Musk the benefit of the doubt despite massive public evidence that we are long past the benefit of doubt stage.

Why are people such suckers?

Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. He for some unfathomable reason decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met him or interacted with him in my life; he started by spewing outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure out) until I pointed out false personal aspersions were actionable; so then he appears to have decided to go after the book instead. The first time I tried to correct one of the obviously false statements about my work that appeared on his blog, providing irrefutable evidence (he claimed Giovanni Arrighi had never said something I'd attributed to him, I produced a quote from Arrighi saying exactly what I'd claimed), he simply cut the part with the evidence out of my response (he carefully edits the comment section). After that I blocked him on twitter and stopped even looking at his blog. I thought eventually he'd get bored and go away, but bizarrely, he kept it up for literally years. He stalked me online, showing up to attack me whenever my name was mentioned prominently in a public debate, on twitter, he made up dummy eggshell accounts to try to trick me into engaging with him, he'd pretend I was arguing with him, knowing I couldn't see his tweets (people showed them to me later), he'd take tweets I'd made in arguments with others and putting them on his blog pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a totally and frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally, again, knowing I'd blocked him and had refused to interact with him for years at that point, he created a twitter bot to attack me every day for a month, each tweet ending with "stay away!" - i.e., pretending he wasn't the one stalking me but the other way around.

So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about my scholarly work if you like.

In fact, most of the "factual errors" he claims to have found are either differences of interpretation, downright misrepresentations of my position, or points so trivial it's somewhat flattering that's the best he managed to find. Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my interpretation of the Sumerian principles called "me" was incorrect. When I showed this to one of my best friends, who is a Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out loud. Nobody, he said, really knows what the "me"s are. There are a half dozen interpretations. The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure, he said, lots of people have other ones. I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The difference between 1 and 3 had absolutely no bearing on the point I was making in the sentence in question. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this again and again as proof that I'm an ignoramus. In other words, he's still not managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book.

Frankly, this is a transparent and rather pathetic game. Anyone who goes through a long book on diverse topics will be able to find some things they can hold out and say are "errors." Just to show how easy the game is to play, just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong managed to himself make more glaring errors than he managed to come up with in 544 pages of text. Some were genuinely embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand:

1. he claimed that Switzerland doesn't have an air force (it does)

2. he claimed that Jeremy Bentham's body is preserved in London School of Economics (everyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his body is in University College London, LSE didn't even exist when he died - and this guy is an economic historian?)

3. he was completely unaware that the bubonic plague struck Medieval Europe more than once - which, again, for a professional economic historian, is incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very very basic Medieval History 101 stuff. And he was just totally clueless.

I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England.

Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.

Rinse aid is completely unneeded if you properly maintain and use your dishwasher.

I never use any, and my dishes are completely spotless. 30 years old dishwasher, super hard water.

Specifically, you should:

- always fill the salt of the dishwasher's water softener once it's empty. It cannot soften the water if it doesn't get cleaned by the salt. If the water is not softened you will get spots. EDIT: Apparently US folks often have dishwashers which don't soften the water. Ugh. In Europe I haven't even heard that such a thing exists! :|

- configure the dishwasher to your water hardness.

- do NOT use detergent which is advertised as "you won't need salt". This is garbage for lazy people. It cannot properly replace the water softener. Think about it for a moment: The detergent is meant to fully dissolve during washing so you won't have it on your dishes after the final water cycle. The only way it could affect the softness of the water in the final cycle is if it did NOT fully dissolve in time. So there are two factors to be optimized which contradict - stay long enough to soften the water, but not long enough to leave remainders on the dishes. It will never work properly.

- This is not related to rinse aid, but you should know it: Clean the sieve regularly, at least every week. It will get ultra nasty with gunk if you don't. If you have no time for cleaning it, buy a second one, switch them once one is dirty and put it among the dishes so the dishwasher washes it like a dish.

My take on this is, 10X what? What is the metric for code that we're comparing? Is it correctness? Speed? Reliability? Fault tolerance? Readability? Intuitiveness of design? Fast development? Someone easy to collaborate with? Excellence at debugging/fixing/refactoring code?

The best programmers I know are 10x better at no more than a couple of these metrics, while every coder expresses a different spectrum of credits/debits across the skill areas than the 'norm'.

Successful code itself seldom serves more than a couple of these metrics well. Fast code is almost never fault tolerant. Or readable. Or easy to refactor.

What's more, the creator of one 10x code is unlikely to easily shift his/her skill set ideally well to produce 10x code on a different project with very different priorities. What's more likely is that the 10x coder's next project will be implemented much like his/her last, regardless of whether the project's design criteria demanded otherwise. So across different projects, the same 10x coder won't deliver 10x results on all, even if s/he performs equally well on the same metrics -- because the design requirements have changed.

Like writers, programmers aren't good at adopting different writing styles for different roles or domains. The skills needed to design and write 10x code for an operating system or math library do not extend to a 10x user interface or social media app.

We really need to stop judging complex systems using single metrics. Oversimplification sucks.

This thread is filled with people arguing false dichotomies: "test scores" vs. "fancy extra-curriculars" or "rich experiences" vs. "working class experiences."

I recently saw one child into college, and have another on the way. I've spoken to many admissions officers, counselors, and similar folks making admissions choices for public and private universities.

To a one, they all claim to be looking for two things: (1) students who will succeed at their university, and (2) a diverse range of students to avoid a monoculture.

This means they try to look at the "whole student." For some students, that means academics and test scores to show academic prowess. For others, it's working summers to pay for their college to show it's a personally meaningful step for them. For others, it's being a primary caregiver to siblings or parents while still meeting college requirements to show grit and determination. For others, it's demonstrating consistent progress in pursuing a passion (e.g., volunteering or music or art) with a trajectory that continues through college.

Admission officers say they want a student body comprised of all of the above, and that's how they get the diverse range of students to create a dynamic learning environment.

Some of the least interesting students are "box checkers" who have a bunch of disconnected extra-curriculars that don't show passion, direction, or a proclivity towards success. If a student defines "success" as "getting into college," then what will they do once they get there? Probably flounder.

Test scores can be a useful data point towards determining collegiate success, but it certainly won't be the only one used. Nor will extra-curriculars or any other single factor.

The single biggest piece of advice for any applying student: create a narrative that shows how your activities (whatever they are) demonstrate why you will be a successful student that achieves your major-related goals. Your grades, scores, work life, home life, interests, and personal experiences should all be connected to show you are thoughtful, motivated, driven, and have your shit together. Do that, and you'll have the best chance of success at most admissions offices.

Japan and Tokyo works because people "make themselves small". Whether that is wearing your backpack on the front on the subway, wearing a mask, sharing communal spaces, or not shilling dogecoin.

Most foreigners grow contemptuous of Japan when vacation mode subsides and they have to abide the social contract and logistics which makes "Tokyo Works". For example, waste disposal and recycling are complex (and I've worked in AdTech). Leasing an apartment involves 3-4x months of deposit, including a gift to the landlord as residual traces from Japan's feudal system, a inch thick of paperwork, and signing half a dozen places that you are not a yakuza member. Getting cell phone service too is a process, and when you go signup, about half a dozen employees will loop in and out of the process. There's also kinds of ceremony and bureauracy, and things that are hard to reconcile for foreigners who are used to "freedom" and pursuing ones desires. Personally, everything about Japan makes sense to me, and why I'm one of the survivors. I literally have nothing to complain about Japan, whereas the Reddit group r/japanlife has the highest concentration of cynical and mopey people I've ever seen.

Most of the unhappy foreigners come to Japan/Tokyo thinking it is like London or NYC, except with Anime and Manga. I urge you to reassess the day-to-day realities before committing to a foreign country. There are things which the Japanese expect everyone to do properly, and whether you think it's inefficient/dumb, it's not up for negotiation or discussion. For example, if you enter the subway gate and realize you meant to take a different subway gate/train, you can't back out, and some station staff will give you a hard time and hold you hostage instead of giving you a solution. There's a strict protocol, which Japanese people have been trained all their life to not err, and when (foreigners) make these mistakes, Japanese people are like deer in headlights. Or, you bought a drink of the vending machine, then the bus comes, and you run to catch the bus forgetting to discard the drink. This will be frowned upon, and if you're a tourist, you're probably oblivious to it, but you are creating stress for people around you.

Don't come to Japan if the believe in the notion of systemic oppression. Japan is not politically progressive, and it is socially acceptable, sometimes even encouraged, to not be an independent thinker or question social norms/tradition. This is a stark contrast to the SF/HN culture, especially the "hacker" mentality is frowned on. Consider how Japan only has 44 billionaires, whereas Taiwan which has 1/5th the population has 36.

White collar Americans are obsessed with Japanese high cultural exports like Omakase because the Japanese do things that don't scale. They dedicate their life to one modest craft, and focus on the details. Meanwhile, the typical tech person have this sentiment to focus on the "big picture" and things that scale to millions, billions, even if that means moving fast and breaking things. That's kind of not Japanese. Americans have been taught to think about "big picture", and maybe that's why America produces many innovations and innovators, but the Japanese are about doing things right. Nowadays everyone is talking about Squid Games, which is a huge commercial success mostly to Netflix, but it was accused of plagiarizing the Japanese "As the goods will". There are lots of cultish products that come out of Japan, because people aren't thinking about how they can capture the value to be billion dollar idea, but just focusing on their craft ( as a

Study Japanese before you go. You'll learn that there are three writing systems, one of which is used to pronounce English words, but the Japanese way. This is one of the many reasons the Japanese do not speak good English. Foreigners complain the Japanese don't speak English, but that reaction is precisely why they will be unhappy in Japan. This is there country, and the Japanese are proud, and as far as they are concerned, English is foreign, and if you are in Japan, you have to pronounce it in the mora-timed Japanese tongue. Deal with it.

Foreigners complain about how it's hard to make friends or be fully accepted, even after being in Japan for years and speaking good Japanese, but Japan was never keen on having foreigners here. It's like people who invite themselves to a party. Westerners feel entitled to the idea that the world is an immigrant country like the United States, but Japan is not. Just observe the historically districts where they placed foreigners.

It's hard to describe Japan. Japanese zen poems known as koens are seemingly contradictory or paradox. That's how I would summarize Japan. For all this about being private and not voicing your opinion and making yourself small, the Japanese love Twitter more than anyone else. It's a land of many paradoxes and contradictions, that is not meant to be logically resolved and reconciled. For example, the thing that are trending right now are having an American BBQ, having an American tent and camping in the park. Meanwhile, the stories and staff providing these services can't speak English. It's not sufficient to call this appropriation. Japanese people love having weddings in a church/chapel. Other than that, it's a pleasant / awkward feeling to stumble a church by accident in Japan. Watch Silence by Martin Scorsese to learn some history.

Honestly, I am generally a big fan of pg, and many/most of his points I agree with. But every time he puts out a new blog post I feel like I'm now reflexively starting with an eye roll: "OK, what quality that pg has in spades has he decided to laud now as the one thing that's super important for success, happiness and societal progress?"

It's not that I really disagree with him that much, but for a man who is obviously very smart, and who can come up with lots of new ideas, I find his blog posts shockingly lacking in introspection. It's basically all the qualities that are needed to build a startup are the most important qualities for society at large. What I never see is thought processes along the lines of "Gee, how can my world view be colored by my unique experiences, and how might I think differently if I had a different upbringing or experiences contrary to the ones that actually occurred?"

As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg's posts seem so concerned with "sorting" people: you're smart or not, you've got lots of new ideas or you don't. And it's not hard to surmise why he has this worldview: literally his whole job is to sort through people pitching to find the winners from the losers.

But I wish he would just step back once and think a little more broadly about some contrarian ideas that don't just totally support his vision of success in the world.

Seems a lot of these comments are thinking “nice” refers to the livable sense, but the article is specifically referencing aesthetics. And then makes the argument that modern neighborhoods don’t look pleasing because there is no consistency between neighboring houses.

I don’t buy this at all. There are many tracts of suburban (USA) houses where every house looks consistent and similar, with subtle differences in coloration being the main changes. And they do NOT look aesthetically pleasing.

I have a different theory. Go look at an old building and note the intricate details on trim, along windowsills, above doors, under roofs. Look at old bridges, lampposts, street signs or skyscrapers.

Humans used to build things with passion, and the builder’s pride shows in the result. Even low cost buildings like brownstones in the cities have these details; they give the buildings personality.

My theory is modern construction, since it is often prefab or cookie cutter parts, lacks these human touches, and we subconsciously sense it when we think they don’t look “nice”.

> It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on.

This may be true in the abstract, I agree, but out there in the world, you don't have to stray too deeply into kook-dom to realize that, unsettlingly often, we're (the US) the guys responsible for the creation of the conditions in which warlords and drug cartels operate in the first place -- and almost as frequently, of the groups themselves. There are no drug cartels without a War On Drugs, and indeed, the CIA has been shown to be deeply involved in cartel activity itself. (See the Kiki Camarena story, Gary Webb's work, and the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz. All mainstream sources, no whackjobs. The recent-ish Camarena Netflix documentary "The Last Narc" is terrific.) So you could make a compelling case that if we didn't get our hands dirty in these areas at all, we wouldn't need a CIA or NSA to manage the inevitable consequences when the actors involve start behaving in ways we don't like. (I'm told they call this "blowback".) And indeed, this is exactly the point. It's a genius business. It's like the guys in Amsterdam who own both the cannabis coffee-shop and the kebab place next door to it. Revolving door operation. Prints money!

> That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.

Respectfully, this is impossible. Human beings cannot do this. No one is incorruptible, and there are too many people with an interest in meaningful oversight never existing, starting with these little mafias themselves. The real-world record bears this out: there is no meaningful oversight, from congress to FISA to your local cops using StingRays. They're just not going to tell you what they're doing. And if you bother them too much about it, well, let's just say don't get on any small aircraft. This is an open secret in DC. Look, even Chuck Schumer knows: "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

As I've said in other threads: if you ask a bunch of people to get world-class-good at lying, stealing, betraying, and murdering, and they then start doing those things to you, well, there's no one to blame but yourself.

That's not really a reasonable argument. Signal makes a profound UX tradeoff to protect metadata by not requiring servers to store it in the first place: it drafts off people's phone contact lists, and thus everyone who uses it needs to be identified by a phone number.

Matrix doesn't have any special way of avoiding that tradeoff. It just takes the other end of the trade: Matrix servers are exposed to valuable metadata, so that people can use whatever identifier they want.

And, of course, the flip side of Matrix's "freedom and liberty" federalized design is that it is May 7, 2020, and the project is just now announcing E2E by default for private conversations. This is exactly why, years ago, Moxie Marlinspike wrote his post arguing about the downsides of federalization. It sure looks like his predictions were borne out!

I think both of these projects are valid and important, and that they have different goals and audiences, and we do people a disservice when we pretend like they're in any kind of serious competition. Matrix is what you'd replace an IRC server with. Signal is what you'd tell an immigration lawyer to use for messaging.