General_Effort

That reminds me of an old joke. Life in Soviet Union is not different from USA. For Dollars, you get everything.

Not true. Though the nazis certainly built a lot of additional Autobahnen to prepare for the war, they knew they would start. Fun fact: Wehrmacht logistics largely relied on horse-drawn carriages. The soviets got Studebaker trucks.

Insurance is generally for contingencies that are very rare but ruinously expensive. The average cost per person is low, but the cost to the one it happens to is extreme, like a reverse lottery. So it makes sense for a large group of people to pay a little bit of money each month, to pay for the cost to the one. This is how both health and fire insurance work. (Health care is about more than that but that's a different and less straight-forward story.) So, anyway, that's why sane people view it that way.

Historically, the problem with private firefighters was that you had a business that made money when there were major fires. That's a bad incentive. You get similar bad incentives in health care, too, which is one reason why coverage for some interventions may be denied. Another thing about fires is that they are contagious. They threaten the entire neighborhood. That's why you have, for example, the CDC in the US. Controlling contagious diseases is not left to private providers.

I have no intuition for how hot or bright these trees would be. They certainly would be very different from the sun. The sun is literally incandescent; white-hot glowing. Trees would presumably use a mechanism comparable to glow-worms to generate radiation only in a very narrow frequency band. The fair skin color of elves suggests that they do not come from a high-UV environment.

Somewhat less than half of the sun's energy reaches us as visible light (43%). There are a few other factors that might allow the trees to glow brighter than the equatorial sun at noon. Unfortunately, the intensity per area diminishes with the square of the distance, so that doesn't get us far (no pun intended).

It would be much better if that world was basically rectangular (with reflective sides and top); basically a terrarium. That would also explain why you would place 2 light sources at 1 end. The length of a long rectangular box would only be limited by absorption of the light. The trees should glow brighter at the top. Plants, animals and structures on the surface, near the trees, are hit with only "mild" power, while the high-intensity light near the top of the box is absorbed or scattered by the atmosphere over a long distance. I'm not sure how to work out how long such a box might be. Mainly, I don't know what assumption to make about that high-intensity light at the top.

Anyway, we should consider that elvish anime eyes originally evolved as an adaption to low-light environments and only later became useful for seeing over long distances, because originally there possibly were no long distances.

Hmm. That should allow us to estimate the size of that world. The light of the trees must not be so bright as to cook everything in the vicinity; just make it nice and balmy. But, on the opposite side of the world, there must still be enough light to see. Having the occasional photon bounce back would eventually be enough to make out a static scene, but, apparently, it's possible to see things happening in real time, yes?

Does flat mean that we are talking about something like a simple disc here, or just that a beam of light travels parallel to the ground? The latter would imply a rather strange geometry, which I can't wrap my mind around. It would make more sense, though, as, obviously, we couldn't assume that light intensity diminishes with the {ETA:] square of the distance.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals are how a career in science is built. It's impossible to measure the productivity of a scientist. What is done, is that one looks at their publications. How many publications do they have? How often are they cited? What is the quality of the journal?

This creates very bad incentives, leading to things like publication bias. It also means that you must publish in prestigious journals. You don't have a choice but to accept their terms. Libraries don't have a choice but to stock these journals. It's a straight-forward monopoly racket. These publishers make fantastical profits.

All that money can be used for PR campaigns and lobbying to keep the good times rolling.

The boomers had cars and flexed being able to drive stick or know what a carburetor is, unlike those feeble Millennials. They had that greaser subculture. Hmm. I guess that makes the movie Grease the equivalent of War Games or Hackers.

So what is the zoomer thing? What eye-rolling help do they give to doddering old gen-Xers? What will they flex in their old age?

Believing that animals are just like us s hardly and outlandish belief, on the facts. We're evolutionarily closely related. We have basically the same skeleton. Skull, spine, rib cage, hips, 4 extremities. Arms and legs go: 1 big bone, 2 smaller bones, and lotsa little bones. It looks to be the same with the brain.

We expect vegans not to blow up slaughterhouses or such. Fair enough. But expecting them to shut up about their beliefs is a bit much, no? Expecting them not to tell people how they feel, not to kiss in public, or hold a pride para... Sorry, wrong prosecuted minority.

I've heard these takes about vegans for literal decades now, and not once has an actual vegan popped up to tell me that I'm a murderer.

Ok, so that's why you're not making any sense. You have no idea what's going on.

Look, it's very simple. Vegans are a small, harmless minority. So some people bully them. Of course, it's their own fault. They wouldn't mind them if they weren't "out and proud". It's always the same story. There's almost no variation.

I thought you were saying that it's ok to bully them because they believe the wrong thing. That's what @redisdead is saying. He compares them to "right wing cunts" when they speak their beliefs. Fascis get bashis. Just like vegans, I guess.

Watch the company you keep.

No, you cannot patent an ingredient. What you can do - under Indian law - is get "protection" for a plant variety. In this case, a potato.

That law is called Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001. The farmer in this case being PepsiCo, which is how they successfully sued these 4 Indian farmers.

Farmers' Rights for PepsiCo against farmers. Does that seem odd?

I've never met an intellectual property freak who didn't lie through his teeth.

Vegans believe that animals have the same rights to live as humans. A nazi believes that the "others" do not have the same right to live as "his people".

I don't think you'll be able to convince me that these are morally or ethically equivalent positions. But I see the point. They both believe the wrong thing. The out-group sucks. Yes, I know how humans tick.

Heh. Funny that this comment is uncontroversial. The Internet Archive supports Fair Use because, of course, it does.

This is from a position paper explicitly endorsed by the IA:

Based on well-established precedent, the ingestion of copyrighted works to create large language models or other AI training databases generally is a fair use.

By

• Library Copyright Alliance
• American Library Association
• Association of Research Libraries