Corvos
2hr ago
We are not friends in any meaningful sense; you are allied with my tribal enemies, and will be for the foreseeable future.
You are vastly oversimplifying. There are twice as many people in Europe as in the USA - we are not 750 million clones of Angela Merkel or Schultz.
What makes a friend? Personally, I read much of what you write here with interest and appreciation. Whatever you may believe, there is some level of sympathy between many Europeans and Americans like you. It's nosediving lately because so many Red Tribers are grinning and making teabagging gestures as Trump threatens to come over and take our stuff because he feels like it and we can't stop him, but it's there.
Sure, Europe and America are too integrated. That's partly because integration has been pursued vigorously by America over the last 50 years for obvious reasons, but it's likely harmful now. But there are levels of integration between 'you are allied with my enemies and I despise you' and 'Europe? never heard of it'.
Corvos
3hr ago
Fair enough. I was unconsciously blending in the claims I'd heard made for cars.
Though I do think thta @Butlerian is right that the up-front costs may be high enough that it makes less difference than you think, unless we truly perfect visual-SLAM. Velodyne LIDARs are expensive.
Corvos
5hr ago
8 of the top 10 grossing films are American.
It interests me that Japanese and Korean cultural exports are very popular globally while Bollywood seems not to have quite made it. I would be interested in any theories why.
Possibly American occupation of a relatively small country led to more cultural meeting and greater feelings of familiarity. (India occupied by UK yes but India is much bigger and maybe less cultural impact long term especially after decolonisation.) But China buys American/Japanese stuff too.
Corvos
7hr ago
One can also be very skeptical of the claims made. I won't claim to have dug in detail but iirc the big claims usually rely on streets being basically clear of non AVs and those AVs all being networked together so they can use the roads incredibly densely.
Corvos
7hr ago
No, this is my prediction based on the fact that the government are literally, physically, perfectly capable of applying the same treatment to migrants. They just haven't. There might be pushback, riots etc. but most riots get put down with water cannons eventually. I do not think we lack actual state capacity if we ever decide to us it. The level of migrants in the UK is maybe 10% and if we are talking about conscription then that is a lot of force that can be applied to the task.
Not in Japan it's not. Culture interacts with this, as do policing styles and various other factors.
The natives likely will, the migrants…might, and will find it hard not to. The government is quite capable of exerting its will on migrants and immigrant communities when it wants to, it’s only that it usually doesn’t want to or thinks it isn't worth it. I think many migrants would leave but I don’t think they’d be able to get out of going to war if they stayed.
The whole thing might collapse after a few years like America in Vietnam as the tensions within the nation come back to the surface. Depends on the exact war.
Corvos
1d ago
I am making the point, which should be obvious to anybody, that even a little bitch can stab their 'benefactors' in the back and will at the first opportunity. Even dictators realise that you can't keep the boot down all the time and you have to induce some loyalty in the captured populace. Save those whose penis and need to waggle it about is larger than their brain, and they usually meet sticky ends.
You need a leader like Thatcher who will just say the Americans are right and we need significant change instead of crying about hurt feelings.
And Trump is doing his best to ruin any such person's chances of getting elected. This is why politics requires more than just "HA! AMERICA SMASH!"
Corvos
1d ago
I would imagine so, yes. Juggling multiple 'allies' is a difficult job and I fully expect the UK to beclown ourselves trying, but we've got to.
Corvos
1d ago
I am British, a Reform voter, and fairly pro MAGA (you can read my other comments on here). Trust me when I say nobody wants to be on the MAGA side if it means being Trump's little bitch and giving him any territory he wants at any time in exchange for him not destroying our economies or taking it by force. People were just about okay putting up with Bush-era 'you do what we say and you buy your military stuff from us and we keep bases on your sovereign territory and you go along with our sanctions, and in exchange you get protection + access to our economy + we won't actually come over and fart on your face'.
Removing the last and a good chunk of the second-last part scraps the deal and you will need to enforce it with full coercion and foil all attempts at getting out from under the boot. Which, yes, you have the capacity to do, but it is symptomatic of Trump's foreign policy that he complains about the lack of local populism and cultural protection then immediately makes the parties that agree with him look like cucks.
(Dase is Russian btw)
Corvos
2d ago
a 'here be dragons' zone in between
Contrary to popular opinion, the government is not required to indulge iamverysmart people who think they’ve found a clever loophole. As ‘sovereign citizens’ find out every day. Unless you have a very peculiar and sure to unpopular UI, people on your site are either streaming or shopping, they are not doing so simultaneously.
At no point will I contemplate letting Twitch run without ads.
Truly, a tragedy. If people aren’t prepared to pay for it, why preserve it?
Corvos
2d ago
What I'm saying is that if you run deep-cover agents to try and find out what terrorists are doing before they pull off something really big, then this is going to happen. Maybe you disapprove of deep-cover in general, maybe you don't think it was worth it in this case. But the IRA were emphatically responsible for the murders that they ordered their (assumed) minions to carry out and for the need to find out who was going to get murdered and bombed next.
Corvos
2d ago
I don't disagree, and actually I was thinking 'those look weirdly familiar' before I realised that's how Android and iOS do their package urls. I just think that enough infrastructure was in place that people weren't willing to rework things to satisfy us anal-retentives :)
Corvos
2d ago
an emancipated independent woman who can stand up to the world
It would not be the first time that parents raised their children in a way that sounds like it will make them happy but actually won’t.
Corvos
2d ago
I imagine because the practice of selling domains as domain.com came in long before people used subdomains.
Corvos
2d ago
I slap a popup on my streaming site that directs you to buy shit, guess what, now it's a site for selling shit to you.
Or you could respect your customers and provide them services they like in exchange for money? Once upon a time, Americans were into that.
Corvos
2d ago
That link describes the activities of a British deep-cover agent in the IRA. He was there because it was important to know what the IRA was doing, and he did awful things because the IRA ordered him to.
In the nicest possible way, from the British side, 'taking responsibility for [English] history' always seems to mean 'take the blame for all the stupid stuff we did to each other and you should have magically stopped'. It's the same with the Benghal famine, a natural famine that occured in Bangladesh (and occurs again and again with monotonous regularity Empire or no Empire) but which we get it in the neck for because we didn't magically teleport food we didn't have past a blockade of U-boats.
The convention is that it's www.subnet.host.com. So you might have maps.google.com or auth.google.com or search.alphabet.com. If Amazon is acting as a large supercorp providing many services, and Twitch is a provider of streaming, then people on twitch.amazon.com or amazon.twitch.com are on that site for streaming. If they were there to be sold things they would be on shopping.amazon.com or the reverse.
(In today's internet you pay for the xxx.com domain name, but you can subdivide that domain into as many yyy.xxx.com subnets as you want. Doing it the other way round would be incredibly expensive.)
If Twitch and Amazon are both big messy things full of subsidiaries and you are advertising everything everywhere then you are in the realm of 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' and you should fix your org chart.
even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store
That's how. Like, Amazon and Twitch are separate brands and people use them for separate things, and everybody with eyes can see that. It's not a grand political dilemma like the Minneapolis car incident.
The 'safe zone' is 'you make cola and you advertise your own cola'. The bad zone is 'you run an advertising agency'. 'you make cola but you advertise life insurance from your life insurance subsidiary' is well within 'here be dragons' and you're risking serious issues. It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo. You don't actually have to tolerate autistic winkling out of loopholes.
How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?
Could you give some examples? My model of the world is broadly 'if people want what you are trying to sell, they will go looking for it'. If people buy something and they like it, they tell their friends or they write reviews (I am okay with free samples to review sites etc.). But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
this is the Britain option, where you just import young foreigners to make up the workforce and accept that your country isn't going to be the descendant of what it used to be in a generation or two
Note that Britain doesn't have a thriving economy, because flooding your country with people and assuming that they will magically fix the economy because GDP=economy is stupid and most politicians and civil servants couldn't touch grass in a garden center.
It's comedy but this fictional game show portrays the feeling of trying to be honest in Britain quite well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ksBrraaVAxQ
Corvos
2d ago
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes.
This seems unnecessarily defeatist. The law is ultimately semi-formalised human judgements, and humans are perfectly capable of making judgements without rigid rubrics. You just need a 'safe zone' of examples that are fine, a 'lawless zone' of examples that are not fine, and a 'here be dragons' zone in between. The reason that megacorps frolic so happily is that lawyers are too lawyer-brained to actually apply the spirit of the law when working out loopholes in the letter of it is so much more fun and rewarding, and because governments don't actually want to apply it. When they do want to apply it, suddenly the corps fall in line.
Corvos
3d ago
The theoretical American commitment to liberty makes them unable to say 'we want to reward patriotic and pro-social behaviour' so they end up finding weird and awful metrics for it.
Corvos
3d ago
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that Tony Abbott basically forced through hardline illegal immigration restrictions against huge protests from both sides of the isle right before immigration massively ramped up due to easy travel. The problem is that the numbers are so big in other countries, and the use of migrants so structural, that getting from America’s ‘default yes’ to Australia’s ‘default no’ is extremely difficult. Though IMO Trump should definitely do this.
I can see that, and would probably agree with you if I had read any of his books after age 12 or so. I think that if you are mature enough to consider the morality involved, or its sociological implications, you are too old for the books. Dahl was so successful because he had the mind of a kid, and he famously didn't get on with adults.
As a privacy advocate and a fervent hater of advertising, I will say that the problem isn't the banners, it's the cookies. The EU showed rare common sense by mandating that...
...if you are going to stalk someone on their private machine doing their private stuff...
...until you know enough about them to manipulate them into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make...
...so you can sell that information to anyone who wants to manipulate them...
...then you have to at least tell the person you're stalking.
The entire tech industry collectively responded by saying 'but if we bug them until they agree to being stalked, then it's okay, right?'
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