roystgnr
2d ago
Or compare the Ming Treasure Voyages cancellation with the European Age of Exploration. China was on top of the world, but their institutional infighting manifested as stasis while Europe's often-more-literal infighting manifested as a mad scramble for power, and the difference in incentives set China back centuries.
Compare East Germany with West Germany, or South Korea with North Korea. The economic effects of better vs worse governance on nearly-the-same-genes can literally be big enough to see from space.
I think a more interesting wrench in the gears is the question of better vs worse culture, though. South Korea has a lot more lights than North Korea in all the satellite photos, but at 0.72 and still falling TFR they might as well start turning lights off now before the last person "leaves". Their genes haven't significantly changed, and their government changes over the past 60 years (since the TFR started falling from 6) seem unrelated, but the cultural changes have been massive and baffling. Nerds started getting a mathematical handle on voting system foibles and game theory back around the time of Condorcet (though we've now got much better alternatives to FPTP than IRV-misnamed-as-Ranked-Voting, so the lesser-nerds' focus on the latter at this point in history is weird...), and likewise for economics and at least the most obvious Communism-level economic mistakes. But does anybody have any sort of mathematical analysis of WTF happened in South Korean culture, to cause the gender war to get so bad and the fertility rate to plummet eight-fold in 2 or 3 generations? It's like the stereotype of the pushed-into-overachievement kid burning out and becoming suicidal, but on a 50-million-person scale!
roystgnr
2d ago
75-85 is higher than average for a healthy adult, and I'd generally recommend cardio to try to improve it, but it's "worse than the median", not "infarction at any moment".
What was up with the tachycardia surgery, though? If you've had doctors looking at the problem before and recommending surgical (ablation?) treatment then you should probably ignore general recommendations and ask your GP or cardiologist about your specific situation. The answer might be "yeah, you're physically normal now, the general advice applies" or "yeah, exercise, but in your case it should be lower intensity for longer times", but there's a tiny chance of something like "oh, shit, we need to take another scan" that you'll never learn from a rando.
roystgnr
3d ago
Math is where the inverse of "the" logarithm function is eˣ, computer science is where it's 2ˣ, engineering and science are where it's 10ˣ.
More seriously, your definition of engineering is way better than theirs. Half of engineering is figuring out where it is and isn't safe to not bound your model to the laws of physics and chemistry too tightly. E.g. atoms are a pretty big deal, but if your elasticity model is atomistic and you're building something that's not nanometer-scale then you're doing it wrong.
roystgnr
4d ago
I see the 1st stage vehicle design as optimized for heavy surface to low orbit launches.
Nah. The 1st stage vehicle design is optimized for reusability. The staging velocity is much lower than you'd want to minimize fuel use, because that way it can fly back to the launch site easily enough, and fuel is cheap but time and operations complexity is expensive.
The second stage is confusing, mixing atmospheric engines and heat shields with vac engines for fairly inefficient interplanetary burns.
The heat shields are what it needs for reentry, and the atmospheric engines are what it needs for controlled landing, and those are what it needs for reusability. You're using the same pointless definition that most rocket design programs have: that "efficient" means "payload divided by fuel mass". But fuel is cheap, and the most meaningful definition of "efficient" is actually "payload divided by cost". If each SLS costs $4B to launch, it could have the highest fuel-efficiency quotient of any rocket ever in history before or since and yet its true efficiency would still be too low to ever be sustainable.
Why is this better than launching a lightweight interplanetary-dedicated ship plus a smaller lander?
A smaller lander means you need more landers. Approximately one hundred times more landers, if you compare the heaviest thing landed on Mars so far (Perserverence) with Starship payload capacity. Starship is gross overkill for putting a flag and a few footprints on Mars and then never going back, but it's about what you'd want as the minimal scale product for a large base or a small city.
STO heavy lifter
Did you mean TSTO? Part of the genius of the Starship design is the realization that, if you have a reusable two-stage-to-orbit design, you've basically also got a three-stage-to-Mars design, just by refueling the second stage and then using it as the third stage too. So instead of launching your big Mars transfer vehicle via a bigger second stage and a bigger-squared first stage, you can get rid of the "squared" level of scaling and just do more launches.
NASA designs avoided going anywhere near this in part because talking about orbital refueling used to be forbidden there. I'd love to place all the blame on a few folks like the former Senator of Alabama, but really once Congress started treating space as a jobs program, the idea of cutting costs was doomed already, and infighting over which costs were the most uncuttable was just icing on the cake.
Is the whole mars thing just hype for what's really a STO heavy lifter?
This, on the other hand, I can't entirely rule out. It would be incredibly shitty hype for investors, because "we're just going to plow our profits into a program that won't pay off in your lifetime" is an awful spiel for getting your hands on someone's retirement fund, but for employees it's been pretty effective hype, a big part of how they've been getting very talented idealistic young people to work very long hours with otherwise barely-competitive salaries.
I don't see how the math works out for a bait-and-switch at this point, though. Starship development wouldn't make sense as a purely greedy investment unless they really expect it to undercut Falcon 9 internal costs, which means a flight rate on the order of what they're pulling off today with Falcon 9, which means so much tonnage to orbit that they'll be able to continue the Mars side of the program as a loss leader. Even if Musk is secretly planning to pull an "aw, shucks, we're going to want to cash out most of those Starlink profits in our lifetimes after all", or he somehow gets pushed out by someone else who wants to change plans, they'd still want to earmark a dozen launches for Mars every so often just to keep attracting talent.
roystgnr
4d ago
SpaceX hasn't really explained the mars plan. They might be planning to assemble something in orbit and use a Starship as the lander.
The high-level details have been there for years. No orbital assembly, just orbital refueling. Multiple Starships as the lander(s), with cargo sent in the launch window ahead of crew so they can make sure consumables are there and refueling systems are working.
I hesitate to call this a "plan" since I don't expect it to survive contact with reality unchanged, but the changes are likely to be more along the lines of "wait to send many more cargo ships first, after some break and some get departure liftoff testing on Mars etc etc" or "redesign when Raptor turns out to be too powerful to land on unprepared Martian soil", not "orbital assembly". It would be kind of cool to see them tether two Starships together for artificial gravity in-flight, but that would be hard to combine with their "put the landing fuel tanks in between the crew quarters and the sun" plans to minimize radiation shielding weight.
roystgnr
4d ago
Nobody has this plan. The SpaceX manned-Mars plan is that the crew/cargo configurations of Starship are the Mars rockets, that will each send ~100T to Mars after refueling in LEO from a tanker filled by several reusable tanker-configuration Starship launches. The non-SpaceX Mars probe plans are the same as they've always been, to launch <4T to Mars directly via an expendable upper stage and a separate aerobraking shell. NASA's pre-SpaceX manned-Mars proposal was generally to assemble a Mars Transfer Vehicle in LEO, from parts launched on whatever heavy-lift was politically favored at the time (I see 5 Ares V launches in the 2009 study, for example), to put 80-90T on Mars ... but the cost was always in the $100B+ range and I wouldn't call any of the studies a "plan". Looks like the latest idea was to do (relatively minimal, thanks to SLS Block 2 plus some handwaving about nuclear-electric propulsion) assembly in lunar orbit instead?
roystgnr
7d ago
The numbers are divided by CPI, "Index Dec 1999=100". Multiplying by 175 gets to $245,700/year in 2024 dollars. It's also a median; the mean would be higher.
roystgnr
8d ago
Not even if you stay healthy for 60 years?
If you got healthy enough that your expected future expenses exceed the premiums you can afford, you buy a new insurance policy. Possibly from the same insurer. You'll want to buy one, because individual marginal utility is strongly sublinear in dollars and so you can lose dollars while gaining in utility, and they'll want to sell you one, because dollars are linear in dollars and so they'll have more of them.
If you didn't get that healthy, then you can't freely buy a new insurance policy. Practically by definition: when we freely buy things it's because the transaction increases the expected utility of both sides, and the expected utility of an insurer who is going to lose money on your transaction is not increased by it. If it gets made to happen anyway, that's not a sale, it's forced charity. If we admit that it's charity, and we want it anyway and can't get enough of it without force, then we can pretty quickly recognize that the most efficient way to implement forced charity is to explicitly progressively tax everyone and spend some of the revenues on charity recipients, not implicitly add costs and constraints to one specific market. The dead-weight loss of taxation is quadratic; if we can divide a hit over 100% of GDP rather than 17% then you the total damage gets smaller even before we consider unintended consequences.
I do see why we want to lie to ourselves instead. Charitable program costs appear on a budget where they can be criticized by everyone who wants your legislative seat, whereas lost opportunities just get a handful of weirdo Bastiat fans mad at you. But when we run a charitable program ourselves, high costs can thereby be both minimized (the only unseen costs are that dead-weight loss) and controlled (you can see exactly what is incurring all the rest of them), whereas when we try to merely mandate that someone else take over our charity against their own best interests the unintended consequences can run wild.
Using taxes to pay for disability accommodations in services gets us disability accommodations; merely mandating them sometimes loses the service for years. Using taxes to pay for an endangered species' habitat gets us more habitat; merely mandating preservation of their habitat gets their potential-habitat destroyed. Charging higher gas taxes gets us more fuel-efficient cars; mandating more fuel-efficient car fleets gets them replaced by fuel-guzzler trucks.
Something that costs 1 dollar might be billed as 30 dollars so the insurance pays 1 dollar five cents. But if they can they'll charge 30 dollars against your lifetime limit.
See, this is the kind of thing we could start to fix without making any insurance illegal, with a mere truth-in-advertising law to define terms consistently, or with public quality-of-service metrics if we don't want to micromanage vocabulary. I love the idea of the "Bronze", "Silver", "Gold", "Platinum" Tier labels in the ACA. Does the "lifetime limit" in your contract's fine print actually apply to the fakey billed prices rather than the actual paid price? We'll call the catch-all bottom class "Sawdust Tier", and if you don't describe your plan that way your competitors can do it for you. (Of course, if the lifetime limit applies to the actual paid price in your fine print, but not in your accountant's office, that's the We're In Jail Now Tier.) There's still unintended consequences ready to crop up from mistakes even in attempts to inform rather than constrict markets, but retaining flexibility really limits the scale of the damage.
(like removing lifetime limits).
Wait, seriously? (goes to look it up...)
Yup, it's now illegal to offer to sell anybody insurance unless you have infinity dollars.
At this point we should just ban insurance plans that don't provide sips from the Holy Grail. The damned insurance execs may say they haven't yet found the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, but they also said they only had finite money; ultimately I think it's the right call.
[Edit: I'm trying to grouse about utopian laws vs unintended consequences, but on reread I see this comes off as snarky towards you too, and you're the best contributor in the discussion here, so I apologize and I'll shut my sarcastic ass up.]
roystgnr
9d ago
The type of thinking where we dispassionately try to predict the secondary effects of an event, or the type of thinking where we curse at dispassionate analysis? I'm going to blame the latter.
I recently debunked this nonsense meme for a friend when it made the rounds again on Facebook. Although he in particular is actually a caring and compassionate person who immediately understood and accepted the correction, I haven't been getting that vibe from most of the "blame the Kulaks" types in the same misinformation ecosystem. I'd bet that if you divided the country into people who think falsehoods are more dangerous than envy vs those who think envy is more dangerous than falsehoods, Spergistan would be stable and prosperous (despite an increasing Gini coefficient) whereas Equalia would end up with poor peasants being killed by even poorer peasants for saving "too much" seed corn.
Personally, I can also see dispassionate utilitarian arguments for our level of or even a higher level of economic redistribution, but "we can afford to tax and redistribute trillions of dollars a year because ... taps sign The Economy" still ends up resting on the foundation of The Economy, not because I said so, but because the reality of total production needing to balance total consumption says so.
Eventually, there will be people who start saying “fuck your economy”.
Of course there will. This shit didn't kill people by the tens of millions last century because of a weird virus that made everyone's minds go temporarily haywire, it did so because our minds' permanent "we all need to share and what are incentives anyway" instinct made sense for a 150-man tribe in the pre-agricultural pre-industrial world where our ancestors evolved. If the Chieftain has more fruit than he can ever eat, it's not because he planted an orchard, it's because he's an ass who took too much from the gatherers after their trip to the wild fruit trees. That kind of thinking doesn't even apply in a world where fruit comes from agriculture, much less to a world whose richest men obviously weren't merely hoarding the output of wild operating-system trees and wild electric-car trees, but nobody ever spells it out explicitly, they just let the same instincts run wild.
roystgnr
9d ago
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution.
Don't forget the bimodal distribution of lawyer starting salaries.
As recently as 1991, the median for those was $40k (a bit over $90k in 2024 dollars) and the shape of the distribution was the usual vaguely-lognormal looking thing where the modal lawyer made about 10% less but a fat tail made more to make up for it, with the tail steadily decreasing and then basically vanishing around $90k ($210k inflation-adjusted).
Over the next decade, BigLaw firms had decided to really start bidding up their offers for the top lawyers, and the results look like no distribution you'll find in a stat textbook. The median salary was at $50k, basically the same as it had been in 2024 dollars, but was now the balance of a lower (inflation-adjusted) mode and a big spike at $120k (around $225k adjusted), with fewer salaries in between.
In the two decades since, the median has remained a bit over $90k, and the distribution seems to also have basically fixated when controlled for inflation: there's a wide swath of new lawyers making $75K +/- $25K, and then there's a big narrow spike of the new lawyers who "made it" to $220K +/- $10K, and from $105K to $205K there's relatively nobody.
roystgnr
15d ago
Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great.
There's an argument I saw once that suggested we already do this.
It would be ridiculous to study from a Calculus book written by Newton or Leibniz, wouldn't it? Because their ideas really were so great, many people afterward have successfully understood them and extended them and found better ways to teach them, and because their ideas really were so great there's not much conflict between modern Calc 1 Textbook A and modern Calc 1 Textbook B; everybody agrees that you'll learn the important stuff either way, so we just quibble a bit over how easily or how well. Ask how to learn Calculus and you might get a recommendation from 1970 but you won't get one from 1700.
Shouldn't this have happened with Marx? Maybe the ideas should now have a more solid theoretical basis, or a more rationally organized terminology, or something, but they should be basically the same ideas repackaged in newer and better forms in a way so complete that the original becomes a historical text, completely obsoleted as an educational text. That's how things like science and math work.
But that's not how Marxism works. I think it's related to the problem where, when a bunch of Marxists try to implement Marxism, there seems to be an astonishingly high risk of some of them ending up with an ice axe to the brain. Even when the lucky ones get to claim that they've refined it into "Leninism" or "Stalinism" or whatever, they at least end up getting denounced by their successors posthumously. Perhaps Marx's genius was so heroic that he just got everything right the first time and nobody could improve upon it? But more likely he's just a Schelling point. He inspired some major far-left revolutions, so if you want to be a far-left revolutionary the obvious thing to do is to coordinate around him, but you have to rally around him, not his ideas, because there's just not enough substance in the ideas to latch on to. Everybody sees the objective truths in two random Calculus textbooks and agrees they're both still Calculus, but try to rally around two random analyses of Marx and there's too much risk you'll just get two warring groups each convinced that the other group aren't True Marxists.
roystgnr
16d ago
I'm not even sure if that's a federal crime. The Secret Service generally won't commit crimes, and they aren't generally treated as co-conspirators or anything if they witness crimes and decline to intervene, although in theory they're at least required to report on it after the fact and testify about it if subpoenaed. This doesn't come up much for obvious reasons, but IIRC when one of GW Bush's daughters was drinking underage there was a Secret Service guard witnessing it without stopping it, and the justification was basically "if we interfere she's just going to decline or ditch protection and then she's neither sober nor safe".
But even if they couldn't turn the situation into some "manipulating the Secret Service for X" charge before and definitely can't do so now, it still can't be thrown out of civil court due to a criminal pardon, and a civil judgement could still be enforced.
roystgnr
16d ago
That hasn't just been forgiven, though, has it? The President can pardon federal crimes, but not state/local crimes or civil torts.
roystgnr
16d ago
It doesn't justify literally any pay award, just those with strongly positive EV. "We'll pay out 10% of the massive unexpected increase in value" isn't a crazy division. (and you can tell it's unexpected, because if it was expected you'd buy up the price of shares until it was no longer massive)
The whole point of the suit is that the process by which Musk's award amount was reached was biased in his favor, not a neutral process.
In that case I absolutely insist that every complaining shareholder be instead given what they deserve. Buy out their shares at 2018 prices (adjusted for NASDAQ growth) instead of forcing them to suffer from the results of the unfair outcome, and let every penny of the difference come from Elon's pocket.
roystgnr
17d ago
It's even more absurd to bring a lawsuit against a company for either making you a ton of money (if targets, which included market cap, are hit) or getting its CEO to work for you for free (if they aren't).
roystgnr
18d ago
Willing to leave Earth behind, and also able to afford to leave Earth behind. Musk thinks that Starship can get Mars one-way-ticket prices down to $500K in the medium term and $100K in the long term. I'd append another zero to those numbers (and I'm a huge SpaceX fan! others may prefer larger grains of salt still!), but even if I don't, it's hard to see the most anti-social/failure/criminal element ever managing to front the dough. Some of the misfits will (I'm also a huge capitalism fan in general) but I'd bet the net selection effect is still not in their favor.
roystgnr
24d ago
Fries with garlic salt + fresh chopped parsley don't really need anything else to dip in, IMHO. Add black pepper and/or ground chili pepper too to taste.
The parsley might not stick well to air-fried less-oily fries, though. That could take some experimentation. Maybe just a little vinegar first?
roystgnr
30d ago
find /usr/include/c++/14/ -type f | xargs grep '= new' still shows me nearly a hundred uses in standard library headers, so "long gone" is a bit of an exaggeration. If libstdc++ authors are still at that point, imagine where your average coworkers are. ;-)
I admit that shared_ptr was nice, and the development of "like auto_ptr, but you can put it in containers" was a godsend. Pointing grep at my own favorite project I still see 6 invocations of new in non-deprecated code, versus about 800 invocations of make_unique.
But I'd still argue that even modern unique_ptr best-practices count as manual management and are thus more annoying than "the programming language will just figure it out". Even if you try to mimic garbage collection behavior with shared_ptr you still have to worry about leaking unreachable cycles of pointers that a garbage collector would have been able to detect. This is all a useful sort of annoying if you write any sort of interactive code where big a garbage collection sweep might drop a frame or add input latency or whatever, and even garbage collected code can leak memory because "I forgot to remove a reference" isn't a drastically different bug from "I forgot to delete an allocation", but heap management is still the thing I notice the most complaints about when users of other languages first move to C++.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Is there a way to do C++ without header files? I realize it's incredibly petty, but having two files per class just keeps turning me off of Unreal.
If you're creating an application or something like a dynamic library using someone else's API, technically you can put every single thing into one giant .C file with no header files and it'll work. If you're creating a library for others to use, either it needs to be "header-only" (i.e. it all gets recompiled by every user, which really only makes sense for pure-template code where the user does every instantiation) or it needs to have separation between declarations in headers (for the users' compiler) and definitions in source files (for the users' linker). Technically you can mark all your definitions as inline and put them in headers and just have one file per class even if you're not doing fancy template tricks, but people don't do this, just to avoid longer recompile times.
It's common to have more than one class declaration per header file, but for big projects it's just easier to keep everything organized if you have one class per header.
It's not uncommon to do "unity builds" (no relation to the game engine), where a bunch of source files get batched together so that (because of include guards) the header files only have to get parsed once per batch rather than once per file. This is just to reduce compile times and allow for more Inter-Procedural Optimization in a single compiler pass, AFAIK.
Complaining about two files per class isn't petty so much as weird, though. Partly I say this because I love having two files per class (the declarations are "what does this do", which is easier to read when removed from "what messy tricks does this use to do it" definitions), but mostly I say this because there's so much more in C++ to complain about. I'd have imagined a C# fan would have been most annoyed by having to manually manage heap allocations, with no garbage collection.
would anyone contend that this is the most powerful engine?
I thought that was the general consensus. People also think it's the hardest engine to use (which is why I played with Godot with my kids, despite C++ experience myself), but AFAIK it's had the most features for forever and people manage to wring out the most performance from it too.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Obviously bombing hospitals and refugee encampments is a bad thing, to say the least.
Obviously it's a bad thing, but it's not obvious that the bombers are to be considered the ones responsible for the bad thing. The Geneva Conventions authors weren't quite solid enough on game theory to write that attacks on human shields are always and entirely the responsibility of the defenders-cum-war-criminals who used human shields, but they did write that such attacks are permissible when the military gain is proportionate to the harm to civilians. Building military bunkers under a hospital is only a war crime, not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
roystgnr
1mo ago
explicitly talking about why crying in front of border fences was good then but doesn't conflict with an immigration stance that isn't "open borders" now.
If AOC had been running this year, she could have threaded the needle between "we don't need to enforce our borders" and "Trump's border enforcement was nothing to cry about" by asserting that Trump just did it badly. Harp on things like kids unable to be reunified with families because they didn't collect enough data when separating them.
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
On the other hand, the "I'll do what you want but I won't screw it up" card works in any player's hand. Even if Trump does end up taking the blame for any big problems, he won't be the one running in 2028, and it'll be easy enough for any Republican (except Vance) to simply say "well, he had good goals, and I'll be the one to achieve them, without any mistakes this time."
Harris tried, and while it wasn't the only argument against, plenty of Trump campaign hay was reaped from her stated 2020 policy positions and Senate votes.
It was a pretty good argument against. "My values have not changed" probably sounded like a tough focus-group-approved thing to memorize out of context, but without some explanation for Harris' changing positions it was just an obvious attempt to weasel out of an incredibly important question when she was asked about the changes. When someone is obviously trying to mislead you, the only safe thing to believe is that an honest answer would be the one you didn't want to hear, so it wasn't too crazy that many moderates and progressives concluded that Harris wasn't to be trusted.
roystgnr
1mo ago
expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you lie to them
What's really weird is the ones who have that expectation, not just in a positive sense, but in a normative sense. At least on eX-twitter it seems like there's a significant number of people who believe that, when a candidate has taken a position previously and has since repudiated it weakly or hasn't even repudiated it at all, it's somehow ethically unacceptable for a voter to hold that position against the candidate unless the candidate is currently running on that position. @MaiqTheTrue is correct that it's "Machiavellian" to believe that you should manipulate voters who have the memories of goldfish, but is there a word for the belief that voters are thus morally required to have the memories of goldfish? Maybe this is just a bit of random chaff from the "wishful thinking"/"ought-is" fallacy, where if "X would have made it more likely for my team to win" then that's supposed to be evidence that X is true, at least in a weird sense of "true" that doesn't mean you can use it to infer any other propositions.
That pushes the mystery back one step, anyway. Why did they do that, and other countries didn't?
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