This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.

It’s soft power until they start using it.

And what do you call Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan…

Seriously man if I have to point out the obvious to you like this, the conversation isn’t worth continuing.

They say it’s not a DEI initiative; they just want to get this talent onboard for their business.

Ironically, that’s exactly what DEI initiatives were all about: recognizing that if we let white bros excluded all others from the workplace, like they have in prior decades, we will shut out the majority of the world’s talent, and we should do whatever it takes to make sure everyone can join, work, and truly focus without watching their back all the time.

US didn’t have total dominance around the globe either. They just had a lot of soft power

The US has military bases, nuclear subs and aircraft carriers stationed around the world. That’s a little more than soft power. And our military spending has always been outsized.

Sure, but Japan was always relatively small. It was a country with a low population and few natural resources.

This stopped being the yardstick for influence around WW1. Japan has the number 4 GDP in the world right now and they were number 2 for a while, very close to the US. China’s landmass and population don’t mean much to the rest of the world if all they represent is impoverished agrarians, which fairly describes a lot of China still.

The biggest issue with China is that they don’t believe in the right to free speech and free expression.

They don’t. They believe in collectivism and order. However I don’t know that they aspire to bring Hanification to me here in California. Their ambitions are more regional. The US definitely reached around the entire globe.

While the US has been more of an outlier in allowing unfettered free speech

For whom though? This is more myth than reality. The US deposed democratically elected leaders all over South America, and has supported dictators around the world if they offer us resources or control. Look at the Middle East. China has a long long way to go before they even begin to be as scary as the US has been for the last 50 years.

free expression is pretty central to European identity.

I’m not sure what “European identity” has to do with this conversation, which has been more about the US and China. I worry that we are veering into vague concepts like “western civilization” that are more myths for white supremacists than actual entities.

It’s true. The very poor people I’ve known in the US have believed that “the system is rigged” and they have little freedom and no voice. They believe they are exploited by powers far beyond their ability to challenge and the last way any of it would ever change is through voting, which they see as an empty, farcical gesture.

“Multilateral” may include a very powerful China. The two are not mutually exclusive. China has been very prolific already in exerting its soft power around the world. They probably do stand to gain from the US losing standing. However I very much doubt that the US losing standing will immediately lead to total Chinese dominance around the globe. China has a lot to deal with, surviving its impending demographic apocalypse. There was a time we feared Japan in the same way: nonstop economy, strong culture, they bought a lot of American assets and real estate… soon they’ll take over the world! They’re still here, and very powerful, but the “big bad” fears were overblown. I think similarly, China wants its historic provinces back, and would like to exert the same kind of influence over Asia that it once did, and be a global trade power, but all of that put together is still far less than the imperialism which America has actually achieved and maintained around the world. So yeah, an ascendant China may be one feature of this future but I don’t see the problem with that. I don’t start from a position of hating and fearing China.

Good. Obviously it was wrong to trust the US this entire time. It’s time to dismantle the post-WW2 American dominance over the world, and move toward a more multilateral future. This process feels scary and might be quite difficult, but it’s important and it’s time. No one country should be considered the world’s policeman or supreme authority. I just hope that everyone shaking their head at the US realizes that they can only sit there doing that for so long, because the very next thing they need to urgently do is step the fuck up into that leadership vacuum before dictators do.

He said he would end the war in a day.

He just didn’t say which day.

Yes. But they don’t seem to.

Yeah converting waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here… they’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially a perpetual motion machine.

Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If he can find another water that does something equally useful but at lower temperatures, without exotic materials… I mean John Galt can fuck right off.

If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.

Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.

As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.

Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?

Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)

1. the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)

2. streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that

3. Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams

4. Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow

See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?

I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.

Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?

Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?

We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.

Trump thinks the only problem with the War on Drugs is that it didn’t have enough collateral damage to be properly called a war.

I swear that man’s brain is permanently stuck in the 1980s with its war on drugs and panicked about heavily armed criminals. He’s still there, mentally, but now he has real power!

Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.

Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.

This was my first and only comment here so there is no doubling of anything. I also didn’t say that, but I think it’s fairly hold of you to say that psychopaths aren’t dangerous, categorically. Please do go on…

Loss of contact with reality can be a great starting point for committing heinous, inhuman acts. Psychopathy spans a wide range of functional levels and characteristics.

I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?

A lot of people in the world only have one kind of HVAC, heat or cooling, but not both.

Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin