I initially wrote a response about why it isn't worth it. Many downsides and not as many upsides, but on second thought I realized I was prejudging the HN community and I don't like that I was doing that. Considering this is a day old and probably only people particularly interested in the topic are still reading, I'll give a go.

I'm not fully sure how to structure this, so I'm just going to dive into a list of potential answers to the original question: What was/is there to win? While I am aiming at the question about Afghanistan, general region topics and Iraq factor in very much as well.

1. Destabilization: Much of the problem in the GWOT was and is due to the confusion of purpose. Some saw it as to defeat Al Qaeda. Some as revenge for 9/11 (despite the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabists, even if they had been in the Afghan training camps. That eventually evolved over time to issues with the Taliban, and it's various networks like the Haqqani and the Quetta councils in Pakistan. The problem is that while certain groups like the military leadership (such as Petraeus) bought into this, they didn't understand or weren't empowered to counter the underlying desire for instability at the political and above level. When I say above I mean what I call the political "shadow players", the ones that exist through multiple presidencies and have a huge influence over top-down decision trees in government. I like to use Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger as prime examples. They in turn influenced the top level political entities to make moves often counter to the surface purpose of the war(s). A great example of this would be when Ian Bremmer and Rumsfeld, despite protestation from the military, decided to tell the Iraqi commander with 40k troops asking what to do with them to go fuck off. In the end, much of actions of that type were very much geared towards keeping things unstable, for reasons I will go into further, and it's worth noting that's pretty much exactly what has happened.

2. Containment: Let's be frank. Iran is sandwiched in between Iraq and Afghanistan and it has been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. Also worth remembering in context is that much of Saddams power was increased when we quietly backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. The joke on the ground used to be "How do we know Saddam has WMDs? Because we still have the receipts!" Not much actually changed from the 90's and destabilization of the region plays into keeping Iran busy there instead of elsewhere such as in Lebanon and Syria, at least to a degree. It's more than that, but Iran is the main target of containment. It also was used as a draw to get fighters to show up there instead of in western countries, another form of containment. Lots of foreign fighters started showing up the body count.

3. Presence: By establishing and expanding the middle east and western asian connections, infrastructure, bases, etc, we have closer inroads for conflicts in the future, and that's not even necessarily geared towards ME countries. It could be China, Russia, Africa, etc. Africa in particular happened to play this out with Libya, Sudan, etc, and it continues to this day.

4. Combat hardiness: at a more Machiavellian level, the relatively tame conflict(s) on blue-side were seen as a good proving ground to refine modern combat techniques, tools, tactics and strategies. Lots of think-tank analysis after the fact to help gear up towards conflicts in a future that might be more tri-polar conflict likely. It's a dirty business to be a general and have to think like that, but it is what it is.

5. Black markets: Just as in Vietnam, the destabilization and control offered a great opportunity for certain organizations to participate in black markets. See, for example, congress is supposed to have purse string control of the CIA... but if they can pull some Iran-Contra esque gun-drug running on a suddenly booming opium producing country that has almost no rule of law and is swarming with military who don't ask too many questions, they can essentially remove themselves from congressional oversight. Just look at the growth of the opioid epidemic in America in time with Afghanistan. Ignoring the pharma part, a huge percentage of tested heroin in America traces it's origins too... yep, Afghanistan. It's an age old playbook the 3-letters have been using for a while. (Cocaine cowboys like Barry Seal into Arkansas... who was the governor there again?)

6. Kickbacks: You also have to realize that a lot of the policy influencers tend to be old white guys who own or on the boards of defense companies in Virginia (or oil companies like Halliburton), and those good ol boys have lots of power. Lots of what happened was just plain old money laundering from taxpayers/the treasury into their pockets. There is a reason a few counties in Virginia have had the highest growth of millions in the country since the GWOT started.

7. Resource control: along with presence and control of these places, comes the ability to influence resource flow routes (and who gets those contracts, see above). This is one of the most important and oft overlooked aspects of the whole thing. See cries that the wars were about us taking the oil weren't quite true. It was more about controlling who the oil did go to. Even in the modern context a lot of the action in say Syria has a lot of hidden resource control route justifications the public never hears about. On the Afghanistan side one thing it does is help prevent natural gas and oil from reaching China to the east and Russia to the north. I saw the current Russia-gate hysteria coming many years ago because the shadow players like ZB telegraphed it so much... always talking about the return to a tri-polar world.

8. Banking: Banks and economies tend to boom in times of war (until the war is over and things contract, or if you are in the country the war actually happens in). This is also highly under-analyzed.

9. The elephant(s) in the room: Israel and Suadi Arabia. Much of the actions in ME have been due to a large level of influence they both have over policy makers in the US. Many of the above reasons seem to benefit them more than the US, especially when the repeat blowback comes home to roost in another 20 years.

10. Destruction of rights at home: when the people cried out for a response, the military congressional academic think-tank complex immediately used the opportunity to further undermine individual rights at home. They have constantly moved the overton window further and further towards acceptance of a dystopian semi-totalitarian state. Just look at any topic in HN, a forum full of hackers, to see the excuses and servile placations for these things. There are multiple reasons, some of which are a bit over the top to get into, but the more reasonable justification is that technology has changed the threat model away from nation states and more and more towards single actors being able to pull off big things (bio-engineering, infrastructure hacking, etc). Many of the MICC/good ol boys in DC/VA buy into this reasoning on the surface, despite really understanding they are undermining the foundational principles of America (and lining their pockets at the same time). A prime example of this would be William Binney's report that he had designed a surveillance program called ThinThread that would have protected American's privacy and still enabled the gov to track threats, and implimentation would costed in the 10s of millions. The program was scrapped in favor of a multi-billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and lost threats in the haystack of information.

Just a few off the top of my head. Hanlon's razor just can't account for all these things. Yes incompetence runs rampant, but incompetence in these cases is often just as bad as malice, or is easily manipulable by those with malice.

Yeah, you have described the essence of the problem. The game was quite realistic, enough that rookie Cup drivers would use the product to get familiar with tracks they'd not yet raced on, but that level of realism made it not so fun for the casual gamer. (It turns out that racing cars at the top professional level is actually hard and not something you pick up in 15 minutes.)

We would go to NASCAR events, weigh and measure car components, talk to the crews/drivers, and most of us even got the first level of competition license (typically 3 full days of classroom and on-track instruction and then 3-6 more days of individual mostly track time) so we understood what driving a racing car near, at, and slightly over the limit was like.

The PSX product introduced a feature that later made it back to some of our PC titles, called "Arcade Mode". It was still racing (in that skill mattered), but arcade mode gave the cars far better braking, allowed them to slide and pivot more but spin out less (by changing tire slip curves), and gave drag reduction to cars that were losing the race. We also introduced the smoky burnout/donut ability which immediately made it into the PC title (but had a bug that caused a smoky burnout to be the fastest way to launch the car from a standing start, which critics [rightly] hated).

At the end of the day, fairly few people are interested in very realistic racing. (Many of the ex-Papyrus team are over at iRacing now and they're on the ultra-realistic side of things.) If you want to sell a mass-market game, ultra-realism doesn't sell as well as fun and engaging gameplay.

The end state of this drive for realism was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_Legends which I worked on some of the early code for, but left before it shipped. Even in the early stages, with the best computer and graphics card of the day, a full set of physical controls (including force feedback steering), it was difficult to drive the car around for a single lap at 9/10ths pace, let alone race them in traffic.

Well, what's your comfort zone?

I wish I had a recommendation based on experience for one of these really strange operating systems like EUMEL, Guardian, OS/400, and L3. But I don't. I've used CP/M and MS-DOS, but those are just really limited, not really interesting. Although, with ZCPR and 4DOS, you could make them reasonably usable, it was like coming out of Plato's cave when I switched my primary operating environment from 4DOS to csh on Ultrix.

Squeak is a pretty different operating environment that isn't simply primitive. Oberon is another. They can both run as user processes on top of Linux, as well as on bare metal. Both of them are somewhat alien.

Are you comfortable with embedded development? If not, try Arduino. It starts out easy, since you program the boards in C++, but you have the opportunity to build things that will run for months on a AA battery with submicrosecond interrupt response time — because there's no OS. (It's routine for even programming novices to write their own interrupt handlers.) Arduino instantly gives you the ability to measure things on microsecond timescales, a thousand times faster than you can normally see. Modern boards like the Blue Pill have response latencies in the 100-nanosecond range when they're awake. That's the time it takes light to go 30 meters, as you're probably aware.

In retrocomputing land, VMS was the first OS I used that was really usable. The OpenVMS Hobbyist Program still exists, and it's actually possible to run old versions of Mozilla on it. F-83 was an interactive Forth IDE that provided higher-order programming, virtual memory, and multithreading under MS-DOS, in 1983 — without syntax or types. Turbo Pascal was also an IDE, in a way the first modern IDE, around the same time; the first versions ran on CP/M and MS-DOS. But I think that you kind of had to be grappling with the limitations of BASIC on those systems to appreciate that.

There are Pick systems that still have enthusiastic users: https://www.pickwiki.com/index.php/Pick_Operating_System but they don't sound appealing to me. Other systems with cult fanbases include FileMaker, HyperCard, and Lotus Agenda, which last I think you can run successfully under FreeDOS. Agenda is interesting in part because it's so alien. (It's easy to forget that it was normal at the time to have to use the program manual to figure out how to exit.)

There are a bunch of modern specialized development environments that can do strange things. Radare2 is an environment focused on reverse engineering. Emacs is focused on text editing, but for some reason it's also the main user interface for interactive proof assistants like Coq and Lean, which are shaping up to be pretty interesting. R is focused on statistics. Jupyter is sort of focused on data visualization, although not really. (Now I see you've been doing deep learning for 10 years, so I guess Jupyter is your best friend.) LibreOffice Calc is focused on rectangular arrays of mostly numerical data (although in many cases their most advanced users use Excel instead). You can develop applications in all of them.

How about math? It's one thing to invoke a Runge-Kutta integration method; it's another to be able to prove convergence bounds on it. And machine-checked formal proof is shaping up to be an interesting thing, like I said.

How about cryptography? That has the advantage that there are right answers and wrong answers, so you can test your code.

How about shaders? Shadertoy is accessible and super fun. Maybe that's too similar to HPC, but the shader parallelism model (similar to ispc) is pretty different from both AVX and MPI.

How about mobile development? SIGCHI papers are full of experimental user interface ideas to explore, and Android Studio is free and relatively usable, if clumsy. Have you seen Onyx Ashanti's Beatjazz?

In the neighborhood of beatjazz, there's livecoding. It's a thrill to get a nightclub full of people dancing to your code, and there are a bunch of different environments.

GNU Radio with an RTL-SDR makes it possible for you to run DSP algorithms on RF signals over a pretty wide frequency range, with applications in communications and sensing. Maybe if you've been doing HPC, DSP is already second nature, but if not it might be rewarding. And DSP has close connections to control theory and image processing, as well as the more obvious applications.

How about alternative programming paradigms? If you're comfortable in procedural and OO programming, how about extreme alternatives — answer-set programming like miniKANREN, constraint-logic programming (as supported by modern Prologs https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/clpz not just Mozart/Oz), Erlang-style fault-tolerance-focused programming, APL-style array programming (though maybe you're familiar enough with that to take it for granted), or Forth? How about strongly typed programming like Haskell, Rust, or OCaml? (And of course Haskell is purely functional, and OCaml is mostly so.)

And STM solvers like Z3 can easily solve problems now that were infeasible only a few years ago.

Also, wasm.

Or maybe try hacking together some games in Godot.

I don't know, myself I find that it's hard to avoid getting out of my comfort zone in some direction, just because the world is so big and my knowledge is so small. Deep learning is the out-of-my-comfort-zone programming thing I want to try next!

I can third this. I left about 7 years ago. I have moved from Wisconsin, to North Carolina, to Virginia, to Texas, and then to Washington. The Mormon church managed to find me each time. (I briefly moved to Pennsylvania for work for about 6 months between living in NC and VA, and that was the one time they never found me).

I have always rejected all attempts to "re-activate" me. I have never provided notice of my leaving, and I have never as much as attended church once in any of these locations. Several of the moves I didn't even leave forwarding addresses or change of address at the post office. Heck about a year ago I missed some important documents from the IRS, because even they didn't know my new address. They were contacting a previous address, yet the Mormon church had already visited me (against my requests) a total of three times at that new address.

The Mormon church in fact does encourage harassment of ex members, they just don't advertise it as harassment. I am assuming the top comment in this feed that claims they never promote harassment is probably from a current member. The church promotes and encourages members to visit ex-members "out of love" to "save them". It even goes as far as assigning certain members to "re-activate" specific lost members as a task or chore that they must report back progress on.

So the members are harassing, but they do it under the guise of "love" and "salvation". The leaders of the church teach this twice a year in their worldwide broadcast conference (General Conference) where they tell stories (generally fictitious but claiming to be true-to-life) about how active members have gone to ex-members' homes and pushed and prodded for months and years to get members to re-activate. They will hail these persistent efforts to ignore the privacy requests of the ex-members and to push them even despite threats, because according to the story it eventually worked. They will laugh and say that "the spirit" will eventually get through to these ex-members if you just push them hard enough. This is all harassment. Yes, it is done naively from brainwashed members who think they are helping, but it is indeed harassment.

Imagine breaking up with a significant other who then continues to say they know you were meant for each other. They keep showing up at your work and at your house trying to get you to fall back in love with them. They are convinced that if they insert themselves back into your life that you will feel that love again. But you want nothing to do with this person. That person feels like they are doing something out of love, but to you it is harassment.

I've watched countless families destroyed over mormonism. It is toxic, but in the most crafty ways possible. Looking back, I did it all. I harrassed exmembers and gained pleasure from it. I thought I was truly helping them. We would laugh afterward at the threats we got. It was harrassement but I did it... i was brainwashed without realizing it. I am sick to my stomach for admitting it, but I was guilty of these acts for 30 years. My perspective has changed with many years out of the church. But trust me, it is part of the Mormon culture. I speak from experience. I am guilty of harrassing hundreds of people against their will as a Mormon.

Further, it is worth noting that according to Mormon doctrine, someone who is an active member and leaves the church is "an apostate". Depending how far they went through the ladder of Mormonism (such as going through the temple or even working at the temple) this actually destines someone to a future life in "outer darkness". This is a place reserved for basically only apostates (people that left the church). The mormon church has even taught terrorists and hitler will be able to seek forgiveness in the next life and go to a lower form of heaven, but not as low as outer darkness. This literally puts people who leave the church as worse than mass murderers.

I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you.

A lot of the people complaining about "toxicity" on the internet seem to be under the impression that if we "deplatform" the so-called toxic people, that will fix things. But on the contrary, that makes things worse.

If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone either ignores them or politely presents a counterargument, they either move on because they feel they've been heard, or they engage in a polite discussion. Maybe they change their mind, maybe they don't. If they really can't engage in polite discussion, then they come across as making their ideas look worse, so they aren't really doing much harm.

If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone rails about how awful it is and gets them banned, then that person is angry, and that anger motivates them to keep posting about it everywhere and spreading their idea. Meanwhile, they will integrate that idea into their identity, which makes it far harder to change their mind. And if you actually manage to get them to go away, they will go to cesspools like Voat, where they are even less likely to be exposed to ideas that change their mind, and where in fact they are likely to be exposed to even worse ideas.

Let's get some perspective: what you're complaining about is people saying things you don't like on the internet. Yes, what they are saying spreads ignorance, but the solution to ignorance isn't silencing the ignorant, it's education.

MLK and Harvey Milk both recognized that the source of the bigotry they fought against was fear borne of ignorance. But the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more. All it takes nowadays is for someone to say one of a list of banned phrases and they're completely written off as even human. If we're going to bridge the gap here, we on the left have got to consider that we might be the toxic ones.

I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization.

There's an interesting history of one-way content delivery by satellite. Although info on the service is now sparse, since at least 1995 PageSat was delivering a constant feed of Usenet updates via satellite broadcast as a means for smaller ISPs and BBS operators to avoid the (at the time) substantial bandwidth required to receive NNTP - I once worked in a rural university IT operation that no longer used the service but still had the hardware lying around. This sparked an interest in the broader ways that content has been delivered by satellite, predating the practicality of two-way VSATs. A prime example is the use of IP-over-MPEG to deliver the downlink side of a consumer internet connection via satellite television broadcast, while the uplink uses dial-up or ADSL. This arrangement is unusual in the US today but still in use occasionally.

On the other hand, there are still organizations trying to use the same "broadcast internet" model. Cidera nèe SkyCache flopped on using satellite broadcast to deliver content to edge CDN nodes in the early 2000s, and Outernet is currently flopping (minor opinion inserted there) on delivering educational content using a similar model.

This is viable in certain niches. The broadcast industry, for example, makes use of similar systems with the Public Radio Satellite System (affiliated with NPR) using one-way UDP broadcast to deliver live events and recorded syndicated programs to member stations. This has the upside of lower and latency and much lower jitter compared to the internet but the margin of superiority over conventional internet delivery is getting narrower by the day.

On a slightly related tangent, the general nature of the design of satellite data relay (with spot antennas covering relatively broad areas of the planet) means that the downlink channel of any satellite internet customer can generally be received over a wide area, even if they are using a modern two-way VSAT. With reasonable encryption this doesn't pose much of a problem, but some satellite ISPs, particularly in the developing world, continue to make use of unencrypted IP-over-MPEG for their downlink. This allows a malicious eavesdropper anywhere in the region to receive the traffic one direction, which has the extremely important implication that it allows them to hijack TCP sessions by intercepting sequence numbers - this enables IP spoofing over TCP, something that is generally regarded as impossible. This is sufficiently reliable that it has been used as part of the C2 infrastructure in botnets. I have a research paper on this somewhere.

In the 90's I was an architect on Intel's Willamette (Pentium4) thermal throttle (TT1). TT1 "knocked the teeth" out of clock cycles if the checker-retirement unit (CRU, the hottest part of the die) got too hot. This evolved into TT2/Geyserville (where you move up/down the V/F curve to actively stay under the throttle limit). We were browbeaten by upper management to prove this would not visibly impact performance and worked on one of the MANY MANY software simulators written throughout the company to prove this. (It was actually my favourite job there.) This is when the term "Thermal Design Power" arrived: top marketing brass to avoid using "Max Power" which was far higher. It is possible to have almost a 2x difference between max power (running a "power virus", which intel was terrified of from chipsets, to graphics, to CPUs) and what typical apps use (thermal design power). Performance was a bit dodgy on a few apps, but not a significant compared to run-to-run vairation. (Remember this is 1995-1997 after the half-arsed Pentium fiasco in 1993 when Motorola openly mocked intel for having a 16W CPU... FDIV wasn't thermal fiasco, but it was a proper cock up).

Die are sorted based on something called a bin split: die are binned immediately after wafersort based on their leakage (there are special transistors implanted near the scribe-lines that indicate tons of characteristics, as well as DFX units through out the die that are rings of 20 inverters that oscillate, also indicates tons of data on how the die behave, however testing the those buggered DFX circuits takes an enormous amount of time, and you can't slow down wafersort, so there are proxies).

The bins are designed in such a way to maximize profit and performance based on the die characteristics. Thermal throttle plays a role in this and each bin (among various vectors) is allowed some tolerance, which is exactly what OP has discovered. However, this has been going on for coming up on 30 years! So nothing really new here, I just thought I'd let you know that of course Intel is aware of this, and they never claim performance numbers outside of the tolerance allowed for thermal throttle.

FWIW the failure mode (which was also common in drives for the SPARCStation at the time) was called "stiction." That occurred when the drive parked the heads, after power down, into the landing zone on the platter.

At Sun we took apart a number of failed drives (which could also be recovered sometimes by giving them a sharp twist) and hunted for the root cause. The answer was that over some time the drive heads became smoother and the surface of the landing zone also became smoother. When the tiny edges of the head had been removed by this process, the surface of the head was pretty much optically smooth (very little variation) and when it landed in a part of the landing zone that was similarly smooth the surfaces would push out the air between them and become stuck just by air pressure and surface friction (stiction). The drive would not spin up until the head had lifted off the surface. The firmware issue was that head lift off was checked for so quickly that the power up of the spindle was aborted before anything happened (this was to prevent damage to the head by dragging it along the platter's landing zone). By jostling the drive you could manually cause the platters to rotate and if you found a spot that wasn't completely smooth (or if you managed to have the heads move out of the landing zone) the surface would be rough enough that the head wasn't being held down and it could lift off again.

Seagate gave us a firmware fix which basically waited longer for the heads to lift off allowing the spindle motor to move the platter a bit before giving up. Quantum (the other disk supplier) beefed up the retract solenoid and gave us firmware that would try 'regular' retract and then 'heavy' retract before giving up. For a pretty long time I had a Seagate drive that had been disassembled to the point of exposing the heads and platters so that the effect could be demonstrated to skeptical engineers.

I'm going to preface this post by saying that I don't have a problem with most of my coworkers (male and female) being Asian. In fact, I prefer it. I'm not Asian, but the majority of my friends, classmates, and coworkers throughout my life have been, and that continues even now during my career in tech.

Whenever I see anything related to affirmative action being discussed nowadays, I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. A continued pursuit of diversity will require discrimination similar to that exhibited by prestigious American universities.

My coworkers (past and former) and friends who are women SWEs overwhelmingly fall into two buckets: American-born Chinese with parents who are middle-class or higher, and PRC-born Chinese with wealthy parents.

I get the strong impression that gender diversity is viewed as more important than race and class. I'm a male of color who has been in the industry for more than four years now, so I no longer have to worry about breaking in. If I were applying to CS programs or looking for my first job right now, I would feel some resentment. I've convinced and helped three of my friends to do a career switch because there's just so much assistance (financial, educational, and otherwise) available for women. From what I've seen, there is just so much more provided to help women get into the field.

I commend the big tech companies for lumping male URMs and all women together when it comes to prioritization, but this isn't the case for most companies, who are expending great effort on balancing the gender ratio while treating men of color as second-class URMs, or even ignoring their status completely. It's fortunate that the best jobs are the most fair, but even if a place sucks, a first SWE job is still a first SWE job.

What I predict will happen is the gender gap will begin to close, but the aforementioned diversity issues not related to gender will remain. This will be due to a combination of various factors, with the most significant being fatigue with affirmative action practices, and that discussing socio-economic and race is much more sensitive than discussing gender, Saying "stop hiring men" or "only hire women" is easy, even if you are asking people to discriminate against candidates similar to themselves. "Stop hiring Asian women" is not. And if you are willing to make that request, why would anyone listen?

I remember this from 19th century novel "The Captain's Daughter" by Alexander Pushkin[0]. While the book is fiction, the practice isn't presented as something extraordinary for the mid-18th century and may very well be true. I haven't looked for non-fictional sources.

The second paragraph of the novel reads as follows:

Матушка была еще мною брюхата, как уже я был записан в Семеновский полк сержантом, по милости майора гвардии князя Б., близкого нашего родственника. Если бы паче всякого чаяния матушка родила дочь, то батюшка объявил бы куда следовало о смерти неявившегося сержанта, и дело тем бы и кончилось.

Oddly, in both English translations linked to by the Wikipedia article the mention of pregnancy and handling of the girl situation is just dropped.

In my very imperfect translation:

"My mother was only pregnant with me when through the help of a near relative of ours, Prince B., himself a Major of the Guards, I was already enlisted in Semyonovsky regiment as a Sergeant of the Guards. Were my mother, contrary to the wishes, to give birth to a girl, my father would've notified the regiment of the death of an absent sergeant and that would've been it."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain%27s_Daughter

Why must we accomodate the needs of drivers? Why do they hold a special place? Can we instead invest in bike infrastructure?

So, here's my personal opinion. For the record, i live in a bike-friendly mid-sized central-european city, do own a car, walk a lot (if the bike is not an option) and use public transport - but whenever possible, i use my bike. For me it's the superior mode of transportation. It's the cheapest option after walking, healthy, fun, efficient and for 90% of my day-to-day transportation needs it's also the fastest option. The overhead of finding a parking spot (twice) is mostly nil and there are pretty much no bike traffic jams. I shop every day and carry the groceries in my backpack (upside: fresh produce every day, don't need as much storage space). Car usage is mostly limited to longer distances (i.e. visiting relatives) and transporting unwieldly stuff - i wouldn't even own one if i hadn't gotten this one for free. The same applies to pretty much all of my friends. If the infrastructure is there, they all prefer riding a bike.

That said, as a young adult (early twenties), my car was part of my male identity. All of my friends believed they were good drivers and could be promising race drivers if they wanted. That's all gone now; my car is not a status symbol anymore, but a utility. And i don't respect someone just because they drive a fast car, that usually just means they were willing to invest a bigger share of their income in that particular hobby. My previous car had 60hp and that was plenty enough for my needs. Cars never made me really happy; they meant long commutes, road rage due to other bad drivers and congestion and terrifyingly dangerous situations aplenty, even though i'm a careful driver.

So, back to the discussion. In my opinion, the biggest problems for cyclists are:

1. Infrastructure: It's not that we're unjustly taking away from the drivers to give to the cyclists - cyclists have been neglected for decades and what happens now is just that they get a little bit of what should have been theirs from the beginning. Cars take a bigger share than they deserve. There was a time where cars weren't welcome in the cities too, i took a huge marketing campaign and lobbyists to change that.

2. Infrastructure: bike lanes mostly suck, because they're crammed into existing spaces that were planned for cars and pedestrians; spaces where they just don't really fit. They're often too narrow, of disastrous quality (ever wonder why road bike cyclists without shock absorbers prefer the road even if there are bike lanes present? That's even legal around here!) and sometimes feature unnecessary stops that could have been avoided if the street had been planned with cyclists from the start.

3. Drivers: some drivers hate cyclists for no apparent reason. Luckily, this is not a huge problem here as almost everyone spends time on a bike, but the stories i have to read on reddit ... some cyclists are probably victims of carelessly attempted manslaughter (i.e. drivers throwing full cans at cyclists).

4. Storage: bike theft is a rampant problem almost anywhere (for several reasons, afaik there's no easy solution). You really shouldn't leave your bike outside overnight if it's worth anything (disregarding rust as this is a problem for cars too). But secure bike storage options are pretty rare if you don't happen to have the option of storing it in your flat.

You should try riding a bike. It's fun, it's healthy and you'll mature as automobile driver as you'll learn to get more perceptive. Don't get angry if you have to stay behind a cyclists for a couple of seconds until it's safe to overtake - you're actually losing only an neglectible amount of time. If you live in a city, try a bike commute; depending on the distance you might be faster than by car. In my case, due to traffic jams and searching for parking it'd probably have taken me three times as long to commute by car. My previous city has one of the best public transport systems in the world and still i was faster by bike).

And you should support biking, even if you drive a car: more people on bikes means less traffic, less congestion. Parking spots will probably be reduced, but there won't be as many car owners, so there's that - and you can easily fit 10 bikes on a single car parking spot. Less pollution, less noise, healthier people are probably reducing costs on public health care, but i don't know how true that'd be for the U.S. with a privatized system. Old people on e-bikes means fewer old people driving their cars at half the allowed speed.

Really

There’s a thing called the “Cell Danger Response”, where individual cells react to detecting danger to themselves in a somewhat selfish way, by inflaming and emitting purines (the chemicals cells also release when they lyse apart during apoptosis.) By the fact that other cells detect danger using these purines, this response is usually cascading in a local area. It lasts a long time; sometimes cells just never go out of this “red alert” mode once in it, because they’ve isolated themselves well-enough that they can never perceive the environment again to see that it’s all-clear.

This Cell Danger Response is thought to be responsible for some large amount of the “harmful” inflammatory response in our bodies. It is being suggested as a cause for syndromes as widely-ranging as metabolic syndrome and autistic spectrum disorders. (Not because it seems like a neat fit; but rather, because experiments to fix/disable CDR in tissues seem to ameliorate the symptoms of this cornucopia of syndromes/disorders!)

The Cell Danger Response is “selfish” because it protects the cell itself from onslaught, but it hinders higher-level functions of the body from eliminating the problem that is causing the cell to react in the first place. The CDR is a bit like when people run screaming to the exits of a building when a fire breaks out: an individually-useful strategy if you don’t know the context you’re in, maybe, but very suboptimal from a bird’s eye view of people being jammed together and trampled upon.

The CDR is very much the way you’d expect cells to react to threat if they were independent unicellular organisms within a colony, rather than cells in a multicellular organism. And, given what we know of the evolutionary history of multicellular life, we might very well have some highly-conserved DNA coding for organism-level responses by individual cells, retained from an era when our cells were their own organisms.

The important thing to realize is that these responses aren’t what the body “wants” in a global sense. They’re optimal for the cells in some game-theoretic way, maybe, but—given that you have a nervous system, and an immune system, and a few other things that all link up to let your body know where damage is and send a lot of just the right type of cell there to fix or fight that damage—the CDR is more harmful than it is helpful. Our immune systems don’t complement it; they obviate it, and its lingering presence actively impedes the immune system’s work. The immune system has its own methods of triggering tissue inflammation, entirely separate from the CDR, and it only deploys these when there’s a global, top-down reason to do so.

Picture our immune system as security in a mall, trying to get people to file orderly out of the mall during a fire, and you won’t be far off. Their job would be a lot easier—and more successful!—if the people didn’t freak out and run randomly away from the fire, but instead just kept about their business apart from following announcements to head toward specific areas of refuge at a measured pace. And while this “human danger response” might be a bad trigger of an otherwise-sensible response to fear, that is useful in more situations than not, the CDR is—as far as we know—useless and counterproductive in 100% of the kinds of dangerous situations cells will encounter in the context of a multicellular organism. (Okay, the CDR might be advantageous outside the body, like if you’re a spermatozoa or spore. It also might be advantageous if you’re a [live] cell in direct contact with the environment, without dead tissue or mucous in the way. But that’s actually really rare in higher animals!)

———

And that’s just the least useful inflammatory response our bodies have. We also have a bodily-level whole-immune-system response to suspected parasitic onslaught, that’s pretty counterproductive now that we have a super-bodily-level response to parasites involving bathrooms and hand-washing and food-washing and anti-parasitic drugs.

The parasite immune response serves as a useful contrast to the CDR: while the parasite immune response would become helpful again in the event of a cataclysm that sent humans back to the Stone Age, the CDR would still be counterproductive for us even then. The CDR would only “become useful” for human cells that regress all the way back to being unicellular life-forms. (Sort of like the HeLa cancer cell line.)

When I was 17, I started dating the woman who I married when I was 20. She was older than I was, so it's fairly horrifying to me to see people publicly equating "pedophilia" with "sex between adults and teenagers". It makes my old wounds ache to see respected community leaders like Andy Wingo publicly accusing her of pedophilia and, implicitly, of abusive behavior, promoting the unwarranted social stigma we had to struggle against for the entire duration of our relationship.

Although we were only intimate partners for seven years, the relationship was not in any way a matter of her taking advantage of me or abusing me. The relationship changed my life dramatically for the better, and I still love her, even though it has been some years since we last saw each other.

I thank God I lived in New Mexico, where the age of consent was low enough to protect her from legal risks in addition to the social ostracism she did suffer.

To state my position clearly, there is nothing wrong with sexual relationships between adults and older teenagers. It is not a result of pedophilia, nor is that situation inherently abusive. It does require special attention to issues of inequality of power stemming from economic and social differences, as well as the special difficulties faced by any relationship involving teenagers or people in their early twenties stemming from inexperience and higher levels of impulsivity.

Of course, the relationship that provoked this controversy had nothing of this egalitarian character. According to the account of Virginia Giuffre, the victim, she was enslaved by serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who preyed on teenagers precisely because of their economic and psychological vulnerability; he ordered her to have sex with a variety of men who were presumably unaware of her enslavement. Her obedient efforts at seducing Stallman’s friend Marvin Minsky included accompanying him on travel around the country, but she has not alleged that they actually had sex or that he knew of her enslavement. Physicist Gregory Benford testified to observing Minsky reject Giuffre’s advances.

Epstein may have had an additional motive for preying on teenagers: he maintained a large library of surreptitious video recordings of famous men having sex with enslaved underage women. There is evidence that Epstein was working for the US Intelligence Community; prosecutor Acosta accepted an unconscionable level of impunity as a result.

Stallman defending his dead friend Minsky from wholly unfounded allegations of “sexual assault” on the basis of the above facts is what provoked the current controversy.

I find it profoundly appalling to see people like Andy Wingo equating people like my beloved first wife to perpetrators of atrocities like Jeffrey Epstein, asserting that the most important fact about our relationship is that I, like Giuffre, was 17 years old when it began.

> From a Spaniard who never understood the indepentist movement, and assuming you're in it by the tone of your message: Why this movement, what do you expect to happen if Catalonia becomes independent

> Before we make any assumptions, please consider that I'm asking this truly from an intention of learning, and not trying to bait any flames, or establishing my position. I've just never had the opportunity to talk to someone on "the other side".

Thank you for asking this so politely! I appreciate it very much. Really, thanks! It is very rare that Spaniards take this attitude, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Regarding your question, not all independence supporters share the same reasons. I think my particular reasons are not very representative, so do not take what I say as too relevant in the grand scheme of things. But I can only speak for myself.

My only reason for wanting a catalan state, separate from spain, is concern for the short-term existence of my language. I could not care less about the economic situation.

I have witnessed since my youth in the eighties the slow decline of catalan usage, and its replacement by spanish. I realize that this is not a very important concern; the world has far worse problems, but it is still a legitimate concern that merits political attention. I am anti-nationalist and internationalist, but this does not mean that all languages on Earth must disappear except one, and all cultures must be merged into a single one.

Most of my life I have not been pro-independence. I identified proudly as a catalan-speaking spaniard, and even had t-shirts with the spanish flag as I traveled around Europe. It was in 2003, on a summer travel in Portugal with people from Spain (spanish speakers), that I realized that they did not see the catalan culture as a legitimate part of the culture of their own country. Somehow, the catalan language was "less spanish" than the spanish language. I found this idea illogical, and the fact that they seriously espoused it was deeply outraging. Then they pointed me to the spanish constitution, that states clearly in its infamous Article 3, that spanish language is the preferred language in front of the other, lesser, local languages. This was clearly contrary to my view on how things should be, but it was just a law that could be changed if most people agreed, and it seemed logical than most people would.

I did not become separatist at this point. Instead, I embarked in a sort of personal crusade trying to convince all spanish people that I knew that they should accept the possibility of the catalan language being the sole official language in the catalan countries, lest it would disappear and they would lose an important part of the culture of their country. To no avail: the fact that a person from Valladolid who moved to Girona had to learn the local language was so foreign to all castilians that it left me in sad despair.

But I did not become separatist at this point. Instead, I was moved by the enthusiasm around a new proposal for a local law ("estatut de Catalunya 2006"), that had the support of the spanish socialist party (then the main party in the state, thanks in part to its overwhelming support by catalans and andalusians), and also the support of all the parties in the catalan parliament except the spanish conservative party, which had a minor presence there. This new local law established the equality of the rights for the speakers of both languages in the territory of Catalonia. I did not agree with the form (both languages were to become equally official, and citizens had the right to communicate with the spanish administration in either language), because I really preferred a single official language, but still, it was a reasonable compromise. Then there was a referendum in Catalonia, under the auspices and support of the spanish state, and the new "estatut" was approved by an overwhelming majority. Once it was approved, the spanish parliament decided to "cut" it and remove some articles (notably that of the official languages) and the spanish constitutional court declared it "unconstitutional". I found this very disturbing, and the removal of the articles undemocratic and offensive.

But I did not become separatist at this point. It was just a shitty generation of spanish politicians, and in a few years we would get some fresh, young people who would be more tolerant than old dinosaurs like Alfonso Guerra and Manuel Fraga, the main figureheads of opposition to the catalan "estatut". No worry about that. After all, I was spanish, and catalan was just as spanish as the other official languages, and what I wanted to do was to change spanish law for a better fit with my concerns. Also, this view was shared by millions of people in Catalonia, so it would be just a question of time.

Why do I think the catalan language will disappear if it does not become the sole official language in at least a major part of its territory? Besides programming languages, I have a keen interest in human linguistics, and I have read a lot about its amazing possibilities, and the history and the evolution of languages. I have learned that diglossia (the simultaneous presence of two languages by the same people) is an unstable situation that invariably resolves in the slow disappearance of the least powerful language. A language that has no monolingual people seems to be doomed to disappear. This is clearly the case for the catalan language, and it is enforced explicitly by the spanish constitution. I understand that languages evolve and disappear, and it is ridiculous to feel sad about this natural evolution. But when this evolution is biased by a law with which I do not agree, and which the speakers of the more powerful language refuse absolutely to change, it becomes mildly infuriating.

But I did not become separatist at this point, yet. At the end of the day, my language would be alive as long as I was, so it was kind of a stupid concern to be worried by the disappearance of something that, by definition, I could never witness.

What triggered me was a very emotional situation. My grandmother--who did not speak spanish--had fallen and was spending a few weeks at the hospital. She could not communicate easily with the nurses, who were all foreigners and only spoke spanish. A quite correct spanish, by the way, due to the fact that you can only work in Spain if you speak spanish, regardless of whether you speak catalan or not. Seeing my dying nan struggle to communicate with their caretakers during the day (my family spent most of the nights there) was, to put it lightly, extremely enraging. Now it was not a rational decision; protecting the existence of my language became an emotional issue. A prioritary issue in my political criteria.

Now, I did not still became separatist, due to that problem. It was the result of a very rational argument. Now that the catalan language is a main priority, there are two possibilities.

1. Change the laws of Spain so that Catalan becomes the sole official language in the catalan territories.

2. Separate Catalonia from Spain, and change the catalan laws.

I disliked both alternatives. The first alternative is my preferred, but sadly it is utopical. If Spain could just accept that the spanish language is not official in part of its territory, I would proudly wave a spanish flag again. The ideal example is Switzerland, where each language is official alone in its territory, all on equal grounds, and all the swiss people share a beautiful sense of unity. But any rational person agrees today that accepting such a thing is an impossible burden to impose to the majority of spaniards. Maybe I am wrong, but in that case it must be a majority of spaniards that convince me back.

The second possibility is awful also. For one, all separatist parties have made a major point of their programs that the catalan republic must be bilingual, which in my view does not solve anything. I do not see the point of an independent spanish-speaking catalonia. Yet, I think that convincing the catalan parties that bilinguism must be catalan/english and not catalan/spanish is much less chimerical than convincing the spanish parties. So here we are.

In the end, whatever the reason, I think that the catalan-speaking people is, well, a people, and it has the right to decide, alone, about its future. As a member of this people, I understand that I want to fight for the independence of my country.

Regarding your Brexit reference, I believe that brexiters are nuts and I identify with the scots, who want to escape the English crazyness and stay in the european union for good. I want to escape the Spanish craziness, which I deem impossible to reform. I actually find the idea of wanting to reform spain as abhorrent. As a catalan, I desire the well-being of my western neighbors, but they must sort out their problems themselves.

>10 and having to find a spot to do your homework while your parents' flatmates are having a "marriage crisis psychotherapy session" over vodka.

Raises hand it me! it me!

To be honest, it was fun at that age, many fond memories. We head great relationship with (most of the) flatmates, which included two very sweet old ladies: an X-Ray technician in one room, and a retiree who eventually moved out and rented her room to a couple with a kid in another. There was also an alcoholic with his wife, and his daughter's family living in a different room - we didn't really talk to either.

Showering was a complex process, because not only one needed to figure out the time sharing, but also the water heater was a tricky beast. Known as 'kolonka', it didn't have a tank: the water was being heated in the pipes as they ran over gas being burned (very common back then). It was hard to get the temperature to be consistent; it had to be a two-person operation, with one person in the shower, and another manning the kolonka. The toilet, thankfully, was separate from the shower (as is common in Europe), which allowed for some degree of parallelization of the person hygiene streams.

The kitchen was huge, and had at least four stoves. No (figurative) bottlenecks there - but that's where you'd bring the (literal) one.

There was only one telephone line, with a rotary phone to match. Anyone would pick it up, and call out loudly to see if the callee is at home.

Everyone fed the cat.

I was lucky to have my own room: my parents' room was large enough that it could be divided into two rooms and a small corridor with an honest-to-God wall. The other couple with a kid also had a large room, but theirs was divided with a bookcase. It was a very old building, the ceilings were 4-5 meters tall, and if one went creative, one could easily build a loft - but no one did.

We moved out when I was 11. The apartment, which housed five families, was consolidated into a regular apartment and sold off to someone rich - just as it was before the Revolution. Everyone got enough money for their rooms to buy an apartment further away from the city center.

That was one aspect of living in the early 90-s that is not coming back soon: there were no rich neighborhoods. There were (newly) rich people, but they didn't build out enclaves yet; everyone was mixed together. The historical center was rather dilapidated, and the people who lived there came from all walks of life. I came back 15 years later, and the city felt like a Disney-fied copy of its former self: clean and painted up, but much less alive.

We moved into a newly-built highrise, with a great view from the 9th floor, and a boiler that had a tank. I finally felt comfortable inviting friends over to our place.

We remained friends with most of the flatmates, and visited each other in the years after. The communal get-togethers (i.e. people staying in the kitchen smoking and talking about everything ranging form world politics to personal things) were a missed aspect.

The X-Ray technician worked for as long as I could remember, which, I think, how she maintained a clear mind going into a very old age. The other one didn't fare as well: she got scammed out of her apartment, IIRC by someone who got some sort of guardianship arrangement with her (help with basic necessities and whatever old people need) in exchange for inheriting the apartment. The arrangement, ad well as the scam, were common at the time.

She was found in the streets, not being quite coherent, and somehow, the police reached my father, who had to take care of the situation. We found out she had an estranged daughter in Moscow, who didn't want to have to do anything with all of that. And so we were the closest people she had left. My father arranged for the old woman to be put in a mental health hospital, which was probably for the best. Whatever was left of the Soviet healthcare system at least meant that you didn't have to pay for it.

In retrospect, another downside of getting our own place was that flatmates having a "marriage crisis psychotherapy session" were, most often, my parents. I could always go either of the old ladies' places in the communal apartment to weather out the storm. At the new highrise, I didn't know who our neighbors were.

Ultimately, I don't know if it even made my parents much happier. I think, in the end, it was just not that important. The reason, I feel, is that the Soviet work ethic was, in its idealized state, very Protestant in spirit: one was to find their self-actualization in work. "From each according to their own abilities" and all that. Things like housing conditions and personal relationships were, ideally, secondary. "Why? Because we are the pilots, and the sky is our home. Airplanes come first, girls come second", went the popular song, which, by 90s, was utterly obsolete.

Most of the people weren't quite sold on that, but quite a few were. Some never changed. And, as many articles here on HN discuss, tying one's happiness to work and success leads to a predictable crisis.

But, having grown up, and having lived with and without roommates in the US, I do agree - that's a substantial difference.

The thing that determined the dynamics of the communal flats the most was that people usually owned their part of the flat (post-USSR), and so were much more invested and tied to it. Even more so in the Soviet times: it was very hard to change your housing (not impossible, and there was a black exchange market, but something that required a lot of effort). So people in communal flats were stuck with each other over a span of decades.

My family lived in a communal flat for 12 years, most of it with the same 4 families. So yes, very different from the way people live with roommates.

That whole 'kommunalka' model obviated itself by the end of the 90-s.

I think that with the current climate of gaming, this is a minefield to answer, and I don't think it does me any good to answer it. It feels like a "gotcha, I knew it!" kind of question rather than an honest inquiry into how Bot Land's monetization came to be. However, I've always wanted to be transparent where I can, and I'm sure some people are wondering about this, so here's my thinking that led to cosmetic-only salvage packs:

For any game to be monetarily viable, it needs to pull in an average of $X for each player. Any free-to-play game (including freemium but not including something like shareware) skews how that average is formed because typical free-to-play games are lucky to have 5% of their playerbase spending any amount of money. This means that a large portion of the playerbase is actively costing money. Thus, they tend to rely on whales to spend huge amounts of money to compensate for all of the people spending nothing (or next to nothing). For this to work, the spending ceiling needs to allow for purchases of this size to even take place.

I wrote a salvage-pack modeler that would compute how many items of each rarity you would get by opening X packs, and how much Botcoin you could convert those items into should you want to sell them. I determined that at the highest number of packs that you can buy (70 packs, i.e. $100), you unlock nearly every cosmetic item in the game except for the rarest ones (which you actually unlock very few of). However, the average Botcoin value is enough for you to purchase several specific items that you may have wanted. I never wanted players to spend $100 for a single item and not be able to get it somehow.

By allowing direct real-money purchases of individual cosmetic items, I'd have to skew prices so heavily to make the same average revenue that I don't think players would want to purchase them. Also, there wouldn't be the fun or mystery of opening a salvage pack. I know what that sounds like. I even did a parody of EA's famous words for April Fool's last year (https://youtu.be/cCmj2hKbWeQ). But I can unravel a bit of this at least:

1. I'm not a businessperson. I don't know much about the psychology behind sales and how to make various business models work.

2. I have somewhat conflicting goals with Bot Land. I want the game to be free-to-play, I don't want to exploit users, and I want to make a living off of the game.

3. The model which I know can fit those goals is the salvage-pack system that you see in the game now.

4. The payment model is not set in stone. So far, Bot Land has grossed significantly less than $1000, and a large portion of that is from users who already had accounts before the game even launched, likely indicating that those users wanted to support me moreso than get something in the game. It's easy to be ethical until challenged, but I'd like to think that if I found users spending ludicrous amounts of money in the game, I'd do something to curb that behavior.

5. There's been an absurd amount of work just getting to launch, and I'm not positive that I can even continue Bot Land's development beyond 2019 without greatly changing the plans my wife and I made (more about that here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aCE4s5UvVLH7dHuO1OA2m5Sw...). This bullet point's relevance is that I have so few resources to even be able to focus on the game alone right now, let alone any other issues that may pop up.

You may take this as incoherent rambling or mental gymnastics to be able to justify what is typically a predatory business model in gaming. I will be reevaluating as time passes to figure out whether something needs to be changed. I highly doubt Bot Land will be successful enough for me to even be able to make those decisions though.

> doesn't that end up giving your game P2W functionality?

Functional items are supposed to be balanced such that they can be situationally better than other items of the same category, but not outright better. Arguably, being situationally better allows you to be outright better the more situations you come across, but I think that fully exploring the nuances of this would be a much larger conversation when I think that the heart of your questions is around loot boxes. In short: I don't think that even if you could purchase Botcoin directly would the game be pay-to-win.

Finally, one last note that's not the most salient: I never really intended for salvage packs to be convertible into the other items in Bot Land, just cosmetic items. The one monetization point that I've written down for the future is to introduce hardware coupons, that way you can directly purchase functional items. I don't know when this would happen though, if ever.

---

There are parts in this post, specifically with the five points I enumerated, whose connection to the original questions and even to my own supporting points may not be clear to a reader. I took time and care to type this, but I'm sure that I could have made things clearer. I don't mind participating in an honest discussion about this or other aspects of the game. I'll likely stream tomorrow (Monday) if you want to ask me in-person (although I can't guarantee that I have the required amount of time to devote to the conversation).

Yes, the truth is more nuanced: production is a collective endeavor that requires knowledge, energy, raw materials, labor, and capital equipment. Here in Argentina, the government is still in the hands of landowners, who control the raw materials, just like in the medieval feudal system. The US, on the other hand, is largely run by investors, whose access to capital to invest in capital equipment was the crucial limiting resource in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The difference is that capital equipment is not the crucial limiting resource for programming, or even for building self-driving cars.

Consider a steelworker: perhaps he earns US$80,000 a year, but he is operating two million dollars' worth of steel mill. (More accurately, a hundred steelworkers are collectively operating a steel mill worth two hundred million dollars.) If he (and his coworkers) were to save 10% of their salaries, they could build their own steel mill after 250 years. It's understandable that in such a situation most of the bargaining power is with the investor.

Contrast that with our situation. A typical salary in our profession is US$150,000 per year. A nice laptop costs US$2000. A nice rackmount server, even if you can't be satisfied with a VPS, might cost US$500. (And I used to host my website on dialup in my house, and cable modem connections today are a hundred times faster than colocated data-center bandwidth was 20 years ago.) This is two months of savings, not 250 years. So we have a lot more bargaining power, and that's one reason we're able to demand so much more money than the steelworker.

This is a terrible situation for investors, or for that matter managers of big companies. They are left without bargaining power through ownership of capital goods; they therefore struggle to recapture that bargaining power by lobbying, litigation, and of course illegal wage-fixing conspiracies like the one Google was involved in a few years ago. Aside from its dismal implications for us as individuals, this development will discourage talented young people from going into engineering — law or management will be more lucrative.

Law is zero-sum: a case that one lawyer loses, another wins. Management is largely zero-sum, a popularity-contest game of corporate politics to obtain control over more of the company's short-term fixed pool of resources. Engineering is positive-sum: what one engineer produces, another can buiild off of.

So what does a country look like when its talented young people choose law or management over science, engineering, or medicine? René Favaloro commits suicide; young people idolize Maradona rather than Einstein, and play football rather than experimenting with chemistry sets or building ham radios; its nuclear fusion program is a fraud; it imports its computers from China, then does the last assembly step locally, in order to capture the windfall value of government protectionist measures designed to develop local industry; the talented young people who do go into science or engineering (including programming) usually emigrate, often to a country with better universities. Argentina has been this way for a century or more, and the US is starting to become this way, too.

But it's worth pointing out that, even in the middle of the 20th century, the US wasn't that way, and that's how Silicon Valley was able to exist in the first place.

I think all of the above comments hint at this but don't state this explicitly:

One of the general problems with growth is that it always and necessarily plateaus, and the growth stage has different dynamics compared to the plateau stage. When your town/business/country is growing it is easy to leverage the future because there is more wealth to spare.

In the growth period, investing in a new park/office space/spending program is totally rational if it helps improve growth and quality of life now, given that repaying that debt will be easy later. But once growth slows down, our expectations of progress must also wane. This is hard for many people to accept because they think that past growth was paid for with past success, when the reality is that it was paid for with current success.

I'm a recent PhD graduate that focused heavily on publication and collected ~20 publications. I think the situation with peer review is worse than discussed here.

Peer review:

1. dramatically reduces the pace of progress

2. exacerbates publication bias

3. creates a false sense of accomplishment

4. creates a false meritocracy

5. creates many perverse incentives

(3) and (4) unfortunately wrap into grant financing as well. The merit of your research isn't measured on its impact on the human condition, but on it's 'impact' factor (a measure derived from your publications).

The gatekeeper problem here is pernicious as well. If you become a highly cited author your ability to get/maintain financing improves. You also become a gatekeeper as a peer reviewer. Which means that you are now strongly incentivized to accept papers from people who cite your work or align themselves with you, and reject everything else.

What is absolutely amazing here, is that the peer review process is opaque. It is my belief that if you knew who reviewed which papers you would quickly discover that mild to severe abuse of peer review is the norm, not action by a handful of bad actors. This is because the entire academic reward system is wrapped into the process. Getting your name on a big paper can have lifelong ramifications on your ability to get grants, start companies, do consulting work, etc.

Peer reviewers should probably get paid for the work. If they don't get paid then their incentive to do review must come from somewhere else, vague notions of improving the field don't cut it. Peer review should obviously be transparent. Some people might be uncomfortable signing their name to a paper rejection, but its time to get over that. A small payment might help reviewers overcome this discomfort. It is bizarre that peer reviewers don't get paid. Peer review is valuable work if done right, and without payment all the reward of being a peer reviewer comes for the wrong reasons.

Finally, I agree with some other comments. Publication should not be contingent on peer review, it should come first. This would increase the pace of progress, reduce publication bias, reduce the false meritocracy, reduce the ability for bad actors to censor research, and more. The cost would be a larger number of publications, but perhaps this would help people realize that many of the publications coming out right now are of little value.

Transparency is badly needed in many facets of academic research. My company made a site that helps bring transparency into literature review (sysrev.com).

I'll happily give my views as a tourist. I've just come back from a CA road-trip and the homelessness I saw was absolutely devastating.

For some background, I'm from London. We have homeless here, but it's different. I've very very rarely ever seen someone who is homeless here that also has any immediately obvious mental health issues (of course, just my experience). I try to interact with them as much as I can, I live in central and I can't fathom how dehumanising of an experience it must be being ignored by thousands of people a day. So a quick chat and an offer to buy food and that's about it. All in all they are usually pleasant people and quite polite. Now London is also different in the states in that - at least in my peer group (16-25) - almost no-one carries cash. At all. Chip & Pin and contactless all the way.

But the states was something else. The first city I was in was San Fransisco. I had so many expectations of this city, but the sheer scale of homelessness and the sheer amount of people who didn't care because it wasn't their problem was absolutely mind bending. Something that is seared into my memories is that of a young man who must've been around my age who in the most polite way and with the most destroyed look on his face asked if I could "possibly spare any change." Just the tone he said it with and the look on his face genuinely gave me tears in my eyes as I walked with my girlfriend. I could only say I was sorry that I didn't carry cash on me, but he didn't even wait for a response as I assume he almost always gets ignored. We saw homeless tents all along the street our hotel was on (Eddy Street) and they were literally shooting up heroin, in view of everyone, a couple of steps away from the entrance.

Almost every other city we went to was the same. LA though was next level. I can't remember the exact areas but it was near union station/the jewellery district - but my goodness we literally walked down a different street and the difference was night and day. Needles on the floor, a geezer walking past throwing a bloody tube on the street, so many boarded up shops with signs that looked maybe a few years old. Absolutely insane! It was even more surreal seeing "luxury flats" overlooking those streets, it felt like some kind of jest.

The last time I'd seen poverty (not just homelessness, poverty) like that was when I was growing up in Tangiers. Honestly I feel so much for the homeless over there because I have no idea how you're supposed to get out of it. At least here we have some safety nets with social housing and benefits (although there are definite cracks where people slip through). I really hope things get better somehow - it was painful seeing how little passers by seemed to care (I assume they are desensitised and have struggles of their own). We spoke to so many Uber drivers about it and they would just blame the homeless - "It's all their own fault. They can get help if they want to."

At the risk of a "flame war" where there are no winners, I would like to comment on some the statements here before they get stale. If we avoid ad hominem attacks and stick to the math, the claims, and counterexamples, this can be a useful scientific discussion and I very much welcome all the criticism of my ideas.

The irreproducibility of IEEE 754 float calculations is well documented... on Wikipedia, by William Kahan, and in an excellent paper by David Monniaux titled "The pitfalls of floating-point computations". It is amazing that this is tolerated, but IEEE 754 has done a great deal to lower the expectations of computer users regarding mathematically correct behavior.

The posit approach is not merely a format but also the Draft Standard. Whereas floats can arbitrarily use "guard bits" to covertly do calculations with greater accuracy, the posit standard rules that out. Whereas the float standard recommends that math functions like log(x), cos(x) etc. be correctly rounded, the draft posit standard mandates that they be correctly rounded (or else they have to use a function name that clarifies that they are not the correctly-rounded function). By the draft posit standard, you cannot do anything not specified in the source code (like noticing that a multiply and an add could be fused into a multiply-add with deferred rounding, so calling fused multiply-add without telling anyone). The source code completely defines what the result will be, bitwise, or it is not posit-compliant. It cannot depend on internal processor flags, optimization levels, or special hardware with guard bits to improve accuracy; this is what corrupted the IEEE 754 Standard and made it an irreproduci ble environment to this day.

The claim that posits is a "drop-in" replacement for floating point needs a lot of clarification, and this is unfortunately left out of much of the coverage of the ida. Clearly, if an algorithm assigns a hexadecimal value to encode a real value, that will need work to port from IEEE floats to posits. The math libraries need to be rewritten, as well as scanf and printf in C and their equivalent for other languages. However, a number of researchers have found that they can substituted a posit representation for a float representation of the same size, and they get more accurate results with the same number of bits. I call that "plug-and-play" replacement; yes, there are a multitude of side effects that might need to be managed, but it's nothing like the jarring change, say, of moving from serial execution to parallel execution. It's really pretty easy, and it's easy to build tools that catch the 'gotcha' cases.

Some here have suggested the use of rational number representation, or said that there are redundant binary representations of the same numerical value. Unlike floats, posits do not have redundancy. I suspect someone is confused by the Morris approach to adjusting the tradeoff between fraction bits and exponent bits, which produces many redundant wa6s to express the same mathematical value.

Perfect additive associativity is available, as an option, with the quire. If needed. Multiplicative associativity is available, as an option, by calling fused multiply-multiply in the draft posit standard. Because quire operations appear to be both faster (free of renormalization and rounding) and more accurate (exact until converted back to posit form), I am puzzled regarding why anyone would want to do things more slowly and with less accuracy.

Kulisch blazed the way with his exact dot product; unfortunately, any exact dot product based on IEEE floats will have an accumulator with far too many bits (like 4,224 for IEEEE double precision) and an accumulator that is just a bit larger than a power-of-two size. The "quire" of posits is always a power-of-two, much more hardware-friendly. It's 128 bits for 16-bit posits, and 512 bits for 32-bit posits, the width of a cache line on x86, or a an AVX-512 instruction.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." In evaluating posit arithmetic, please use more than what you see in a ycombinator blog. You might discover that there are several decades of careful decision-making behind the design of posit arithmetic. And unlike Kahan, I subject my ideas to critical review by the community and learn from their input. The 1985 IEEE format is grossly overdue for a change.

Here's another mental model, the balls model, which I sometimes find useful, especially in this case. Here it is in case it helps someone:

Imagine electricity as red balls, which can travel along conductors. Groups of red balls feel drawn strongly to places which have less balls, and away from places which have more balls, leading them to equalize quantities among all points in the circuit (let's assume for now cables can't store the red balls, only transport them. Points in the circuit are places that can store balls).

if you have a battery, both the sides can store balls, but assuming it's charged, the plus side might have 12 red balls and the minus side none. The difference in red balls is 12! A quite strong force pushing red balls from the + to the -. (that's the voltage). When the circuit is closed with a wire, the balls will travel quickly and end up with 6 at both the + and -. How many of them travel at once (Intensity) depends on how large the tube is (Resistance).

What if instead of 12 and 0 we have 112 at +, and a 100 balls at -? Well the force is the same as before (12), the whole circuit works the same way. 6 balls go from + to -, over the same amount of time (tubes have the same throughput), you then end up with 106 at both ends. You just have these 'residual' red balls hanging around, doing nothing special.

However, if you suddenly connect this circuit with 212 balls to the first circuit with 12, the balls will quickly flow from from the first to the second, this time with a force of a 200! (The point here is that voltage is a relative measure, unlike charge.)

You might have an isolated electronic circuit starting with 12 and 0 balls, and think all is well. You touch the circuit once to start it, the balls are flowing normally. You leave it working for a few hours and come back, it still seems to be fine. You touch it, and ZAP, a spark, burnt smell, you're wondering what happened. Well the thing is that external sources can sometimes add a red ball or two to your system. Over time, they might add up, and after a while you end up with hundreds. As soon as you touch the circuit, they all flow to somewhere that has fewer.

Ok, where does the ground come into this? A 'ground' is like the - side of your battery. It's an object that can store balls the same way. However, instead of having one 'storage point' which can be filled with balls, it has a several. So take a metallic object, and say it has, for example, 11 storage 'points'. If you connect it to a single + point containing 12 electrons, the balls spread out so that there's the same amount of balls in each point (as we explained at the beginning). So after a while your 1 and 11 points, end up with one ball at each point. (Analog to the concept of capacity)

So the natural earth turns out to behave like a huge metallic object. So big that it basically has an infinite amount of storage 'points'. You can pour red balls into it all day, and still end up at an average of zero balls per point.

So now you take your 12 to 0 circuit and connect the - side to the earth. The difference between + and - is the same as before, 12. The flow from + to - is about the same (same resistance), so the circuit behaves almost the same. If however an external red ball is randomly added, it flows from the - to the earth, meaning that you never accumulate balls in the circuit.

This allows you to set a reference amount of 0 balls in every circuit you work with. Which is great. The amount of red balls at the + can still be set to whatever you like, and they will flow nicely from + to - along whatever circuit you create (like before), but on top of that you never run the risk of having red balls jump from one circuit to another if they accidentally touch, because there is never a large difference in red balls as they all have the same reference amount.

Anything big which is conductive enough can store a lot of red balls. So what qualifies? Soil usually works, water works to an extent (https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/164898/can-t...). When you can't connect to those a big object will have to do, like a car frame, it will have enough storage that over a short time it looks infinite, but if you really pushed and kept adding red balls at some point the reference level would change. With the earth you could pour red balls your entire life and barely make a difference to the reference level.

(So now you're thinking, the red balls are electrons, right? Well sort of, but don't tell a physicist! Otherwise they'll get angry and start talking about flow direction being this or the other way. Or they'll say something about non-rigorous representations, wave-particle equivalence, the balls actually being a 'lack of electrons' and we'll all be confused.)

By replication, let's refer to refutations. I'd unfortunately agree that positive replications would provide relatively little value. But replications that seem to refute previously published studies are critical for at least two reasons I immediately see, and undoubtedly many more:

1) Replication efforts need to be strongly incentivized. Science in modern times has been taking repeated hammer blows to its credibility. The systems we have in place seem to result in more and more simply 'fake' science being published, including in the top journals. This is not an easy problem to solve since replication efforts can be very costly and things like pre-publishing still ends up relying on good behavior, which is something we can no longer necessarily take for granted. The one small tool we do have against bad science is replication efforts. Every effort should be made to incentivize these. The willingness to publish significant refutations to influential studies is well below the bare minimum we should expect from journals on this front.

2) What is the purpose of a journal, outside of making money? It's to inform people by providing a filtered repository of the information the reaches a high level on the scale between reliability and relevance. When a journal publishes a study that may have been false, they end up doing the exact opposite of this - they are misinforming society. And this is especially true for the study which seems to have been refuted. It was not a footnote - it has been widely referenced and had a significant impact on public discourse. This all leads to a strong obligation to publish.

3) (another point derived from #1 while writing) - Publication of refutations aligns journalistic interests with public interests. In our current system journals are primarily motivated to publish the most 'meaningful' results which is ultimately a euphemism for the most shocking results. So they have an incentive to want to give these studies the benefit of the doubt. Yet these are the very studies which should be held to the highest degree of scrutiny and criticism. A journal that is willing to publish refutations of the studies it publishes returns this alignment since if Science found itself full of little more than refutation of 'meaningful' studies it published in the past, it would quickly lose its prestige. Yet at the same time if it was willing to publish refutations, yet they were few and far between, one could hold what was published within the journal to a much higher standard of reliability - which would be good for both the journal and the authors who were able to meet what would undoubtedly be their now increased standards.

>Which NP's don't have as much of, since they didn't go to (or complete) med school?

This is a very politically sensitive question. I'll answer bluntly, because yay for pseudonymity - no one will answer you this bluntly in real life anymore.

The road to NP is a bachelors in nursing, being a nurse for a little bit (increasing numbers of programs don't require nursing time, so as to be more competitive with PA programs) followed by some (fairly easy) grad courses, followed by being an NP. In some states this requires supervised practice; in others, it leads to independent practice. As an aside, "supervised practice" isn't - hospitals hire NPs to be cheap manpower that does an end-run around physicians, so they use them to their maximum and, in effect, they end up unsupervised.

Nursing is not "doctoring light," it is its own thing (keeping an eye on patients, administering medication, taking vitals, measuring ins and outs, changing dressings) so while it provides exposure to the clinic, it does not provide exposure to clinical reasoning. You pick up things like "CTPA to catch a pulmonary embolism," basically enough to do monkey-see monkey-do medicine, but again ... not to reason. So you miss exceptions, you miss uncommon things, you miss subtle things, you miss contingencies. Honestly, docs that go to malignant residencies (residencies that just use trainee physicians as cheap bodies rather than trainees) end up something similar.

NP courses do not make up this difference even a little bit. Columbia's school of nursing is a big proponent of NPs being the equivalent of physicians. They attempted to administer the first of three physician licensing exams to their NP students and the pass rate was less than half that of the worst med schools in the country.

An NP is basically an under-educated medical student. And a medical student is someone too ignorant to be allowed near a patient - that's what residency training is for.

PAs are substantively similar. Their coursework is a lot more similar to med student coursework, but they skip out on the back half of med school. Some PA programs are three years and cover at least some clinical reasoning; some are just a bit over two years, and don't cover any at all. They also don't do residencies.

So, basically: if you wouldn't want a freshly graduated medical student on his first day of residency treating you, you don't ever want an NP or PA being in charge of your care.

And they often are. Hospitals not-infrequently hire a doctor to act as a malpractice license, and then they stock up so many PAs under the doc that the doc never actually has the chance to supervise.

In practice, I do prefer PAs. For social and political reasons, NPs often end up working closely with other nurses and NPs, and PAs tend to end up working more with the physicians (despite, at least fresh out of training, the two being completely interchangeable). The NPs end up spending their time with people that can't teach them any clinical reasoning, whereas the PAs get taught alongside the med students and residents. Even though the PAs usually don't spend an extra 40 hours a week studying like a med student or cramming like a resident, they at least pick up some stuff during their shifts.

It's not the med school that really makes the difference. It's the residency. Med school is what gives physicians the ground level knowledgebase to go spend four or more years working 80+ hours a week (plus studying) intensively training. Mid-levels have less training, it's true, but the key difference is that they have no residency. Even hours worked are apples-to-oranges: an NP shift is about knocking out paperwork, a first year resident shift is about seeing all the patients and knowing all the things because your attendings will constantly be hounding you about them and you'd better know your assitis from your elbowitis, you'll be writing treatment plans and they'll be ripping them to pieces (or, hopefully, not).

The other thing is just personality. The people who are driven to study their asses off day-in and day-out for a decade are not the same people who get a bachelors in nursing and go take blood pressures and hand out pills. It's an enormously different pool of people. NP becomes about getting independence and a pay-raise, but it draws from the average nurse crowd.

Bottom line: when physicians and mid-levels and healthcare executives get sick, they go to physicians. That people who aren't insiders get mid-levels foisted on them is a crime against the public. "You don't know any better, and we don't have a better way of making our profit margins, so you get people who aren't educated enough, aren't trained enough, and aren't supervised or held accountable to look after you. Of course, if you've got money and you know the system, you can have a real doctor."

(There are some mid-levels I love. They tend to be the ones who have worked in one little niche forever, and take their shit super seriously, and go out of their way to study and read like they're physicians. I most often see this in critical care PAs. I fucking love them.)

No one in healthcare is allowed to say this anymore. Hospitals need mid-levels in order to make profit margins. Insurers want you seeing mid-levels (they actually advanced the term 'providers' to muddy the water between physicians and non-physicians) in order to minimize healthcare costs. Any doc who says any of this out loud is "not a team player" (read: getting in the way of our minimizing our expenses).

I'm not an old-school doc, either, talking out of nostalgia and bias. I'm a second careerist who came to medicine after working at the executive level in health insurance, often working on cooperative agreements with large physician groups. I've seen this from the other side.

As for clinic incentives: I don't know. Any incentives against sending the patient to the ED would apply even moreso against sending them to admit to another hospital's inpatient service, so that doesn't make sense. Especially since the other hospital was in another hospital system, so it's not like her hospital would get dinged for the cost of a readmission or something. And, as you say, if she wasn't concerned, why bug two doctors? If she was concerned, why not send them to the ER?

My suspicion is this: he's a shit clinician. People who can't reason about what they're seeing don't tend to stick by their guns, because they're already making decisions by gut and habit. So, he saw a sick patient and got concerned and made some calls. He wasn't taken too seriously because the labwork was probably not too dire and/or he didn't report all the relevant values and/or because he came off like an idiot, so the "just take my word for it, this patient looks like shit" line that I'll buy from someone whose clinical judgement I trust got ignored. So, two docs told him the patient didn't sound like they needed inpatient care. And because they learned medicine by monkey-see monkey-do to begin with, and they didn't have enough clinical reasoning to make a cogent argument to themselves as to why they'd ignore the monkeys, went against their own judgement.

It's easy to overpower someone's judgement if they don't have judgement to begin with, just habit and gut feeling.

The simple and honest answer to your question is greed. The fact is that the USA has more than enough money to support a healthy and well-educated population through government-funded healthcare and education (including what you asked about - higher education), but the capture of significant portions of our government by corporate interests has successfully stopped that kind of progress from occurring so that an ever-shrinking number of people can become unfathomably wealthy. This has been accomplished primarily through the use of emotion-based propaganda over a series of decades and has been incredibly effective at poisoning the national discourse.

Reading this article brought to mind one of my favorite radio stations, WOJB. It's located in rural northern Wisconsin. I live in Minnesota outside of its broadcasting range, but I always look forward to listening to it on my trips to visit my relatives who live in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

The first time I listened to it the DJ had his 4 year old daughter with him in the studio and during one of the breaks she asked him to sing her favorite song. He obliged and it was some depressing country song, but towards the end she joined in enthusiastically, breaking the tension. It was very heartwarming. That is my favorite radio memory and the kind of radio you don't get from corporate stations.

After that I looked the station up and learned that it was founded to bridge the divide between the Native American and white populations of the region between whom there were significant racial tensions. I can't speak to whether it did or not, but it certainly seems like it has. One year while driving through I caught a live broadcast of a pow-wow which was a delightful surprise.

A few years ago I was driving through the area and I couldn't pick them up. The next town I got to I stopped to look up the station to see if I had just forgotten the right frequency but it turned out that their transmitter had broken and needed a complete replacement. In the end it took them about a year to raise the funds to buy and install the new transmitter and I think they are still operating at reduced power because their antenna needs to be replaced (which is apparently in part what caused the original transmitter to break). It just goes to show how fragile these institutions that can form the pillars of communities can be.

They do broadcast online, but I find that when I'm not traveling I mostly listen to local stations here in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is almost certainly a beneficiary of the policies the article cites as the cause of the decline of rural radio. Radio here is as vibrant and alive as it's ever been (at least that I've been around). I have 6 different public stations that all have different programming in my car presets and there are many more commercial stations I listen to on occasion. The FM dial is completely packed (I don't think there are any open frequencies right now) and the AM dial is pretty full as well. I just wish this did not come at the expense of my rural neighbors (and I don't think it has to).

Real socialists very much distinguish themselves from liberals. If the labeling seems inconsistent, it's likely because the spectrum of American politics is so narrow the two get collapsed into each other. Socialist politics have been in a state of almost total collapse over the past 50 years, and most Americans are unfamiliar with its main tenets.

Having spent a bit of time trying to understand this band of the spectrum, here's my very rough mental model. Regarding economics, you can think of the left continuum as moving roughly from liberal -> progressive -> social democrat -> socialist -> communist.

* Liberals pretty much favor what you might call free markets, with some regulations against the worst excesses (pollution, fraud, etc).

* Progressives tend to favor a more Keynesian approach, with the government stepping in to try and tone down the amplitude of the boom/bust cycle, pursuing aggressive antitrust action, etc (think Elizabeth Warren).

* Social Democrats believe that capitalism fundamentally produces inequality, but also wealth, so to maintain social cohesion, markets have to be balanced with a strong welfare state, or safety nets (Sanders circa present day probably fits here).

* Socialists believe that capitalism is an inherently exploitative distribution of _ownership_ where an elite social class owns most of the necessities like housing, hospitals, factories, etc.[1] Socialists believe that that ownership is the result of workers being forced into a bad deal: having to sell their labor in exchange for access to those necessities, and that the remedy is for those workers to unite to wrest those necessities back from the owning class.

* Communists accept the same principles as socialists, but believe that the end goal for politics should be a society where all resources are collectively owned and distributed on the basis of need. Authoritarian communists believe that a strong centralized government is needed to make this happen (think Stalin or Mao), and that once the redistribution happens, that government will fade out of necessity. On the other hand, libertarian communists (also known as anarchists) believe that centralizing state power will only reproduce the exploitation of a capitalism under different owners.

[1] Not all socialists oppose markets, some think they're great, but that individual firms should be collectively owned by their employees, rather than external shareholders.

Ah, yes, the good old Pascal's mugging[1].

I am aware that cold fusion experiments are both much cheaper, and if successful, considerably safer and cheaper than hot fusion. Yet, there is no plausible mechanism for fusion to occur at room temperature. For two protons (hydrogen ions) to fuse, they must be brought to within 10e-15 m of one another. This requires overcoming the Coulomb repulsion between the two positively charged protons. This in turn requires a great deal of energy, roughly 6 KeV even once quantum tunneling is taken into effect. This corresponds to velocities of roughly 10e6 m/s, or roughly 0.5% the speed of light. This is is called the Gamow energy or the Gamow peak[2]. In hot fusion, this is accomplished by heating a gas to something like 10e7 K, at which point the average energy of any given proton in the plasma is roughly 6 KeV. Not coincidentally, this is also roughly the interior temperature of stars. It has been shown time and again that fusion does occur in a tokamak reactor... just not quite fast enough to overcome the cost of creating and containing the plasma.

At room temperature, the fraction of protons traveling at 0.5% of the speed of light is zero for all intents and purposes. Thus, spontaneous does not normally occur at room temperature, which we can all agree on. For cold fusion to proceed, there needs to be some other mechanism capable of making up this difference, either by somehow accelerating protons to an extremely high velocity, or otherwise encouraging them to fuse, perhaps by lowering the Coulomb barrier by some unknown mechanism. For the Fleischmann–Pons experiment (the original "cold fusion" experiment in the 1980s) this was hypothesized to be achieved by the crystal structure of palladium[3]. However, after the failure to replicate the original experiment, this hypotheses appears to have been falsified. In fact, no experiment has ever shown a measurable rate of fusion occurring at low temperatures.

And yet, there is the precedent of the Gamow factor. The classical potential for the Coloumb barrier is 3.4 MeV. Therefore, in a purely classical model, it is literally impossible to get two protons to fuse unless they collide at close to the speed of light. Yet Gamow showed that fusion could occur, with some probability, at much lower energies, thanks to a well known phenomenon called quantum tunneling. Why could there not be some other way taking this further? Furthermore, there is the precedent with fission. In the 1930's, many notable scientists were fission could ever be used as a power source. They were aware that fission could be effected by alpha particle bombardment, but this did not seem "energy positive." Sound familiar? And yet, when Hahn and Meitner[5] discovered spontaneous nuclear fission occuring due to a chain reaction in uranium in 1938, it immediately became apparent it could be used as a massive source of energy, and Einstein immediately warned FDR and the Manhattan project began.[4] Why could not a similar story play out for fusion? Cold fusion is tantalizingly plausible and the experiments, as you say, can be conducted on a tabletop. Why not try?

My answer, which is of course a subjective judgement, is that good science happens by searching where the light is, exploring the implications and edges of existing theories, not out in the dark, trying things completely at random. Rutherford wasn't bombarding gold foil for the hell of it. Randomly trying things in an atheoretic way in the hopes that a previously undiscovered and unsuspected piece of new physics will drop out is closer to alchemy, and just about as likely to be successful. More than 2,000 years of randomly combining urine and lead resulted in not one ounce of gold. (I grant you that tabletop cold fusion experiments may very well find a new bit of chemistry.) But the argument against is simply this: 6 KeV. It's simply too much. No chemical or electrical process is going to get you that, unless it first turns your experiment into plasma, in which case you're back to hot fusion! It's like throwing pebbles at the moon and calling it the Apollo program. It's not a matter of just getting the right pebble. You can try quartz and obsidian, rough and smooth, for as long as you like, but you're not even beginning to address the invariant in the room, which is that you just can't impart enough kinetic energy to your pebbles to even get them out of Earth's gravity well, much less to the moon. That is why I believe that a dollar spent on cold fusion actually has lower expected payoff than a dollar spent on hot fusion.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamow_factor

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_exper...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn#Discovery_of_nuclear...

Bermuda rigging:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_rig

If you're not familiar with sailing rigs, you probably don't even notice it as anything other than, "that's what most modern sailboats look like." This is precisely because it is a extremely efficient at sailing upwind. And their fastest speeds are roughly doing perpendicular to the wind.

Boats like you see in pirate movies and such have what is called square rig. These boats will sail their fastest downwind, but struggle much more in other directions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_rig

EDIT: So I just realized that the Wikipedia article does not have a great explanation on the actual physics here. I'll do my best, though this is all subject to my (mis)understanding.

Obviously, just putting a sail on a raft with no other modifications will just push your raft downwind. You have some ability to control direction with the rudder, but that's it. To sail perpendicular, you need to start leveraging other forces. The main ones are lift force from the sail shape, and drag from the centerboard. [0]

Bermuda rigging uses a triangular sail that is rigged along the axis of travel. (Compare to square rig, where the sails are perpendicular to the axis of travel.) The sail has enough slack that, as wind fills it, it curves. The sails then begins acting as a vertically-oriented wing, using the airflow over the surface to generate lift -- though, in this case, the lift pushes the sailboat sideways.

So you have the wind attempting to push your boat sideways... That is not helpful for moving forward. Enter the centerboard, which resists this push by simply increasing the surface area of the boat under the water. In order to move sideways, the water has to be moved. So you have two opposing sideways forces, and the result is a bit like pushing a wedge -- the boat moves forward.

Also of interest in the physics is speed. So a boat sailing downwind can never go faster than some fraction of the wind speed. Because if it was, the apparent wind would either be zero or a headwind. However, a boat moving perpendicular or upwind can actually move faster than wind speed, because it is utilizing more forces than just the raw wind. And, in fact, the faster a boat moves upwind, the faster the apparent wind is, moving it yet faster.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centreboard

Really small boats might get away without one. For example, a Hobie Cat (around 16 feet) is using a combination of its hull and a large rudder surface to achieve the same effects.

> Were people paid for their labor?

Yes. Different jobs paid different amounts, and people were paid for overtime. (With a bunch of malarkey about what exactly qualifies as overtime.) Some jobs had a harder time attracting workers, because of relatively poor conditions + poor pay, compared to others.

Most prices for essential goods (Basic food, housing) was set by the government to be very low. Many well-paid people had money, that they couldn't really spend in the official system.

> Was everyone given ration cards?

Yes. There were a large number of consumer goods (meat, vodka, butter) that were rationed. Other goods, of which there were no real shortages of (In the post-war period), were bought at regular stores. If you weren't a drinker, you would often trade your vodka ration to someone who was.

For yet other goods, of which there were shortages of (Fresh vegetables, for instance), the government encouraged private production of them. Some Russians had plots of personal land.

You could have a plot of personal land in one of two ways. You could either be a collectivized farmer, and, after you met your annual slave-like obligations to the collective, you could work on farming your small personal plots. Alternatively, you could be a well-off city resident, owning a datcha (A small summer home, often with a small plot of land.)

You could then grow produce on your personal plot of land, and sell it at farmer's markets. Due to shortages, and artificially low prices in the official system, food at farmer's markets cost many times what it would cost at a grocery.

> Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?

Official government prices for food were very cheap, and if you weren't picky, there was no shortage of cheap calories that you could buy. So, people weren't starving to death, but if you wanted more then your 500g of sausage, and 90g of butter/month, you needed to spend money in the private markets.

Party members in good standing had access to party-only stores, which sold more limited items.

> I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?

No. You see, the Soviet Union never actually reached communism - for its entire history, it claimed to be in a transitional period, from capitalism to communism. Once communism would be reached, there would be plenty for all, and money would, obviously, be irrelevant! (Or not. The powers that be weren't super-clear as to how exactly that would work, and none of the citizens really gave a shit, because it was clear to everyone with a room-temperature-or-higher IQ that communism would not ever be reached in their lifetimes, and that it's better for your mental and physical health to not ask too many questions about it.)

But, in the meantime, as people were working their way towards communism, money was still necessary as an incentive for good work. State-ran businesses did financial accounting, they would purchase raw goods from other state-ran businesses, would sell their products through state-ran stores. For consumer goods, there would be multiple competing brands, with different quality, and pricing.

The difference between the USSR and the USA, in this sense, is where the profits would go, and how much of the accounting was 'real'. The government would often place economic orders that it wouldn't need to pay for (If the army needs to move a 50 soldiers from Moscow to Vladivostok, it doesn't pay the transportation department the price of 50 train tickets.) It would also do financial malarkey with the profits of state enterprises (To subsidize things like staple foods, housing, education, medical care, etc, which were provided to the citizenry at below-cost prices.)

PS: Bonus point:

You may ask: Well, what did people who had extra money/vodka/etc do with it?

There were a few things you could spend it on - there were some non-essential consumer goods that had vastly inflated sticker prices. Luxury goods (Which you might buy second-hand from a party member, who bought theirs from an official, party-only store), and domestic appliances were one example. Cars, were another - they would cost multiple years of wages - and also came with a multi-year, sometimes decade-long waiting period.

Bribes were a third one - with a large bribe, you could often shave a few years off your waiting period for a car.

The black market was a fourth one - a lot of people in the Soviet Union stole from their workplaces. And I do mean a lot. There weren't department stores, you couldn't go into a Lowe's, and buy a bunch of new roof shingles for your datcha. Yet, everyone who cared about the roof of their datcha had new roof shingles. How was this possible?

The answer is, of course, elementary. What you would do, is get in touch with an alcoholic who works at the roof shingle factory, he will arrange for a pallet of shingles to fall off the back of the delivery truck, and you will arrange for him to get fifty rubles, and four bottles of vodka. He will be drunk for two days, the truck driver will buy a radio for his girlfriend, his workplace will do some accounting bullshit to try to avoid blame, the government construction site that expects these shingles will have to delay work for a week, and the Regional Minister of Construction Supplies will give a radio speech about how if we only worked really hard, to produce enough roof shingles, in a few decades, we will finally attain communism, and we might have department stores, where private citizens could go to, and purchase shingles for their datchas.

It's all insane, of course, but I've yet to live in a country which wasn't.