I think synthetic fuels might be good for situations where there are no feasible alternatives for now, like airplanes. But while they may not increase the net amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, they would still produce pollution locally, so I don’t think they would be desirable for things like cars. Also, we need to reduce the number of cars irrespective of whether they’re electric or not (for many reasons, but in the context of climate change, because manufacturing a car also generates a lot of greenhouse gasses and is an inefficient use of resources), so I don’t think that trying to soothe people’s irrational fears* by having synthetic fuels as an in-between so that they can ultimately be convinced to go electric is the right approach. In a world where most cars are capital assets instead of many people’s sole lifeline out of suburban purgatory, it would be a lot easier to say “you’ll use an electric car from now on and you’ll LIKE it!”, so I think it would it would be more fruitful to try to get closer to that world.

But my impression of this research is that the goal of it is having something that can be installed in people’s homes. I doubt we’re ever going to be producing synthetic fuels in people’s homes at a large scale.

*EDIT: I think I came off as too dismissive here, so I’d like to rephrase this and expand upon it. For the vast majority of people, range anxiety is an unfounded fear. That doesn’t change that the fear is real, but it does mean that it can dispelled by having a sufficient number of people in their community show that it is unfounded. But having synthetic fuels as an off-ramp, even though it can at best be a temporary measure that still has many of the problems of fossil fuels, would significantly slow down this process. There are, of course, also rational reasons not to get an EV; not being able to afford one, living somewhere with a flaky electrical grid etc., but those are things that need to be solved regardless and the very institutions that are incentivising EV can do something about (of course, the best reason to not get an EV is to not need a car to begin with).

If you like Yakitate!! Japan, there’s a whole genre of competitive cooking manga and anime that includes Chuuka Ichiban!/Cooking Master Boy and Shokugeki no Souma/Food Wars.

It’s not quite a genre per se, but I often enjoy it when there’s an educational aspect to something. Cells at Work and Ruri Rocks would be obvious examples, but I would also include, say, Golden Kamuy or (manga) A Bride’s Story. Hobby and cooking anime tend to have elements of this too, Yuru Camp, How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, Sweetness and Lightning etc.

So not really “edutainment” in the sense of trying to trick children into learning by wrapping it in something that looks like entertainment, and more something where you can imagine the creators pointing at their work and saying “Look! This part of the world exists too! Isn’t that neat?” with stars in their eyes, if that makes sense.

Your points? You haven’t been making any! All you’ve been doing is treating the assertions that democracy is susceptible to corruption and anarchism less so as almost axiomatic, backing it with little more than “look at how bad things are!” (while ignoring all other factors that created the current state of things) and a need for an alternative, while being dishonest about what democracy is.

All forms of governance, with no exceptions, require delegation. But as soon as you delegate, there is room for corruption, and therefore a need to prevent it. In other words, there is always going to be a minority of people mandated with authority and a need for mechanisms to ensure that they don’t abuse that authority. And any system of accountability that involves fewer people than the public, is going to be more corruptible than one that does involve the public. Even anarchism would, without a democratic core, inevitably decay into a dictatorship in all but name. By insisting that anarchism is distinct from democracy, you’re contributing to undermining the very thing you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re trying to say that there are some very fundamental problems with current implementations of democracy, I wholeheartedly agree. But do put it that way, then. Democracy is entirely too important to be reduced to a lure for replies.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem just states that strictly speaking, there is no system within a particular subset of voting systems that is guaranteed to be immune from spoilers affecting the outcome. So not only are you using an overly strict definition of democracy that doesn’t even encompass all democratic systems implemented today, let alone all the ones that could be (which again, includes anarchism), but you’re disqualifying things based on not meeting a level of perfection that is unreasonable to expect of anything. It’s not like anarchism would be free of irrelevant factors affecting decisions; it would be a lot more affected by relationships between people and people’s standing in a community for one thing.

None of the problems you point out are innate to democracy. The reason you associate them with democracy is not because of any inherent quality of democracy, but because of history. To simplify things a lot, the people who championed democracy back in the days of absolute monarchies and nobility also championed a liberal economy. At the time that would have made sense, since it was seen as more fair and meritocratic than an economy managed by the nobility. And compared to that it was, but ultimate it just ended up creating a new nobility in all but name.

But just because they were wrong about one thing doesn’t mean they were wrong about everything. You can pick and choose ideas, and the anarchism you’re promoting is one such attempt.

We don’t actually know that it doesn’t work, because as I’ve said, all modern democracies have a particular flaw and we don’t know what happens when that flaw is fixed. I would also say that what you’re describing as “anarchism” is just another form of democracy; democracy is a set of principles, not a concrete system. And that anarchism would in practice not be as different from what we have today as you’re imagining. Instead of top-down it would be bottom-up, maybe (which has some problems of its own), but you still end up with elected representatives at higher levels of governance, because even with modern technology it would be impractical to have all the stakeholders of the Rhine, for example, do consensus-building in one big meeting. And those representatives would need to be held to account, just like today.

I think it’s far more fruitful to look at the actual problems we’re having and what structurally is causing them and try to do something about those causes, instead of going on about what systems would or wouldn’t work, because there’s never going to be a perfect system, we’re always going to have to solve problems as they come. Especially when clearly the problem here isn’t the system itself, but the existence of power structures that exist outside of the system and are therefore not constrained by the system, allowing them to undermine the system. If solving that problem results in something that can be described as “socialism” or “anarchism”, so be it, but one thing it absolutely has to be, is a democracy. Because again, anything that is not a democracy is going to be inherently more susceptible to corruption (and therefore be ineffective at solving problems) than even a mediocre implementation of democracy.

It’s also one of the oldest (in the modern sense), an early adopter with little to no best practices to learn from. Not to mention that it kind of wandered into being a democracy through legal interpretations rather than being one by design.

Anyway, you’re not looking at things structurally enough and missing the fundamental problem: excessive consolidation of power. By which I don’t mean the “big government” conservatives like to complain about, because governments don’t have to be monoliths, but simply what it sounds like: one entity having an excessive power at its disposal that it’s able to use at its own volition. To prevent that in government you need to not only design it in a way that not one part of it has an excessive amount of power (through separation of powers, independent institutions etc.), but also have mechanisms in place to keep it that way, because it’s ultimately people who are doing the execution. And any such mechanism that does not involve accountability to the public is doomed to failure, because that mechanism is, once again, executed by people, and the fewer people are involved, the easier it is to take over. In other words, it’s not simply that democracy can work, it’s the only thing that is structurally capable of working. Any other form of government is inherently more susceptible to corruption.

However, implementation details matter and a flawed implementation can cause it to fail. And basically every modern democratic state has one big flaw: it has political democracy, but not economic democracy. As a result, there is very little constraining private actors from accumulating as much capital (=power) as they can, based on the naive assumption that market forces are enough to prevent them from accumulating too much. And so once enough capital has accumulated in once place, that power can be used to undermine political democracy as well. So the problem here isn’t that democracy doesn’t work, it’s that we don’t have enough of it.

It’s kind of absurd how the second smallest continent has a similar number of countries as the two biggest ones.

Might be a cultural difference. Continents are mostly cultural constructs, which is why most people don’t consider Afro-Eurasia a continent, even though it’s a continuous landmass.

Given that Spain had a lot of colonies in South-America and that Columbus’ voyage that led to the “discovery” of the Americas (more concretely, parts that are currently considered part of South or Central America) was funded by the Spanish crown, I can imagine that Spanish-speakers may have a different view on “America” compared to northern Europeans and their diaspora.

It’s kind of hard to tell because it’s a low-poly model at a low resolution, but it looks like they’re wearing the mask kuroko wear, who are stagehands in Japanese theater that you’re expected to pretend aren’t there while they move things around on the stage.

This is from Tomodachi Life, right? I haven’t actually played it, but from what I know of the game, all the characters are Miis. So if the store staff were also Miis, there would be nothing to distinguish them from regular characters, so maybe they’re trying to avoid giving the impression that you can interact with them in the same way as you can with regular characters.

Is the fact that their shirts with each other’s initials together spells “KY” (kuuki yomenai hito = person who can’t read the room) intentional or just a coincidence?

I don’t know about other local systems, but the Wero branding is already starting to show up when making iDeal payments. I think there’s a good chance that at least in the short-to-medium term, the transition is going to be largely seamless for stores, where support for the local system translates into support for Wero, and all they really have to do is change the name in the order form.

“Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive.”

Certainly, in the same way that failing to catch a bank robber and allowing them to skip town is expensive.

I see a couple of major practical reasons why game (engine) devs are under no threat from this even if it gets better in the future:

1. Scale. Like all things AI, this is not going to scale well. This doesn’t generate code, 3D models and textures, both making games and playing them requires running the model. So if you want a game to have a persistent environment where the world behind you doesn’t get regenerated into something different after taking 8 steps, the context window is going to get real large real fast. And unlike programmed games, you can’t make choices about what’s worth remembering and what isn’t, what can be kept on persistent storage and is only loaded when it becomes relevant etc., because it’s all one big, opaque blob of context, generated by a black box; you either have it remember everything or it becomes amnesiac in a way that makes it useless. Memory availability also isn’t increasing at a rate where this becomes a non-issue any time soon.

2. Control. Manipulating the world though a text prompt gives a lot of control, but it’s also very course. It’s easy enough to tell it that you want a character that can run and jump, but how fast does it run? Does it accelerate and decelerate or start and stop instantly? Does it jump in a fixed arc or based on the running speed and duration of the jump button being pressed? How far and how high? You’re going to run in the limits both of what you can convey and what the language model will understand pretty quickly. And even when you can get it to do exactly what you want, it would have been faster and more practical to manipulate values directly or use a gizmo place things. But there’s no way to extract and manipulate those values, because again: big, opaque blob of context.

The needs of the kitty outweighs the needs of the few.

I’m still fond of the classic “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine!”
Those kids going on about 6-7 like it’s some kind of power couple don’t know what they’re doing to poor 6.

Same idea as behind “Enough is enough, an egg is an egg.”

This is a reference to the Narutaru OP.

Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.

Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.

Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.

Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.