Well the privet to luxury was due to quartz watches taking their core business, and now Chinese superclones are in the early days of threatening their luxury business. At a certain point it’s hard to care about the residual difference.
Probably be easier and more reliable to use star navigation with modern cameras, computers and atomic clocks. Especially for commercial aircraft flying above the weather.
With a quick calculation 50 ms time offset would mean about 20 meter difference. You can get that accuracy with NTP over residential internet and a better TCXO could hold that for a day. You could sync clocks and download the almanac at each airport. The almanac could be digitally signed and NTP has an option for authentication, too. That's about 10 USD of hardware (plus what you need for image capture and processing).
I'm pretty sure with dedicated hardware and better solutions you could get much better accuracy.
AFAIK OpenSCAD does not do any meaningful optimizations that are enabled by having a limited DSL, despite that normally being a good reason to do a DSL. And ironically you often have use a general purpose language (python and C++) to do custom optimizations not possible in the DSL.
A common trick in mining is to send surveyors to an area they don’t want so the various interests just so happen to decide that the area being surveyed is the one with historical / ecological significance. After that has been established they send surveyors for the area they do want.
The ecological studies also cover the surrounding areas. They can’t say that absolutely everything is significant so to make the stronger case they pile the significance into the area they think is the likely site to be developed. Then the miners are ‘responding’ to the feedback by relocating to a less significant location that already has been ecologically studied and deemed insignificant.
That's not how environmental surveys work, or the process for challenging them. They absolutely must include detailed information about the actual site and the activity proposed to occur at that site.
Subsequent developments can take advantage of the initial survey but must still provide an environmental study about how their own activity will impact their specific site.
The #1 reason for environmental surveys being deemed invalid in court is the course of action you discussed: developers trying to avoid scrutiny by not being sufficiently specific about what they are actually planning to do or where.
The miners were doing mining surveys for internal use only, the environmentalist were submitting the cultural / environmental surveys as complaints which they’re allowed to do as part of the law the local government made for itself since it was government land that was being leased. It was more of a public consultation process, if no one complained then that’s fine too. The miners already have strict environmental regulations they have to follow regardless of where they build. Having seen these submissions it’s often stuff like, there is a river and since rivers are where people tend to congregate if we were to look we might find some ancient stone age human artifact despite no such thing ever being found within 100s of kms. Also rivers move, especially small ones.
Causality is an issue there, I would suggest that genetic auto immune issues that are rather wide spread can cause all of the above. I think people are finding that GLP-1s help with auto immune issues.
I can speak only for myself. But when I was overweight, the heels of my feet would crack into such deep fissures that I could remove skin like thick pieces of jerky.
I lost 90 pounds and now the heels of my feet are as soft and supple as a baby's bottom.
Being overweight causes all sorts of weird side effects.
The incidence rate of genetic issues generally doesn't change much over time due to how slow genes changes, so an increase in obesity rates from 5% to over 40% in just a few generations suggest the cause is very unlikely to be due to genetics.
In the US, I'm convinced that it was the food pyramid.
As a kid in the 80s, I wondered how it made sense that my diabetic father was told to follow the same model as non-diabetics, which emphasized carbohydrates.
Anectata: I sleep much better after losing about 25 kg, and don't snore anymore. I didn't really think before about how your airways can get fat, but now that they're thinner, I had to relearn how to swallow, because food/drinks tried to go up my nose. I guess my point is that resting better has all sorts of secondary improvements.
Like almost every psychoactive drug it really depends on the individual. I have ME/CFS from a strong genetic propensity to dysautonomia. I think that my ME/CFS is an autoimmune reaction to the dysautonomia where, counter intuitively, medications like melatonin and amitriptyline, by helping with dysautonomia, actually substantially increase energy levels and mental cognition during the day. My case is a bit extreme at ~1/20K but I think ~1/50 of the general population have a similar but much milder reaction. At N=120 a study like this would not be able to detect that. These ~1/50 people are more likely to have the sort of sleep issues / burnout that makes them more likely to reach for melatonin in the first place. So the more interesting study would be conditioned by the subset of the general population that have already decided they need melatonin.
I would assume that the task of being a taxi driver would act as a near constant test for Alzheimer’s, would be interesting to do GWAS studies on older taxi drivers and compare against taxi drivers who quit earlier in their careers.
The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
I guess the difference is who pays and who has the economic power to pay.
In most western countries the corruption is mostly between entities with legal income, in poorer countries at least one side has its main income from illegal activities.
> In most western countries the corruption is mostly between entities with legal income
Do you realize how much dirty money moves through and is laundered and stashed in the US? And how many billions of dollars a year in "legal" income financial institutions and other "legitimate" business entities, not to mention the US Treasury, collect from facilitating this?
> The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
Do you even read what you write? If you institutionalize corruption to reduce competition between different corrupt factions, you end up with a not endemically corrupt society?
Here's what it actually means: if you institutionalize corruption, you end up with an endemically corrupt society that is incapable of even recognizing corruption for what it is.
> ...at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
No, the corruption is just more sophisticated so that we can pretend it isn't corruption. Just look at campaign finance. In many ways, it's even more insidious than companies handing over paper bags full of bribe money to politicians and government officials.
The amounts are bigger, the number of people who get a piece of the action is great and it's all "legal" so the corruption is more durable. And, again, everyone gets to pretend that it's not corruption.
A society that pretends it is not corrupt is better than one that has given up on that pretense. No matter how bad you think things are it can always get worse. I am not looking forward to the coming free for all.
By endemic I mean to its core, it’s the difference of having everyone being corrupt versus just the elites / political class being corrupt. If anyone thinks that the problem of corrupt elites could be improved by extending that corruption to everyone then I’m not sure what would convince them otherwise.
I am suggesting that it's more than the elites, then you'd have to take into account the people who would act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity. As someone who has tried and failed to sell software into Cambodia I know from experience that the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
Have you ever even been to Cambodia? I spent half a year LIVING there.
Trying to sell software into Cambodia puts you squarely in a procurement situation where you're going to encounter the patronage networks that are responsible for the corruption.
So since you seem to be suggesting the Cambodians have a disposition towards "act[ing] in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity" (versus, say, Americans who you seem to think just elect corrupt politicians but have no disposition towards corruption themselves), why don't you share your experiences with the "lower strata" of Cambodian society as a software salesman?
In case anyone else is still reading this, there's an important context here: the US dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. This is more than the Allies dropped in all of WW2.
The bombing was a direct cause in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and an estimated 20-25% of the country's population (1.5-3 million people) died under the Khmer Rouge. People in rural areas still die every year in Cambodia due to unexploded ordnance.
American action against Cambodia was part of the First Indochina War, in which France was fighting to maintain a hold on its French Indochina colonial empire. In principle, the US got involved to stop the spread of communism but in reality, it was also doing France's bidding.
The result: millions of innocent people were killed by US military action. Cambodia and Vietnam were left destitute after the war, and the US, having lost, engaged in an economic war against Cambodia and Vietnam through the 1980s. In 1990, the nominal GDP per capita in Cambodia and Vietnam was under $200. People literally had nothing. Hunger and threat of famine was widespread.
So anytime you see a Westerner hinting that people in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam are more likely to "act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity", as if they are a less moral form of human being, you can read it for what it is: just a continuation of the racial, cultural and economic superiority complex of the West that has caused mass destruction all over the world and still somehow finds a way to blame its own victims for their misfortune.
No. A country is not a homogenous mass, and people hated Vietnam, and that was decades ago. Someone in the US mentioning Cambodia's abysmal position on the corruption perception index should understand the fucked up role their country had in that but that doesn't mean they're having a "superiority complex" or "blaming" the wrong people.
> ...the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
This coming from a person who apparently never lived in Cambodia and might never have even visited, but who tried and failed to sell software to Cambodians.
This is a perfect example of the Western superiority complex. The average person in Cambodia is 27 years old. Well over half the population lives in rural areas, where median salaries are under $300/month and higher education enrollment is not even 25%.
The implied suggestion that Cambodians are a more corruptible form of human is as sad as it is ridiculous.
I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
I wouldn’t be so worried about the corruption of my society if I thought there was something implicit that meant we wouldn’t be corrupted in the same way that others are.
Nor do I blame the Cambodians for their predicament. You’re tilting at windmills.
> I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
You didn't need to pay any advisors. It's very well-known that selling into Cambodian companies, all of the successful of which are owned by people who are part of the patronage networks, is typically pay to play.
But I still fail to see how this gives you any insight into the lower stratas of Cambodian society. The people who are living and working in Phnom Penh making procurement/purchasing decisions are not even "average" Cambodians. They're among the more fortunate.
The average Cambodian is a "poor" person trying to get through the day with limited awareness of the power structures in Phnom Penh. Even the ones who have some awareness of the system they live in know they're powerless to change it.
But that’s the beautiful thing. The system working as the law, regulations, etc. dictates is by definition not corruption! No wonder the upper middle class and richer segments hate corruption. (Not all of them. The Rule of Law kind of liberal certainly does.)
I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
> ...but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
In relative terms?
So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?
I would measure by relative destruction of wealth since corruption is an inefficient destructive process that can quite often yield very little left to steal.
The US, as I noted, is the wealthiest country in the world according to numerous metrics. Yet the median savings is only $8,000, the Brookings Institute found that "the overall share of middle-class households that do not make enough to afford basic necessities where they live ranges from 23% to 57%" and so on.
It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.
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