I don't think doubling the support would have been nearly enough to ensure Ukrainian victory.
The fundamental issue is that Russia has not fully committed to winning the war either. While losing the war would be an existential threat to the Putin regime, not winning it is not. As long as the war drags on, there are more effective uses for Russian resources to ensure the stability of the regime. But if the war becomes an existential threat, Russia could mobilize its entire economy.
A regime change in Russia is the only way Ukraine could win the war. Maybe by a coup or by military force. Or maybe by an arrangement, where the current regime can retire comfortably in a third country without having to answer for its crimes.
Individuals saving for retirement must deal with the risk that they live to an old age and their savings must last for decades. Pension plans have a higher safe withdrawal rate, because people on the average have average lifespans. When a plan member dies early, their remaining contributions can be used (partially or in full) to fund other members' pensions.
But mortality credits (pooling) don't solve the math of the discount rate - they add 100 - 150 basis points of reduction so retarget to 5.5% vs 4% if generous
So they are still structurally designed where they HAVE to allocate towards risk to meet their targets which is at core of issue
It feels like you're missing the whole point of the whole article, which is that treating public pensions like a bunch of 401ks misses the opportunity to invest all that money in something that benefits the retirees collectively. I'd rather retire on 4% from a bond to improve the school my grandkids go to than 5.5% from a PE firm that intends to "more efficiently manage" the retirement home I live in.
Only taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans get to use 7%+. Because they have the power to use future taxpayers’ money to pay for underfunding/underperformance/corruption from the past. And obviously, politicians that would choose to increase taxes today for something that could but punted to the future would lose elections.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 mandates that non taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans use discount rates from high grade corporate bond yield curves, which are much lower.
Yet that is the modus operandi of governments worldwide that need to secure the votes of the old. There is no reason the US explicit has different rules for taxpayer funded and non taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions. They are the same liabilities, the same cash flows, the same probabilities, just different political entities on the hook.
Even some non taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans are more privy than others, depending on the political power of their beneficiaries.
Until recently, philosophy of artificial intelligence seemed to be mostly about arguments why the Turing test was not a useful benchmark for intelligence. Pretty much everyone who had ever thought about the problem seriously had come to the same conclusion.
The fundamental issue was the assumption that general intelligence is an objective property that can be determined experimentally. It's better to consider intelligence an abstraction that may help us to understand the behavior of a system.
A system where a fixed LLM provides answers to prompts is little more than a Chinese room. If we give the system agency to interact with external systems on its own initiative, we get qualitatively different behavior. The same happens if we add memory that lets the system scale beyond the fixed context window. Now we definitely have some aspects of general intelligence, but something still seems to be missing.
Current AIs are essentially symbolic reasoning systems that rely on a fixed model to provide intuition. But the system never learns. It can't update its intuition based on its experiences.
Maybe the ability to learn in a useful way is the final obstacle on the way towards AGI. Or maybe once again, once we start thinking we are close to solving intelligence, we realize that there is more to intelligence than what we had thought so far.
The Turing test isn't as bad as people make it out to be. The naive version, where people just try to vibe out whether something is a human or not, is obviously wrong. On the other hand, if you set a good scientist loose on the Turing test, give them as many interactions as they want to come to a conclusion, and you let them build tools to assist in the analysis, it suddenly becomes quite interesting again.
For example, looking at the statistical distribution of the chat over long time horizons, and looking at input/output correlations in a similar manner would out even the best current models in a "Pro Turing Test." Ironically, the biggest tell in such a scenario would be excess capabilities AI displays that a human would not be able to match.
Europe was technologically advanced but lacked in state capacity. The Aztecs and the Maya were the opposite.
Sanitation is a literal stone age technology, originally developed by societies we have very little evidence of. It doesn't require technological sophistication — only a government capable of and willing to administer it.
European middle ages were characterized by the lack of state capacity. Cities and trade declined after the fall of the West Roman Empire. Governments became weak and incapable, and the society was structured around regional warlords and their personal relationships. But technology kept moving on. While European societies had limited resources, they could do things their more capable predecessors could not.
And then, towards the end of the middle ages, states started consolidating again.
A gift economy only exists between people who agree that they are participating in one.
Gifts between equals create expectations of reciprocity. If you use open source software, you are expected to contribute. Accepting a gift without an intention to reciprocate is an admission of social inferiority. Users who don't see themselves as socially inferior to developers are not participating in the gift economy and not bound by the social contract.
No, emphatically not. We are surrounded by them and people behave as if they are without acknowledging it. Saying it isn’t so doesn’t change the fact that we give more attention to people who [give] us free shit. It’s baked into our little monkey brains.
> Accepting a gift without an intention to reciprocate is an admission of social inferiority.
I wish I'd read your response more thoroughly before responding from my phone in a parking lot.
You do not understand gift economies at all. You've reduced them to transactionality, which is capitalism, and capitalism kills gift economies for fun.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a molecular biologist who is also a mother and a member of the Anishnaabe peoples. Braiding Sweetgrass is a book everyone should read, but you especially. The Serviceberry is a much shorter and denser discussion of gift economies but I doubt it's approachable for anyone who has read nothing of hers.
Perhaps we are talking about two different concepts called "gift economy".
The gift economy concept I'm familiar with has been used to describe various non-state polities, where people exchange gifts to maintain relationships and establish social standing. Gifts between peers are expected to be of similar value, while patrons are expected to give their clients more valuable gifts than they receive.
Well you’ve got less of a capitalist filter on that than I feared but I think you’ve got the cart before the horse.
The parts that relate to open source are this: when you have riches, you share them. People making a genuine effort to reciprocate when they are able (which may be months or years from now) makes the social structure function (if you like, by the rule of large numbers - someone always has more than they need when others do not).
If you do share in kind, your social status is unaffected by this aspect of your culture. If you are consistently more generous, your status increases. Call it Bayesian if you like. He helped us in the past, he will help us again in the future, so let’s keep him safe.
If you’ve ever been nominated as a maintainer on someone else’s project, this is usually why. You’re one of the top contributors not already on the core team, and they either like you a lot, or the contributions from others have fallen off and even they know this is not sustainable, and you’re the next best option.
There is an element of gifts given to strangers, which I’m claiming should also show up in how you receive “visitors” to your project, but I think outside of fiction this is typically set at a best effort level. It’s acceptable to set it at the “decency” level discussed elsewhere in this thread. But a lot of people don’t and then yell back when people scold them for it.
I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.
Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.
I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies.
It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.
Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.
I'm genuinely curious about your position, it's interesting.
But I can't figure it out what it'd look like in practice, might be hangover, might be I need more caffeine, whatever it is, it's on me. Don't read following as "you're saying X and thats silly!"
(A) Are consumption rates in general unsustainable?
(B) If (A) is no, are consumption rates of specific items unsustainable? For example, is the legislation you're thinking of like the deprecation of plastic bags for paper? Or something that covers a much wider amount of consumption?
(C) If (A) is "yes" or (B) is "more global", at huge scales like an economy, legislating quotas or rationing or anything at all, in practice pushes activity onto black markets.
If the concern is changing individual behavior, and individual behavior isn't changing on it's own sufficiently, what sort of legislation would change it?
> It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working
Of course it is not working. The bloat and planned obsolescence of "modern software" is legendary. I had to replace the hard drive on an older computer becsuse Win 10 is slow as a dog on it, even with LTSC version and even with most of the crap disabled. And making things require the incompatible latest and greatest instead of fixing things (hello Google) , does not help either.
Maybe it's because people spread FUD about the effectiveness of "reduce and reuse" instead of convincing others that "reduce and reuse" has value as a concept.
In addition to the volume issue, there's the composition issue. When I was a kid, we recycled all our flint cores. Well, not quite that far back... Milk came in glass bottles, and the person who delivered the bottles of milk to our house picked up the empties to take back to the dairy. There were also steel cans for canned food and soft drinks (which eventually rusts away), and of course lots of other glass bottles. Now more and more of those kinds of things come in plastic, of which little gets recycled. And cans are often aluminum, which doesn't rust away.
Furniture was wood and fabric and (maybe) springs, with a little bit of pressboard (which was itself recycled paper and textile, usually used on the back of desks etc.). Now furniture is particleboard (made from sawdust), with lots of glue and some kind of plastic veneer if it's in a place that shows. Wood is genuinely recyclable (or re-usable as antiques!); I don't think particleboard is recyclable, although I could be wrong.
Automobiles were steel, fabric, glass and copper wire (with rubber insulation); plus of course rubber tires. Now they are those things plus a lot more plastic. Tires, both then and now, are essentially un-recyclable (although occasionally turned into artificial reefs).
I could go on, but there are probably more authoritative (= better) studies of this. But I suspect in general that we have lots less recyclable "stuff" these days than we used to.
When I grew up in Sweden, soda was sold in standardized glass bottles. All brands used the same bottles and they just put paper labels on. You'd return the glass bottles for a deposit, they'd take them in, remove the label, wash then and refill them. You could tell how old the glass bottle you were drinking out of was by how scratched the label was.
In the 90's, they were all replaced by PET bottles. We were told at the time that this was because the oil used in the plastic bottles was still less than the extra oil used to ship the heavy glass bottles back and forth.
So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)
It's more like two business days in the academia, and only if a simple response is enough. Complex questions often take longer, because coming up with an answer may take an hour or two of uninterrupted time.
And if it's a cold email requesting something beyond a reply, and you don't have an existing business relationship with the sender, there is no expectation that you respond. An endless stream of requests from less reputable entities is an unavoidable fact of academic life. Such requests often go directly to the spam folder, as people have collectively decided that they are spam and trained the spam filters accordingly. Even if you think your request is legitimate, it can be indistinguishable from spam.
Hear such mixed things on that though, often it's oh academics love to hear someone wants to read their paper, just email them, they'll be only too happy to provide you with a pdf.
So I tried it once; no reply. (A month or two after it was published too, not something that might've been difficult to dig up.) Probably straight to spam.
"Living wage" means what a household needs for a dignified life, not just for bare subsistence.
If you need roommates because you can't afford an apartment on your own, you are poor by definition. That's probably the most universal definition of poverty that has ever existed. As long as there have been houses, the baseline household has had a housing unit of their own. Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.
> Households that have to share housing with others have always been characterized as unusually poor, no matter the continent and the millennium.
Historically speaking this is incredibly wrong.
Nearly every culture evolved from some sort of shared communal longhouse to individual clan homes, to extended family homes. The idea of individual private rooms actually comes about explicitly from Manors in the late medieval ages. We really didn't see widespread individual homes until the industrial revolution. In places like the East, individual rooms were an import from the West.
Even in rare places where there were individual family homes (Ancient Egypt, for one). Privacy and individuality were just not concepts. Through the 1800s, you might have literally been sharing a bed with a stranger in a hotel.
There has also never, ever been a point in human history where living without some sort of roommate was common. Even in situations where you had lots of single workers, they almost always lived in bunkhouses or SROs.
This was about households rather than individuals and housing units instead of homes, and privacy is unrelated to the discussion. For example, longhouses typically had internal subdivisions that functioned as housing units. A household that cannot afford a baseline housing unit is unusually poor, regardless of its size.
In a developed country, the baseline housing unit most households can afford is typically an apartment or a house. Households that cannot afford one are unusually poor.
Someone who forms a single-person household and doesn't earn enough to rent an apartment is poor.
Single-person households are often poor, especially when the person is young. Living wage estimates for such households tend to be higher relative to typical wages than for larger households, as the idea of a living wage is largely about rising above poverty.
One way to look at this is that "fluid intelligence" represents potential intelligence or raw processing power. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are then actual intelligence, or the intelligence another person can see.
Or maybe a bit less seriously: In my experience, fluid intelligence often manifests as stupidity in young people, for whatever reason. Crystallized intelligence and emotional intelligence then represent intelligence as a lack of stupidity.
I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich. They remember that the damage he caused mostly affected capitalists and professionals in developed countries. His businesses mostly didn't abuse labor in developing countries. He didn't cause that much environmental damage. He didn't undermine democracy and the society that much.
People remember that Bill Gates played the game and won, and the damage he caused was mostly limited to the economic sphere and to other people playing the same game. That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
>I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich.
That rags-to-riches myth about Bill Gates is not true.
He was a Harvard dropout, but not some poor kid.
Bill Gates was always rich. But with Micro$oft's success, he became a lot lot richer later.
His mom sat on some major committee at IBM. She had significant clout there.
That's how Bill even got the chance to pitch a new OS when the IBM big bosses were looking to unleash their new PCs.
Do you really think they just yanked a school dropout from the streets into their boardroom to decide important business future for their company?
Paul Allen had started Microsoft with Bill Gates. It was Bill's mom who pitched Microsoft as a potential partner to IBM's CEO John Opel.
Bill Gates scouted and found a chap (Tim Paterson) having a working prototype called 86-DOS. And Bill purchased it (with his family money), rebranded it as PC-DOS and sold it to IBM (but he cunningly kept the copyright as he rightly figured that other manufacturers would clone the IBM PC hardware and would need a DOS for their PCs (thus, he later licensed the new OS to non-IBM PCs as MS-DOS)). I daresay his mom was instrumental in such cunning dealmaking.
>That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
The problem is that he is using his wealth for some shady stuff, so it is not good.
Bill Gates's name is mentioned in the Epstein files, for some unsavory links to that child molestor.
And his BGMF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) got banned in India from funding local NGOs, because a Parliamentary committee indicted BGMF's involvement and funding for shady and shoddy vaccine trials on tens of thousands of poor Indian tribal children without informed consent and under false aegis.
Be careful whom you consider your heroes. They may not be all they seem to be.
The fundamental issue is that Russia has not fully committed to winning the war either. While losing the war would be an existential threat to the Putin regime, not winning it is not. As long as the war drags on, there are more effective uses for Russian resources to ensure the stability of the regime. But if the war becomes an existential threat, Russia could mobilize its entire economy.
A regime change in Russia is the only way Ukraine could win the war. Maybe by a coup or by military force. Or maybe by an arrangement, where the current regime can retire comfortably in a third country without having to answer for its crimes.
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