What's interesting is that rigid culture that forced us to do adult behaviors despite retaining juvenile traits, now when it's getting lifted and replaced with freedom to do whatever you please might leave many individuals maladapted from the evolutionary standpoint to prolonging their genetic line. Which I think is perfectly fine. New generations that are better adapted to the culture of hi-tech freedom will arise from the few that currently accidentally already do the evolutionarily correct thing.
> New generations that are better adapted to the culture of hi-tech freedom will arise from the few that currently accidentally already do the evolutionarily correct thing.
That's one possibility. Another is subcultures which prioritise reproduction over personal freedom will end up demographically dominant in the long-run. Look for example at Kiryas Joel, New York, and similar ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, whose growth shows no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Of course, exponential growth can't last forever, but nobody knows what exactly the limit is and when it will be reached – it might not be reached until they've become a very substantial percentage of the population, maybe even the majority.
My elder female dog loves to play and the way in which she plays has only gotten more nuanced over time. She's even adapted to play with me, play with other dogs, play with smaller dogs, and play with puppies.
The basic semantics of her language of play are all the same: she bows, she'll yawn, she barks and does that side-eye glance. Sometimes she'll dance. If she gets really hyped up she'll get the zoomies.
Dogs, from what I've observed, are incredibly intelligent and social animals as they exist today.
A lot of dog play is rehearsing hunting-related behaviours. For example, playing tug-of-war over a toy is practising playing tug-of-war over the kill, which helps to break it up into manageable portions. I wonder if adult domestic dogs are more prone to play because they have limited opportunities to use these natural instincts for real? Maybe in a pack of wild dogs where they are constantly being used for real, they would be less likely to rehearse them
A company is meaningless without a government and law enforcement. The existence of a barrier is necessary for a company to have practical value as a legal concept.
That's not really true; in places without government, or adaquate aligned government, businesses have been known to form their own police forces and quasi-governments, even navies. Profit is a powerful motivator, if something business needs doesn't exist already they'll create it.
It's misleading to claim that companies own their existence to governments, to imply some innate subservience of companies to governments, when companies can and have created governments whenever the need arises.
I'm talking about companies as commercial enterprises seeking to profit from doing business. No funny business with esoteric definitions.
You say companies creating governments are the exception because usually governments which are compatible with doing business already exist. And this is in no small part because companies modify their environment to create that set of circumstance in the first place. Sometimes they create governments outright where none previously existed. Most often they do it by lobbying or bribing a government to adopt rules better for doing business. Sometimes they hire private armies to destroy and replace governments which cannot be brought into alignment with the companies.
The colonial trading companies are the most famous examples because of how extreme they were, but there are countless examples throughout history and around the world.
Companies forming governments outright, complete with new currencies, was common in the undeveloped American west. Companies hiring mercenary armies to destroy unaligned governments has happened several times in South and Central America.
Companies needing governments are like beavers needing ponds. If none suitable exists, they make one.
The legal concept doesn't feel esoteric to me. In contrast, "companies" creating governments is quite rare in my mind. The historical concept you're referring to was even more of a legal concept. Those companies were individually chartered by their host governments. They might have inflicted something else on their victims, but ... Let's take the East India Company as an example. It might have appeared sovereign at times, but was trivially dissolved by the British Empire.
You're getting the cause and effect wrong. For a company to exist, there needs to be stable structures in place. Foundational things like money, infrastructure, laws, people - "Capital".
There are many examples of companies causing those stable conditions to exist. They even create currencies whenever one doesn't already exist. It doesn't work in only one direction, that's my point.
Any evidence for that claim? The issue is not whether there is administrative overhead, but the amount of it. It’s not obvious to me that completely different funding models would incur the exact same amount of overhead on the practitioners.
It does happen in a fashion in the Canadian system where family doctors at least operate as private businesses that bill the gov't, and because of that have to spend quite a bit of time on paperwork which then requires a whole edifice which there has been a lot of complaint about recently.
A search will find you plenty of articles about this.
That and the nature of the relationship introduces conflict. Plus the bulk of provincial governments administrating the thing are ideologically biased against it because they are conservative or neo-liberal in bent, and have been chronically underfunding it for years....
If I only earn when I treat, then I have an incentive to over-diagnose. Insurance thus forces me to document my diagnoses, and I spend much of my time on documentation and appealing denials.
So the wealthy can finally cheat death efficiently once and for all ;-)
On a more serious note: that might be hard in medicine per se to pay for “results”. And I found some of the insights from “Outlive” quite interesting: how we focus in cure but not prevention; and how in the bigger scheme of things Antibiotics was almost the only “real big invention” in western medicine for a very long time (e.g., in terms of actual medical impact)
It has inevitability, but you're right, not predictable periodicity. Is predictable periodicity a necessary part of a cycle? I feel like the rise and fall of nations is a cycle, but not necessarily one of predictable periodicity.
Juries absolutely do make errors, including ones which result in innocent people being put to death.
In a number of cases, the Innocence Project has certainly managed to find hard DNA evidence that linked the actual murderer to the crime, resulting in saving people from death row. One of my friends worked on some of these cases. As former law enforcement, he was very much aware of the various ways the system can fail. Police officers commit perjury on the stand, "expert" witnesses use pseudoscience with zero factual evidence (there are processes to prevent this which have gotten slightly better), and there are shockingly terrible public defenders.
Democrat leadership and large donors may have moved left, but the voters haven't. Which is why Biden was having trouble with some groups previously thought locked-in Democrat.
Poe's law. This doesn't seem completely absurd because there are plenty of jerks on planes who don't dim excessively-bright screens much less reduce the volume of crap music.
What's the bar, though? If out of a million people reading a joke, 80% find it funny, 20% find it meh, and one solitary person needs the joke explained to them, I think it's still fair to call it a funny joke. There are multiple comments in this thread missing the satire so it's obvious the percentage is a bit higher than that, but I'd wager the majority of people didn't need the joke explained to them.
HN is not a representative sample of normal people and has a long understood inability to recognize satire, or even just particularly strong sarcasm. HN not getting a joke is not evidence of it being a bad joke.
I've never seen an online community fail to grasp sarcasm as badly as HN. I deliberately make one out of 50 posts ultra-sarcastic (to the point where no normal person could possibly believe I'd hold whatever view I wrote), and they always, always go straight to -4.
