carloshasanax

carloshasanax

  • Commented on The Ferguson Question
    The militarization of police forces, started with Bush The Elder, enhanced by Clinton, and really ramped up post 9/11, is bearing a bitter fruit. Goddamn it, I am sick of this anachronistic meme. The current militarization of the police forces...
  • Commented on We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday.
    Numbers, Charlie, and past tendency....
  • Commented on We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday.
    You've seen the level of sarcasm the typical right-wing nutter uses, Charlie. It's probably one of the easier natural language processing problems left on the table. I wouldn't even call it artificial intelligence, since the TRWN can be simulated by...
  • Commented on The myth of heroism
    It was Robert Graves, but Graves was a serious nut. While it's a spectrum, popular culture differs from folk culture in two important ways: first, the cultural product is usually a consumer good, and second, it's usually a good that...
  • Commented on The myth of heroism
    "even those of us who others see as villains: nobody wakes up in the morning, twirls their moustache, and thinks, how can I most effectively act to further the cause of EVIL™ today?" Except for the name on the label,...
  • Commented on Rule 34, meet Kafka
    I think, from reading the excerpts in context, they hand counted the user IDs which showed "undesirable nudity," rather than run the videos through a flesh pixel counting algorithm. Then they used that proportion to come up with a bad...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    Once upon a time, small change, things like pennies, didn't have a consistent exchange rate with national currencies. The coins were too expensive for national governments to produce consistently, leading to shortages and inflation, and it disproportionately affected the poor,...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    Many of the ideas for narrative experimentation in electronic books have already been instantiated as printed books. There's the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books, but also the OuLiPo group, Cortázar's Hopscotch, Nabokov's Pale Fire, etc. They haven't...
  • Commented on Another deceptively simple question
    The electronic book hollows out the market for the disposable book and the utilitarian book. It creates a new market for the multimedia book -- one barely scratched, although it's been theorized about for decades. (It may be that this...
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    Considering I'm cited on the third page of hits on Google for "cost per ton mile"... The proper comparison is difficult, but if you break it down into fixed and variable costs, the variable cost of rail is about an...
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    "$0.03 for rail, $0.10 for sea And people wonder why the Chinese are building the rail-net they are." George Herbert's figures are taken from this site. Actual transportation economists consider ocean freight significantly cheaper than rail....
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    To get more technical, what this advance mainly does is replace labor with capital. All the other changes Charlie mentions, even the Roman roads, result in new frontiers on the Kármán–Gabrielli diagram....
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    None. Caveat: we haven't seen a modern economy "fully" mobilized for war yet. It might be different then, but I tend to doubt it. Driving is just not that large or well-paid part of our workforce. I don't see the...
  • Commented on Marking time, more thoughts
    My understanding is that containerization has cut the cost of international freight so savagely that even if energy costs tripled, permanently, in many cases it'd still be cost-effective to manufacture goods in the cheapest labour regime and ship them around...
  • Commented on Who ordered *that*?
    At which point the empire runs into a serious internal insurgency problem -- probably several of them, simultaneously -- until it is forced to re-structure. Eek. Insurgencies in the American system don't work that way (see the current sesquicentennial festivities)....
  • Commented on Who ordered *that*?
    So a good start would be to integrate the entire EU, plus Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, NZ, and maybe every country in Central and South America, as States with senators and congressmen and participation in elections. Jesus, man, we'd...
  • Commented on The language of alienation
    Oh darn. Let me see if I can reconstruct. I once tried the experiment with a Louis CK comedy routine about everyday life as a single working father in New York City. I believe the most recently coined word was...
  • Commented on Off the Map: Women in Science and Science Fiction
    Make it possible for men to breastfeed and be pregnant. Thats the single most important thing that could be done if we want to get a true equality careerwise (and probably in every other aspect too).Holy crap, no. I can't...
  • Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
    Charlie, I think the question is still ill-framed. What characteristics do you think a more intelligent human would have? Are they in the range of existing human variation? (I personally don't think the ability to do mathematics is very indicative...
  • Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
    Oh, not that slow. It's entirely possible to train yourself to become a mental calculator -- I know, I used to be one. Does it actually help in the real world? Well, it passed the time on road trips....
  • Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
    I could never buy the specific mechanism of that story....
  • Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
    To expand on my earlier comment, language depends on the rather close control of lips, tongue, teeth, breathing, and so forth. Anyone who has had their parts of their mouth anesthetized knows how difficult it is to make themselves understood...
  • Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
    Here's a different hypothesis: starting from mathematical primitives, the physical basis of the Universe is relatively easy to understand. However, biological brains evolve in too complex an environment for the ability to manipulative mathematical primitives efficiently to be much use......
  • Commented on 2512
    Hi Charlie! I like the new system. In five hundred years, I'd expect the composition of the atmosphere to be closely managed. Most likely the climate will be tweaked to open up more of North American and North Eurasia's marginal...
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