This is a tripwire to spike cost of taking by force. Europe doesn't have the blue-water navy or air power to fight a peer war with America but also does not need to.
Europe cannot fight a peer war with America: on day one the Americans cut off our cloud services, and all government administration falls over.
(logical consequence of this is that the US invading Greenland is really bad for any US startups, such as one might find on HN, because it makes the EU much more likely to respond with "local only" rules)
That's a two way street. Tens of thousands soldiers on European soil becoming PoWs. US Equipment in European bases like Air Force or Preposition Army Stocks impounded by Europeans. Logistics going further east via Ramstein - effectively whole Middle east cut off from US reach. Access to early warning radars in Europe also gone. Ability to rearm and refuel ships pushed all the way back to USA.
We switched their email off would be a political joke compared to tens of thousand soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. And that's all working with assumptions that EU won't nationalize European part of AWS/Azure/GC/(other US cloud providers) to force it to continue its operation.
Don't forget things like cutting off trade with the US, or trying to organize a dump of their debt to attack the currency. Or, trying for hack-attacks on key US network components. None of these involve "traditional military" but they'd affect the randos at home quite a bit.
Weird take. If you want to undertake approximately a bajillion dollars in capex to prove out and scale up a new node, it is extremely to have one massive, anchor customer who will promise well in advance to offtake basically the entire thing for a bit and who has creditworthiness exceeded by few non-sovereign entities, and thus is able to write contracts against which it is easy to lend. Also this customer makes little chips (when your defect rate is higher) and bigger chips (when your defect rate is lower). Of course you don't try to synthesize this profile out of a bajillion tiny customers.
I believe he's referring to the fact that social security, despite being billed as essentially a "retirement account" type program where e.g. silent gen paid in and got out roughly the same amount, it functions more like a ponzi scheme.
This is a consequence of the fact that, when the program was instituted, Roosevelt wanted to immediately start paying out to some people. So, boomers (very large generation) paid for their parents (relatively much smaller generation, meaning small per-person bill).
Now millennials and zoomers (relatively smaller generations) are expected to pay for boomers (much larger per-person bill). Between that, the incredible spending of medicare, and the federal propping-up of the housing market, a huge proportion of the economy has been dedicated to wealth transfer to the olds, an unproductive class who will be gone soon anyhow.
It's probably not a "loss-leader" so much as "somewhat lower margin". Their bizdev guys are doubtless happy to make a switch between lower-margin, higher-multiple recurring revenue versus higher-margin, lower-multiple pay-as-you-go API billing. Corporate customers with contracts doubtless aren't paying like that for the API either. This is not uncommon.
Yes, there is some (if not conclusive) evidence that speedy trial and persistent execution of the worst, most violent offenders reduces violence in the next generation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10480901/ It turns out killing the worst per cent of a generation's males provides a powerful selection effect. It's by no means the only cause or conclusive but worth considering.
I'd be more shocked if culling a full per cent of men yearly did nothing. Plus a lot died at the scene of crimes or in prison awaiting trial. The question is how much and precisely what. Doing reliable social science is hard enough on current data or interventions. It's very hard with historical data over that sort of time period. However, we get better knowledge by discussing interesting hypotheses and how to study them better. This one is interesting and there may be something to it. It's also at least quasi-testable; someone could fund a study on examining alleles associated with aggression in historical remains.
Note that Frost and Harpending are pretty conservative in their estimates; they figure only ballpark half the decline could be explained by this.
If you were to approach this question with intellectual honesty, you would identify pretty quickly that there are far better ways to try to answer it.
Case-control methods, natural experiments, surveys of criminals, and meta-analyses of the prior.
Literally any method other than "pick 600 year period and say 'vibes shifted generally across a continent and then homicide went down'"
Of course this question has been studied extensively for decades and the current conclusion is: completely inconclusive!
There's some evidence it increases violent crime, some that it decreases it, most evidence doesn't clearly show any effect at all.
So whatever effect it may have, it almost certainly isn't very strong, or is countervailed by opposing effects.
I think that if we're proposing the State, which we know to be fallible in so many cases, should make irreversible decisions like "executing suspected bad guys" more frequently, then we should have extremely strong evidence that it would actually achieve the desired result.
> It's also at least quasi-testable; someone could fund a study on examining alleles associated with aggression in historical remains.
Good luck establishing how "alleles associated with aggression" contributes to violence. I'm pretty sure most of the people who adopt your position would argue that their "aggressiveness" is a virtue in whatever competitive landscape they choose to occupy.
You are talking about the kind of research we can do today. You can't really do case-control for medieval populations easily, nor surveys of criminals, nor of the broader population since everyone is several centuries dead. Natural experiments might work and are exactly one of the things we should see further researched in this area. Meta-analyses can't happen until there's other research to meta-analyze.
I think we're in violent agreement here; yes, this obviously bears further investigation. The way good science gets done is "We have some preliminary evidence that could support a certain hypothesis. We think people should do further investigation." Then you go do that further investigation to see if you can reject the null.
The alleles point, though, is weaker. You're not just looking at stuff like MAO-A activity, also CDH13, COMT, other variants. We actually have a pretty good set worth analyzing that are pretty well-characterized in research, so we don't have to depend on any one particular allele. We have a pretty good set of those that aren't associated with, I don't know, aggression in boardrooms.
There are many documented links with Peter Thiel, the much more influential founder of Palantir. Epstein and Maxwell had their hands all over the Silicon Valley spooktech sector of which Palantir is an integral part.
But when you talk about "the Jeffrey Epstein Friends Club that runs SV" in a discussion starting with Lonsdale you are implicitly and probably intentionally tarring him by association. It's a serious enough charge to lay against someone that one shouldn't do it, even by allusion, without evidence.
This is also a discussion about Palantir more broadly, but of course Lonsdale is tarred by that association, that's not my doing.
If he finds Epstein association distasteful then as someone with ample means and no need to fear retaliation against his employment, he certainly should have publicly repudiated his close associates with Epstein ties. Has he done that?
That depends if he was involved in or aware of Epstein's trafficking. Given Thiel is rather well-known to be gay, I sincerely doubt he had anything to do with underage girls. We aren't yet sure if Thiel was aware of Epstein's other activities either; the only thing we do know is that they did visit at least once and Epstein extended an invite to visit him on his island. Whether Thiel accepted either, we cannot yet say.
If you're Lonsdale, you don't speak against a longtime close friend on the basis of bad optics when you have no way to know whether he actually did anything wrong. There are a whole stack of other, more-powerful people we can and should look at hard over their presence in the files. If further evidence is released against Thiel, Lonsdale, et al. we should reconsider their behavior. Until that point, it's wrong to tar them over this.
Your personal motivations for pursuing a particular commercial enterprise and the business of the enterprise itself are not the same. One is the purpose of the company, the other is your purpose in working for or founding it.
You'd have a very hard time arguing the materiality of Lonsdale's personal political beliefs and anti-communist stance for the investors of Palantir. Even a good attorney would have a hard time arguing this. He'd have an impossible time arguing it against another very able attorney. He'd also have an impossible time proving actual damages, which means you couldn't win a securities fraud civil case. Or common law fraud.
Oh also any investor who sued someone who made him boatloads of money over his political beliefs would have a very tough time finding someone to take his dollars and give him board seats in the future.
That matches what I've been told by various personal trainers. 6-8 reps if focusing on strength, ~12 for all round, and 16-18 for size/endurance. Do three sets, weight should be enough that the last couple of reps on the first set are a bit of a struggle. Subsequent sets just push through as far as you can.
You can do the goofiest workout you can possibly imagine as a young untrained male and put on muscle. You will do so at roughly max rate regardless of what you do as long as it’s vaguely productive. This isn’t useful research ngl.
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