Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Thunderf00t"
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@qurqo That's not quite true. Depends on the type of work, the type of boss, the type of system, the geography and transport systems, and the type of employee. The right combination and productivity skyrockets when people can work from home, the wrong combination and it tanks. Noteworthy is that work from home systems often expose employees who weren't doing anything productive at work either, and incompitent managers who were actually making things worse rather than better... But it is worth noting that there are psychological aspects to the whole thing too. Some people work better in a more relaxed environment without other people distracting them, which could mean working from home, depending on their family situation and the way the office is organized, or it could very much mean NOT working at home for a different combination of those same factors. Likewise, some people require that very distinct separation of space between the two to focus on the relevant tasks, others can manage with as little as putting on different music in the background and be good.
A functional work from home system can reduce how much productivity is lost if people take time off work due to certain illnesses and events, where they can't come in to the office or work a full day, but still have the time and ability to get Some work done to regular standards (compaired to forcing sick people to come in and work a full day as usual, which produces distinctly substandard work and is very likely to infect other employees and further tank productivity). And on and on the list goes.
Very much a case of 'applied correctly to the right use cases this is very beneficial, applied badly and/or to the wrong use cases it is quite harmful'... much like a truely staggering number of other things, really.
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@gorillaguerillaDK I followed what was going on in the UK's parliament regarding Brexit... the reality is it wasn't just the opposition opposing for the heck of it, it was multiple parties (and factions within parties) being staggeringly incompentent and perfectly willing to through the country under a bus with a 'no deal' exit if the alternative was anything other than their own deal.
The whole brexit referendum was Supposed to basically just be a bit of propaganda that killed the idea so certain individuals couldn't keep using it to be a pain in the butt for the government at the time. They could Claim to be in favour of it and so keep certain subsets of their supporters satisfied, and, they Thought, be confident that it was such an obviously and staggeringly stupid idea that it would never actually pass the referendum. (and, really, even if it did, if the margin was narrow enough, the referendum wasn't binding anyway, there were plenty of ways to spin just not doing it), and the fact that they bothered asking would be a nice boost in the upcoming election.
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They underestimated the propagandists who saw benefit in a successful Brexit campaign.
They underestimated the ignorance, gullibility, and (to a lesser extent) stupidity of the British public (... honestly, the general public in most countries, but only the British public is relevant here).
The referendum came back in favour of Brexit.
And then public sentiment and media attention shifted such that just ignoring the results or otherwise fiddling the system to avoid going through with it was simply Not Viable.
So they had to go through with it.
This was followed by attempting to stall and dick around such that the EU would end up basically forcing the UK to stay by way of negotiations breaking down and no 'leave' agreement being made. Then the failure to go through could be blamed on the EU (boosting the popularity and election chances of the politicians who Claimed to be against such things) rather than the government, and Brexit wouldn't happen (no predictable consequences)...
Except the EU was having none of it and told the UK to either make a deal or leave without one.
What followed was an utter farce, with first the government (or at least PM) constantly going with a 'make proposals that will clearly be unaceptable to the EU but make it look like it's the EU's fault that things aren't working until we can just blame the EU for Brexit not happening' strategy, despite it being increasingly obvious both that that was happening And that the EU wasn't following the script, and then once parliament as a whole (and the general public) got so fed up with that nonsense that changes were made regarding who was actually conducting the negotiations (and running the country, if I recall correctly) the situation I described in my first paragraph became the status quo (with each faction being more interested in their constituents being happy with them for trying to push their pet obsession than in getting a nondisasterous result that could be blamed on specific individuals who weren't even in power anymore and the EU when it came to calming said constituents if need be) continuing right up until the deadline ran out.
Oh, and as an added bonus the PM and a few other officials decided that it would be a great idea to promise solutions to certain problems that this whole issue caused that were A: Directly contradictory to what they had told the EU they were going to do to resolve those issues and B: Flat out illegal anyway.
The simple fact is there was never a good plan for Brexit because, to those who would be making such plans, it was Never Supposed To Happen!
The need for election reform in the UK is almost as dire as it is in the USA, because that was a staggeringly incompitent showing.
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@InfernosReaper For reference, it's a long established fact when it comes to public speaking, including (possibly especially) teaching, that if you want your audience to remember Anything you say, then you have to repeate it at least three times, presented slightly differently each time so that it is attached to more different things in their mind (but also so they're less likely to just tune it out as something they've already heard. The slight variation is important). And the more things you have to say, the more important that repetition is. Especially as people will, normally, remember only the last thing and, if you're lucky, the First thing, you said. So you get an opening that tells you basically the 'headlines', then a middle that repeates every single one of those (though normally with a lot more elaboration and detail), and then a closing that's basically a summary of the main points (not quite the same as the 'headlines' in the introduction, because it's less 'this is what I'm talking about' and more 'this is the most important bit I said about that thing')... except if the lesser details are important and need to be remembered as well, that middle bit will repeat itself a few times too.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is part of the reason the videos end up long and repetative. Sure, it's probably not the Whole reason, but probably a contributing factor.
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@ericmaclaurin8525 My understanding is that previous attempts at carbon markets resulted in various scams that made some people very rich off doing nothing much and did very little to actually change carbon patterns.
Also, while some countries can manage smart regulation most of the time, and most can manage smart regulation some of the time... smart tax policy is a pipe dream, because basically the defining trait of most big 'centre right' (yeah, that's questionable labling, but moving on) parties is 'we'll gut the many and various useful things that the taxes pay for (but never the corrupt nonsense that's not working, oh no) so you pay less taxes! pay no attention to the fact that the actual reduction is so low that 90% or more of the population won't notice any real benefit and that privately owned sources of the same product/service, when hey even exist, cost several times as much per person (not per user, mind you)!'. It's pretty rare that they have anything else going for them as entities (their individual politicians can be just as capable of looking after their constituants local needs and interests as anyone else, but their higher level policies? yeah, tax cuts and 'screw the people who need services (such as clean water) and aren't rich!' is pretty much the whole of it, at least most places.)
... and that's when your 'leftist' parties even understand what a budget is and why you shouldn't just jack up taxes, print money, or force everyone to work for no compensation (this is less consistent, there are plenty of 'leftist' political parties that understand this just fine... but there are also a surprisingly large number that Don't!)
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@John_Lee_ not so much. Asset value isn't money you had to use, it's more a measure of the willingness of the banks to give you whatever arbritrary amount you want at any time. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, how much money you actually have becomes utterly meaningless, as you basically never spend your own money on anything except serving the interest on loans. The banks make more money on you paying interest than repaying the loans, and if you ever stop being able to pay the interest without paying the loan, they take your stuff, so so long as your stuff is still worth more than the amount you owe them and you keep paying the interest, they'll keep lending you money.
If your stuff isn't worth enough any more, but you can still pay the interest? well, they might require that you repay some loans before taking more, maybe.
So... yeah, so long as he can still pay interest and his stuff is still worth enough to the banks if they have have to collect in collateral rather than cash? he's still Functionally got exactly the same amount of money he had before: an infinity symbol rather than a number.
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the process of how it came out lead to most people with a clue who were paying attention concluding 'this probably isn't a scam... but it's also probably wrong... but there's a Slim chance it might be an actual thing'.
As events transpired and more pictures and video came out that shifted to 'these people are actually delusional'... because 'partial levitation' was litterally 'behaves exactly like a piece of iron of the same size in a magnetic field'. Which is to say, nothing like a superconductor.
Still pretty sure it's not a scam, because there was no way for the 'scammers' to actually gain, well, Anything out of pretending to have something they didn't, given the way everything happened.
Honestly, the entire process was more someone who got booted from the team tried to steal credit for what they Thought they had while the rest of the team was still trying to nail down if they actually Did have what they thought they did (and, importantly, the ability to replicate it reliably), and the ex-team member doing a very bad job of it in a way that made everyone else on the team look bad, then a mad scramble to salvage That situation even as the origional dubious paper had set off a cascade of internet hype.
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@zaarkeru3391 Frankly, most communists barely know what the hell socialism is (or was) beyond the word they use to seem legitimate rather than like a bunch of bomb throwing psychopaths*. Much like right wing lunatics insist they are 'conservative' for similar reasons.
*Early socialists were quite popular with governments and bankers. They played by the rules and were quite helpfil in mitigating and managing the down sides of capitalism... then the radical political faction that would come to be 'communists' became a thing... they publicly called themselves socialists, claimed to represent socialism... and acted almost indistinguishably from the Anarchists of the day, who were most famous for boming police stations and assasinating government officials and generally just making life difficult and dangerous for everyone, and particularly those with power and authority. One can imagine the consequences of that, no? Meanwhile, Workers Co-ops, and early socialism was basically workers co-ops and various related tools, systems, and ways of thinking about things in practice (and had little or nothing to do with systems of governance), are actually moderately common in... the USA (though one can find them in other places, easily enough). Where they act as what they were pretty much always intended to be: A patch on capitalism to account and compensate for the way industrialisation and automation distorted the labour market (that distortion being detrimental to the workers).
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@stripedcollar335 a 'dark age' is litterally just a period for which we don't have much in the way of written records.
We probably Are in a Cultural dark age due to the complete insanity that is modern copyright law in most of the world, but we're nowhere near the circumstances that lead to the dark ages in Europe.
In the north east, it was mostly that no one was really keeping records of most things yet anyway, in the west, the collapse of the roman empire lead to economic decline that meant that there simply weren't the spare resources to dedicate to specialists whose entire job was to keep records of stuff that didn't really matter all that much in the shorter term, as more people had to be farming etc. locally to make up for the collapse of the trade routes, and big cities couldn't fit enough farm land close enough to the city to do that, so a lot of the biggest cities shrank as people moved to... smaller cities and larger towns where that wasn't a problem.
Society as a whole didn't really Collapse, technological regression was limited and inconsistent, technological Development continued, etc. The biggest problem was probably that no one entity had the resources for most large scale engineering projects anymore. Fortunately the Romans built major infrastructure stupidly well (and even if they couldn't build on that scale, maintainence was still possible for more local entities) to the point where it was still highly significant in many places up until the world wars.
Mind you, the modern world would, in some respects, be a Lot harder hit by such a collapse of trade routes (heck, just look at the effect of recent disruptions), but we're still not talking complete chaos and collapse.
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Well, in this case there's a fair bit of evidence that it probably wasn't a Scam, just because of how the events actually transpired. But, well, it started at 'there is probably an error here, but it Might be a thing' and very quickly shifted to 'this is almost certainly an error' and then 'this thing you are claiming is proof not only isn't proof, but isn't even what you're claiming it is' with all the 'partial levitation' nonsense (and it wasn't just the people who made the thing and initially claimed it to be a room temperature super conductor who were claiming 'behaves exactly like iron in a magnetic field' was 'partial levitaiton' which somehow meant something completely different).
So... yeah, dudes were wrong. Probably weren't faking or trying to scam anyone, just wrong. And to be fair, LK-99 apparently IS a bit weird and interesting. It's just... not at all a room temperature, ambiant pressure, super conductor. If they ever legitimately got results indicating such (rather than messurement errors or misinterpreted data), then it was due to something else weird happening in the manufacturing process.
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@donaldhobson8873 whether it's multiplied or divided by technology depends on the speicifc technology, yes. It's not consistent. But you do run into the problem that if an LED uses less electricity, the electrical bill goes down, which leaves a gap in people's electricity budget, which they generally fill by either getting/using something they couldn't afford to before, or being less careful with their energy usage now that the preassure's taken off. (screens are more energy efficient, thus costing less to run? sure, that could result in less electricity usage... or we could have bigger screens now that they fit in our existing energy budget! ... ok, purchase price is a bigger issue there, but it's not an invalid example. Graphics cards are similar. More efficiency doesn't result in less use, so much as better results for the same use, most of the time.)
Well, unless the cost of living is going up and making everything worse, in which case the excess funds for electricity will be reallocated to other things (that's functionally affluence going down though, I think?)
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I'd be more interested in the one they've built in Japan, to be honest. It's actually built in one of the Exceptionally Rare use cases where the specific tradeoffs that come with the advantages and disadvantages of maglev compared to regular rail actually make sense, and so it's actually indicative of whether maglev tech is equivalent to hyperloop (complete nonsense) or monorail (actually does have valid use cases where it's better than regular rail, they're just very limited).
Well, to be fair, maglev is Already substantially ahead of the hyperloop. They have actually been built and used in practice, after all. Generally they've then been repalced by more suitable regular rail or the like, but they Did work. Unlike the hyperloop which... well, it never actually happened. Even the test track wasn't actually the tech that was promissed, and the actuall Result of that nonsense that got built was...well, we all know about that. Not even vaguely indicative of the initial concept.
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