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I imagine this is a temporary gig until the burbclaves build out their own armed security services and he moves on to high-speed pizza delivery.

Some rule of law would be nice, so that we don't have to resort to private security forces.

But property laws disproportionally benefit the rich.

> disproportionally

So even you concede they benefit almost everyone, only they benefit some more. So should we really be dismantling them and descend into anarchy, just to harm a group you dislike? Doesn't seem like a good move.


All I'm saying is that if a society wants true equality, it cannot have property laws because some individuals will inevitably own more than others.

We must decide which is more important.


I think the historical evidence is pretty clear that the only way we can achieve true equality in wealth is in equal squalor.

And?

In the current age, can something be both unequal and good?

yes?

And...that is not nice

Only because you hate the rich. I get that it encourages them to share to keep the pitchforks off their lawn, and that noblesse oblige has broken down recently, but property laws are the foundation of our prosperity. If you can't have something that's actually yours (property laws) for you to invest in, then there will be little investment.

Wanting property laws not to give additional advantages beyond those that wealth itself already gives is not hateful. It's also pretty reasonable that the vast majority of people who are not rich might not care about preserving "our" prosperity in the current form. I'm pretty certain there have been plenty of societies with worse quality of life for most people in them throughout history with property laws at least as strict as ours, so it doesn't follow that people would overall be worse off with more egalitarian property rights. This doesn't even address the obvious issues with assumptions that maximizing prosperity is inherently the most important thing; it was arguably more "propserous" to avoid regulating child labor, 40 hour work weeks, minimum wages, etc., but I fundamentally disagree that those would be bad policies even if there were provably shown to reduce "prosperity", whatever that means

But there's a loophole. Burbclaves will need to let deliverators in, which is a gap in the armor. How are they supposed to defend themselves? Some sort of rat thing?

> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?


Allegedly, it was given a lower grade due to it not being a feasible business plan, in the professor's estimation. Of course, this forms part of the legend behind Fred Smith and FedEx, so that should be taken with a grain of salt.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fred-smith-told-yale-professo...


“Initially, Ravel was to create a variation on the music of Isaac Albéniz, but copyright laws prevented him from doing so.” [your article]

“[Koji Kondo] had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme as it perfectly matched its speed, seeing as under Japanese copyright law, music is released into the public domain 50 years after the composer's death. However, Kondo was forced to change it in November 1985, late in the game's development, after learning that it had only been 47 years and 11 months after Ravel's death.”[1]

Funny how things rhyme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...


A few years after this, a documentary was made about some of the men still living at the Sunshine (mentioned in the first paragraph): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0m2FaC8GUs


Great assessment of Dave Barry


> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?


In 1997 Linux was still so niche that the hacker-to-user-ratio was definitely on par with BSD.


BSD was much less desktop oriented then, and there wasn't newbie friendly documentation around.

Whereas it was a niche but still relatively common for teenage hobbyists to install Linux, get X11 running, read the HOWTOs and surf the web with Netscape for Linux[1] on the home (or school) PC and geeking out on all the Unix things that you heard the older kids got to use at the university lab workstations.

You could argue those users had the hacker spirit of course and many of them did learn programming as well after a while since you still ended up building stuff from source half the time when you wanted to install something.

It helped that you could easily get your hands on cheap Linux install CDs in bookstores and computer shops.

[1] Netscape seems to have been at version 4.0 by 1997. WP thinks version 2 was already available for Linux.


Honestly, I didn't even think of BSD. I actually don't know anyone who uses it on a personal level, I assumed it was more of an OS that you had to use for your job. But I guess, given how niche it is for individual use, you'd be right. But to be pedantic, if you took something really obscure (like hobbyist OSes that have little practical use), you'd probably get to a 100% "hacker" user base.


Playstation, Juniper, NetApp, Netflix to name a few small users. If you touch any of these, you use it too.


I know many OSes are based on FreeBSD, I assumed that OP implied people who used the actual standard distribution of it, not highly-customized embedded or similar versions. Also, using Netflix wouldn't make one a BSD user just because it's what they run on their servers.


Don't forget macOS and iOS, Darwin is also derived from BSD.


I’ve been seeking out classic phpbb-style forums more and more for community. I just stopped browsing Reddit a few weeks ago after realizing there was nothing I’d truly miss: no characters that I’d come to know, and no reason to maintain a relationship with anyone there in particular. Regarding “identity,” I actually feel that Reddit (and of course Facebook) rely on it too much: maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).


> maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).

One of the few things Google+ actually got right (admittedly after a good deal of pressure from the community) was the ability to set up simple one-way pseudonyms. It meant you could talk about business or mental health without it being forever chained to your real name.


Very sorry for your loss. An uncle had bladder cancer about 15 years ago, and while he survived, it began a very steep decline that led to his passing in 2022.


Right off the bat I get something that sounds like something Frank Klepacki would have used in the Red Alert 2 soundtrack (likely pulled from Methods of Mayhem). Nice.


> For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect.

Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?


I'm happy they didn't choose to go full authentic with quirks mode and table-based layouts, because Firefox has some truly ancient bugs in nested table rendering... that'll never get fixed, because... no one uses them anymore!


I think the layout as such (the grid of categories) isn't particularly dated, though a modern site would style them as tiles. The centered text can feel a little dated, but the biggest thing making it feel old is that it uses the default browser styles for a lot of page elements, particularly the font.


I think it’s the former. Many of these retro layouts are pretty terrible. They existed because they were the best at the time, but using modern HTML features to recreate bad layouts from the last is just missing the point completely.


They’re making their own point. This is a document as a piece of expression and communication, not pure utility.


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