> Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?
Yes, please! Maximally efficient is minimally robust.
We need robustness in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.
In addition, we need competition in a lot of areas where we have complete consolidation right now. The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.
I agree that we do need robustness in our production and economies, and a lot of it. But I don't really believe that most tariffs, especially current ones, will ensure that in any way.
Generally if you want stable and reliable local production of something, you subsidize that production or industry. You guarantee a certain amount of product will be bought/paid for even if a foreign supplier can or is willing to undercut that cost. That is why we have a large agricultural surplus in basically every western country, subsidized crops means there is money on the table for somebody to be in that industry which ensures surplus production even when other places are offering cheap food to trade.
Those can also be misapplied and corrupted, but it is still better than nothing at all or not extremely well planned and implemented tariffs which can sometimes hurt local production of other things still.
> We need robustness in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.
Exactly this.
Economies follow the same general principles of our distributed products. There’s good reasons you pay extra and lower efficiency (a bit) to have redundancy and resilience. We saw that we need more of it during COVID lockdown chaos.
Generally lowering tariffs has been a good thing overall, but there’s a point where it stops being beneficial.
Lisp lost because none the the Lisperati came down from on high and deigned to explain how to use it for tasks running on the 1980s microcomputers.
Lisp also lost because the 1980s Lisperati spent all their time explaining lists and recursion over and over instead of explaining hash tables, vectors, and iteration.
Somehow, Lisp lost out to pathetically slow BASIC interpreters and C compilers that you had to swap floppies continuously for hours. That is a stunning level of fail.
Given that most modern languages are an half implementation of Lisp, with exception of C derived languages, in GC, JIT, JIT caches, REPL, dynamic code loading, IDE tooling, and how this AI wave is driven by the language that Peter Norvig coined as being an acceptable Lisp in 2010, I would say it still suceeded.
Amazon had better return policies. I suspect that is gone. I'll probably buy even less from Amazon, anymore.
I've gotten 2 different "You didn't return the right item" because I presume some underpaid, overworked contractor at the Amazon return site lost it or stole it.
Fortunately, the second one is very well documented, so Amazon is going to lose badly if they don't figure out what is going on.
A bit of engineering and a lot of myth and degradation due to time.
The engineering seems to be a combination of genuine construction advances and the usage of wood that was abnormally dense due to having been grown during a big drought.
This, of course, contributed to the "myths" around the Strads with the varnishes, techniques, etc. supposedly being "The Thing(tm)" that made Strads so much better.
Finally, wood degrades with time--period. It doesn't matter how much you try to preserve it, it's just fact. The current Strads are either "Ship of Theseus" type violins, or they are heavily degraded.
At this point, modern luthiers create better instruments than even a Strad in its prime. They have access to better woods, better glues and finishes, better tools and training, better analyzers and better players than anyone in the time of Stradivarius.
When played as close to double blind as is possible, the data comes back with modern players preferring modern violins made by modern luthiers over the old Strads.
> We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.
I disagree.
Even if you simply made the database no cost but such that an actual human has to show up at an office with a signed request, that is fine. That's still open.
The problem isn't the openness; it's the aggregation.
> The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.
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