Not quite never. You just need the tax rate plus marginal change in lost benefits/increased obligations to exceed 100%. For example there’s a breakpoint in the UK around childcare over 100k income that makes it way worth salary sacrificing to get below if you have kids. I can imagine there are similar niche things for small businesses around audit requirements or whatever, but not enough of an expert to know.

“show people what they can do with it” - pushing so hard. Hammer in search of a nail…

“God, modernist literary fiction is so plebian.” - anon probably.

Next he’ll ask for “ulysses” and get mad when pointed to James Joyce instead of Homer.

Do you think sitting on your arse claiming there’s nothing to be done is more or less demoralising than singing in the streets with like minded people?

Maybe you work different than most humans, but I think the answer to that is pretty obvious for the rest of us.

US economic output is more than adequate to achieve this already, but we choose instead to concentrate the benefits in the hands of a few.

Regarding tarrifs bringing back manufacturing: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/trumps-tariffs-what-is-behind-them-and-will-they-work “but this is very unlikely to work. Manufacturing has changed, with production now spread across multiple countries in so-called ‘global value chains’. Moving whole supply chains back to the US is going to be prohibitively expensive, result in rising consumer prices and make US-produced goods internationally uncompetitive. The model of manufacturing that underpins Trump’s approach simply hasn’t existed for the best part of 40 years, and is not coming back.”

First pass googling this returns very low information quality. I suspect “calculable” is more more like it than “measurable” but would love to see a source where measurements had been made that showed this effect greater than standard error.

“If not duffers, won’t drown. If duffers, better drowned.”

Avoiding Gell-Mann amnesia! Unfortunately, to even get to this question you have to be expert enough in one area to see through the BS… Not a luxury everyone is afforded.

Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you’ll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver’s mechanical advantage.

By analogy, if you’re using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can’t lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn’t fit under a particular rock or whatever.

If your basket has a big fuck off hole in it stop putting eggs in…

Thus frames the eggs as the humans and the basket as earth. Could easily flip it and say we are stewards of one planet and if we fuck up so catastrophically we have to leave maybe our arrival wouldn’t be the best idea for the next habitable planet we land on…

Wow, that was their takeaway from that game? I honestly didn’t think about it once the whole playthrough, why are they so desperate to role play racism/sexism?

I can’t help comparing it (unfavourably) to baldurs gate 1. The story just didn’t hook me the same way.

God I hadn’t thought about it that way. Scroobius pip wrote “Tommy c” about it, which has a really positive spin, so I always thought about that angle.

Yeah, I the flaws define the character, more even than the relationship with Watson in my eyes. I quite enjoyed Johnny Lee miller in “elementary” the same way for actually being shown struggling.

Superhero Downey Jr type holmes’ are fine in their own way but sort of misses the point.

I haven’t played a lot of souls, but elden ring death (both of non-boss enemies and protagonist) is super toothless. What made it more relevant in previous games?

Omg yes. It was not just a corridor. It was a send up of every game corridor game that I had played to that point. Taking a design limitation and making it a compelling plot twist was exactly what made bioshock awesome. One of my top 5 gaming moments of all time.

For me grind is when the gameplay loop is motivated by reward not exploration and plays out the same every time.

Good gameplay can come from a feeling of freshness because there are lots of possibilities, because rng or because player options (say, slay the spire), or from lots of genuinely novel content (say, elden ring).

It doesn’t feel like a balancing act at all. I just want more of the latter and less of the former, but maybe some people really do play for repetition?

That’s a really interesting hypothetical. They always had ads but obviously the early scale and scope was smaller, so revenue was piddling early on. They had pretty limited costs though and were a super hot ticket to give capital to. I mean they needed some kind of financing for their trajectory, which maybe anyway would have pushed them to monetize aggressively any which way.

Ultimately I don’t think we’ll ever know and the examples of people choosing not to get filthy rich off the back of these innovations are extremely rare. Even when e.g. openAI gets set up explicitly as non profit it gets bastardised, so what chance does a regular joint stock company have of operating in the interests of consumers.

Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I’m not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.

Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.

Merry Christmas to you!