Pretty normal margin in some kinds of businesses, like supermarkets. Then again, supermarkets aren’t likely to see all their customers leave at the drop of a hat.
You are forgetting that tenured researchers often need lots of PhD students to actually do their research. So that ratio of 8 PhDs to a tenured researchers could actually be pretty good.
I know it’s not popular to bring politics into things on HN, but… From the outside at least, White House policy sounds like at least as much of a black swan event as COVID.
I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought. But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries. Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones. These people are generally easy to reach for populists and propagandists.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
Anything touching disk, such as reading a bunch of source files is just so much slower on windows right now. From what I hear it improves a little if you actually go through the Linux subsystem, but it just can’t touch native Linux performance.
Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.
Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.
And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.
Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.
Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.
Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
At 20mph in a well-designed street, there’s still a lot of opportunity for people to keep themselves safe. Not so much with guns.
On badly designed streets and with bad and/or speeding drivers, on the other hand.
And don’t get me started on the dangers of cars with high hoods. We’ve known for years that to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe, they need to go on top of the car, instead of under it.