One thing you can do when people are spending money on magic beans is point out that magic beans don’t exist and they are all stupid for buying them. The other thing you could do is open a magic bean store.
Ideally you do the first part while buying up all the beans for cheap, then commence step 2: convince people they are super valuable and sell the magic beans for profit.
If gold is inherently valueless, then isn’t shipping all of it away immediately to other countries in return for useful goods the most rational thing to do?
And if they could get gold at a fraction of the cost of other countries and exchange it for useful goods, isn’t that more rational than building the goods yourself?
The Spanish were not stupid and were not acting irrationally — except perhaps thinking on too short of a time frame. The gold trade was a total moral abomination, but it was a good trade economically for hundreds of years.
The main problem was that it was basically an arbitrage play and once the margin got erased from inflation, they had let the rest of their economy atrophy.
This is one of the reasons the Saudis invest so much money in tech companies and other industries.
It wasn't an arbitrage thing and I'm not sure there's anything fruitful in the comparison to saudi arabia.
The Spanish Empire was, more than anything else, a product of the reconquista. The major institutions of Spain were all directed towards the taking and holding of new lands. When granada finally surrendered in 1492, the monarchy turned towards conquering the canaries and then the new world to avoid the large scale structural changes needed to go from a militaristic, medieval nation to a peacetime state in the early modern. The systems of repartimiento and encomienda were more or less borrowed wholesale from the reconquista. The conquistadors and chroniclers all saw the Americas through the lens of the chivalric literature they loved. The name "California" was borrowed from one of those books, about a fictional island of Amazons who aided the moors.
Precious metals were a solution to the problems Spanish monarchs had in organizing Spanish society. It paid for soldiers in the monarchy's constant wars. It paid off loans to italian and dutch financiers, and it was something that could much more easily be controlled by a distant monarch than import duties or taxation (which nobility were largely exempt from). It also gave them some limited control over their inflation issues by devaluing and revaluing the coinage as financial pressures required. This eventually caused other problems, but the point is that Spain was never really an arbitrage play. They didn't have to be, since they controlled some 30% of the world's gold supply and >90% of its silver at points.
> The conquistadors and chroniclers all saw the Americas through the lens of the chivalric literature they loved.
More like the opposite. The Golden Age of Spain was all about making fun on the knight from the "New Man" making wealth from the Americas.
Heck, it's the main theme from Don Quixote. The old, idealistic, outdated, Medieval wannabe-knight (hidalgo meant hijo-de-algo, son of something, hereditary titles) vs the simpleton but grounded peasant from the New World era. Also tons of peasants tried to travel overseas to make good money, and maybe scaled up their status to the ones from a merchant.
As Cervantes itself was a limp from a war which was something reminiscing old romantic but bullshit times, with Don Quixote you have the clear message that the warrior/knights were looked down against the traveler making wealth from overseas.
Kinda like a far west outdated "Justiciero" in the US from an aristocratic background compared to some middle-level educated hick but with a prosperous job in the 50's thanks to making good money from trade in a fish port.
Don Quixote came out nearly a century after Cortes and is often cited as specifically having killed the genre/culture it was parodying. Look at how much Diaz talks about Amadis with full seriousness.
I would like to think that the New World self-building travelling pragmathism killed the epic born maybe from the Reconquista epics and of course from El Cid.
It's like finding New York policemen devouring dime novels around the Far West and believing themselves as lonely, macho gunslingers...
In the end the 70's cop movies aren't that different to a Western movie, but they still look a bit rusty compared to a Charles Bronson movie with slight detective skills where a bit of slow pace and thinkering it's needed and most of the old rural tropes wouldn't apply to a big city.
A similar thing would be comparing the Medieval Spain tactics against the post-Spain birth ones where guns were becoming to be the norm, such as the Arcabuz.
The old men in knight novels fought for their own good cause, but the New World men where just about the profit and trade. Coming back to Spain with goods was far more 'secure' than getting your life threatened by Mesoamerican tribes everyday. I mean, if you got the goods and avoided any fight, the better. It would be the most rational thing to do for the times. Specially without advanced medicine.
Meanwhile, it's obvious that the old Quixotic man wasn't afraid of death, but the new pragmatic Spaniard would have for sure a different mindset.
Still a Catholic, but he would value far more its life once he was aware that some of his neighbours could improve their life in a trip and actually have some terrenal, tangible, REAL goods to enjoy instead of being tied to a farm or the fields and maybe just religion and the paradise as a relief.
Your values could quickly shift once you turned back to Spain loaded as hell with spices -very valuable for the time-, salt, exotic fruits, gold and who knows what. That and the incipient technology. Windmills? Guns? Far better ships? To hell with the hoe.
They did what was considered the rational at the time.
The modern view would be that investing the money can product long term economic benefits. The Saudis are trying to turn the temporary oil wealth into more permanent economic strength, so they'll remain wealthy when the oil is gone.
The files of a high profile and long running investigation are going to be full of false leads, hoaxes and other bullshit. The reason they don’t just always release the files after closing cases is that there genuinely are going to he innocent people caught in the crossfire who have privacy rights.
This case is so important and such a clusterfuck that the files need to be opened anyway.
Person asking above question explains he doesn’t understand so I guess he also doesn’t understand prosecutors, lawyers, law enforcement, judges make mistakes.
So yes this is best explanation. Revealing everything might bring great harm to innocent people just because they were somehow mentioned in the documents.
Just add all the experience we already have with “internet investigators” that ruin people lives for petty reasons.
The signatories have spent years attacking free expression. A particularly acute case is when it comes to things like advocating for the end of israeli occupation in palestine, but there are many others. Whining about BLM is a particularly common approach for Thomas Chatterton Williams.
The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.
Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.
Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.
I think you're really off base. A quick search about what Williams has said about censorship on the right seems to undermine your one non-weiss example [1]. There were more than a hundred signatories from across a fairly wide political spectrum (and the letter itself was anti-Trump). The handful of signatories that I follow have squarely denounced right wing censoriousness - I'm open to hearing that I'm seeing a non-representative sample, but you didn't provide any useful info on that front.
Notice how this article frames the entire thing as caused by the left and happily ignores the fact that what is happening under Trump is not new. Were the excesses of the left the cause of the Stop Woke Act in Florida? The right has been screaming about firing professors since God and Man at Yale was published. In my opinion, this is not anything resembling a serious accounting of the threats to speech from the right.
And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.
In terms of the actual topic, I would be shocked if Williams approved of spiking the CECOT 60 mins story, if it is in fact politically motivated as many suspect. And I'm not particularly a "fan" of Williams or anything, though I've heard him on a couple of podcasts.
But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.
So, can we see him writing about how this was a bad thing?
Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.
Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.
People in the US now have to use VPN’s to get access to domestic news from a foreign country. I think it’s fair to say that the wheels have come off democracy and things are badly broken.
Things are bad, but the worst part isn’t hidden/missing principled reporting, it’s that a significant number of people don’t care to attend to it where it exists, domestically or internationally. And a majority of US voters cast their ballot for this outcome, so in a sense it’s democracy working as intended, however horrifying any problems or outcomes.
Plurality of voters, narrowly, but still it's enough.
How many just vote Republican without thought as they have always done, how many are in the fox news cult? So many people just thought they didn't want a female president or Trump would lower inflation. It's hard for me to accept that Trump represents America, but he represents enough of it.
They didn't like go out on Dec 21st, and look where the sun was and mark it. They didn't even have calendars like that. They watched the sun every day, and waited until it stopped being lower in the sky at it's highest point in the day (or whatever other sign of the solstice they wanted to use), and marked that angle and built whatever viewport they wanted (a door, tunnel, etc).
Then they could just go wherever they built the thing that pointed at that point in the sky, and go, oh, okay, the solstice is soon, or just happened, or whatever and plan accordingly.
It actually wasn't really accurate to the day, anyway. There are a few days on either side of the solstice where the effect is basically the same for the viewer.
Something to keep in mind is that this isn't only useful for determining the exact date of the winter solstice, which they may not have even cared that much about. You can see roughly where you are in the year on either side of the solstice by looking at how far out of alignment the sun is on a given day. So it could be useful throughout the fall and even well into the winter for gauging the passing of time. People didn't need to plan day by day or even week by week, but they did need to do things in roughly the right part of the year.
People act like this is some unexplainable advanced technology, and anybody can just do this with a stick and some rocks.
she is a producer, not making anything innovative music wise (she must have done similar things thousands of times), with a long experience in live music, and she is a/?the? core dev of the tool she is using.
honestly i think the planning is at most a few minutes long (once she decides what she will go for) then she probably let the experience talk.
This is such conspiracy theory bullshit. The point was that China controlled an algorithm and platform that was capable of manipulating the views of millions of Americans on _any_ topic. Maybe some people cared about Israel especially, but that wasn't the overall reason for trying to get TikTok in the US out of Chinese control.
You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.
I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.
Yes, and serious voices have been calling for that since at least the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is especially true now that the owner of X is openly calling for major political changes in the EU.
This only makes sense. People correctly understood that foreign media organizations are a risk to self-governance and the tech companies which took much of their power should be treated the same way.
The American government, even today, simply does not have comparable cooperation with private companies. If Facebook and Twitter decide one day that they’ll no longer permit people to post mean things about American political leaders, a policy that is at least routine and I think universal in China, I think it would be a no-brainer for Europe to ban them. (Even if they release a special global version of the app that they promise isn’t subject to domestic censorship rules.)
The fact that they u-turned on so many policies the second Trump got into power shows otherwise. Not to mention the owner of X was Trumps right hand man for the first 6 months post-election.
Well, part of an LLM's fine tuning is telling it what it is, and modern LLMs have enough learned concepts that it can produce a reasonably accurate description of what it is and how it works. Whether it knows or understands or whatever is sort of orthogonal to whether it can answer in a way consistent with it knowing or understanding what it is, and current models do that.
I suspect that absent a trained in fictional context in which to operate ("You are a helpful chatbot"), it would answer in a way consistent with what a random person in 1914 would say if you asked them what they are.
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