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If someone’s ‘story’ improves in notability, attractiveness, attention grabbingness, etc… wouldn’t someone else’s ‘story’ have to decrease in the same?

As human attention is finite. Or is it suggesting that the ‘story’ can somehow qualitatively improve, without limit, while actually occupying less physical time?


How are they so beyond direct detection if they similarly permeate the entire universe?

Every quantum field only interacts ("couples with") a subset of other quantum fields. Undetectable quantum fields would be one that don't couple with any fields we interact with.

We already see something like this with the neutrino: they only interact via the weak force and gravity, so we need massive detectors measured in kilometres and buried underground to detect them.[1,2]

It's estimated that about 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, traveling close to the speed of light.

Now imagine a particle that doesn't even interact via the weak force. The only way we would be able to detect it is via gravity, but gravity is an extremely weak force at the individual particle level. That's a possible candidate for dark matter. (Even particles that interact only via the weak force and gravity are candidates, but it's generally believed they'd have to be more massive than neutrinos.)

There's also the possibility that, if it turns out that gravity is an emergent property arising from quantum interactions or something along those lines, that there could be fields that don't participate in the gravitational interaction. But that's highly speculative territory.

[1] Ice Cube neutrino detector: https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icecube/

[2] Super Kamiokande neutrino detector: https://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/sk/


Then it is a bit strange why it wasn’t designed to be ‘BitTorrent-like’ from the beginning as the parent suggests.

Isn’t there a danger that if the rule is selectively enforced, for whatever reasons, that it will actually decrease the credibility of the participants/organizers?

Who says ‘ 400 years should have been enough time’?

Why not 4000 years or 40000 years?

Or never? There are simply no preordained guarantees.


Why would Soviet statistics suddenly become credible and trustworthy when it comes to grain and oil production?

The entire premise seems flawed.


It seems unlikely that the Soviets would manipulate their statistics in a way that makes them look politically "worse", i.e. if the data are false then imports are likely to be higher, and exports lower than reported which would tend to support the narrative.

There's also the issue that imports and exports involve external counterparties. Of course, you can still fudge your numbers but this will create inconsistencies vs the official statistics of other countries.


The Politburo wouldn’t want to manipulate it that way.

But thousands upon thousands of farm committees would definitely have tried to under declare how much grain they made, keeping some extra to barter as needed, and also to make it easier to hit targets next year.


Who gets to determine the minimum threshold? And how will they enforce it?

Most people have little to no money, hence being without the ability to afford housing. You’re obviously not familiar with the social security system we have in place now. The only thing lacking is the inspiration to escape that system as Medicaid and social security insurance don’t allow for any savings so participants are frightened to lose the only thing keeping them and their family alive. Provide them with housing at no expense, higher education at no expense, and a food stipend and you’ll see a lot more success and a lot less homeless.

Just pay them money which they can spend on housing. Either from free market or from social housing. Lot of housing in Finland is run and owned by municipalities and those units are rented just like others. Only the biggest fuckups go into system where money is directly paid to city for the housing.

You do have leeches, but well it is probably lot cheaper in long run than not paying. Like for example my car has never been broken into. And I haven't heard theft being any way rampant.


anyone can hide and claim they have no money, better to provide housing to good students with good job. We can call it I don't know, "credit score" or something like that.

Enter now a bureaucracy who will ask the right questions, involve all the stakeholders, foster an environment of trust and cooperation, coordinate across organizations, proactively address any issues, create a people-first strategy, etc... Meanwhile nothing gets built....

or just bribe the person who is assigning flats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v7eSQJWxc4, because this system was already tried.

The government and laws?

Which part of what government?

With what legal basis?

Things aren’t magically legal and viable in the real world just because an HN user imagines it.


Most liberal democracies have provision within their founding documents and case law to allow for central governments at all levels to provide for the general welfare.

You are asking highly vague implementation details about a small hypothetical. It comes off as incredibly rude and like you're fishing for some answer you already mentally dunked on.


Why does your opinion matter more than anyone else’s opinion here?

Even if you believe my previous questions were too opinionated, responding with even more can only be detrimental, and it is not going to lead anywhere productive.

For example, try making a substantive argument as to how a credible enforcement system would come into existence. Otherwise the default assumption is that it will not turn out any better than already existing government systems.


I'll add a second opinion to that. Still feeling smug about it?

Smug about an argument I haven’t seen? What do you believe is the actual argument…?

The part where you like to go around being annoying and then when people get upset retreating to "my opinion is just as valuable as yours". Which I think is stupid, except this time I'm not even going to engage on that and directly say that I also agree with their position, which means that not only is your opinion dumb it is also in the minority.

This seems incoherent, how does this relate to the prior comment?

And why would the number of users expressing opinions even matter?

Edit: I’m not here to score points, so it seems irrelevant in any comment chain whatsoever.


Even more so, Probably 100% of the population over 70 has cancer in the sense of a clump of abnormal cell divison, just that for a lot of them it’s so slow growing or in a benign tumor that it doesn’t get discovered or treated.

North Korea didn’t join the 1886 Berne Convention until 2003… so it probably was a free for all until then.

I can just imagine some guy in Pyongyang sitting with fully legal copies of every copyrighted work up until 2003.


That’s more of an issue with the network security then?

And even if computers didn’t exist, it still would make no sense to assume every single person is competent 100% of the time… at any company. Human beings are fallible, and that has to be factored in.


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