Yeah if they got power they might try to ban their political opponents!

That kind of stability does make money.

Contrary to what MBAs want to believe, there’s no way to actually model a business in its entirety. Instead we have to use heuristics. And that predictability — minimizing the amount of potential energy in outstanding transactions (like searches paid for but not yet used) — is of value.

One can put a number on the value, but such numbers are always a little arbitrary.

Stepping back though, even if we want to make an attempt at a purely numerically model, the present value of selling a search can go way negative if one has to keep the server running indefinitely until a person uses the search.

If I sell you a search, and then you wait ten years to actually use the search, my side of the contract ends up including ten years’ worth of server costs as my server sits there waiting for you to use the search.

Again, it’s an edge case, but it illustrates the point. The cost of delivering on my sold goods goes up the longer you take to actually collect those goods. The physical world analogy would be if I sold you a car but then you took ten years to take possession of the car: now I’m paying for a garage to store that car for ten years.

Generally speaking, that’s the monetary reason to put a cap on the time involved in delivering on a sale.

Another angle to look at it is that money tends to devalue over time, and so goods (relative to money) tend to inflate in value over time. If I sell you a baseball for $10 and then you take a hundred years to collect on my baseball promise, maybe by then a baseball costs $100 and I’ve “lost $90”.

In summary, there are numerical models that show the costs of unbounded delivery times, but even without that there is a value to the predictability boon of keeping transactions time bound.

It needs to be able to tell nearby devices to “say cheese”, so they can blink their LEDs prettily before you take a photo.

Basically because the product they’re selling isn’t “You get to do a search whenever” but “You get to do a search this month”.

The reason for that, based on my experience with various web startups, is they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.

If millions of people pay their $5 and then don’t use their searches, then in the extreme case Kagi could be maintaining servers twenty years later in anticipation that their customers might use those searches.

It’s an edge case, but it illustrates the point.

Also, on the customer side, there’s a psychological benefit to free things. Free as in “already paid for; no cost to using it”.

If you have something that can be used this month but not any other month, then using it is free. If using it now means you can’t use it next year, then there’s still a cost to it despite it already being paid for.

Not just mines, but sleeper drones with onboard AI that just sit there for decades due to an extra zero in a config variable before suddenly activating as if the war is still happening.

Yes. It only takes one party to initiate violence involving two parties.

This is why it is necessary to be prepared for violence even if one never initiates violence.

Violence is for situations when one’s choice of other resolution methods is gone. Such situations do exist.

This is true of everyday people. But a small percentage of people are psychopaths, who are perfectly happy to be violent whenever they can get away with it.

A seriously deprived scenario will make others violent, but there is always a subset that is violent even in comfortable situations.

Thinking that it is better to cause harm o an attacker rather than permitting the attacker to harm oneself is not a dystopian attitude.

A place in which it is possible that someone might try to hurt you isn’t a dystopia. It’s a natural part of reality.

A place in which no aggression exists is, however, a utopia.

There’s a difference between “violent crime exists” and “violent crime is so prevalent that regular citizens need to carry around an implement designed to kill people quickly while they go about their daily lives.”

Only if you haven’t yet experienced violent crime.

I carry a weapon because of one violent encounter I experienced in 2009.

I decided that I never want it to happen again, so I am content to carry a weapon for the 1/1000000 times that it happens.

I’ve had hundreds of thousands of encounters with strangers and only one of them involved the stranger trying to seriously hurt me. That one was enough to change my view on the nature of reality.

Crashes don’t have to be prevalent in one’s life in order to wear a seatbelt.

People should be confined to boxes full of packing foam. This reduces the variable and permits police to control the situation more easily.

No he’s saying that weapons permit people to be equally strong.

Without weapons, big people get to control smaller people. With weapons, a person gets to modify their own susceptibility to being controlled.

I’m guessing you’re a rather large person if you don’t understand this.

No, being limited in self defense to the power of your body is a pre-civilized state. Asking women to punch people to defend themselves is nature rules. That’s where whoever’s biggest gets to take advantage of people.

Well not if you aren’t armed. If you are armed, you do get to kill people.

An armed society is a polite society.

Actually increasing the level of possible violence (and also the uncertainty of violent outcomes) does lead to a reduction in aggression. You have to be willing to think it through though.

My car isn’t driverless, but I as the driver have less control than ever before.

It’s an EV, and it will not shift to drive or reverse if the charging cable is attached.

Great for preventing me from destroying a charger. Terrible for getting away from someone trying to mug me.

Far too much of the safety features these days assume an environment in which all harm is accidental. This comes at the cost of safety in environments where someone is trying to harm another person.

Given the amount of the playable game that takes place on foot, they should have called it Field

Did they fix the driving?

That was the one and only reason I gave up the game. It was amazing from the start, and then I got in a car and it was horrible, and I stopped.

Listen to the soundtrack, then compose something new

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