Eh, you don't need to dismiss the impact of colonialism or have any notion of inherent racial qualities to think this is true. Having strong, consistent institutions and relatively low levels of corruption (or at the very least, concentrated and generally legal corruption) is a per se advantage of operating in a developed economy. If you don't have experience with the other side of things, you probably don't have a clear sense of just how gummed up the works can get with nonsense.
People don't want to live on top of one another. We have a huge country, and we enjoy having our own land. I understand most people in this world don't understand that rationalization, but it is what it is. Murica.
Do you have any sort of proof that this happens on any sort of statistically significant basis? It appears most of the people in this country live in urban places and that this has been an upward trend for a long time...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
Apparently most of America, wants to. Your observation doesn't really mean a whole lot, I could move to Michigan and buy a 10 acre lot for a tenth of what I'd pay here in king county, but I and most of the people that live here don't want to do that....and not only is this my observation - it's a statistical fact.
The last decade has seen people leaving rural areas with their own land to very much live on top of one another in the cities. More Muricans live on top of one another than you're giving credit for. In the context of this thread, no one is suggesting building subways in the middle of Wyoming - this conversation is very much focused on urban areas.
Joyce scholarship in some sense seems like mathematics --- the construct is an invention, axioms can be whatever they are decided to be, and the only question is in how productive and beautiful the construction is.
That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.
> From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs
You're not entitled to having your PRs merged, or even having anyone look at them. PRs not of particular interest to those maintaining the project simply get low priority. Especially with volunteer work, time is limited and while your PR might appear large and of importance to you, it may not look like that from other perspectives.
But the stackoverflow answer is right, and accounts for the fact that in the majority of cases the person who is asking a confused question is indeed confused.
If what you are trying to do is to get best performance, make use of work that other people already did, rather than wasting your time on a solved problem.
If you want to learn about how efficient matrix multiplication can be implemented, that is a different problem.
The problem with Stackoverflow answers of the form "You asked about doing X, but it looks like you are trying to do X to achieve Y, and X is not a good way to achieve Y. You want to do Z. Here's how to do Z" is that later when people who actually do need to do X are looking for help, their searches keep turning up these damned answers that don't tell how to do X.
SO needs a flag on questions that is set if there is an answer to the actual question as asked and clear otherwise, and that can be used as a search filter.
By the way "make use of work that other people already did" might be nice for getting something built fast but it may not be the best thing.
Any issue that involves writing fast code involves tradeoffs. If you sit down to write something new you may have different views on the tradeoffs than whoever wrote "the fastest" one.
Life ain't so black and white. In fact even these 'best of field' products tend to be ugly inside and unoptimized in places. (source: I develop linear algebra libraries)
Bonus: for low level ASM math, every "solved" problem (which by the way it wasn't) becomes unsolved the second Intel or AMD or whoever releases a new chip or coprocessor.
This is something I'm interested in contributing to. Can you name a few libraries (especially ones implementing new and interesting work) that would welcome open source contributors? Alternatively you can just contact me (via my profile info) if you're working on something in particular but would rather not be identified publicly.
This is totally irrelevant, because the governance model of a a company is a limited dictatorship, and not all those people are equal. A company is only the people at its top, the rest are chattel.
A company is also not made of people in the legal sense, it is a separate entity.
That is BS. You are talking about businesses as if all you know about them is from Hollywood movies.
I suggest you go ahead and build a company, any company. You may learn how things really work, not the evil caricature you have in your mind. It's not that hard and it’s quite rewarding.
Evolution only optimizes for having offspring in the future. Trying to find a rational reason for some evolved behavior is not necessarily a fruitful way to think about it.
Not a surprise and not a disappointment either, when it was clear from the start that all results are within measurement error bars, so that there was neither experimental nor theoretical reason to expect to see something.
It also would have literally meant the end of the world in a short period of time. Reactionless rockets with little to no cost or requiring high technical capability would lead to a terrorist shortly speeding up a hunk of lead to near lightspeed and slamming it into a earthside target, and that would be that.
We've had a few thousand nukes, many secured with the password 0000, lying around for a few decades now in a dozen countries, and that hasn't materialized. For some reason, we seem to be much better at imagining ridiculous scenarios for terrorists than they are at implementing them.
Well first that need to get it into orbit and outside of the suns gravity well. Then they'd have to get it far enough away that the lead could get up to light speed before hitting it's target, you can't do this in solar system because you can't change trajectory that fast. Finally they have to aim it correctly at earth from that distance.
A big ask for a group of people who's best technical achievement so far is to fly a plane into a building.
In view of history including colonialism this statement sounds very naive indeed.