If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals. This seems to be a hard thing for many to understand or accept because it is largely a second order effect, the capitalist primarily concerned with their own personal gain but winds up improving the lives of others as a side effect.
This is the essence of Adam Smith's often misunderstood invisible hand metaphor. Of the individual he observed: "By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Second order effects stack up and improve quality of life for more people better than trying to do so explicitly.
Multiplying capital creates abundance and that abundance allows for improved standards of living for and the means to spend excess resources in support of charitable endeavors. Growth is good because it means more abundance and opportunity. I would argue that pursuit of growth is not an ideology but a force of nature. Life is opportunistic and will expand to wherever there is fertile conditions, and often adapt even when they are not. We are part of nature and understand this intuitively, seeking growth opportunities. As an example, one is better off being part of a growing company (more wages and opportunities) than one that is stagnant or declining (fighting for scraps and survival).
>If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals
If you look at it empirically, the majority of people brought out of poverty (and I suspect the other metrics but am not as familiar with them) in the past few decades have been in China as the result of deliberate policies by the CPC.
Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.
They are being honest, you're just being pedantic. The fact that everyone pays taxes which ultimately pay for e.g. socialized health care/insurance or college-level education doesn't alter the fact that for the person receiving it, said good comes with no invoice, which is a conventional meaning of "free".
The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
If we’re talking about social costs and social benefits then it does matter. Different countries can have wildly different costs for delivering the same education, an education whose value to society (or lack thereof) needs to be taken into account.
Whether an education is paid for by loans or by higher taxes, the cost is ultimately borne by someone. In neither case is it free and in both cases its cost-benefit difference should be scrutinized.
> The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.
Anybody who imagines that the use of the term "free" in connection these resources/services means that they fall out of the sky should stay as far away from public policy decisions as possible.
I went to school (K-BS(c)) in the UK, and it was entirely normal to talk about that as "free", despite the fact that in dozens of conversations my parents would discuss the way in which their local taxes funded all of it, including my university education. People are not that stupid ...
> "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions.
Calling these programs “free” obfuscates the issue because there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing; they genuinely don’t understand that the resources have to come from somewhere, which means someone else who does not necessarily benefit from the program pays for it now or those benefitting from the program have to pay for it later.
> Apologies if English isn't your first language.
I would encourage you to review the site guidelines. These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
>there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing
Untrue.
>These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
"Free" has a specific meaning in English, and someone who doesn't speak it fluently might think that it means, for example, "appearing from nothing". Whereas a fluent English speaker of sound mind understands that "free" refers to the price in a transaction. No one thinks that the "free pizza" at an event was created at no cost to anyone in the supply chain that brought it there. They just understand that it means that they won't be charged for consuming it. But for some reason, I never hear people make a big deal about how "I can't believe you'd say free pizza when I know that your organization had to pay for it!" It's always when it comes to reactionary opposition to social services where this simple word immediately becomes so much more nuanced and impossible to comprehend for the layperson.
You know these people exist. Try asking them where the money is going to come from to finance this education and see if more than 10% of them can explain it to you.
> "Free" has a specific meaning in English
You’ve made a few allusions to the idea that the people pushing back on this reading of the word “free” speak English as a second language when there’s been no indication that this is true; it’s just something you’re saying to imply that these people are less intelligent than you. I would again encourage you to read the site guidelines. Posting like this is contrary to the spirit of the forum.
> Whereas a fluent English speaker of sound mind understands that "free" refers to the price in a transaction.
The price for whom? If a parent pays for their child’s education, it would be very uncommon for the child to say that his education was “free.”
Similarly, state-funded education is free to the college student. It’s not free for taxpayers who don’t attend the college. They are a party to the transaction because they are the ones paying for it.
Obviously. But part of a democracy is voting on politicians who will choose what resources are distributed. Do you think "TANSTAAFL" every time you take a road without paying a toll?
The student does not participate in a transaction that involves paying money in exchange for education. Taxes are collected and allocated as seen fit by the state. Students and others pay their taxes, but taxes are not directly transactional.
…but there is cost to the student or their family. The difference being that paying for it or not is not an option. You can’t just say “I won’t go to uni, so I won’t pay for it”
By this definition, nothing is "free"; there is always some cost, whether financial or otherwise. It's an absurd bit of pedantry that does nothing but derail discussion. Free tuition is free at the point of sale to the student, just like the interstate I drive on sometimes is free to use as compared to the toll roads, even though my taxes paid for both. It's not complicated terminology.
It's not free, but because of its unique market shaping power, the government is often the best & the cheapest way to do things like education or health care, because it has no incentives to spend money on bullshit to raise prices.
That's why there's a harpist in the hall in fancy hospitals in the US and not at Necker in Paris, or why the administration at universities in the US is multiple times the size you'll see in France. Market shaping incentives.
Netscape 6, which was released in 2000 and based on the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) recommended 64MB of RAM. The Mozilla Suite was the basis of the Phoenix project (later renamed to Firefox) and they shared the same technological underpinnings: Gecko engine, SpiderMonkey JS engine, XUL interface, XPCOM, etc. Phoenix/Firefox was about using the Mozilla technology to deliver just a browser, independent of the suite, with aim of being lighter weight. So while Firefox didn't exist yet its heavier predecessor did.
How I yearn for when their marketing had everyday people touting how "Windows 7 was my idea!" Every Windows release since then has felt like they are hostile to user input.
The very top and very bottom are a 55% to 45% split in either direction. It's not a heavy skew, a single party flip in the quintile from the majority to the minority would make it 50/50 even. Those quintiles cancel each other out when voting on party/caucus lines. It's actually the 2nd and 4th quintiles that have the biggest skews. Democrats take the 2nd quintile while Republicans take the 3rd and 4th.
I definitely appreciate your measurements, but I think your analysis is off.
The top & bottom quintiles don't cancel out, but rather support the same trend, which is that Republicans have more voting power per capita.
That said, I am surprised that the top & bottom quintiles are nearly balanced. I'll have to look up which bottom quintile states have Democratic senators.
I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.
The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.
It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.
It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.
The ironic part is, we became the wall. Many immigrants stayed in Mexico because they couldn't cross to USA. Trump invited our wimpy president to a secret meeting, afterwards Mexico silently made the change of attitude from country of passage to destination.
Yeah: If someone donates money to the government for any purpose, that becomes government funds, and the Constitution says Congress and only Congress has the authority to decide where those go. Not the President.
So either Trump is doing this officially as a President, but with funding that is illegal/unconstitutional...
... Or the funding is legal, but Trump is doing it as a private citizen, which is a federal crime. [0]
The Supreme Court will jiggle the constitution and some forgotten legal precedent from the magna carta will fall out and 5-4 this is actually not a problem at all if you think about it.
Doesn't matter if a trillion dollars was shat by God himself out of a plane into the Treasury. They failed to get historic district planning permission, they failed to save historic materials and objects, and lied about the plan. The now revealed plan is an gaudy, boorish, tasteless, and tacky abomination because that is the essence Trump.
I've seen it where a project needs to get done but the company can't hire anyone for it due to firm wide hiring freezes. So in come the consultants to bang out a sloppy version 1. In the meantime you wait it out until you can hire a real team and gradually transition them in to rewrite what the consultants did. At least the company will have learned something from the consultants trying to implement the project. When your domain is complicated and has many dependencies there's some value in having anyone trying to figure that stuff out.
Of course, when the project is inevitably a late, half functioning, buggy mess you get to blame the consultants.
That was still in place at least when I left, and I'd be amazed if it got replaced. It was one of those wonderful pieces of infrastructure that you rarely even notice because it just quietly works the whole time.
NCSA also used it for some data archival and I believe for hosting the website files.
I looked up at one point whatever happened to AFS and it turns out that it has some Amdahl’s Law glass ceiling that ultimately limits the aggregate bandwidth to something around 1 GBps, which was fine when it was young but not fine when 100Mb Ethernet was ubiquitous and gigabit was obtainable with deep enough pockets. If adding more hardware can’t make the filesystem faster you’re dead.
I don’t know if or how openAFS has avoided these issues.
The Amdahl's Law limitations are specific to the implementation and not at all tied to the protocols. The 1990 AFS 3.0 server design was built upon a cooperative threading system ("Light Weight Processes") designed by James Gosling as part of the Andrew Project. Cooperative processing influences the design of the locking model since there isn't any simultaneous between tasks. When the AFS fileserver was converted to pthreads for AFS 3.5, the global state of each library was protected by wrapping it with a global mutex. Each mutex was acquired when entering the library and dropped when exiting it. To complete any fileserver RPC required acquisition of at least six or seven global mutexes depending upon the type of vnode being be accessed. In practice, the global mutexes restricted the fileserver process to 1.7 cores regardless of how many cores were present in the system.
AuriStor's RX and UBIK protocol and implementation improvements would be worthless if the application services couldn't scale. To accomplish this required converting each subsystem so it could operate with minimal lock contention.
This 2023 presentation by Simon Wilkinson describes the improvements that were made to AuriStor's RX implementation up to that point.
> In practice, the global mutexes restricted the fileserver process to 1.7 cores regardless of how many cores were present in the system.
So in theory the bandwidth could scale with single CPU and/or point to point bandwidth but cannot scale horizontally at all. Except on the new implementations.
Correct, and the point-to-point bandwidth is limited by the maximum RX window size because of the bandwidth delay product. As round-trip latency increases, at some point the window size becomes insufficient to keep the pipe full, at which point data transfers stall.
One site which recently lifted and shifted their AFS cell to a cloud made the following observations:
We observed the following performance while copying a 1g file from local disk into AFS.
AuriStor Client (2021.05-65) -> OpenAFS server (1.6.24): 3m.11s
AuriStor Client (2021.05-65) -> AuriStor Server (2021.05-65): 1m
AuriStor Client (2025.00.11) -> AuriStor Server (2025.00.11): 30s
All of the above tests were performed from clients located on campus to fileservers located in in the cloud.
There are many RX implementation differences between the three versions. It is important to note that the window size grows from 32 -> 128 -> 512.
I may be confusing two systems but I believe that AFS system was also encompassed the first iteration of “AWS Glacier” I encountered in the wild. A big storage that required queuing a job to a tape array or pinging an undergrad to manually load something for retrieval.
I know some large financial institutions that still use it. They were building big systems using the stuff in the 90s and early 00s. It still works and nobody has the appetite to rewrite it as it's a massive undertaking that would be very expensive and high risk. Better to just keep updating it to support the occasional new requirement.
They'll rarely advertise it in a job listing of course. They're looking for people with Java/C#/C++/Python experience, and there's certainly plenty of that, but also thousands of little Perl scripts doing ETL workflows.
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