Farmers are specialists at growing things, not at moving them across great distances, marketing them to dozens small buyers and or starting up packing plants from scratch. They don't have enough trucks, people or packaging machines to move them around.

Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.

Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.

One of the reasons why it works, is that there are reasonable conditions. For example, regular health checks, strict registration, passing gun safety examination and, last but not least, not being a criminal. And it works. Despite steadily rising number of guns among people, it is one of most safe countries in the world.

Canada, Finland, Austria and many other countries, prove, that you don't have to impose blanket bans to have a safe country. You just need sensible laws.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic

Maybe it would be better to train an LLM with various tuning methodologies and make a dedicated ARIMA agent. You throw in data, some metadata and requested window of forecast. Out comes parameters for "optimal" conventional model.

It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard, in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad either. But nothing since then.

Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying.

Recently, CD Project did make some moves in that direction, but nothing close to what Valve is offering.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental disconnect, between what society needs to function and what some societies are willing to tolerate. Almost everything we take for granted, like potable water, air conditioning, personal computers or long distance transportation, relies on industries generating some sort of externalities.

Regulating these industries is necessary. But we have reached the point, where the regulation makes many of them almost impossible. This has several effects.

First, the society is now dependent on delivery of these dirty products. This is obviously problematic if there is a major crisis that disrupts supply chains, or if those who manufacture them are no longer willing to deliver.

Second, working class collapses. Manufacturing jobs are one of the more stable available. They are generally unionized, or are conductive to unionization. This is unlike service sector jobs. White collar professions can mostly cope. But those who were already disadvantaged find themselves in an even worse position.

Third, the externalities move in locations with less oversight. This can, obviously, cause greater pollution and environmental degradation globally. Further, delivery of the manufactured goods across great distances adds to carbon footprint. This, again, leads to greater environmental toll.

Taken together, benefits of overregulating "polluting" industry to oblivion, are at best local and temporary.

I would also like to note, that the collapse of manufacturing jobs can be easily linked to increased political radicalization.

That being said, it's not all gloom and doom. I firmly believe, that as the impacts of this approach are felt more and more, there will be a push for sensible deregulation. Europe is already leading the way, weakening or delaying some of the more absurd regulation schemes.[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

It's mostly a question of when, not if.

Recently, there has also been a movement to drop standards based grading and advanced classes, under guise of equity. That I find more troubling.

Crusades in middle east started as an attempt of Eastern Roman empire (although they just called it Roman empire / Basileia Romaion) to recover from recent advances of Muslim invaders in Anatolia (modern Turkey). But turned into an overwhelmingly religious effort in the west. The first crusade especially was largely ill organized and chaotic affair. Where on one end of the spectrum you had nobles arriving with somewhat well equipped forces and idea of what to do, and on the other you had pilgrims, with whatever they just picked up in their hands and not answering commands of anyone, but their priest.

The economic side of things came into play after the process started and gradually became dominant. But it didn't start like it.

Finally. Interest of France in Mongols can be easily explained precisely by the influence crusades had on French and other Christian elites in Europe. The initial victory of 1st Crusade was followed by a series of setbacks. Muslims gradually begun to push crusaders out, the fact that crusaders started to fight amongst themselves helped a lot.

And then mongols arrived, almost from nowhere, crushed one of most powerful Muslim states at the time, and didn't stop there. It did seem like an immense opportunity, and in a way it was. If French, or someone else in Christendom, could convince khans that some form of cooperation is possible, or even better, if Mongols converted to Christianity, there would be a decent chance to not only save Jerusalem, but to move on to Egypt (still majority Christian).

[1] https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-c...

But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.

He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.

West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.

It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.

Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up an agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare.

People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them run wild.

Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now you can hit many of them, at the same time.

I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for agents, thing is.

In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the point when we should consider worrying.

Now, recently, they had a very good run. This must be admitted and even celebrated.

But the aforementioned flaw is still very much present.

In other words, new wind farms will need subsidies, an those will have to be payed for by the populace. This isn't necessarily something specific to wind power, nuclear needs subsidies as well.

Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4]

The whole process has been mismanaged at best.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/business/economy/Europes-specialty-chemi...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-chemical-ind...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_(2022%E...

[4]https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/heating-eating-energy-b...