Yes, actually I do. Are you aware how long the process of transformation was and how little actual violence did the royal troops mete out? Most of the blood during the French Revolution was shed among the revolutionaries themselves, later. Not by the old regime which barely resisted what was happening, being confused more than anything else.

The French monarchy was remarkably limp-wristed in its reaction to the post-1789 developments, probably because, in the beginning, not even the revolutionaries themselves expected to actually dismantle the monarchy. There was no civil war similar to Cromwell's England, nor massacres in the streets similar to modern Iran. In the largest event of that early period which could be called "a battle" (Storming of the Bastille), a grand total of 114 royalist soldiers made their last stand. Which is tiny for a country the size of France.

It took about a year for the situation to progress from the first session of the Estates General to the royal family attempted flight from Versailles, and 2,5 more years for the King to be executed. A classical case of the frog being boiled very slowly. The royal regime was indecisive and offered close to zero violent resistence.

(If you want to learn about an actual abortive French revolution which was suppressed with actual brutal violence by the royalists, look up Fronda of 1648-1653.)

In contrast, current rulers of Iran have 0 doubts about what is going to happen to them - and within minutes - if they get caught by the street crowd that hates them.

People are afraid of AI, but human organizations can be quite opaque as well.

That said, as a Czech, I wouldn't use any accentuated characters in my passwords. Anything beyond 7-bit ASCII is just asking for trouble.

We are somewhat violent species, so I agree that almost every significant economic and societal development has the potential to trigger some violence. That said, the jobs that are potentially threatened by AI are nowadays usually done by fairly sedentary people, so I wouldn't expect any large-scale violence, an occasional Ted Kaczynski notwithstanding. Programmers, translators and painters just aren't used to destroying things in the real world.

It would have been different if AI started to replace drug dealers or the mob.

The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.

They are now both serving life.

This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.

My point wasn't about Hannibal, though. Carthage died in a very different way from Rome: none of its institutions or cultural developments survived, while we still encounter plenty of obviously Roman things in everyday life, starting with the letters we use and names of the months and ending with Latin names for diseases and animals. Pretty much the only thing that survives from Carthage is the faint memory of Hannibal and, for military history buffs, Cannae. Otherwise, the culture has been erased from this world.

The story of the callback is interesting and reminds me of the Mongols suddenly withdrawing from Europe in order to elect the new Khan.

Sufficiently long term, everyone is dead, and I am not sure if we can tell those long-term effects that you foretell from random chance.

The Roman Empire is very dead, but so is the Carthaginian one. Nevertheless, a lot survives from the Roman Empire: basics of law, their alphabet, descendant languages and a certain fame. Quite a lot for famously war-like people.

In comparison, the Carthaginians are gone completely, only fans of history know anything about them. And they are gone because they lost a series of wars all too decisively.

Hmm. Maximum speed attained by Artemis II when they left their initial orbit was about 11.1 km/s IIRC. While this is somewhat less than true escape velocity from Earth (11.2 km/s) and you are technically correct, it is also enough of a speed that if you fly away in any random direction (and not a carefully calculated one), perturbances from the Sun and other massive objects will probably prevent you from reaching any sort of stable orbit around the Earth, and you will start bouncing around the inner Solar System in an erratic way.

I certainly wouldn't like to model that trajectory for months or years.

By now, various forms of large-scale welfare are over 100 years old, so we have a lot of collective experience in what works and what doesn't as much.

It seems that there is a big difference between attacking extreme poverty in severely underdeveloped places, which was often quite successful and resulted in economic development, and attacking "standard" poverty of the lowest decile of the population in developed countries, which seems a lot less tractable.

My working theory is that in extremely underdeveloped places, most of the population is quite capable of productive work and building a competitive economy, but lacks the know-how, institutions, stability and means to do so. If provided with those, they can kick-start their own future.

While in the developed countries, the permanently impoverished subset are the people who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot do the same regardless of the means invested into them.

It is quite sobering to know that the most generous social system in the world, in France, spends about a third of the national GDP on social spending, and still has some really bad banlieues and very persistent class conflict. If a third of GDP of a developed country cannot do the job, the problem isn't in the raw amount of money spent, but somewhere else.

But your point still stands.

State X may be free in the sense that there is no military occupation or outright dictatorship, but that does not mean that its society values freedom highly. There are degrees to "lived freedom", and being too ban-happy is on the (for me) bad side of the spectrum.

Imagine a very religious society, something like a Puritan state, or a Wahhabist colony, where the faith itself imposes significant restrictions on everyday life of an individual and all laws are derived from religion. Would you call it a free society? What about the few non-believers who live among them, what level of freedom do they enjoy (except the freedom to move away, if they have the means to do so)?

This is not a simple boolean variable.

Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.

OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy.

Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.

I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.

It is quite obvious that Russia miscalculated heavily, and someone who wasn't part of the small team that decided to go in, and thus whose face is not at stake, may be more amenable to declaring "OK, our goals have been basically met, let us solve the rest at the negotiation table".

From what I get out of my Russian and Russia-located acquaintances, people are growing tired of this nonsense. Not yet rebellious (though some of the recent actions of the government, like messing with the civilian Internet to the point of unusability, plus mass culling of cows in Siberia, have certainly increased the total level of anger), but dead tired. There is political space to conclude this war, and the reason why it isn't happening is personal.

If Turkmenistan can have it, why not the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Monument

(Though it no longer rotates.)