He showed me their Cray, which had its own dedicated computer room, and they set it up with the coolant pump and fountain unit right in the middle in front of a glass wall facing the hallway so everyone could gawk at it.

But even just thinking about it for half a second from a balls and bins perspective, 100k items into 100 binary bins is obviously gonna saturate.

A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.

So it's this very pervasive, almost universal shared experience there. Totally different than my experience as a kid in the 80s that did indoor soccer briefly.

One observation my friend made while we were talking about this one time down there, is that basketball plays a similar role in the US. Yeah you need a hoop not just a ball, but that ends up approachable. In fact my neighbor down the block keeps a portable hoop set up in the parking strip so long as it's dry out, and right now a couple kids are playing some casual 1 on 1 lol.

Anyhow it's really clear that having a huge community available with few barriers to play and learn makes a huge difference.

Now that I think about it another similar experience was seeing my ex that grew up in Taiwan play some ping pong in a bar here in the US. She didn't particularly care about ping pong or play it much, but because she was immersed in it at school as a kid she could still smoke anyone in that bar easily lol.

But starting at $600k for that?

It's clear they'd like to have a Lamborghini Urus like sales success that's not exactly a traditional style Ferrari but this thing seems like a total miss.

But Ferrari being who they are they'll do the same scummy crap of making dealers and customers buy the turd if they wanna get an allocation for the next highly collectable supercar.

It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.

For example here on the west coast we have a non trivial probability of earthquakes big enough that a lot of infrastructure may be down for weeks.

Another motivation is political. We've already seen efforts to restrict people's ability to warn others about ICE's activity. So I know some people that while not going full revolutionary or anything, are interested to learn about some peer 2 peer alternatives as a sort of hedge against things getting worse.

And some people just play with it because the tech is neat, it's fun to see how far your messages can get, etc.

As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.

Anyhow, replying is clearly past the point of utility here.

This is not the history, it is a mythology in opposition to the empirical evidence.

Which is why you should read Graeber.

No, it does not, and that's Graeber's whole point.

"Markets" are not some sort of physical law of the universe.

A simple example of this is it's the norm in hunter gatherer societies to take care of people who never will make an equal contribution back in the transactional sense.

Because the social ties in those societies are not simply transactions.

If your model fails to accurately describe empirical reality, time to improve/expand the model.

I'd strongly suggest reading his books. They profoundly changed my understanding of how human institutions and society form.

Would using pectinase to break it down first reduce the risk?

And the 2nd chapter of it is after the ballot measure passed, the state liquor commission drug its heels for a couple years, because most of their executives are far more conservative than the median voter here (a side effect of a lot of them being Salem locals vs Portland, but anyhow).

Eventually the state legislature got fed up with the obstructionism and passed a "ok, we're just doing it how CO did, stop stalling" bill.

And here we are. The sky didn't fall.

There's a lotta ways ballot measures can go into stupidity, but this is an instance where it helped force the bureaucracy to align with the majority voter position.