This isn't about your choices with mobile devices, this is mandated by the government, and the broadcasted data is literally open to anyone.

Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.

So, the effects might be less dramatic than we'd expect. The industry will adapt one way or another, not the first time a technological shift like this happens. Who knows, maybe we'll even get functional micropayments out of this. One thing that will definitely happen that you didn't mention is disguising advertisements as organic content. It's already happening with instagram influencers and even newspapers publishing sponsored content.

Dependency injection for implicit params, for one? Also, you can almost see implicit conversions as one take on type safe dynamic typing. Almost.

But of course Scala also brings functional programming and its own ideas to the mix.

One other thing you can try is get more people to report that post. Maybe there's a threshold at which they will look into this more seriously.

This Inflatoplane is more of a precursor to modern "tensairity" designs (e.g. some of Prospective Concepts designs). While certainly interesting, pressurized bladders in aircraft have so far been a dead end due to practical limitations (catastrophic modes of failure, wear, altitude pressure differences IIRC). The only flying wings where inflatable bladders are successfully used are kitesurfing kites. But those don't normally carry people up high.

Parafoil based designs on the other hand are now everywhere. Paragliders, parachutes, parafoil kitesurfing kites, even parafoil sails (SkySails).

Again, I'm not defending Crimea invasion by any means, but the original question is why do people accept autocracy, and the answer lies in their perception as much as actual truth, neither of which should be ignored.

Let's be fair, the last few years recession in Russia was largely, if not entirely, caused by post-Crimea sanctions and crashed global oil prices, it had little if anything to do with liberty deprivation.

As to the general point, nobody in Russia knows or cares how well off an average American is. People care how well off they are relative to their own yesterday. Russians know they have it better today than in the 90s, and they (think they) know whom to thank for that. I guess same goes for Chinese as their economy has been growing wildly at the time, although I have no personal experience there.

To be extra clear, this does not mean at all that autocracy contributed to that growth in any positive way – most probably the opposite, – only that it appears so from the inside, as without freedom of speech it is very easy for the regime to take credit for any improvements and blame the west for any setbacks. Russia excels at that game domestically, which explains why Russians are largely fine with the relatively small amount of freedoms they're enjoying. Again, probably a similar situation in China.

(I didn't downvote you, just wanted to expand on GP's point)

I find that liberal use of copy-paste _across projects_ is way cheaper than building up a library of well thought out, generic components even in the long term.

If you have ten concurrent projects that need the same components at the same time it could make sense to build them up as privately published libraries. Otherwise it's unlikely that the overhead and rigidity of that approach will pay off if you only have one or two projects that you're actively working on at any given time.

This is the Economist sentence that you're commenting on:

> When the Chinese aviation authority, absurdly, accused the airline of imperilling safety because its employees had joined the protests

If you didn't believe that pilot protests / speech is a safety concern, you wouldn't disagree at the use of "absurdly" in that sentence, and then wouldn't double down on that by giving an example of an incident which you think imperiled safety.

Otherwise, if you didn't agree with those fake safety concerns, there is nothing surprising about the usage of "absurd" by the Economist.

You have some anonymous user in this thread fantasizing about crazy scenarios that didn't happen, and you're propping them up with your own judgement, and then you're telling me to hold my judgement and trust the alleged "experts" that happen to agree with you.

No thanks, I'll take as much freedom in judgement as you afforded yourself.

Which is why some people choose moral principles that are more rigid. And well scamming people into buying useless rocks is on the wrong side of mine, no matter what moral kickback it's artificially bundled with.

Promoting bullshit has real costs associated with it. Those bullshit crystals cost people money and don't do anything. People get dumber being convinced to buy them, and will use that dumbness in other parts of life. Promoting a market for delusion and false hope is the last thing anyone needs.

It might be hard to put a precise dollar value on second order effects like these, let alone on things like moral integrity, but that doesn't mean this value isn't there.

There is no shortage of people who will do whatever bullshitting it takes to earn more money, and that's not something to be celebrated regardless of whether it comes with mental health donations or another trendy atonement mechanism.