Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.

I don't think this is true. ROCm is a huge advantage for Nvidia but as far as I can tell it is more a set of R&D libraries than anything else, so all the Hot New Stuff keeps being Nvidia first and only (to start with) as the library ecosystem for the hotness doesn't exist yet. Then eventually new libraries are created that are CUDA independent and AMD turns out to make pretty good graphics cards.

I wouldn't be surprised of ROCm withered on the vine and AMD still does fine.

That seems a little bit suspect, how many Iranians do you know? I have difficulty believing that less than around 20-30% of them support the regime. There seems to be a baseline of around that fraction of people who support the status quo.

It isn't so hard to find people who support full-on communism. Any reasonable sample should be turning up a lot of really weird opinions.

If we wanted to worry about nuclear proliferation, negotiation was the path to take. There was a JCPOA and it seems like Khamenei Sr turned out to be serious about Iran not developing nukes in his lifetime. They've been a year or two away for more than a decade as I recall. Senseless violence isn't going to do anything to encourage disarmament - that is another part of why the Iranians have such an easy battle ahead of them in terms of propaganda.

If we're going to worry about Iran getting nukes, assassinating the anti-nuke guy and pummelling them as Trump is will not help the situation in the slightest. The only path where they survive as a state is the one where they build nuclear missiles.

It is hard to spin that in a positive light. It looks a little unreasonable. Even without a propaganda effort by the Iranians there is a great scratching of heads in the west trying to figure out why we're embarking on this crazy crusade.

Although I hear the IRGC's lego game is on point so that is interesting.

It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources.

However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all.

While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.

I'm not seeing any need for a strategic reserve here. There aren't any strategic issues. It is a bit far-fetched that a helium shock will even lead to the end of MRIs.

A strategic petroleum reserve makes a lot of sense, petroleum is part of the food supply chain and it'd be stupid to be in a position where a short disruption could cause people to starve. Not to mention the military implications if an army can't zoom around because the petrol stations run dry for whatever reason.

I don't see anything on the list of uses for helium that looks particularly time- and helium- sensitive in the way that a strategic stockpile would help with.

If a company were actually serious about managing the risks it'd be some relatively quiet role reporting to someone responsible for operations like a CTO, COO or head of product. Maybe part of the CEOs personal staff but not an exec.

Priority or not, it suggests the company doesn't understand risk. In a company that doesn't look at risk-adjusted rates of return as a natural part of how they do things a CRO is mild bad sign.

An analogy might be helpful. Testing code is, with some squinting, a form of institutionalised risk management. Any particular test doesn't necessarily do anything useful, but they apply a certain level of pressure that means the code in general fails less and force people to think more about how they're writing their functions. If a company tells you that it has a special pool of coders who add tests, separate from the ones that write the actual code, that is a bad sign that they know how to do testing. A huge chunk of the value is forcing the person who makes the front line decisions to think about what they are doing. Not to say a dedicated testing team doesn't sometimes make sense in some unusual companies, but it is an exception to the rule. Risk management isn't the type of responsibility that should be separated out into a separate role for most companies because that is much less valuable than the people doing the work being part of a management chain that understands risk.

I can't help but call to mind the concept of "illegal enemy combatants" who could be sent to Guantanamo Bay back in the War on Terror days [0]. It always struck me as a uniquely American concept that one could travel half a world away, attack someone's homeland, declare them to be fighting back in an illegal manner and get a pat on the back for upholding justice.

Obviously it'd be better for China - and the rest of us - if their internal dialog was more coherent. However it seems less useful to ruminate on one particular example. The country is so large that without estimates of magnitude and broad statistics all that can really be said is that everything happens somewhere in China. Any one example is ultimately an internal matter for them. Authoritarianism isn't much fun but the problem isn't the one-off miscarriages of justice but rather the seeping pervasiveness of forcing people to make stupid decisions instead of letting them better themselves in the manner that they see most fit.

> In today’s China,... judicial independence [is] labeled as erroneous ideological trends of the West. In fact, justice is justice, and doesn’t distinguish between East and West.

And I will say that if this part is what people wanted to focus on, the dry distinction between dependent and independent judiciary is actually one of the major advantages that the West maintains over China. But in the article it is more of a one-line thing and part of a longer, vaguer list

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_enemy_combatants#2001_...

1) Commercial entities generally try to sell their products for a profit (positive price).

2) Negative prices make this quite hard.

3) To get back into positive profit, they're going to need to charge a higher price later on.

There are 3 ways the overall market can go if prices are negative - either prices go positive at some other time to make up for the losses the power providers are making, someone figures out a use for the free power and the price stops going negative or power providers go out of business. Typically what this seems to result in for renewable-heavy grids is occasional (even regular) negative wholesale prices and some impressively high retail prices. Free electricity turns out to be very expensive; it shows the grid isn't coping.

If countries enter the lunatic phase of money printing you never quite know what they're going to do next. But it probably isn't going to be good for asset owners and it may well already be too late to get things out of well known vaults. Better to be a bit early.

I'd read the article, but the site seems to be down.

The story you seem to have told is they just wasted time low-balling you because they didn't have enough information to offer a competitive salary. You weren't ever going to settle for $250k, they didn't have enough leverage and they lacked the information to identify that. I'm not sure how you're seeing this story as one where more information to Meta leads to them offering you a lower salary. It seems like you'd have rejected them regardless unless they went higher.

All the employers knowing that you'd have "taken the job even if they offered $200K" seems to be completely useless to them. They're locked in an auction and the market price for your time is nowhere near $200k.

And you're underestimating how much of an impact the broader market is having on Meta's thinking in this scenario. If your silver tongue or secret number was a factor here then everyone would end up being overpaid because they wouldn't reveal that they were happy to work for a reasonable amount. It doesn't matter how much or little Meta knows, they're only going to offer $300k if they have a reasonable belief that you can find a job for $300k somewhere else; informed by a pretty detailed analysis of the employment market. And in fact that appears to be exactly what happened in your story. Nothing about that dynamic has anything to do with your salary history or spending habits and them getting better information on those things doesn't change your negotiating position. Since a key factor is the future, even if they know you'd say yes to $200k, they'd still be best served offering you more money. I've had that happen to me 2 or 3 times because I'm a sloppy negotiator and don't try very hard to optimise salary.