>There's a fairly good case to be made that playing by, and being able to set, international norms is in the long term benefit of powerful countries.

Yes, but it doesn't matter. The entire concept of truly sovereign states existing is the point. The second a state wants to leave the agreement, they just stop cooperating. There is no "greater sovereign" with which you can enforce these rules, and if there is -- say, a bigger country invading a smaller country to enforce the rules -- you're once again in a state of war, and none of the rules mattered in the first place.

Apart from Europe, the number large, powerful non-signatory countries is pretty significant: US, China, India, Russia, Iran, Saudi, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and more.

I've always thought it is interesting that the concept of international law is by definition in conflict with the de facto anarchy of international relations. I've always had mixed opinions on the topic, simply because you can look at an institution like the UN, and see that it functions much more successfully as a simple forum than a deliberative body. The idea that somehow we are going to implement something as difficult as a criminal court on an international basis seems... very idealistic. A court like this always seems sensible at first glance, but I'm not sure it can really exist effectively at all over any serious time horizon.

I would be curious as to the costs/benefits there.

I agree with you generally on the incentives, but it took us 70 years to paint ourselves into this corner, and we’re not going to get out of it because of a third-order incentive.

Take Europeans, put them in Kansas. Fund their healthcare as though they were in Europe, and watch their health outcomes take a nosedive because the environment here is non-trivially worse for you health.

Unless I’m wildly misunderstanding these studies, it makes sense that we would need to spend more for the same outcomes because we are starting from a more unhealthy position, so the same results require more resources.

We need to at least be controlling for the 10%+ differences in obesity rates, and the enormous differences in UV index. That’s before even considering weekly exercise minimums that most European get when just walking to a bar.

I am constantly told how much less Europeans pay for better health outcomes and all I can think about was the obesity crisis I grew up around in Texas.

Socializing healthcare isn’t going to get an huge portion of the population out of their cars and get them walking as a primary or secondary mode of transportation. Not when it’s 100° and the grocery store is five miles away.

Americans, in no small part, have worse health outcomes because we have dramatically worse lifestyles. I support German-style universal healthcare, but I’m not going to pretend it will suddenly give us German health outcomes.

The choice of who we tip is entirely arbitrary. How much we are supposed to tip is also arbitrary. There is no logic behind it. The system is entirely stupid.

It clearly existed so that the proprietor can delegate the duty of finding and punishing bad service employees to the customer... which is, again, a terrible system that makes no sense, and it make even less sense now that it's spreading to all manner of jobs where this tenuous connection doesn't even exist!

The article is about the rigor of a paper on the harms of relatively small amounts of alcohol consumption. The comment is about the obvious harms from large amounts of alcohol consumption. The two things are barely related beyond, perhaps, the title of the article.

We can at the same time recognize the harms of alcohol, while also caring about whether there is a relatively safe dose with which to consume it.

As a parallel, we can look at substances as banal as finasteride or aspartame as examples of where we are actually quite concerned about the safety of the small dose, while recognizing the obvious dangers of consistent, large doses. In all three cases (ethanol, finasteride, and aspartame), the "benefits" of each drug are unrelated to health, but meaningful to most people. The main difference is that ethanol is much easier to consume at dangerous levels, likely because regulation is quite difficult, especially when you can make it at home relatively easily.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316611

Points: 47

# Comments: 83

It's seems like an odd-duck for sure, and I doubt it's a realistic proposition. I do think "perfect encryption for dummies" is all well and good until organized crime organizations are able to challenge the government in certain regions of our country.

All of this sends us deep into the realm of political philosophy, the nature and purpose of governments, and the freedom vs security tradeoffs we live with.

I listened to the latest Plain English podcast this morning, which was explicitly about the potential for a ransomwarepocalypse in the coming years, as open models let any tom, dick, or harry become capable of a plug-and-play ransomware attack, instead of that being left to the realm of professionals. It's a bit nerveracking to think about every nigerian prince scam suddenly becoming a sophisticated attack on your local water sanitation system.

https://youtu.be/vWvazbGPCCI

The general thesis on identifying architecturally interesting areas on the golf course: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...

Identifying dynamic golf design so you get more interesting play on the same course: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/friday-pins-vs-sunday-...

Measuring the addition and removal of hazards and how it dynamically affects different skill levels, and how to measure that: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/measure-2000-times-cut...

How I created a golf dispersion pattern generator -- which I made open source -- so that it can be improved, because the golf analytic companies already have the data and almost certainly won't share it: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/how-to-bake-a-dispersi...

A fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something.

One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them.

I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find.

Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.

The point isn't that labor isn't "valuable" it's that "value" here is a moral position. This same thesis could have been said about basically any mechanized industry.

There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. You can't un-invent the nuclear bomb, or the printing press, or the steam engine. We need to find a politically stabilizing way forward, and that means we need political coalitions that don't consume themselves with infighting.

Right now we can't even work together to build housing for young people... how the hell are we going to get through this mess without actually trying to build something bigger by making sacrifices.

We absolutely need an abundance agenda if we want people to have children. Reject the zero-sum investment thesis of NIMBY protectionism. Invest in density, efficiency, and antitrust. This is one of the most openly obvious self-owns in history. It's genuinely absurd.

We are all in this together. Make financial security easy for young people and we'll actually get children.