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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yeah, and if you wrote some feedback to a magazine article, the editor might write a response to you and publish both in next month’s issue, but that would be the end of it. No one who read your feedback as published in the magazine could respond to you directly - it’s not really a conversation, it’s slow and limited by the format. You could write another message to the editor responding to their response, but that wouldn’t get published in the following issue so at most it would just be a one-to-one communication.

    This is very different from writing a post on an internet message board and getting twenty responses from twenty different people in a span of minutes. The closest past equivalent I can think of is literal soapboxing, where you go stand on a street and talk at people walking by, and they can immediately respond to you if they choose - but then that’s in person, face-to-face.


  • Yes…

    It’s easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

    xkcd #438 (June 18, 2008)

    Personally, I think that we (humans) haven’t really socially adjusted to digital communications technology, its speed or brevity, or the relatively short attention span it tends to encourage. We spent millennia communicating by talking to each other, face to face, and we’re still kind of bad at that but we do mostly try to avoid directly provoking each other in person. Writing gave us a means to communicate while separated, but in the past that meant writing a letter, a process that is generally slow and thoughtful. In contrast, commenting on social media is usually done so quickly that there isn’t much thoughtfulness exhibited.

    We’ve had three-ish? decades exchanging messages on the internet, having conversations with complete strangers, and being exposed to dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other people reading and responding to what we write… less than one human lifetime. We’re not equipped for this, mentally, emotionally, historically. Social and cultural norms haven’t adapted yet.















  • Yes, although having the ship is only part of it. What the diagram can’t really show is that the US also has a global logistics system which supplies the carriers and their accompanying battle groups when they deploy to other side of the planet. That system has been decades in the making, it’s not something you can just buy, it requires a crazy amount of planning and organization.

    I doubt the US could deploy every carrier effectively, but it can certainly put multiple battle groups at sea simultaneously and keep them there for a long time.




  • The problem being that Taiwan is a critical part of the entire global economy. TSMC fabricates ~50% of all semiconductor products in the world, but critically >90% of all fabrication at 5nm or lower (basically everything with a fabrication process less than a decade old). They are the leading edge. If you want to make a modern CPU, TSMC is your foundry.

    By threatening Taiwan, China is holding a gun to the head of the entire world. Loss of TSMC’s fabrication would basically shut down the global computer industry.