No. We've been lucky. And yes, there have been successful attempts to get them better under control. The first 20 years were pretty reckless and afterwards there also have been unintended close calls.

Yeah, using nuclear bombs as an example of restraint isn't very enlightened. We made bombs for one purpose, and when that purpose went away we instantly found another use for them as soon as we had the first bombs ready, and then proceeded by furiously making as many of them as possible. The main reason we haven't blown up the planet a few times is luck.

Overripe Camembert Mortars? Munster grenades?

The list of chemical weapons uses in the last century is nice. I'll point out though where it suffers from 'mainstream' bias. That chemical gas usage in Iraq in 1920 is omitted is acceptable, the claim can be disputed with reason. A similar claim about use of chemical weapons by the Syrian is taken as fact because everyone says so, while it's very doubtful that the Syrian army has resorted to chemical weapons. The very significant fact that Iran always refused to even make chemical weapons let alone use them while Iraq used them abundantly is turned into them running a weapons program after some restraint. They never made the weapons. Sure, proponents did some research, but proposals for weaponization were met with an unequivocal no from Khomeini.

I wonder about the claim that chemical weapons killed millions of people . How many besides the german concentration camps? Often war casualties were not killed but maimed.

Intelligence is a plus if the species is opportunistic and social. Like for instance raptors. Standing on rear legs opens opportunities - indicating that it increases chances for opportunistic strategies to outweigh the extra braincost.

I think the genes responsible for 'bigger' and 'more' generally don't take up more space, much less than 'restructure to do the same in a brain half the size'. Probably we've taken a very wasteful approach to getting smarter in terms of er, brain real estate.

Look at some of the proof of concept hacks in the field.

With RFID people are able to copy enough details to generate a mag-stripe without your card ever leaving your pocket. Meanwhile, merchants are trained that if the chip on a card doesn't work to revert to mag-stripe.

So now we have exactly the same insecure mag-stripe transactions, and at the same time we can now copy the mag-stripe without even seeing the card.

Sure, chip and pin is more secure, but only if you get rid of RFID and mag-stripe, neither of which is happening.

The difference is that because these cards are "fraud proof" the bank will refuse to reimburse you for the fraud, and will instead leave you on the hook for the bill. In some cases the banks have actually had people arrested for daring to say that they were the victims of fraud.

The credit card companies aren't doing this for you, they aren't doing it for security, they're doing it to shift the risk.

Actually, RFID with no PIN is a massive step backwards from mag-stripe, sure mag-stripe could be easily copied, but RFID doesn't even have to leave your pocket to get copied, and there are many proof of concepts in the wild for this already.

I live somewhere where ALL credit and debit cards have chip and pin, unfortunately almost all the credit cards also have RFID. I've had long arguments with my banks and finally managed to get non-RFID cards, but it's really hard to get back up to the level of security provided by mag-stripe

And to be clear, although all our cards have chip and pin, they also all have mag-stripe, so the cards themselves aren't actually any more secure than they were before, but because most stores (not all) also use chip instead of mag-stripe, you don't generally give away your card to let the staff skim them anymore.

It does not claim (as I understand it) to represent every scenario, merely a special case of a specific scenario.

Freeman Dyson wouldn't be bombastic and exaggerate, would he? "Prisoner's dilemma has been solved!"

For actually intelligent strategies (and the point of strategies is that they should be intelligent), the folk theorem is the relevant solution, not this. For that matter, this seems like a weak, specific case of the folk theorem.

Pardon? States other than NJ or OR still require there to be a person on site who can hit the kill switch for the pumps. (I don't know if helping folks with disabilities pump their gas is legally mandatory, and if in so in which states, but this is likewise common even in "self-serve" stations).

"Attendant" is not synonymous with "full-service".

One year vaper, previously 20 year smoker. I've had the medical labs done to show how much damage was undone in just one year.

At 41, I can run farther and faster, keep up with young folk better than most of my non-smoker friends of the same age. 3 years ago this was not the case.

Which means that we haven't been hiring the best and the brightest. We've been hiring those who are similar to us.

I agree, and I totally support blinding of resumes, and as much blinding as possible in general. But there's one thing you overlook, which leaves your argument vulnerable:

It's possible that hiring the best and the brightest is not the wisest move. It's possible that it's a good idea to hire those who are similar to us. I don't think so, but it's possible, we don't know.

To take a concrete example, take the study that showed lab assistants were rated more poorly with a female name on the resume. That's solid proof of gender prejudice. But playing the devil's advocate here, we don't know that it's unjustified prejudice. Perhaps the people evaluating the resumes have had tons of lab assistants of both genders, and found a clear tendency that the women performed worse than their resumes suggested, and the men performed better.

Thing is, even if that were true, I'd advocate for blinding. It's not for efficiency's sake that we should end discrimination, but for justice's sake: You didn't choose to be born a woman, you deserve to be judged on individual merits. Even if women on average were awful at this job, that information should be off-limits to use in hiring decisions, because using it would be a great injustice to those who are not awful.

This is of course even more salient in the case of race and ethnicity. Because while it is highly implausible that women should be worse lab assistants, we do have crime statistics, and if people were allowed to discriminate based on those, it's quite possible that a shop owner could "reasonably" deny Roma entrance to his shop, for instance. It will probably reduce shoplifting! But it's also a horrible injustice to those Roma who do not shoplift. It doesn't matter if that is 90%, or 10%. It doesn't matter if there's just one honest Roma in the whole country. No individual should answer for the statistical proclivities of a category he didn't choose to be in and can't even escape.

But this also shows why blinding yourself to information about race and gender can't just be a "best practice". That asshole shop owner who denies Roma entrance to his shop, he's doing a great injustice, but he might well a comparative advantage over more fair shop owners. Being just can be costly, and because of that, it's important that we demand sharing that burden fairly. We can hope that when we do, we find that it isn't so costly after all, maybe it's even a net benefit. But we must never base our demand for justice on such hopes. Justice first, then profit.

Intel knows that an investment in diversity is insurance against the government.

It's not government they're afraid of, it's their rivals' PR teams, and powerful people in media who on a whim might decide to throw their power around.

Yes, it could be, in fact. Few companies are on such an existential knife-edge that they can't afford to make a few godawful decisions. If you don't believe that, I have a couple of teambuilding activities and motivational speakers to sell you.

As it happens, I think that companies do rush to hire competent women, and even less competent women due to quite rational reasons (a company's productivity is not simply the sum of its employees skills). It's a supply problem, and it starts long before high school. But whether I am right or wrong about that, an argument that a business sector can't possibly collectively and systematically make poor decisions, is a weak argument.