Mod parent and all ancestors Funny. Crying doesn't help, so let's try Funny.

And I already checked the entire discussion for Funny and the rich target was again missed. At least that's what the moderators say, even though I think this FP branch went there...

"You want to get to Solution City? Sorry, you can't get there from here. All the roads have been torn up and replaced with fences with minefields underneath and drone patrols flying over."

Always feel a bit disappointed when a long discussion falls into oblivion without a Funny.

Thanks for the citation. My records do indicate I read it in 2011, but no details come to mind. The date indicates I probably got it from the Chiba library...

The Public Markets have rules and laws that incentivize very destructive and predatory behaviors. Corporations behave like psychopaths to hit quarterly numbers for 'fiduciary duty' laws.

Private assets don't have these so they can build real companies with an eye on the future.

But private companies don't have nearly as much access to capital because all the investment money goes into retirement because of stupid tax laws which goes into psychopathic public companies.

And then Blackrock / State Street / Vanguard collude to tell these companies how to behave socially and politically, often against the interests of everyone else in society.

Of course this could be done poorly but the idea has merit. Congress is most likely to screw it up, but who knows, maybe they won't.

That's peak optimism for 2026.

It's a bad idea because it hinders trade. However, if only one side is profiting from the trade, the other side doesn't have much reason to support the deal.

This is probably fallout from Trump's "pleasant comments" about our allies.

This is a weird situation.

If the license is changed it's no longer AGPL, it's a unique license.

If the license has restrictions then the copyright is violated by not adhering to the license.

The above makes it sound like both parties want to have it both ways.

I would just give the Russians proper attribution but the European governments hate Russia so much that they couldn't possibly do that. This is a problem with having governments run open source projects.

In the en it's probably going to be like Russian gas which they sanction except for not freezing to death in the winter, when they just look the other way and stay alive to hate the Russians another day.

The whole damn thing stems from some royal cousins hating each other in the 1830's. America was designed to "eff that noise" but every stupid American politician wants to act like a European so Americans get dragged into their stupid wars and other zero-sum games.

Open Source software is supposed to be a non-zero-sum game and the licenses are supposed to create the conditions for that. Maybe FSF should consider a v4 to improve the situation. Anybody seen Eben Moglen lately? Last I heard some whackadoodles at FSF were mad at him. Maybe a post-FSF license is needed.

"Play nice, children."

I think you've never tried to understand the code of a large project written by a different group of people.

I believe there was a period right after the civil war that was as bad.

Even that depends on how long you expect it to be before you need the funds. As the "cashing in" time gets closer, you need to reduce the high-risk part.

The problem is that this allows the trustees to bet someone else's money on wildly speculative things. Proving that they acted irresponsibly will be on the person who lost all their means of hiring a lawyer.

ED: "But it doesn't work for gravity with linear curvature"

IIUC there are two different kinds of things that are called "gravity waves" in quantum physics by those who aren't experts in the field. One of those is undetectable, and the other is what we've been detecting. (I'm no expert, so I can't clarify that.) There's also something called "gravity waves" in fluid dynamics, and that's definitely detectable.

Relativity = gravity is represented by the curvature of spacetime. Curvature is linear, R. The formula treats curvature linearly. As things get closer and curvature spikes, the math just scales at a 1:1 rate

Quadratic gravity = Squares the curvature. Doesn't really change things much when everything is far apart, but heavily changes things when everything is close together.

Pros: prevents infinities and other problems when trying to reconcile quantum theory with relativity ("makes the theory renormalizable"). E.g. you don't want to calculate "if I add up the probabilities of all of these possible routes to some specific event, what are the odds that it happens?" -> "Infinity percent odds". That's... a problem. Renormalization is a trick for electromagnetism that prevents this by letting the infinities cancel out. But it doesn't work with linear curvature - gravitons carry energy, which creates gravity, which carries more energy... it explodes, and renormalization attempts just create new infinities. But it does work with quadratic curvature - it weakens high-energy interactions and allows for convergence.

Cons: Creates "ghosts" (particles with negative energies or negative probabilities, which create their own problems). There's various proposed solutions, but none that's really a "eureka!" moment. Generally along the lines of "they exist but are purely virtual and don't interact", "they exist but they're so massive that they decay before they can interact with the universe", "they don't exist, we're just using the math out of bounds and need a different representation of the same", "If we don't stop at R^2 but also add in R^3, R^4, ... on to infinity, then they go away". Etc.

The theory isn't new, BTW. The idea is from 1918 (just a few years after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was published), and the work that led to the "Pros" above is from 1977.

It depends on your time horizon. The predictions aren't *currently* testable. Testing them depends on building new tools.

I sort of don't like it, because I don't really accept continuity, but I've no evidence that my feeling is correct. (I expect things to break down before one gets to 10^-33 cm. But that's because of something Wheeler speculated about in the 1980's.)

You do understand this is a fork of an open-source package, that the entire code of the original version can be read, and any backdoor, if found, removed from the fork, right?