You may almost think that criminal and civil cases are handled differently.

Ah yes we can only rely on assumptions when someone's freedom rather than money is on the line.

We could rely on facts when making determinations. Like the fact the government said foreign countries were paying for the tariffs.

Fact: Costco explicitly told the public that part of the price increase in some of their goods was having the customer "absorb" (pay) the price of the tariff.[]

  "When we looked at -- we also source flowers from Central and South America. We looked at that item and decided that while we were able to offset some of the tariffs through similar activity that we did increase some price there because we felt that, that was something that the member would be able to absorb and it was more of a discretionary item there."

[] Q3 2025 earnings call

Why would you expect to see speed of software development reflected in the current GDP?

Because, allegedly, everyone is writing bespoke software that solves their every need?

If every software company was _actually_ 4-5x or more productive (like CEOs are saying) that should be easily detectable in economic data

I’m not familiar with this writer or the writer this is about so can someone help me out with something? This article is fawning over this Scott person, talks about how the audience is more intelligent than average and about how ‘impeccably sourced and credentialed’ this Scott person’s arguments are.

Am I missing an in joke somewhere or do people actually write like this?

Scott Alexander, https://www.astralcodexten.com/ is one of the most influential bloggers in tech spaces.

I was a keen reader, but don't follow so much anymore.

That said, I don't think his blogging influence is that large, but whose is?

He's likely fawning over Scott because he wants the post to read by readers of Scott.

"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down"

Idk, the whole article is super weird, even though I agree with the point

Are you actually surprised that a livestream paid for my NASA would promote NASA? Geez, that’s innocent.

No, we're referring to the piece that was posted here on the previous day. You can search for Artemis on this site and read that piece.

I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems.

If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:

https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...

It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.

There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.

Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.

It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.

I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc.

So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.

The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that when you read Charles Camarda’s thoughts after his meeting with NASA in January, it could have been written in 1986 or in 2003.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDU...

It’s pretty clear at this point that the shuttle was already broken at design. But seeing the same powder keg of safety/budget/immovable time constraints applied to a totally different platform decades in the future feels like sitting through a bad movie for the third time.

This isn’t even remotely funny.

I am laughing. I'm not even near the end of this thread.

I know that math makes it harder to come up with political zingers but if there are two civilizations; one lasted 150 years and the other lasted 250 years the average is 200.