This is a solid point, and doesn't deserve to be dismissed out of hand for wordplay reasons due to the apparent contradiction.
Obviously a team made up of self-reliant individuals is stronger than a team made up of not-self-reliant individuals.
Inidividuals who don't neglect the resources of the collective (which is impossible), but need them as little as possible, seem pretty clearly preferable to the alternative.
I think the author would make the same argument that they did in reference to Romanian neuter:
> The issue is that these nouns do not behave like a fully-fledged gender. Importantly, there are no dedicated neuter endings for adjectives; instead, when a Romanian ‘neuter’ noun combines with an adjective, that adjective will be either masculine or feminine.
That is, “lo” is a remnant of the neuter but because it is accompanied by a masculine adjective (there is no such thing as a neuter adjective), it does not constitute a true gender.
No, it is correct that there are no neuter nouns in Spanish. That’s all it says. And you are very incorrect about “lo”. You can’t read a page of Spanish without encountering it several times.
there's a steady droll of anti-free software going on.
I take it to mean that commercial interests are stronger that potential gains enabled by new technological forms of collaboration. We (as a society) are 'choosing' to keep all gains enabled by digital technology private rather than revising the capitalist apparatus which is strained by these new digital possibilities.
I was thinking about a comment I read here, that claimed that in China companies have to hire party members because is the politically correct thing to do.
And that got me thinking how in "the west" companies have to hire lawyers (and accountants) for legal compliance reasons.
I am guessing you are seeing the parallel because both sentences have the words "have to hire" in them?
Companies need to hire lawyers because we live in a society that places a high value on playing by the rules and regulations that come down (idealistically) from an elected body.
So if I am a company that "has to" hire lawyers and accountants, I only "have to" do so because there are rules in my country about how I (for example) represent my financial situation to unsophisticated investors so they don't lose their shirts.
You can see how that's a different form of "have to" from hiring someone's uncle so your business doesn't get closed by the corrupt government?
I was assuming that there would be law in China that clearly stated this as a legal requirement?
Also, I have this perspective in which, given the case that this is a corrupt practice, it ends up as a form of taxation (corrupt taxation, but same thing from an certain business perspective).
microtonal harmonic grids free from the rigors of 12-tet (i.e. midi, i.e. the keyboard)
but don't get me wrong, 12-tet is an incredible accomplishment on its own. but it's what it is because of (now obsolete) physical constraints of instrument building.
I've been trying to think about how to go beyond 12 tet for years. I recently read this quote on a (unrelated nothing to do with music) book[1] "So it's a bit like a piano
that has a meta-key that lets you add new keys." which summarizes my goal better than I've ever been able to.
The funny thing is that outside of keyboards and electronic music, nobody cares about temperament. Most wind and string instruments are for all intents and purposes, untempered. The 12 tone scale is still important -- it produces a roughly consonant scale without excessive complexity. A 19 tone saxophone would be unplayable.
"These "investors," who have zero industry skills or expertise, take advantage of a [insert economic activity]-as-a-service (?aaS) model to gain sophisticated capabilities"
The type of billionaire individuals who by virtue of inheriting billions upon billions, don't ever have any real skills (nor the need to develop any) and yet, they live in societies (subcultures) which expect that they keep having (and making) billions upon billions.
Think of descendants of descendants of founders of what are now giant corporations.
They fund VC-backed startups, which they then own (by proxy). They can barely use an iPhone; let alone understand how it works or is made.
Except the business being funded is a criminal enterprise, maybe their riches originally come from "shadier" dealings?
My point is that the underlying principle is the same, it's a very powerful principle. This is how the market enables societies to build super complex stuff. The marketplace abstracts away the complexities. This 'principle' is a technology, it's ethically neutral.
This seems to be by design. (or at least a consequence of economic incentives which are politically defined and individual but enacted by the selfish behavior of individuals (specially compnay-size "individuals").
rant-on:
the individual potentializing power of software (which necessitates open-source-style collaboration) goes against the centralizing power of empires.
thus, the economic incentives (softly but relentlessly) lead us all into a situation of increasing complexity (google-scale practices for all) which make for ever more complicated software. combined with a lack of incentives towards simplifying this complexity (which is very difficult) lands us in a situation in which software only gets more complex requiring ever larger groups of engineers to be able to handle them. this also happens to law practice, specially in common law systems. /rant-off
however it is harder to do, takes longer to get there, and there are some tough patches on the way.
because quality takes time and effort (and always encounters failure along its path). it's just more expensive to do things that way.