Post made some good points but in the end it's pretty nihilistic to say that elite spaces shouldn't exist merely because they tend to cultivate elites and other elite spaces. Also very reductive to say that Harvard exists just to perpetuate elitism (no, it has a genuine educational and research mission, whatever its various flaws, that's patently clear).

The world is flawed and imperfect and perfect things don't really emerge from it. Harvard is glorious. Our best and oldest (in the US) university is bad because it's not sufficiently egalitarian, and let's destroy it? It's an engine for our society and other universities have followed in its footsteps. Stanford, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, the Claremont schools, etc etc - none of these were in the original ivy league, all are imperfect to some extent in their admissions and embrace and fulfillment of egalitarian ideals. They are also glorious though. They make our country a dynamic, innovative, intellectually vibrant place and attract students from around the world. They absolutely are key to our (staggering) economic and cultural success (in the US).

Elite clubbiness is an unfortunate side effect of success, but it doesn't mean we should then intentionally obliterate the engine of that success out of distaste for the cose of it.

The best insight in the article is actually this:

> cheaper real estate presents an opportunity for employers with vision

On top of any deterioration in office rents, companies need way less space than they used to since people are working from home many days. This opens up many possibilities that will IMO keep offices in prime markets filled:

-companies take more space per person in office for same cost, providing desks

-companies that couldn’t afford prime markets move in and use them as mainly collaboration spaces (“let’s all work out of Manhattan next week while we finish this project”)

-companies downsize in prime markets but reorient toward specific events - brainstorming, project closings, strategy retreats, get to know each other, cross department workshopping etc etc

No comparison between the excellent economic growth of South Korea and that of Greece, Hungary, Austria, or Italy going back to either cold war or post cold war days, despite this hypothesis of "empire gradient". If you google "World Bank GDP growth <countryname>" you can find charts back to 1961.

South Korea exports consumer goods to the large US market, this has been a massive fuel for their growth. They followed in Japan's footsteps (and China, for a time at least, followed in theirs). I can't think of a single manufactured product out of Greece, Hungary, Austria and few from Italy to the US.

Being on an "empire gradient" is just an arbitrary way to look at a country.

You know who else is on an empire gradient? North Korea. Afghanistan. Belarus. You're not even specifying which side of the empire gradient. Maybe being on the authoritarian, communist side did not work out so well for many countries?

I think what matters for South Korea is moving steadily toward more democratic governance, embracing capitalism, and proximity and historic ties with Japan (not always pleasant, obviously, but ties nonetheless) at a time when Japan was developing robust trade with the US and when Japan's own consumer sector was booming, providing another market for Korean firms.

Korea has absolutely followed the pattern of moving steadily up the value chain, for example in consumer electronics, in autos.

Your post was very good. I take issue with one part:

    I can't think of a single manufactured product out of Greece, Hungary, Austria and few from Italy to the US.

I would strongly disagree with Austria, and modestly disagree with Italy. Austria is a low population manufacturing powerhouse. They are not making consumer goods. They are making "widgets" that other manufactures use to create finished products. B2B vs B2C, if you like. The northern half of Italy is similar, but less extreme. I also struggle to name more than a few consumer or high value products from Austria, but I recommend to look at their median income or GDP per capita and you will say "Wow, that is a rich country".

That’s interesting about Austria, thanks for that! I may have underestimated them. (I did check their growth rate and for whatever reason not as strong as S Korea…)

About growth rates: The higher your median income, the harder it is to have high growth rates. Think about it from the perspective of economic competition: You need to find new markets (hard at this point) or outcompete existing competitors in other countries to grow. It is crazy hard to grow once you are fully developed and rich, like Austria. It does not surprise me that Korea has a higher growth rate than Austria -- they are less developed.

Edit: To be clear: Please do not read this post as bashing Korea. I think they are doing an amazing job in the last 50 years growing themselves out of poverty. It is a crazy and amazing story.

…he says, as his company eagerly does business with Xi in China.

No organization I am part of will ever do business with you if I can stop it.

You fought for Turing but I suppose the Uyghur concentration camps mean nothing to you. They are not British so how could their lives be worth fighting for when there is money to be made (for yourself) without regard to morality or any sense of decency.

But good job doing Cloudflare PR.

This is gibberish. The discussion topic is about what happens on your Linux distribution that runs on your hardware. The fact that other parties are using Linux for user-hostile purposes says nothing except that Linux is a successful technology. And like all technology since fire was first controlled by humans, it has been used for good and evil.

What most people think of as Linus is really GNU/Linux, and while I don't think the distinction usually needs to be made, it's actually important in this case because it makes it obvious there is no one "thing" to infect and change. Linux is a commodity, and open, and we're in no threat of major problems like that than we are of someone jacking up the price on ibuprofen. The solution is the same in both cases, someone else will offer a better alternative because there's nothing forcing you to use the bad offering.

It’s worse than birth control. There are concentration camps in xinjiang. Called “re-education” or “vocational training.” There are many places to begin educating yourself on this (not directed at the person I’m replying to, but to the downvoters). You can start here if you like. Hrw is human rights watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/19/break-their-lineage-br...

This has already happened. Chen Quanguo was party secretary in Tibet during a major crackdown there and in 2016 transferred to be party secretary of Xinjiang where he led a very similar campaign of severe repression. He remains party secretary there.

You can read about this any number of places including https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch...

In open source the trend unfortunately seems to be toward a Readme.md with a couple of simplistic examples, then you’re left to read the source in lieu of a proper API reference.

I still remember CPAN perldocs as a high water mark for docs. They had specific sections for examples, starting with the summary at the top, and another for proper reference. And more importantly a strong culture of good docs. The examples tended to be close to comprehensive, progressing from simple to complicated problems. Then there would be a rundown of arguments and return values for the key methods.

Legal documents do this as well (albeit in different language, typically at the top of the document).

My experience with Apple store is also similar to the experience described (actively making false statements, in my case about a laptop logic board).