@goatsarah Listening through The Rest Is History podcast has disabused me of this idiotic idea. We've had just as many usurpers, revolutions and civil wars as anywhere else, it's just that the English have had better marketing.
@goatsarah Until the last year or so, I had believed something more or less along the lines of "England has been uniquely stable over the past 1000 years. Other countries have had bloody revolutions (France, Russia) or pulled themselves together out of fragmented parts (Germany, Italy) but England has missed out on all that, the elites here have always known how and when to soften and to give up a little power in order to avoid those excesses".
@baldur You could put it another way - the skills and personal attributes necessary to found a company are distinct from and incompatible with the skills and personal attributes necessary to run a large company.
That's why "serial entrepreneurs" are a thing. They start a company, grow it a bit, and then if they're sensible exit and hand it over to professionals to run.
@goatsarah I've got an outline in my head of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story set in a collapsed America, and one of the twists is that the rest of the world is still fine. It's America that chooses to be a fucked up hellscape.
@goatsarah Yeah, I can hear that one in my head now.
And what that? I'm getting echoes of something... Probably came after it in the TV schedules of 1988, playing from my subconscious mind, it's "Defenders of the Earth".
@carnage4life If you manage to get a really good test for sentience, the problem isn't going to be the AIs that pass. The problem will be the humans that fail.
I keep seeing "the end of low interest rates proves that tech companies never did anything of value" which seems to me to miss the point that technological advances are what /caused/ a decade of low inflation and low interest rates.
My partner reluctantly shelled out for a limited trial of NOW TV in order to watch The Lazarus Project and it has just decided to show us some fucking adverts!
I believe we are contractually unable to cancel it at this point, or I would be straight to the Pirate Bay as a matter of principle, but for everyone else: these cunts screen you adverts even when you are actually paying for a subscription and should not be rewarded with a single penny of your cash.
@richlv@tellyworth@sukiletxe@simon If I had a pound for every some someone reported that when they clicked on something "nothing happened", when in reality when they clicked on the thing a concise and informative error message appeared...