thebestaquaman

With modern tv/streaming, tickets aren't a limited resource anymore, in the sense that by far most of the viewers are not in place live.

Sure, you could price live tickets following "normal" market rules, since you still have the practical limitation regarding the number of people living in reasonable distance from the stadium. The idea of using pricing to regulate demand/consumption for streaming services doesn't really make sense the same way, since the marginal cost of another viewer is essentially zero.

I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there's a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you're one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It's not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let's say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you're still left with millions of dollars per match.

Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we're in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they're still going to be making buckets of money. I don't really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.

Edit: ignore the below, I forgot my pi-factor in the gamma function for half-integers...

Edit 2: Since you're right, my missing gamma-factor completely changes this. An infinite-dimensional hypersphere will have zero surface area for any (finite?) radius.

Original dum-dum:

While I'm completely open that my factor is likely wrong here, the expression you provided is definitely wrong in the 3D case (I'm assuming the r superscript on the pi was a typo), since it doesn't give n = 3 => A = 4 pi r^2.

I believe the surface area of an n-dimensional hypersphere is (n - 1) pi r^{n - 1}. In that case (I may have some factors wrong here, just going off memory), an infinite-dimensional hypersphere has infinite surface area as long as it has non-zero radius.

That almost seems like a wilful misinterpretation of what I wrote, since I never claimed anything of the sort.

What makes you completely wrong is that you're using the fact that petroleum companies are filthy rich and bribe politicians to hell and back as an explanation for why we're still reliant of fossil fuels. The basic answer to why is that "fossil fuels and combustion engines are pretty damn hard to beat" to the point where we still haven't found a viable alternative for some applications.

I get why you would say this, but it's an oversimplification to the point of being completely wrong.

Fossil fuels have an absurd energy density. They're just really hard to beat. Modern batteries and liquid hydrogen don't even come close. Pair that with the fact that we've spent a couple hundred years optimising the steam- and internal combustion engines, compared to some decades (in practice) for electric-based stuff, and you start seeing why fossil fuels are so hard to push of the top of the hill.

Until very recently all alternatives were pretty much worse under every conceivable performance metric. There's a reason electric planes are still in the prototype phase. It's just technically really really hard to even get close to jet fuel and combustion engines.

Oh, I definitely meant far future. While the differences are far too big today, I can see gradually increasing cooperation between e.g. the EU and African Union at some point culminating in the construction of a governmental body that has some regulatory power over them both.

Once such a body exists, I can imagine that it over time accumulates power, bringing the two unions even closer together. The EU started out as a relatively small organ, and has grown gradually to what it is today over many decades. My point was that if some "global government" ever forms, I think that kind of gradual process is how it will happen. Starting out with trade agreements, and then gradually regulating more aspects of government.

These don't need to be mutually exclusive though. A lot of the progress in Europe the past 80 years is a result of the improved cooperation brought by the EU.

The EU isn't like the UN, where everyone is equally represented (sans veto powers), but is a democratically elected super-national body with opposing super-national political factions. I can see a concept like that working on a global scale some time in the (relatively far) future.

I think something like this is the most reasonable, and we're already closer to it than at any previous point in history. We have the EU, the African Union (AU), and I think there's a South American union as well (?) there's also the US, which is a bit between a union and a single state (US states have more autonomy than regional municipalities most other places, but far less than any full-fledged county).

I think that if a "global government" ever develops, it will be due to these unions forming an overarching union. The major hurdle is that we're a very far way off anybody wanting to concede any governing power to an organisation above the "continental union" level. Even holding the EU together is non-trivial, because a lot of people feel that too much power is concentrated far away in Brussels.

Regarding judicial systems and military forces, the UN has showed that it's possible to have a kind of global system for this, but it's still a far stretch from anything that could be called a "global judicial system with enforcement powers".

The majority of Germans in the late 1930's weren't members of the Nazi party either. The majority of Germans in fact claimed being either unaware or opposed to what the Nazi regime did. Did the tell the truth? I'm inclined to believe so. Does being unaware/laying low absolve them of any and all crimes committed by the Nazi government? That's more of an open question.

Actively voting for a government that commits crimes because you don't care sufficiently about politics does not absolve you of responsibility for those crimes. Once you actively enable a fascist government you are complicit in the crimes it commits.

Of course, I'll speak English in meetings and other settings where we're talking about work and need to minimise the language barrier for practical purposes. I'll also speak English in a lot of social settings, because these are nice people that I enjoy talking to.

What I'm talking about is the silent expectation that a group of Norwegians talking at the lunch table should switch to English if one or more non-Norwegian speakers enter the room. I don't like that silent expectation, and really appreciate the colleagues that learn Norwegian well enough that I can just keep the conversation going without feeling like I'm excluding them or feeling that I need to swap to English and fill them in on what we're talking about.

I don't think it really makes a difference, as long as you're staying somewhere for any significant amount of time (i.e. months) it makes sense to start learning the language.

I mean, it's common courtesy to try to learn enough of the local language to buy stuff and ask for directions when your just on vacation.

I was in Germany for half a year during my studies. To me it was obvious that I needed to learn the language from day one, because I had no intent of going around and expecting everyone else to adjust to me not knowing the language. I have a very hard time understanding how someone could move to a country for years, and still not learn the language because "it's not permanent".