Numberwang is really a tribute to Mornington Crescent and a parody of a specific type of low cost British game show, exemplified by “Countdown” which has now been on 40 years.

You are wildly wrong in your assumption that the folding property has low value.

Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.

Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.

That's not a difference between ANSI and ISO paper sizes.

ANSI A (US letter) is a half sheet of ANSI B (ledger/tabloid) is a half sheet of C is a half sheet of D is a half sheet of E. When producing the paper, there is no waste of material or time, its the same process just starting with a slightly differently sized starting sheet (hypothetically; I am assuming that paper production has advanced beyond shaking screens of the largest handleable size by hand).

The difference is that ANSI A, C and E have aspect ratios of 17/22 (0.77) and ANSI B & D have aspect ratios of 11/17 (0.65), while all ISO sizes have aspect ratios of 1/sqrt(2) (0.71).

The waste comes in when scaling between adjacent sizes.

Going from A4 to A3, you can enlarge a document to 141% of the original size, and the margins will match.

Going from US letter to tabloid (ANSI A to B), the width of the paper is 129% larger and the height is 154% larger, so you can only enlarge your document to 129% the original size, and you have larger vertical margins, which is waste.

(But if you double it, from A to C, the problem goes away, because the aspect ratio is the same; so you can produce posters of multiple sizes, just not on every ANSI paper size at once.)

Oh, you're talking about books, not sheets? My reply is probably all wrong, sorry.

So, regarding books, why do you think the methods of printing books varies based on the size of the printing sheets?

Regardless of the size of your printing sheet, you choose a page size that's based on dividing your printing sheet in half N number of times, typeset your document to that page size (which you can't even skip for ISO paper sizes, because you pick your font size independent of the paper sizes), print 2^N pages per printing sheet in a particular pattern, fold and/or cut the sheet up, and bind.

There's no difference in waste or time regardless of your paper size choices, unless you do something silly or artistic, like choosing to print a square book or some shape not derived from halving your paper size.

The article declines to mention how precise paper is. The corners are very, very square and the lengths are very, very precise.

Better than an average square, better than an average ruler.

Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.

Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.

Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.

The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.

It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.

The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.

Can confirm this with YouTube advertising. When enabled for growth, it's nothing but bot farms. When I reached out to Google about it, they acknowledged the unusual traffic but did nothing about it. They are running a huge fraudulent business.

This reads like straight propaganda.

An inefficient system is always going to be ineffective. The author tries to posit that anything that isn’t market based is inherently inefficient and that their Chicago School solution is a success because it’s market based.

None of this is supported with evidence outside the new system working better than the old one.

Militaries efficiently allocate nutrition without markets (it’s the most important work they do) as do grocers.

There are a lot of ways you could improve on this, many not requiring the complexity and overhead of market based solutions.

This is a common misconception. Commons are well maintained in healthy societies. Over extraction being punished by the group.

Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.

African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.

If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.

As someone who knows how to code and who employs a number of coders I am not sure choosing to do it yourself means the underlying code is unworkable.

In two decades I have never met an engineer who joined a project and didn’t at some point suggest starting over.

The world runs on buggy, hack filled, good enough code. The idea LLMs are failing when that’s what they produce is wrong in my opinion.

This is the way.

I have been selling my extremely high quality plastic clothing (Veillance made in Canada items and Canada Goose) and been replacing them with wool and cotton.

Ventille cotton can keep you dry without plastic. Developed in WW2 by the UK for hoses and buckets when rubber was in short supply. Wanted cotton is another option but doesn’t breathe.

Mover - a Swiss brand - have an entire range of plastic free clothes of high quality.

Tons of other options but the above are easy substitutes at the high end.

Bonus, unlike even the best plastics these age beautifully and there are no taped seams to degrade.

Not at all.

LLMS can appear intelligent until they, often, say things no intelligent being would. Then they appear profoundly stupid.

Washing machines wash reliably. LLMs do not.

A machine will be intelligent when instead of producing false output it responds with “I don’t know” and can be trusted.

I work in Hollywood and this is or true. We do not have to pay to have buildings in the background. Nor does TV. How would anything be filmed outside if news crews had to pay fees for filming like that? I have made films in NY, London, Paris, Sydney. We can shoot someone walking through a city as long as we have permits for the space. The skyline is free. As is anything else we capture from space we have rights to.