joe_biden123's comments

I remember reading an article about coding at nasa, like the code that ran the moon landing ship.

I can't remember the link but you can probably find something. the way they code is very careful and deliberate. everyone has an office, none of this "rockstar" nonsense that you have at startups, they are all serious people, the deadlines are sensible, no one pulls all nighters, they come in at 9 and get out at 5. absolutely nothing gets written without documenting it. no line of gets changed without the reason for the change written in documentation. everything is carefully panned. needless to say the code got the ship to the moon and back. this is how coding should be done

seaborn is nice because it let's you do plots with one line that would take a page of code in basic matplotlib, but if you need to change one specific thing it might become really hard.

I honestly moved on to gui based plotting programs like grace or veusz, there's just a button for the things you want to do

the theory works for many kind of surpluses. if there are too many engineers and scientists and not enough jobs for them it's a problem. this also applies to any kind of elites: someone who considers himself above the general population: medieval nobles, roman senators, programmers. too many of them and it's a problem. you can read turchin's scientific articles, he uses data from different societies (widely different) and his equations seem to work to predict instability

the education takes work and they are raised to believe they will be rewarded for it. "fancy education" isn't something useless. read the article. there are 25000+ layers formed every year who can't find a job. lawyers do important jobs it's just there aren't enough jobs for them. there are too many humanity majors too. stem people think they are superior but they also are part of this overproduuced elites. more and more people are educated in stem and soon the demand for them will saturate and their salaries will drop. there is just no control over universities and no planning for the future they let too many people in and the economy can't absorb them. "useless" humanity majors in the past would have gotten jobs teaching or doing research but there's too many of them. society is paying the price

the important part is they are all "elites", and whether their work is productive or not is not that important. they are separated from the masses at lagre by something. it could be college education or senatorial status or a noble title the details doesn't matter. they are elites doesn't mean they are "evil", and all societies need elites. there are just some positions they compete for and if there are not enough to go around sociaty can pay for it. the important part is not to overproduce elites

the beauty of turchin's equations is that they seem to be universal. what elites are doesn't depend much on details, except that they are possible to exist because there is a surplus produced by the peasants, slaves or in the modern era, supermarket workers or 3rd worlders. today's elites are those who were able to work from home while being served by those people essentially.

if you read turchin's paper his model has 3 parts. one accounts for elite competition, another for general/unskilled population wealth and a third one for the society's economy. elites aren't the only thing that produces instability those 2 other things