The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.

Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.

Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.

Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.

The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.

PSA: Rust exposes the popcnt intrinsic via the `count_ones` method on integer types: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.u32.html#method.coun...

    int crc32(byte[] data) {
        int crc = ~0;
        for (byte b : data) {
            crc ^= b & 0xFF;
            for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
                crc = (crc >>> 1) ^ ((crc & 1) * 0xEDB88320);
        }
        return ~crc;
    }

    int crc32(byte[] data) {
        int crc = ~0;
        for (int i = 0; i < data.length * 8; i++) {
            crc ^= (data[i / 8] >> (i % 8)) & 1;
            crc = (crc >>> 1) ^ ((crc & 1) * 0xEDB88320);
        }
        return ~crc;
    }

Java CRC32 nowadays uses intrinsics and avx128 for crc32.

The Huffman decoding implementation is also bigger in production implementations for both speed and error checking. Two Huffman trees need to be exactly complete except in the special case of a single code, and in most cases they are flattened to two-level tables for speed (though the latest desktop CPUs have enough L1 cache to use single-level).

Finally, the LZ copy typically has special cases added for using wider than byte copies for non-overlapping, non-wrapping runs. This is a significant decoding speed optimization.

More reasons it's an odd comparison.

Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.

They are fundamentally different. In slots, you bet against the house, in poker you bet against other players. So slots are gambling in the traditional sense. Poker however is no different than buying a house. There is still a house fee in both cases and in both cases you are betting against other people. And in poker, new players can enter and inject capital just like the housing market. You going to ban buying houses next? You can't eliminate risk from life.

You are basically trying out outlaw luck and randomness at this point.

When drones become cheaper then it’s a problem.

Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH. Your emplacement costs more than $200 and can only fire in one direction at a time.

Or, as we've seen in Ukraine, once your disposable low-cost drones have precisely identified a high-value, high-effectiveness static emplacement, you send in a cruise missile to clear it out, and then the drones continue sweeping forward.

A drone that can go 300 km/h is way more than 100 $, you are in the thousands of dollar range at that point. Turret wins if it blows up one.

Also, it could probably blow up more than one since at 300 km/h you would get 0.5 seconds to respond and I was arguing 0.1 seconds per target anywhere in a full 360. 0.25 seconds for anywhere on a full 360 would be enough for 2 and that is within human capability.

> you send in a cruise missile to clear it out

Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins. Also you can put wheels on the turret, so it might not even be there.

Now you are probably going to argue about a drone that goes 1000 km/h at which point what you have is a cruise missile which costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point the entire argument about drones being too cheap to cost-effectively stop is moot.

Or you might argue that the drones just go high. 50 m is a ludicrously low flight ceiling. But then your drone can not explode on contact. You could use a drone that drops explosives, but that still requires flying over the target. High flying drones are easier to detect, and you could counter that with flying shotgun drones or turret mounted machine guns which have ranges in the hundreds to thousands of meters and would still only cost a few dollars of ammo per kill.

My main point is that bullets can easily disable a cheap drone and are much cheaper than a cheap drone. You just need a cost-effective way of deploying mass bullets against mass drones. Logical answers are ground deployments around targets or drones with bullets that cost-effectively shoot down drones without bullets.

You will then likely get into a arms race of fighter drones to protect your bomber drones. And scale up your drones until they are not easily bullet-destroyable. But then your drone costs have likely increased to the point where anti-air cannons shooting 100 $ explosive shells are cost-effective. And so on and so forth.

Nope. The calculus is not about individual components, but about overall cost of the entire system and all of its associated support. What was the material, labor, and opportunity cost to install the turret? What was it protecting (which is now presumably destroyed by drones, or captured by the enemy)? You're also still assuming that you're facing off against guerillas fighting an asymmetrical war on a shoestring budget, but that's not the case. Whatever force you're fighting can be trivially bankrolled by a peer power who is happy to bankroll them to make you bleed to death. China will be happy to build plenty of cruise missiles, and plenty more drones.

You have presented no evidence as to the overall cost of this mystical unstoppable drone swarm. In contrast, we do know that shotguns, machine guns, and bullets are cheap, mass-produced, and mass-deployed by the tens of millions.

The key unknown of my proposal is the bulk cost and production of a small automated turret or fighter drone that can economically and flexibly deploy cheap bullet interceptors to asymmetrically defeat expensive drones. However, the operational requirements for such devices are simple and within the range of existing technology.

There is no clear evidence that cheap explosive drone swarms are magically cheaper than cheap fighter drone swarms or cheap ground drone swarms. It could easily go either way and without a rigorous actual analysis you and I are both unqualified to determine what is actually dominant.