I remember when a bully would have to go up to you themselves to mete out whatever harassment, and you could avoid a lot of it by just being aware and avoiding that particular person.
Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.
This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.
Kids know how to download or use free texting apps and sites, giving them access to potentially thousands of different numbers from which they can engage in harassment campaigns. In fact, it's an incredibly common tactic.
Similarly, someone from Minsk and Timbuktu can do the same thing, they have access to the same tools.
My point was not "oh, social media bullying is some kind of special case compared to other ways kids today bully their peers". My point was "modern bullying is different from historic bullying, and dismissing modern bullying as the same as historic bullying is intellectually lazy"
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
>”Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types.
That's just not true. The Black Hundred responsible for pogroms were in decline already before revolution having lost state support as bureaucrats felt it was getting out of control. They played zero role after the revolution. Monarchists were a minority among Whites, it is just that the most competent military leaders were (i. e. Kolchak Denikin, Kappel) - but even them were not too loud loud about it as not to lose support. The Reds nearly lost simply because they had zero approval rating to begin with, what got them any support at all was the promise to exit WWI - and the support fell considerably when it turned out that exiting the war meant Brest peace accord.
The whites can want a strict monarchy all they want but that won't be what gets the communists to not pick their arms back up again. Preferences don't change the political reality or what it takes to consolidate and keep power.
The Taliban can hate the west all they want, it's not politically tenable for them to engage in any serious effort to sponsor terrorism abroad. Likewise going full jackboot during reconstruction after the US civil war wasn't politically possible.
> for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics.
Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
I think its not just recency bias at work, but also the broader experience that nothing changed after the first straw. If the complainant can't assemble the various issues into a coherent narrative that signals that they should leave, then they're not going to. So its not just fixing issues as they come up, its fixing the right issues before they can spread.
I worked at company where the projects I was working on kept getting cancelled. And sure, that's business, these things happen. But couple that with also being reassigned well outside of my comfort zone or job description while they looked for something new (and all of the proposed projects that would be back in line with my job title were also getting cancelled before development could even begin), I began to see a pattern.
The final straw, such as it was, was the announcement that they could no longer purchase milk for coffee in the breakroom, in an effort to save money. It wasn't that "I can't work at a place that can't afford milk for coffee", it was "this company is so bad at planning for the future that it can't even find a way to purchase milk for the breakroom, let alone drive a massive development and manufacturing effort to completion".
There’s a sort of a chess clock that starts after the first injury. Every move adds a little more time to the clock but slowly runs down goodwill.
It does seem to be that the later the clock starts the better things go.
But analogies aside, it’s also that first incident of “did I make a mistake coming here?” And that can start with dumb logistical things like they knew you were showing up on Wednesday and they didn’t have a desk or maybe a composter ready for you.
The Gottman Institute thinks that the only emotion a relationship cannot endure is contempt. So far I haven’t encountered any meaningful counterexamples.
Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.
1) the American cult of self-reliance. The idea that people will not value something they did not themselves work for, even if its given to them by a close friend or family member, is basically synonymous with "the American dream". "Socialism" is so bad to Americans that they would rather have diabetics die because they can't afford the lifesaving medicine they need, than to give handouts to such people, just for them to develop a "dependency". There's even an entire health-influencer industry built around the idea that all health problems not directly caused by trauma are because the person suffering just isn't trying hard enough to be healthy, and not, you know, because of a social and economic system that's actively corrosive to human health. "You're sick because you're too lazy to avoid trans-fats" basically the gist of RFK Jr's ideology.
2) Americans are so opposed to thinking more than 3 months ahead that all they see with that 20% price increase is the impact it has on them right now. The easy access to instant gratification is steadily eroding our ability to be patient or suffer any hardship. This has been growing for a long time (c.f. fresh fruits and vegetables of all stripes, year round) but has reached a sort of fever pitch with the advent of same-day delivery for a vast array of bits and baubles.
All of the velcro katanas I've ever owned ultimately ended up pretty stank. I think its the textile lining. Meanwhile, my Muira VCS have stayed pretty clean. My Muira Lace, not so much.
A nit: There's a subtle distinction between an individual human and the power of human organization and civilization that is implied by the article, but never outright stated.
One-for-one, there are many creatures that are individually more dangerous to humans, and a decent number of people are killed by such animals every year. Indeed, a naked human in the wild is going to be quite fragile and easy to kill until they can bring some technology to bear. But there are no animals or even set of animals that could conceivably wipe out all of humanity at any of our technological peaks from the last 100,000 years. Even the number one killer of humans, the mosquito, is gradually being defeated, going from a vector for disease to just an annoyance, just like the flea.
A lot of rugged individualists seem to neglect talking about the human super organism. That the vast majority of our strength comes from sharing knowledge, making tools, and working together.
And on that same note it should be mentioned that exchange of information between humans is relatively slow and guarded. A group of entities that could exchange knowledge quickly and efficiently would represent an extreme challenge for us.
The main strength of microcontroller-based hobby boards (I hesitate to say "bare-metal", but something like that) is that tuning them for long operation on a small pouch cell is pretty straightforward. There is no such easy path to prolong battery life on a Raspberry Pi (not including the RPI Pico). After that, with microcontrollers, you have direct visibility into most interrupts you may need to use. You do not have that in the standard Raspbian linux distro.
They are foundationally different items, and it does not take a tremendously complicated project to reach the boundary between them. Need a robust wifi stack or to run a camera? You need something with at least an RTOS (like an ESP), or an actual operating system. Need to service a rapidly spinning rotary encoder without missing clicks or blocking other operations? You need a microcontroller.
Its certainly true that you can make a Raspberry Pi do everything an arduino can (and mostly vice versa), but in terms of what's accessible to a early-intermediate hobbyist, they are different tools for different tasks.
I used to be all boots all the time, but I realized somewhat recently that unless I'm carrying a heavy load, boots are significantly less comfortable than good e.g. trail running shoes. If I'm carrying the load that the OP is, hiking boots are not really useful for me. If you look at what e.g. extreme long-distance hikers are wearing on the Appalachian trail or the Pacific Crest trail, its usually trail running shoes, because it makes more sense for carrying a light load an extremely long distance.
Certainly, if you've a history of ankle injuries or some other podiatric necessity, go for it. But for me, a pair of good walking shoes and a pair of good sandals is all I realistically need.
Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.
This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.
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