- The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.
- 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.
- 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”.
- Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s.
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.
- 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".
- 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.
- A lot of reasons, but the two big ones are:
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.
- 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.
- This is true up until it really REALLY isn't.
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.
- Yeah, because fuck people who require additional accessibility options, right?
On top of the real concerns around otherwise selectable text in a writing system not supported by the user's keyboard, there's also the issue of whether or not they can even operate enough of a keyboard to transcribe whatever text they want to translate.
- I mean modern day. What I'm trying to express is that "nobody today would be racist against $whateverGroup$!" has precisely zero bearing on what absolute batshit lunacy people were racist about even 50 years ago.
Its also the case that even in the 1920s, while there was a lot of anti-Italian racism, people generally saw that Italian heritage was better than African heritage.
- Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses.
Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc).
To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
- One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency.
There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white.
If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", you'll note shocking similarities to how they talked about Africans, Native Americans, Asians of all stripes, etc etc. Explicit skin color rarely came up.
Racism, especially old timey racism, is all about "how do I define my group as 'good' and everybody else as so bad that I can treat them worse?"
- The problem with this line of thinking is that home invasion is a different kind of crime from breaking and entering.
With breaking and entering, the goal is to get what they can with a minimum of fuss. Locked doors, barking dogs, automatic lights, security systems, etc are all great deterrents, because the goal is to get as much as possible while avoiding capture. The table stakes are that the burglar can get in and out without getting caught.
With home invasion, the whole threat profile is different. The operating premise is that the invader will use violence or the threat of it to brutalize the home occupants into facilitating the theft, the escape, and avoidance of prosecution.
Think of how wild animals engage in violence: they will not enter into a violent situation unless trapped (either physically, or by circumstance - e.g. fight or starve), or they think they can win the fight without sustaining any substantial injury. In the case of a home invasion, you are trapped, but the other guy has chosen the fight.
All of that to say, compliance should be done in the light of keeping yourself and those around you together and unharmed, and not willy-nilly. Obviously, don't pick a fight over a TV. But understand that if they continue their breaking-and-entering after they know you're there, compliance may be insufficient to protect your life.
- I misunderstood you then. I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Even so, most folks who carry prefer concealed carry for tactical reasons, one of which being that unless you have your rifle in a ready position, its not very useful in a self-defense situation, and simply marks you as "shoot this one first". And it turns out that walking around with a rifle in a ready position is generally perceived as aggressive, regardless of actual intent, even by those comfortable with firearms (consider a police officer approaching with a holstered weapon vs one in their hand).
So in the context of this shot, it ought to be relatively easy to pick out the shooter in the moment, the problem is that a ~200m radius around the tent where Kirk was speaking covers a lot of territory, and that's a lot of ground to cover effectively without obviously interfering with students' free movement about their college campus.
- Reports are that the single shot came from ~200 yards/meters away, which is basically the worst case scenario for good-guy-with-a-gun. In an active shooter situation, an armed bystander could in principle stop an attacker from continuing, but the only way that an armed bystander could hope to stop an assassination is if they were walking around looking for trouble.
Regardless of where you stand on the subject of concealed carry, I don't think its controversial to say we shouldn't be encouraging untrained/unvetted folks to go seek out would-be assassins before they have demonstrated themselves to be a danger. That's exactly how "armed security" shot and killed an actual bystander at the Salt Lake City 50501 demonstration earlier this year.
- When my cat was stolen, I was living in California, where only state-certified exhausts will pass emissions testing. And to date, the state has only certified OEM exhausts for Priuses.
So in my case, it was especially egregious (seriously, people have been petitioning Toyota for decades to recall Priuses to make the cat harder to steal), but in general, if you’ve got the OK to sell exhausts in California, you’re not going to endanger it by coming anywhere close to an illegal platinum/palladium fencing operation.
- Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.
- Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.
Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.
- The actual electrical engineering involved there is the sort of thing that an early-career engineer could bang out in an afternoon. Maybe a day or so for the PCB designer. The more time consuming part might be managing the regulatory compliance testing.
Most of the orgs I worked in building simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller either farmed out the actual EE work to contractors or design houses or had 1 EE for like 20 different projects.
- The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.
I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.
I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.
But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".
- I suspect that people conflate "buying a house as an investment" with "investors bought a house", which is leading to the incorrect idea that hedge funds or private equity are somehow cornering the market.
I think the reality is that the main component of investor pressure is from people who hold onto an overly large/well placed home far past the point of utility, because they want to sell as late as possible and maximize their return. Follow that with small-time landlords, and then finally actual explicit investors buying homes as some kind of commodity. A lot of the dysfunction of capitalism (so-called "late stage capitalism") is induced by people trying to outsmart the market, time the market, etc. when they really don't have the knowledge or information to play such games.
- I think "innocent" and "guileless" also bracket the sense you're going for, but they don't quite fit either.
Like, he doesn't see the malice in other people, but its not because he's innocent/naive of such intents, nor does he lack the skills to look for it (guileless), but because (as you say) he doesn't care if people take advantage of him, up to a limit.
Properly calibrated, that's really admirable.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"