> But it is just insufficiently sophisticated people that would conclude from that [getting shot for the crime of border crossing] they were lacking freedom.
Translation: East germans getting shot at the border were just too dumb to realise that they were free...
> Surely it is just to shoot somebody for such an egregious violation of other people's freedom
Translation: Refusing to have their labor wasted on a defunct system, thereby depriving others of its non-existent fruits, soundly earned one's capital punishment, to be carried out on the spot. It was "Notwendig".
> They did have freedom, but just had a different definition for it.
And surly they did have less radiation poisoning due to a different definition of what it means to be "poisoned".
EDIT: How could I miss this misanthropic gem:
> some stupid redneck
Translation: I know only cliches about the discarded working class trapped in the American rust belt, but treating them with contempt seems fun and acceptable, so I'll join.
The problem is that journalism doesn't pay much anymore and confers less status and prospect than a coal miner. To make up the difference, they pick up arms against imgainary foes (secret, undetectable yet very dangerous orientalism) to give their lives a meaning it wouldn't otherwise have. Young woke liberals roughly go through the same as the members of UFO cults in the 70s: Unable to accept being discarded by society, they place themselves at the center of a galactic conspiracy.
The ancients took it for granted that civilisations would rise, reach a peak, and then gradually decline, similar to other living things. It's a distinctly western/modern idea that there could be unceasing progress.
While both these views are essentially myths, my money is on the ancients being more in-line with reality. At the very least I don't need to look at decline and call it "weird". Permanent progress on the other hand is a political poison that will turn people against one another as they try to find the culprits.
and these applications give people a fuzzy warm feeling that lasts for about a month before it recedes and attention shifts elsewhere.
I have it on good authority that owning bitcoin gives people a very similar kind of feeling and there is nothing wrong with that. humans doing human things.
of course now there's plenty of arbiters of what constitutes proper warm fuzziness, and apparently a new BMW made from aluminium and steel is AAA+, but buying 0.1 of a bitcoin is not.
The environmental issues with crypto need no more solving than the environmental issues associated mining gold (much worse), producing aluminum, and in a wider sense humans doing things on earth need solving --- which is not to say that they don't, but to single out bitcoin is disingenuous, uninformed, or just plain neophobic.
I'd rather have a Europe-wide application of the French approach of forcing manufacturers to disclose repairability scores at the point of sale (and let consumers decide who important repairability is to them) rather than bureaucrats getting involved with engineering and microeconomics.
Except that software developers mostly create problems for future developers to solve, increasing -- not decreasing -- demand. The barrier of entry has always been low, yet salaries have only gone up.
Haven't seen this mentioned: I wake up to a double digit GB Finder process every other day. I leave it plugged in during the night. Wear is 3% or 48TB of writes.
i‘ve been watching interviews with homeless people on the Invisible People youtube channel (highly recommend), and one thing that struck me is how skin deep most support networks are. having friends and family vanish the second they could come up with a reasonable excuse seems to be the hardest part for many of them.