I get you. I used to buy Nexus devices as well as some of the first Pixels, until at some point the prices shot up to ridiculous levels for a phone and I went with other brands.
Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.
Same. I've been working with and managing thousands of WP sites for over a decade and the only issues I've had have been with sites acquired from 3rd parties with random themes and plugins (and old WP versions) that break if you update something. Those have gotten hacked and have caused many headaches.
Basically no issues with sites built in-house. As you say, only reputable 3rd party plugins (like for SEO, caching, multilang) most others made in-house.
> Or you could pass an EU Constitution that enshrines basic rights including privacy
That, and (somehow) enforce the basic principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, which they are supposed to do already. That would go a long way towards not misusing that centralized power.
I will have to read up on that 2005 event, sounds weird to me that countries would complain about there being constitutional rights at the EU level. Not sure how those rights would conflict with local ones. Unless there were positive rights, like "the right to internet" or the like, which would be ridiculous and not what I'm proposing (just basic negative rights).
> Sensationalist framing aside, how does any government become a body that decides anything?
Powerful people get together and decide that they know what's best for people. Then they claim that there is "consent" because people are given the right to vote and that there is a "social contract" that no one actually has signed, which everyone should still abide by.
What you're describing is how the process in the EU works. So in essence it is "the EU".
It doesn't seem to have any limits or restrictions on what it can do as an institution. It forced idiotic bottlecaps on all of us for shit's sake... and it has little consideration for privacy laws or constitutions of individuals, otherwise this proposal would've been thrown out automatically each time, if there was anything resembling constitutional values governing the EU's mandates.
It's like being governed by a neurotic unhinged monarch.
Problem is that once you've gotten this thing through to begin with it's comparatively easy to make slight amendments later, also of course with the justification of "protecting the children".
It doesn't change anything with their higher tier sales. Those are bought for a reason that a lower tier device cannot satisfy.
My worry (from Apple's POV) is that all the people who buy the cheapest Mac (currently for $1k) will instead go for this new "base model". And I suspect there's a large cohort of people who "just want a Mac".
Wouldn't "decentralize" or "diversify" be a better term than "democratize" here? I don't really see the democracy involved as opposed to simply having a broader disaspora of education.
Yeah but you're bringing up a kind of chicken/egg problem, where if we had thought about this properly from the beginning we wouldn't have ended up in a situation where we are now slaves to the technology, as in not having enough farm land for everyone without industrial fertilizers relying on fossil fuels, or not surviving without the car/truck infrastructure like you mention.
The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits.
And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.
I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out:
> I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow
I never said it would be faster or easier.
> saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.
Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.
> Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible
I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.
This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.
> why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.
But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.
> To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?
To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:
- can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing)
- can I repair it myself?
- what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed?
- etc.
So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.
If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!
> Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.
However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).
Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.
> How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :)
For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally.
For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in).
Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain.
Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies.
Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point:
Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150.
I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.
I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the above, in the grand scheme of things.
Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.
There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so.
Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree.
Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary).
And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
The positive comments are mostly in response to his view/ideas/philosophy, as in Industrial Society and Its Future and his subsequent books - I don't think there's a single person here condoning the bombings.
If you were to read his works you might find that he wasn't so deranged after all, quite the opposite.
Edit: In terms of the philosophy/view I mean. The bombings were made out of bitterness and anger and are inexusable.
He's written a couple of books (didn't have complete freedom to do it, I remember him complaining about some hurdles) and done mail correspondence with various people.
Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.