spiralx · HackerTrans

Really “cavemanship” was small tribes with basically a socialist economy and that only scales so far, what we have today is 14,000 years worth of societal progress towards social structures that can support more than 150 people who all live together and know each other. If we fell back to that state we'd start developing past it as soon as there were enough resources available to support more than that amount of people - the end result might not be what we have today, but it probably would be more similar to it than to the starting point.

spiralx

há 3 anosdiscuss

Engineers are famously over-represented amongst terrorists, so probably.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....

spiralx

há 3 anosdiscuss

Are you talking about the difference between proximal and ultimate causes? As in the proximal cause of these people dying was an explosion from a bomb set by Kaczynski, while the ultimate cause was that the things that caused Kaczynski's poor mental health that led him to those actions.

Separately I like the phrase "a reason is not an excuse" quite a lot. I can empathise with people who make terrible decisions and understand their reasoning, but that doesn't make me excuse the choices that they made.

spiralx

há 3 anosdiscuss

Yeah we've helped hundreds of start-ups do their R&D claims, and you have to have specific projects that fall within the definition of "novel" and even then you need to explicitly specify exactly which people worked on it and for how long. It's not a blank cheque at all, and they've tightened the requirements this year on top of that.

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

> After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a subset of very far right viewpoints, it's becoming clear that lots of these people claim to want "freedom," but what they really want is freedom from the existing power hierarchies, and to create new ones in which they are on top again.

The linked essay explicitly makes the point that in the absence of formalised structures, power will accrue into an implicit elite from either pre-existing social networks or the formation of in-groups of those who can network and who tick the boxes of qualities the group views as good. Libertarians want to remove the formal structure of government in favour of a new unelected and unaccountable elite arising from whichever group they feel part of. At least the ones that aren't just dupes do.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

> We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one, which has problems that are impossible to fix. Rather than chasing a thousand new systems, we should be fixing the one we have.

Attacking "the establishment" is a common tactic of those who want to replace the existing somewhat democratic and somewhat accountable elite with their own unelected and unaccountable elite.

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

The Tyranny of Structurelessness literally says power structures are inevitable and when a group has no explicit structure an elite will form from either a pre-existing network or an informal network of those who are good at networking and match whatever qualities the larger group deems as "good".

So quoting that seemed to be about making the point that in the absence of formal, structured regulation decided through a well-defined process what happen is that you get elite insiders exerting control for their own reasons which may or may not benefit the general group, and without any oversight at all.

Both articles were in favour of formal structures with accountability and open processes that allow for changes when required, and against unstructured groups that invariably wind up controlled by unelected elites.

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

The essay linked in the article is absolutely spot on when talking about the dynamics of groups with formalised structures vs those that are decentralised, it's well worth a read.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

It was one politician who blocked a full national health service back in the 70s despite bipartisan support for it - IIRC he used his position as ranking member on the Ways & Means committee to stonewall the whole thing. American political parties are probably some of the weakest in the world, they have almost zero ability to control what their members do or even who their members are.

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

This whole topic is extrapolating from people's feelings to the behaviour of a huge public company. I've not seen a single piece of actual data anywhere so far.

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

I dislike using Macs for the same reason, when I had one for work I managed to use Karabiner to remap a ton of shortcuts to at least make it tolerable. And by tolerable, I mean "only cursing at the OS every minute or so rather than on every second keyboard combo attempted".

spiralx

há 5 anosdiscuss

It gets worse: from when I had to deal with this some years back IIRC in Saudi Arabia the start and end of DST is set by decree every year.

spiralx

há 7 anosdiscuss

> If we can keep the poles cooler, we could increase the ice cap, reduce melt, and affect only a small number of living creatures.

And more ice means a higher albedo, so more sunlight is reflected back into space. But I see the challenges of partial blocking as a lot higher than in the general case - you need to keep two hemispheres in place and synchronise them with the tilt of the planet as it orbits the sun.

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