One thing I would like to read is the history of the House of Brunswick he was supposed to be writing for much of his career. According to another website: "In the end, Leibniz was never able to complete the history, although the three volumes of his history were eventually published after his death."
But I can't seem to find them anywhere in any form.
"It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"
Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.
You don't belive parents generally protect and nurture their children?
For most of human history there were few, if any, laws governing how children were raised yet civilization didn't collapse because of that, and, indeed, there were no discernable effects.
In many places parental-infanticide was even legal. Yet always parents did their best to keep their children safe in general, because that's what parents naturally do. Somehow its different now to you I guess but I fail to see why. Obviously some parents will do a poor job, that's true about every human thing. If people can't drive we take away their license. If people can't parent, however, we apperently have to bend everything in society to cater to their failure and create a massive surveillance state.
I guess I was thinking of the samurai as being part of the permanant overclass. You mentioned that of old aristocracy provided officers for the military, so I thought that was analogious to the samurai. Perhaps I misread what you're trying to say.
My reading was that the Samurai were part of the overclass but were pretty useless, albiet still potentially dangerous, and just sat around devouring resources for hundreds of years, so perhaps the overclass of the future could do the same. The samuri weren't all rich, but they didn't dishonor themselves with labor, which is a similar thing and they certainly held power over the state. The end of the samuri was, perhaps, an example of the state getting what it wants despite the desires of the permanant overclass, supporting what you said, but it took a long time to get there.
I suppose you are thinking of the Samuri as an arm of the state and not "the rich".
Yeah. This guy didn't read hacker news a few weeks ago when that article about the Samuri came up.
There are a lot of premises this article takes for granted besides that one too, but yeah, I get it, its fun to make up what the future is going to be like on a super-grand scale where everything is a simple absolute. People were doing the same thing 100 years ago.
I don't understand why the act of buying internet access isn't considered a parental control. I doubt very many kids are doing it or can.
Ok, but parents buy internet access and then let their kids use it, because the kids need it for school. So? The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult, and maybe should be part of the obligation parents have, kind of like their obligated to teach their kids to drive before giving them the keys to a car. Its analogious to saying "kids shouldn't walk home from school or be let out of the house at all because they might wander into a nude beach or join a drug smuggling satanic cult". Most of us don't hold that view because we trust that kids can be taught to be vaguely responsible.
What's more: tools to shield the kids have been around for longer than most of the parents have been alive at this point. The problem is pretty much solved in multiple ways, and wouldn't even be a problem if parents only followed their basic responsiblities. Also it isn't a problem in the first place, I haven't seen any clear, undisputed evidence that shows that kids are degenerating into fiends because of looking at adult stuff on the internet.
Oh yeah, good point. Gun deaths each year amount to like 15 x the twin towers attacks deaths. I'm sure deaths from our terrible unaffordable healthcare system are way higher, but we spent our healthcare money on invading the middle east and paying for a bunch of obsolete fighter jets, so at least terrorism isn't a problem anymore.
It was a crazy time, not in the danger from hijackings but the enormous amount of fear and cowardice America built up within itself. It was crazy because of the mass hysteria not the violence.
Take this example:
1.2 million Americans died from Covid. 3000 americans died in the twin towers attack. That's 0.25% of the number that died from covid.
However we gave up considerably more liberty to defend against the hijackers than we did the virus. It was a very unusual incident but the response wasn't warranted.
I mean like 1/3 of the people who died in the twin towers, about 1000 people a year, die from being hit by trains, but you don't see anyone demanding we give up constitutional rights, or do literally anything at all to change that.
That's true. It seems like those states where its mandatory and free are going the right way. No doubt stuff like this will be more and more important with AI making it so easy to fake other stuff.
Fee waivers are great. A lot of poor parents are too busy / don't have their shit together enough to learn about them & use them. A lot of poor parents won't even have their kids take the tests at all even if they are free, especially if it means taking an entire day to drive them to the test facility. They might not even know what an SAT test is.
but to get to the city we had to take it was a 2 hour long drive through twisted roads that made me carsick. I lived in a small town far away from the city. By the time I got there my breakfast I had quickly eaten gave me a stomach ache, I had woken up far earlier than usual and not gotten my 7 hours too. I certainly would have done a lot better if I had lived in the big city.
Another factor: if you wanted to pay the fee you could just take the test over and over again until you got a great score. So kids with poor parents obviously had a huge disadvantage. Also kids who had the time and money could study for it with prep books - I did, while some of my friends were flipping burgers while still in highschool. Its not surprising I got a higher score than them, but it said nothing about my intellegence or understanding compaired to theirs.
I love how this article has 3 sentences and then stops to quote the first two sentences.
Also peppered with a lot of bad, redundant writing: "That’s the shape I’m watching for. That’s the shape I think wins." - those sentences both say the same thing and you didn't need either of them.
I feel like that indicates they may not have understood HOW to write a coherent and professional article here, or, indeed, an article worth reading. They clearly understood WHY - they wanted lots of attention and to show how big of an AI booster they are but WHAT they wrote was a lot of gibberish because they didn't know HOW to write.
From what I could tell a man was stabbed, didn't die, a minor event that happens every day in cities everywhere and always has - and then the locals decided to have a pogrom.
I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of... knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so incredibly afraid.
They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live there except the dystopian tech and business models they're developing ends up crossing the seas.
I'm sure when this law goes through they won't stop and will shortly be lining up some even crazier surviellance tech.
I'm thinking something that automatically scans your computer for porn or other things, like ripped film mp4s and sends it to the goverment to be analysed.
Or perhaps little gps trackers that children are mandated to wear at all times.
Yeah, although I suspect the study isn't taking account major economic factors involving ai and remote work jobs - the fact is society is built around jobs you commute to and it takes a little bit of time for society to change.
People have understood suburbs are designed for commuters since they first started popping up, this isn't like some bizarre thing that needs careful understanding. It would be like if people stopped using boats, everyone in Venice would be like "people who once used boats are now having trouble getting around town and the streets are too crowded. How curious."
One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.
I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite, even lots of current-day ones.