Not to brag here but I think brutal is a bit of an overstatement. From what I can tell Seattle gets like 9,5 hours of sunlight now. That's almost two hours more than Stockholm, depending on the day. I have friends living in Luleå and two weeks ago they had less than 5 hours of sun. Now that's brutal.
The shitty thing about living in the north isn't the cold, it's the combination of cold and dark, but mostly it's the dark...
Like removing the headphone jack to underhandedly force people into Bluetooth headphones(with Apple conveniently owning Beats, who has the biggest market share of aforementioned headphones) and insultingly excusing it with "innovation" and non-reasons. Yet people will crawl out of the woodwork to arbitrarily defend their phone brand, which is apparently really important for their identity.
From what I understand this issue is ridiculous is the States. I also live in Sweden and in my town 1Gb internet is included in my rent, using the city's network that had basically built fiber in the entire town. On top of that we have tons of ISPs to choose from, some the smaller ones focus on security and anonymity for example.
In contrast most places in the US have no competition at all, which is kinda ironic since the US is the birthplace of the Internet.
I have come to believe the there is no right or wrong absolute answer in regards to markets. Some need regulation, others don't. Internet does though, since it is already a vital part of the modern world. It's not just for porn or games like many old US politicians want to believe. The internet has to be protected from greed.
Is easy to read to much things into something you don't have a good understanding of. But from my experience, assuming racism or something similar is usually premature and overly simplistic. There may be many reasons why a white persons process can take less time than someone black, when if he is naive born. Similarly if two white candidates have very different backgrounds.
Any consciousness vastly superior to ours would be so complex that we wouldn't even be aware of it. So it wouldn't matter what it would do to us. It's the same with most animals. We might as well be gods to them. An ant lives in a completely different reality. The whole concept of "animal rights" is based on the flawed notion of trying to equate our reality to that of completely different beings. Something that is unable to even understand the concept of rights is incapable of having them, or morals, to begin with. Rights are not given, they are taken. There is a reason why humans rule Earth and not gerbils. Rights or morals didn't exist until we invented them. There is no objective spiritual truth out there.
Consciousness requires a critical mass of brain power. A wolf is relatively intelligent but not conscious, they are biological machines that only think about killing and mating and they have been doing that, without change for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the environment doesn't change then they will continue being identical for hundreds of thousands of years more. Trying to give animals human properties is really very foolish. It's like trying to do that with computers, just because they can give us illusions of intelligence and consciousness, but because computers don't have cute faces and cuddly bodies nobody thinks about it. Evolution really is very efficient but brutally so. Only reason why humans have things like compassion is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to us. A single human is really quite weak and underpowered, we need to cooperate, it's the key to our progress. It is also why we think babies are cute and why we are instinctively protective of them and why sex feels good. There really is no deeper meaning behind any of it. If we had evolved from tigers then the world would look very (brutally)different, because tigers are solitary and territorial animals that have absolutely no use for things like compassion, empathy or cooperativeness. We wouldn't think twice about killing anything if it suited us, not even other tigers and it would be completely normal to us. If some hairless ape came to us on his high horse and started preaching about morals and rights then we would think that he was crazy, and then we would eat him.
The thing is, I think it's the only real way to achieve anything of lasting impact.
There will always be ways to exploit various systems, you can only react, not prevent in those cases. Because of entropy, complexity is always increasing. It means that not only are the problems going to be getting harder to address individually but that new problems and systems will be created at an exponentially increasing rate. Those problems are superficial in nature and more like symptoms in any case, than real causes. You have to address the root of the problem and that is human nature. Instead of chopping of the heads of a hydra, shoot in in the heart or something.
As long as politics can play on emotions, people will be liable to act irrationally and thereby manipulated.
The only viable forms of government i see now is a benevolent enlightened dictator or a scientocracy.
The only way to remove manipulation is to remove emotion from politics. So you either need someone who knows what needs to be done and can't be influenced otherwise, or a system that is not easy to influence, like one based on facts and evidence.
Enlightened dictator is a high risk high reward type of deal though, even if he is awesome then there are no guarantees afterwards. Basically rolling dice. Of course you need to do other things too, like restricting the influence of money in politics, but even with decent politicians the masses are vulnerable to manipulation by various interests. That really is the Achilles heel of democracy. So the system needs to be transparent and based on the scientific method. It really is the only way to remain impartial and objective.
We have a long way to get there however, so I think a short term solution is to invest in education. I know it's kind of a platitude and also imperfect, but history and research has shown that education really is the defining factor between the good and the bad. A democracy needs an educated populace, monarchy was fine and natural for certain times because it pretty much the only thing that could have worked when 95% of the populace was illiterate and relatively stupid. Sudden democracy in the Middle Ages would have been a disaster. Unfortunately there seems to be a trend of anti-intellectualism recently is certain places like the UK and US. Make no mistake, whether it is deliberate or not, it is exactly what many interests want. Dumb people are much easier to manipulate.
V for Vendetta was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a manual or goalpost. Britain really has gone to shit. Probably one of the last countries I'd want to move to.
I don't see this as a new problem tbh. It's a function of human nature. We like to think that we are smarter and better than our primitive ancestors but the fact is that we are exactly as dumb our a smart as they were. Only thing that separates us is out knowledge. But we are just as prone to bias, intellectual weakness, selfish dishonesty and irrationality than our dumb ancestors. Most people are followers, we want to be in a group, we want to belong, we want to be led and above else we want to feel good about ourselves. People believe what they want to believe because that is safe, comfortable and easy. The psychology is the same as religion, minus the supernatural. This election showed as much. We are perfectly willing to disregard facts and reason if it suits our narrow benefits or correlates with what we think we know already. It takes great strength of character to put principles and reason above personal comfort and safety and frankly most people lack it. Add to this modern identity politics and you have a recipe for disaster.
Our lives are easy. We think that we are advanced but this can ask turn to shit in no time because our base natures are still very much intact. Consider the Nazis and the power of group think and in group bias. Completely normal people can be made quite easily to do savage things. Even in this post WW2 world, the Stanford prison experiment showed as much. We really are fragile beings and we have to be vigilant, now more than ever, because we are under the mistaken belief that we today are somehow better, more evolved or new. When it comes down to it then we are nothing but animals, driven by our instincts and all the science, culture and philosophy flies out the window. I think the Jedi and the Sith are a great metaphor for this. We need self control and vigilance to not fall to the dark side, which is often tempting and the path of least resistance and no matter hour high you have risen, you can always fall.
I don't see this as a new problem tbh. It's a function of human nature. We like to think that we are smarter and better than our primitive ancestors but the fact is that we are exactly as dumb or as smart as they were. Only thing that separates us is our knowledge. But we are just as prone to bias, intellectual weakness, selfish dishonesty and irrationality than our dumb ancestors. Most people are followers, we want to be in a group, we want to belong, we want to be led and above else we want to feel good about ourselves. People believe what they want to believe because that is safe, comfortable and easy. The psychology is the same as religion, minus the supernatural. This election showed as much. We are perfectly willing to disregard facts and reason if it suits our narrow benefits or correlates with what we think we know already. It takes great strength of character to put principles and reason above personal comfort and safety and frankly most people lack it. Add to this modern identity politics and you have a recipe for disaster.
Our lives are easy. We think that we are advanced but this can all turn to shit in no time because our base natures are still very much intact. Consider the Nazis and the power of group think and in group bias. Completely normal people can be made quite easily to do savage things. Even in this post WW2 world, the Stanford prison experiment showed as much. We really are fragile beings and we have to be vigilant, now more than ever, because we are under the mistaken belief that we today are somehow better, more evolved or new. When it comes down to it then we are nothing but animals, driven by our instincts and all the science, culture and philosophy flies out the window. I think the Jedi and the Sith are a great metaphor for this. We need self control and vigilance to not fall to the dark side, which is often tempting and the path of least resistance and no matter hour high you have risen, you can always fall.
The shitty thing about living in the north isn't the cold, it's the combination of cold and dark, but mostly it's the dark...