It’s crazy to me that there isn’t some kind of scientific review process when they write these things up. Formal logic has been worked out for centuries and you can just look at the math to confirm what they’re saying makes any sense at all.
It wouldn’t solve all problems but some of these recent rulings are so divorced from reality that they’ve left logic in the dust.
“Unnatural” in their argument just means “adapting my idealized personal philosophy to accept this is too hard”
Now imagine that 8.3 billion people are trying to pitch their tents all around you. You’re going to have to work out something formal with your neighbors to make sure all these tent groups fit.
If we were hunter gatherers I might believe you. People are just as rooted as trees. Almost nothing that sustains our civilization is mobile. Crops, forests, water supplies, minerals, etc…
If a freak famine (wind) causes a mass migration (swaying branches) onto your finite and fixed resources (canopy space), someone must lose fingers.
Only a half truth. Borders may have been loosely defined but they were absolutely defended with violence. You couldn’t wander in and hunt in your neighbors woods, take their timber or set up a farm too close. Hell, sometimes they even had well defined natural borders or walls (see: Hadrian’s wall, the great wall of China)
Moving through an area in large numbers might draw a violent response and you might be coerced to leave if you spoke the wrong language or dressed the wrong way. If you were an unknown group of strangers they may well let your boat sink or leave you to starve outside their walls. Modern states have simply codified these reactions into law.
Proto-states and the associated mechanisms developed extremely quickly once sedentary agriculture became dominant. If your entire livelihood is tied to a field of grain you no longer get to run or hide from conflict; controlling who can and can’t get near it becomes imperative.
Cheap mass storage and a home network connection with upload speeds that make hosting media streaming and ‘cloud’ storage out of your closet an affordable possibility.
My closet could already hold DVDs and I could have bought a slightly pricey flash drive to carry around a good chunk of media without getting networking involved. Now I can get the data from those DVDs without leaving my couch or carry around more than I have time to consume. Do I truly benefit much more?
Access to large, quality, high resolution displays that don’t cost multiple thousands of dollars.
Larger and higher quality to show higher resolutions of the same basic media tech from 20 years ago. It’s certainly novel to see a movie at home in HD/4k, but it didn’t fundamentally change the experience of watching a movie in 720p.
High performance portable computers that draw significantly less power.
Power draw wouldn’t be as much of an issue if we didn’t require digital access 24/7. A blackberry w/ voice mail and an iPod drew significantly less power and gave me all access to portable messaging and non-video media.
In exchange for gaining that video media, everyone assumes I will download their app or pull up their QR code menu.
Mobile data networks with orders of magnitude more data bandwidth.
Which still can’t match the sneaker-net bandwidth of me carrying some flash drives or DvDs. Only necessary because the raw size of data has exploded. Though I supposed I gained the ability to scroll memes on the bus.
The ability to own and control all of the technology that you depend on without needing to rent services from a corporation.
We had nearly as much control 20 years ago. Linux was just as available if you didn’t want a mainstream OS.
Technology is so much better, more private, safer and more affordable now
Don’t worry, I’m sure legislation will catch up. Our dependence on convenience tech has allowed Apple/Microsoft/Google et.al. to purchase control of their own regulation. Your OS requires age verification today (because of this ocean of data kids can access from their pocket) and tomorrow all hardware sold will require a DRM heartbeat.
Looking back on it all, the cheap tech has basically unlocked consumer video media. It wasn’t feasible to create and store significant digital video for anyone in the 00s, but now people can make professional quality movies with iPhone. Was that worth the externalized costs?
Modern technology is great. It’s massively cheaper and more performant for orders of magnitude less money.
Performant and cheaper are not inherently good things. LEDs perform a shit ton better than incandescent bulbs and are cheap as hell. But we fundamentally didn’t need more cheap light for 95% of consumer use cases. Now light pollution is climbing exponentially, 10% per year.
Consumer compute was atrocious to start, but reached a useful level where it unlocked a ton of value for people. Graphics at a legible fidelity, replacing paper documents, data over networks, responsive input, portable-ish laptops, etc…
Now we’ve got more compute than we’d ever reasonably need as a species. Landfills full of IoT waste, datacenters filling up with cheap bytes where only 1/10 will ever be read, drones dropping bombs and gearing up to monitor our every move, trillions of Kw/hr spent driving it all every year…
And what novel value has been unlocked by this glut of compute that we didn’t have before? On-demand AI meme videos?
Sure I can spend a few hundred bucks on a personal LED lightshow that would have cost tens of thousands a few decades ago. And sure I can spin up a home lab with more functionality and power than was even available 20 years ago. But what have I actually gained?
We’re gonna need a bigger ashtray
Always sounded weird and corporate to me. Easiest to just ask what your SO would prefer to be called and not worry about what people might think when you say it
The only way to enforce a guarantee is with guns you dipshit
This makes me irrationally mad. I want to think the ratio is some subtle reference to a date or holds some symbolic meaning. But deep down we all know it’s just what some random flag maker from hundreds of years ago thought looked good and then was copied and bastardized without much thought.
Edit: looking into it, it’s even worse than that. The USA uses 10:19 only by executive order in certain contexts but otherwise uses a bunch of random ratios. Some countries tried to approximate the golden ratio but the measurement drifted and they never bothered to fix it.
Theoretically you get hyperspecific representatives. Maybe a district in the west would want to vote differently than a district in the east. Theoretically your vote is still just as valuable and you’re voting with your geographic peers.
In reality it just gets optimized for party votes and you end up with this
it was impossible to afford the number of calories I needed without meat or dairy.
… Because meat and dairy are massively subsidized. If we wanted veganism to be a part of mitigating the climate crisis then it would obviously involve changes in economic policy.
Also, for
manynearly all, their livelihood…
Almost everyone lives by moving vehicles with fossil fuels, making or moving petrochemical plastics, growing things with fertilizer sourced from oil processing, etc…
I try not to get bent out of shape about it but formal safe spaces never made sense to me conceptually. Yes, everyone should have a space to feel safe and accepted but we’re doing piss poor as a society when your arbitrary membership in a marginalized group is the best shot to find that.
They’re a weak imitation of proper tight knit communities and 3rd spaces. They just happen to have some benefit because the membership self selects for similar life views. There’s nothing there that people weren’t getting at, say, a Victorian tea party, a laundry group or an AME church.
Neither side of the debate in this comment section is wrong but they’re talking about two sides of the same coin. Marginalized groups feel modern isolation much more acutely because they had fewer spaces to begin with. Cishet guys feel the isolation as well but can’t voice it in these discussions because “they’re accepted everywhere” and “power dynamics make it different”.
Those statements may be somewhat true but that offers no solution to the problem, not in the way that a safe space offers a simple constructive answer. It’s unfortunate because manosphere and fascist spaces capitalize on those vulnerable men with the same messaging and terminology.
These conversations shouldn’t be about defending one group’s right to create these spaces while delicately limiting that right for another group. They should be about why we fundamentally feel the need for these formal spaces at all…
…
it’s always material conditions and resource distribution
Including those, we’re talking in the range of 170k deaths. And only about 15% of people in the USA smoke compared to 54% drinking. Obviously still a health crisis but shows just how crazy bad smoking is.
They’re not even close to comparable as far as health crisis go. People need to eat; nobody needs to smoke. It’s possible to eat oreos without taking years off your life. Hell, it’s possible to have a diet entirely of oreos with some nutrition supplements. You won’t die from second hand oreos.
a ban just a uncalculated reaction
I’d believe this argument 80 years ago when big tobacco was still hiding evidence but not today. The calculations are right there, millions of lives being thrown away and trillions of dollars burned (in spite of massive progress!) while we drag our feet and push back on something as simple as a generation purchase ban.
We’ve literally seen it with prohibition
Prohibition was a naive attempt with no thought put toward implementation. It was backed largely by appeals to morality and sin instead of strong public health research. And even in spite of that, it did succeed in cutting alcohol consumption.
A whole generation had dramatically lower rates of alcohol use and it took until the 1970s for per-capita consumption to match the pre-prohibition peak. There’s a lot we can learn about public health policy from Prohibition but people only focus on bootleggers and gangsters.
[…] and the drug war
Woof that’s certainly one to unwrap. The war on drugs was a failure as a public health policy but wildly successful as a tool for creating a slave class and an imperial casus belli. Even a glance at policies that restricted drug research and criminalized drug use shows that public health was a fig leaf. And if you’re using drug proliferation as justification for ulterior power consolidation then eliminating drug use is obviously counter productive. I don’t think it bears much weight in these conversations.
Also denying ppl healthcare based on their bad health habits is facist…
Which is my point. I’m also not saying that other methods like education, sin taxes or tobacco alternatives are a waste of time. Public health problems always have to be fought on multiple fronts. But at some point you have to decide how much time and effort you’re going to spend tiptoeing around vice industries. A generation purchase ban is simple and gradual; and there’s no evidence that it won’t work unless you make oblique comparisons to other failed/mixed public health efforts.
I sometimes feel like people get so caught up on the word “prohibition” that their arguments bend towards addiction enabling at a societal scale. Smoking is beyond crazy when you look at the stats (using USA for convenience, but similar for other countries)
The problem is simple: cigarettes are a massive drain on the health system, directly and indirectly. The solution should be just as simple: buying cigarettes forfeits your rights to health care treatments for the damage caused. You get some palliative care but we save the lung transplants for people who aren’t killing themselves.
If you think that’s too harsh then you should stomach the cost of prohibition, policing and black markets. No matter how shitty, costly and dangerous it may be I promise that it will save lives and money if it’s a barrier to even a fraction of smokers.
Very interesting read, aside from the blood curdling close up of those patches of engorged ticks. Also…
At that stage, the bloodsucking arachnids are the size of a pencil tip.
That has to be one of the least precise measurements I’ve seen. Might as well say “as deep as a cup of water” or “as bright as a light”
That is an incredibly unhealthy mindset, I hope you’re joking