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It’s an age of marvels

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Re: It’s an age of marvels

#201

Post by MisterBastahrd »

ertgbnm wrote: post #23

More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…

Reminds me of the story of the VERY early German settlers in Louisiana. They didn't have work animals such as horses or food / sustenance animals such as cows for the first decade of their time settling here (and to be clear, cows were used ONLY for milk... killing cows was a crime in early colonial Louisiana). Clearing the land for farming? The Company des Indes gave them each a pickaxe, a hoe, and a spade.

The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St. Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale.

One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat and taught the children how to hunt, too.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#202

Post by tomjen3 »

mavhc wrote: post #121
tomjen3 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a video where it literally blows the mind of an immigrant from Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8

Literally literally, or metaphorically literally?

Literally, in that he is unable to process things, just in the same way my fuse blows - it is resettable.

Not literallly in the cartoon sense.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#203

Post by asdfman123 »

I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them.

Phones are awesome to look up information or video chat family members on another part of the planet. But staring at them for emotional regulation while avoiding real people around you is a mistake.

I wonder how we're going to solve this problem culturally. I'm trying to change my own habits, but it's hard.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#204

Post by adwn »

somenameforme wrote: post #103
dotnet00 wrote: post #49

It's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the world here first thing in the morning. I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just the recent past would see our current world as one full of manmade wonders. Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending that it does it essentially wirelessly. Adding…

Re: Moon landing - It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972 Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program, which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he remarked that we may never set foot…

> Yet the US space program existed solely and exclusively due to a large and heavily centralized governmental effort.

That's not quite the right conclusion to draw from this. The US could afford to put a humongous amount of resources into its space program because of the productive output unleashed by capitalism and a market-based economy. For example, the US spent a lot of money on a brute-force approach to fixing the combustion instability problems in the huge F-1 engines through trial-and-error; the USSR could not afford to do this, and was forced to go with a much larger number of smaller engines (which due to budgetary constraints couldn't be tested together before the actual launch, with catastrophic consequences).

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#205

Post by dotnet00 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #168
somenameforme wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Moon landing - It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972 Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program, which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he remarked that we may never set foot…

> It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments... Are there any private companies putting humans in space without huge government grants, launch facilities, or ex-gov talent?

The 'huge government grants' thing is doing a lot of (excuse the pun) heavy lifting, as are launch facilities and ex-gov talent.

The government is a customer on Crew Dragon, it's a government 'grant' if you consider it a grant when the government pays money to a company for stationary specifically designed for the government (say, with the respective agency's logo on it). Similarly, the launch facilities are being leased and heavily customized by private companies for their requirements. You can't just prop up a launch complex anywhere, and the best spots are where the government owned ones have been built already.

Ex-gov talent is similarly complicated because there is obviously a lot of exchange between NASA and industry, especially since the space industry is growing rapidly and has high barriers to entry constraining talent availability. For example, a lot of smaller new space companies are founded by people who have previously worked at SpaceX, but it'd be weird to say that those companies are not independent of SpaceX just because that's where their founders previously gained their industry credentials from.

The important point in terms of independence is that during Apollo, NASA dictated the design in detail to companies, the company's job was to build what NASA told them to, then NASA would take ownership of it all and be responsible for running the show. The companies couldn't choose to do whatever they wanted with the designs. Now, with independent private space exploration, NASA just presents its requirements (safety, destination, crew, payload, availability etc). Companies present their proposals, NASA decides which ones fit its requirements best and promises them fixed payments for achieving specific milestones. The risk of cost overruns, failures etc is entirely on the company. The design is developed primarily by the company, and it belongs to them, NASA is essentially just along for the ride like any passenger.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#206

Post by keybored »

petsfed wrote: post #173
keybored wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political compla…

I understood the "extremist violent rhetoric" to refer specifically to accelerationists (in the states, we have the Boogaloo boys, but there are others), whose explicit goal is to accelerate the (from their perspective) inevitible collapse of the current order, to replace it with their own order. Often times, but not always, this is married to a both a doomsday-prepper I-can-go-it-alone mentality, as well as a libert…

There are currently many different extremist groups out there. So I don’t know why you went with that.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#207

Post by AnimalMuppet »

keybored wrote: post #99
brigadier132 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with extremist violent rhetoric.

Like I said, when you vaguely point to something in the Zeitgeist I have to guess. I made my assumption clear so don’t try to make this into a gotcha. Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you mean conflate as in draw an equivalence then that is clearly a wrong inference on your part. [1] This adjective wasn’t in your original comment hence my gue…

You don't seem to be following the site rule of "charitable interpretation" here. This reads more like "legalistic nitpicky interpretation" - that is, like bad faith.

(Yes, good faith/charitable interpretation can lead to misunderstandings when some things are left unsaid. No, I don't think maximum nitpickiness is the answer to that.)

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#208

Post by lotsofpulp »

mtalantikite wrote: post #198
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so much. People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.

Oh, same with my father. He would tell stories about going to the markets in Algeria when he was a kid and how it was totally normal to have fruit sellers cut into a melon right then and there to give you a sample. If it sucked you just wouldn't buy it, so there was always competition for having the best produce in the market. And this was him complaining to me about poor quality produce in the US when I was a kid in…

> Food just tastes better in other countries.

This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#209

Post by petsfed »

keybored wrote: post #206
petsfed wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood the "extremist violent rhetoric" to refer specifically to accelerationists (in the states, we have the Boogaloo boys, but there are others), whose explicit goal is to accelerate the (from their perspective) inevitible collapse of the current order, to replace it with their own order. Often times, but not always, this is married to a both a doomsday-prepper I-can-go-it-alone mentality, as well as a libert…

There are currently many different extremist groups out there. So I don’t know why you went with that.

Because unlike other kinds of extremist, violent, revolutionary political movements, those from the accelerationist + prepper mindset are explicitly opposed to modern life. Think Ted Kaczynski (that is, the Unabomber).

Not all violent extremists are focused on tearing down the modern technological order. ISIS, for instance, is only interested in the end of modern morality, but (evidently, based on their PR/recruiting arm) have no special qualms with modern media technology, industrialization, etc. The Red Army Faction was only opposed to the modern (at the time) government of Germany and a poorly defined concept of capitalism. But there is a specific kind of violent extremist who thinks that computers and mass production and factory farming are the problem. And I understood the GP to be referring to them.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#210

Post by UncleOxidant »

QuantumGood wrote: post #161
dotnet00 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected lea…

Many in Yeltsin's circle believed it had been set up, and was not actually used by everyday Americans, similar to how many Soviet PR setups had been undertaken

Potemkin supermarkets.
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