71–80 of 162 posts
I remember back in the AOL days being excited about the internet and choosing it as a career because I was convinced that when it was possible for everyone in the world to openly communicate and share information that things like corruption and inequality couldn't possibly survive. Funny how that turned out.
Dont we see this with open source? More people show up. More people can find issues. Many more people can find issues than can fix them. The bug tracker bloats. Core team members get called incompetent every 2 hrs. As a counter reaction some core team members get it into their head, to share less or react in unhelpful ways that have long term costs and things go back and forth in waves. We have a few rules at work. 1…
Can you expand upon point 3? I do not really follow sports.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time magazine once bragged on its cover how the US helped Yeltsin win the election: https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/yanks-to-the-rescue-time... He was essentially Russia's Trump although a) probably a lot more in America's pocket than vice versa and b) it's difficult to overstate how much Russia suffered under him. They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously. No…
Most Americans I know that have spent more than a week in Western or Central Europe, want to be in Western or Central Europe. Not quite the same as Russia, but the concept being undermined is that USSR was a superpower that fell leaving only the US. When, at this point, most countries that were aligned with US offer better infrastructure and average-case opportunities for people, while dulling the best-case of rapid…
If Time magazine is bragging about having installed the puppet president that came on a state visit to your supermarket I would have thought that concept was well and truly undermined already.
I don't see how that supermarket having a fancy fish counter really contributes to that other than as a publicity stunt.
The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.
Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government. This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often wa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example). Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your scho…
> With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Not really though? Remember that people still fall for the most hilariously badly made phishing mails etc. Not everyone is capable of determining whether they’re currently viewing the truth or maybe some skewed part of it or outright lies. And then there’s just so much information on the net. Do _you_ know the agenda of all the s…
And neither is misinformation: Government and/or religion could alter your entire worldview, and unless you were lucky enough to travel, you never knew. For example: The spanish flu was really called that because Spain didn't have the wartime controls on its press like, say, the US did. It is likely the US troops really did a job spreading the pandemic, but we (Americans) couldn't really report on the virus at the time.
The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.
The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.
Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government. This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often wa…
That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier.
It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".
Mobile also arrived right around the time we really got confirmation there were no WMDs in Iraq.