I am not the most stringent environmentalist, but it heavily influences my decisions. Seeing Nepalis throw water bottles out bus windows, Albanians burn trash on a mountainside pile, Canadians idling their engine for 20 minutes to get coffee without leaving their car… it makes me wonder why I even bother.
This left me in a weird place where I can’t decide between partying before the end of the world, or do my bit however useless it is.
Probably after that is having my trust in professionals repeatedly broken. It's bad when you encounter people who you blindly trust to do the right thing and realize that they're not necessarily doing it. Healthcare professionals, who you unconsciously partitioned away from other jobs too. That maybe you, untrained as you are, can do it too with a little effort for a lot less money.
After that is the deep understanding that money doesn't buy quality generally, it can, but not as a rule, and that you can't pay people any amount to care about you or your things.
Maybe a lot of that is the eggshells of youth falling away leaving the cynicism of adulthood, but this knowledge and being constantly reminded of it has definitely made me less happy.
I remember in high school chemistry class this kid pulled the emergency shower chain and flooded the room with disgusting rusty water. I vividly remember thinking, “wow he just ruined his life.” He’s a doctor now lol.
It’s also funny how I was a total stickler for the rules and my brother just disregarded them entirely. He enrolled into ROTC in high school and once he figured out the instructors couldn’t do anything but yell at him he just let them yell. They’d tell him to run a mile and he’d walk it as slow as he wanted while they screamed right in his face the whole time.
Now that I’m older I definitely don’t think about the rules as much anymore. Somebody at work said we “had” to do something and I was just like, “Who said that?” And they couldn’t figure out why they thought we had to do it. So we just did it.
There’s a line in the new Elon Musk book where he says something like, “The only rules are the laws of physics. Everything else is just a recommendation.” When I was younger I would’ve thought that was a terrible philosophy. Now it makes a lot more sense.
There was an email about going to China and do some support which everyone answered but Lau. Everyone who answered went to China and hated it. It's a filthy place.
But Lau didn't because he didn't care and didn't answer the mail even when it told him to answer it.
So this is the Lau-method for me. Don't do anything your management thinks is important. It seldom is.
The point is that recommendations are exactly what they are.
The recommendation is "Drive no faster than 45mph on this road unless you want to risk getting a ticket (or killing someone or whatever)."
But who's physically preventing you from driving 60mph? If you were taking your dying relative to the hospital would you drive 45mph?
Perhaps a law of physics is involved and you are physically prevented from going over 45mph because of a governor on your engine, but you could pay someone to remove it (or do it yourself). Speedbumps may increase the danger and consequence of going 100mph and that is something of a physical limitation.
You can think it's asshole philosophy (and perhaps it is), but you're not seeing the world the way it really is, which I think is heart of the matter.
It's like the clip of the guy talking about the German who can't drive because they don't have a license:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo
It's just a recommendation!
Laws can be broken, so why are they different than a recommendation?
I can tell you, "don't touch that hot pan" and it's a recommendation but you can still do it. The government can say "don't speed" and it's a recommendation but you can still do it.
The 'Recommendation' quote just sounds typical of the edgy posturing we've seen Musk fall into. Once the pithy zing fades, we have an idea scales poorly.
There are a lot of dumb laws, but they are typically there to protect us and our fellow citizens from human beings (you and me) doing dumb shit. They are hardly recommendations. If anything, laws are the network protocol of society that allows us a semblance of reliability and stability in our operating environment.
Laws are just recommendations that some people see as more serious than others. If you’re willing to take the risk and accept the consequence, it’s your choice.
> By their very definitions, laws are not "recommendations". There's nothing deeper here
I think this concept is called an information hazard[2][3]
1. https://test.mensa.no/Home/Test/en
Edit: I just got 121, definitely gets harder at the end lol, what a rollercoaster
But I had been following the theories of Alvarez et. al. from 1980 and I fully accepted that the KT Boundary must be the remnant of a major impact event associated with the dinosaurs' global mass extinction. I reasoned at the time that the actual crater need not even be found to jump start the human race to action. I reasoned wrong.
It would be ~2013 before the available evidence was generally accepted.
Since ~1985 when the KT boundary's full implications have been known, I have felt that the whole human race has had one single job, to leverage our 'space race' and weapons technology to deliver a credible planetary defense from asteroids and comets. Soon, already. To launch on short notice from the Moon as an armada of kinetic impactor rockets with a mass-payload of lunar dust to deflect and divert the imminent impact of an object with the greatest level of assurance possible. By definition, one off the plane of the ecliptic that we found only yesterday that would hit next month. As you can imagine, I have little patience for wasteful discussions about 'deploying solar sails on an object'.
This should have pre-empted the Cold War. It (with hindsight) should have been the focus of the space race from day one with all countries participating. Getting lead out of gasoline and keeping CFCs and bromides away from the ozone layer was nice, but when I see the global resources that have been devoted to 'climate' and the abuse of statistics applied to existential threats (as in it's so 'unlikely' so we have no need to plan for it with any urgency)... and exploration of Mars over bases and planetary defense on the Moon, it makes my blood boil. As a parent.
A recent letter to Goldfein ( https://archive.org/download/20180227-david-l.-goldfein-lett... ) was just the latest in a series. Knowledge of KT impact has affected and colored my thinking as an adult to a much greater extent than fear of nuclear war ever did.
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow
I cannot unsee what he opened my eyes to
When I was young, I thought that newer was better, I learned across the years that a more conservative approach is a wiser course. Progress is something that happens when the forces permit it, and the people push hard for it. There's nothing permanent about it, though.
In my view, Linus Torvalds was wrong in his debate with his teacher, Andrew Tanenbaum[1]. We're still a decade out, hopefully not more, from a move to capability based operating systems. These will be more secure, and should provide some actual improvements in stability as a side effect.
We may be nearing peak silicon, but its really hard to say for sure. The ability to mass manufacture chips has a very high barrier to entry, but doing it at a lower scale, or lesser density, has fallen quite far thanks to all the lessons learned on the way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...