5040

>Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money

It used to be that property rights extended all the way to the sky. This understanding was updated with the advent of the airplane. Would a world where airlines need to negotiate with every land-owner their planes fly above be better than ours? Would commercial flight even be possible in such a world? Also, who is greediest in this scenario, the airline hoping to make a profit, or the land-owners hoping to make a profit?

Here's how Horace puts it:

As leaves in the woods are changed with the fleeting years; the earliest fall off first: in this manner words perish with old age, and those lately invented flourish and thrive, like men in the time of youth. We, and our works, are doomed to death: whether Neptune, admitted into the continent, defends our fleet from the north winds, a kingly work; or the lake, for a long time unfertile and fit for oars, now maintains its neighboring cities and feels the heavy plow; or the river, taught to run in a more convenient channel, has changed its course which was so destructive to the fruits. Mortal works must perish: much less can the honor and elegance of language be long-lived. Many words shall revive, which now have fallen off; and many which are now in esteem shall fall off, if it be the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.

Russia has gained more land since this was written almost two weeks ago, so I guess he was right?

>I wonder what took Ukraine so long to go for it.

All of their weapons were coming from America and its allies, and the Americans were somewhat concerned about escalation. The Americans set limits, which the Ukrainians didn't want to violate for fear of fewer weapons in the future, but now that those weapon shipments have slowed, and victory seems almost impossible, they are disregarding the old American prohibitions.

>In former times it was maintained that ownership of landed property extends from heaven all the way down to the center of the Earth, but this doctrine is obsolete, as evidenced by the flight of airplanes.

Bogged has also come to mean something like 'having had drastic plastic surgery' in some circles, the expression being derived from 'Bogdanoff'.

Often, they won't call them gift cards. They'll use things like "verification card." Newly arrived immigrants are often hopelessly confused already. They'll fall for fake job offers. These "jobs" will eventually require them to get gift cards. It can escalate into blackmail. The victim will have handed over all sorts of private information as part of the job application/interview.

This sort of service can be useful for gambling addicts too.

A related problem is the 'sorites paradox'.

>A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are removed individually. With the assumption that removing a single grain does not cause a heap to become a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times that only one grain remains: is it still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

This is the old 'violence in movies promotes violence in real life' argument.

Comparing different versions of an adventure module that has been released for multiple editions can be instructive. When I did this, it seemed to me that each new edition was more explicit than the last, with more precise and simple language, and less evocative prose.

When someone treats a rhetorical flourish in an overly literal manner, is he deliberately misrepresenting a group he dislikes, or is it just a misreading?

I'm confused at the overwhelming hostility on Hacker News, of all places. Don't you guys like technology? These guys are pushing back on outsiders setting arbitrary limits on technological progress. Do you guys really think American politicians are competent enough to micromanage the development of novel technologies?

>vast array of valuable services

I'd argue that this is how libraries get into this mess. Instead of specializing, they adopt a scattershot approach to services, many of which aren't even related to taking care of library materials. Flashy pet projects get prioritized while less interesting things like books or computer systems languish.

I didn't realize we were limiting ourselves to Western philosophy. Also, many mathematicians and astronomers have been philosophers--more so in elder days.

The number 0?

>The hedgehog/fox classification isn't mine, it is Philip Tetlock's

I know it from Isaiah Berlin, but it looks like he took it from Archilochus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox

Good point. Calls to mind the sharing of access control cards or the using of various means to prevent computers from locking in hospital settings, etc.

>Humans are addicted to convenience no matter the cost.

Another way of stating this is that people pay for convenience, and why not?

I was recently looking for a shelving unit for vinyl records. The Ikea solution was 100$. Next step up were 1000$ home-made units on Etsy. In the end, I went with Ikea. Something in the middle would have been nice.

Tangentially related:

NG You know, I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy.

I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy.

https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishig...

Perhaps related:

Aristotle (Pol. 6.5.4 = 1321b31, 7.11.4 = 1331bl5) records ύλωροί "forest-keepers," but does not specify the area or their duties.

Sometimes I think about this.

If you like listening to podcasts, I'd recommend the following episode on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TlXi3_Fyyg

‘If it became necessary immediately to discard every line and method of communications used on the front, except one, and it were left to me to select that one method, I should unhesitatingly choose the pigeons’, wrote Major General Fowler, Chief of Signals and Communications of the British Army, after the First World War.

On today's podcast Tom and Dominic are joined by Gordon Corera, the BBC's Security Correspondent and author of 'Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service', to discuss the often under-appreciated role of pigeons throughout the course of history.

>you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right?

Economic warfare can resemble the sieges of traditional warfare. Yemen was blockaded "economically" to prevent food and medical aid from entering the country. Syrians were only getting an hour of electricity per day in recent memory because of economic strictures preventing them from importing oil. It can get pretty brutal.

The ancient medical schools varied quite a bit when it came to questions of evidence. Something to think about perhaps.

>The Empiricists were sceptics in their attitude to causes, thinking that observation and report of evident conditions and their cures was sufficient for medical science, and thus eschewing causal theory. Rationalist doctors attacked the inadequate methodology of the Empiricists, and they try to explain why the antecedent cause should bring on such and such an effect, while emphasizing the need to decide rationally the proper use of induction, and the relevancy of similarities. The Methodists treat as irrelevant antecedent causes or factors, and they recognized just two pathological conditions—relaxation and constriction; the doctor's concern is to determine by direct observation in which state is the body.

I see him as a tragic figure, despite having personally suffered at the hands of the American government, he's somehow become this great apologist for strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations.

One is tempted to contrast this with a similar move made by Nintendo some years ago:

>Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata will slash his pay in half for the next five months, following disappointing financial results for the Wii U and 3DS maker.

>Other members of the Nintendo board will take a pay cut ranging between 20 and 30 percent of their salary.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-ceo-slashes-salar...

The book Spinal Catastrophism has a great section on "railway spine"--really weird stuff.

>Of particular interest to me as a Victorianist is Moynihan’s account of “railway spine” or “Erichsen’s disease,” a name for an amorphous set of neurological conditions believed to be caused by the jolting experiences of acceleration during railway travel. When autopsies revealed no somatic sources that could cause such effects like loss of memory, sleep disturbances, or back pain, the condition came under increasing scrutiny as such conditions were being inconsistently claimed by people who were not even present at any railway accidents but were merely witnesses. Used by some to sue the railways and others to claim disability to avoid work, “railway spine” became the center of debates about its veracity, resulting in contrasting theories that modern train travel led to the devolution of the spine itself to its primordial layers or that such conditions were merely another manifestation of hysteria and hypochondria. Given that hysteria was typically associated with women (the disease of the “wandering womb”), “railway spine” became the hysterical condition of men whose traumatic experiences of modernity were leaving them recumbent, as opposed to firm and upright.

https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2021/11/06/notes-on-spin...

Why not blame the politicians?

Empathy gets displaced when victimization becomes commonplace.