5,660 karma · joined November 27, 2018
I'm not talking about normal day-to-day life. I'm thinking of massive hacker / DDOS attack, radio interference, EMP attack or some equivalent natural disaster (extremely strong solar flares). Switching to hotspot won't help, since that obviously won't work either.
A cashless society works fine in the sunshine case, but it's not inconceivable that the network could go down in various crisis scenarios for an extended period of time (days). Economic transactions still need to happen ...
That's the same old Tragedy of the Commons argument, which is valid no matter if we're screwed or have a decent chance at solving the crisis. Using this logic, it's irrational to even vote since you waste your time on something which with all probability will have 0 effect.
> Systemic change is what matters
That's true, but how do you get a systemic change? By influencing individual voting and consumption behavior. Global warming has been started and is still driven the most by democratic countries, you can't absolve yourself of the responsibility.
Corporations are a product of the system we've built. They'll never care about the environment, they're not designed to do that. They care about the legal framework, though, which we (in democratic countries) can influence. The hard pill to swallow is that forcing corporations to care about the environment will increase their costs and thus prices of goods and services.
Technically, you're right. May be there's no chance to fix it. But may be false vacuum will decay tomorrow. "may be" is not very useful here.
Is it probable that we're beyond the point of no return? I don't believe anyone can answer that with any certainty.
See, I've never played basketball or golf.
> Fair, but that's a little different from "regional".
"regional" is very vague. The point is that these sports are far from global.
... from your social / regional bubble.
I know Tennis tournaments since tennis is somewhat popular here. Golf? Nope.
> Everyone knows the NBA basketball league
I don't, apart from those 3 letters. And not because it's a popular sport around here, only because of US popular culture influence.
"less screwed" here means "fewer dead people". I think it matters how much screwed are we.
BTW this is the exact switcheroo I expect from the climate deniers - first it was "climate change doesn't exist, why should I limit my consumption?", when it's too undeniable they're going to switch in a second to "too late to do anything about it, why should I limit my consumption?"
You have two probability qualifiers next to each other. What is "may be" in this case? How should a reader read it?
Is it played worldwide? Sure, but so is volleyball. It's certainly not a culturally significant sport everywhere. I think my country has a basketball league, but I don't know literally anything about it. The only player I can recall the name of is Michael Jordan.
> is tennis (and golf, up to a point at least)
Both are sports for rich (countries) only. How many tennis players you know are from Africa?
> Cricket is played in a minority of countries, but those countries are scattered across the world so it's not exactly "regional".
You can think of the Commonwealth as a "logical region". Cricket is popular only in a couple of countries with common history.
They can't alter the past, but they can cut their losses now.
It will also hopefully help the next generation of potentially professional athletes.
Athletes are not like diplomats, they're like warriors, except there's no killing.
More importantly, I know whether the designated point in time passed or not. If you have a submission deadline set at 14:00, the most important thing you care about is whether you made it or not.
But what bothers me more is that this is inviting ambiguity into time definition. What 14:00 means (in addition to all the timezone complexity) now depends on the type of the clock you use. That's just bad.
> A good reason for truncating is that we have a strong bias against being late, but not really against being early.
TBH I don't understand what you're saying here.
The consequence of that would be that statements like "fireworks start at 12 AM" would mean two different points in time depending on how much precision your clocks have.
What it doesn't show is that vanilla JS is not chainable (jQuery is).
React is simple only in some mathematical theoretical sense, but not for understanding by human minds which fundamentally operate imperatively ("if I click on this, load data X from the server and show them to the user...").
You can get some hello world example relatively easily, but you hit the complexity wall quite quickly (need to know "some hooks" - some, like useEffect() are very complex, yet often needed for basic things). The worst of all is debugging with stacktraces making no sense with it all being from the React itself, not your code, not tracking some logical pathway.
(I'm saying that as someone who generally likes React and would choose it for a new project)
China will also not invade Siberia, it's much easier to control it economically than turning your quasi-ally into a mortal enemy. (besides, nukes)
Note that this happened to most post-communist countries. 90s were uniformly bad, in the 00s things started to get better. The troubles likely don't have much to do with the liberal democracy as such, but with the transition of the economic system.
> Arguably. Russia's most successful period since the mid 19th century was under Communism.
The early decades were indeed quite impressive (transformed an agrarian country into an industrial powerhouse), but they did not manage to keep up the momentum, and it's questionable whether it was even possible with the planned economy.
"all they needed" - as if that's easy to achieve consistently for decades.
In the end what killed it was the combination of stagnation and the ability to freely talk about it.
I think it would be much harder to do in the Soviet Union - it was much more ideologically committed to communism than China, such a pivot would probably not happen without major political turbulence.
While a great talking point in Russian circles, nationalist units did not represent a significant chunk of Ukrainian forces in 2022. They played a role in the power vacuum of 2014, but not by 2022.
Regular forces were concentrated in the east. If Russia took Kyiv, they'd effectively cut off any supply routes from the West. The resistance would be futile. Remember again how forces in Crimea resisted forever?
> and probably bring in proxy forces
Could you expand on this? Where, who ... how?
> and the most likely scenario (absent a quick settlement) would be something like Afghanistan 2.0.
Most likely based on what? Where do all these fighters hide? Are the Ukrainian plains as good for hiding and launching covert attacks as Afghanistan caves?
But what Russians expected can be inferred from what they did - their initial Kyiv offensive, Hostomel landing, it's a clear attempt at a decapitation strike. It's actually a carbon copy of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia which fell without a fight which is apparently what Russians expected here as well.