1,833 karma · joined September 19, 2013
Of course a laptop doesn't have that effect on people! I was being tongue in cheek. But beautiful objects in general - think fine art, expensive watches, etc - sure.
But why do people want beautifully designed objects? Just to own something beautiful? Sure.
But also because it makes you look cool, attractive to members of the opposite sex, and earns the jealousy of yours.
But a keyboard which sucks ain't cool: sure the externals are great, but wrestling with a stuck capslock is the opposite of exuding je ne sais quoi.
Not cool Apple. Not cool. And therefore not beautiful.
The example code is spread under core and server and very sparsely documented. It is not clear what is going on.
If you had a walk through of the examples that would go a long way to conveying what Bistro is and how to use it. If there already is such a document apolgies, I must have missed it.
A recent book and very good read I can recommend is Isaac & Isaiah by Caute which charts the rivalry between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutcher (the author of an influential biography on Trotksy). I had not been aware of Berlin's (priviledged) background and the book helped contextualise his thinking.
I suspect that a big part of it is that money is being wasted (the Fed.Gov cannot negotiate drug prices!), and not reaching the intended beneficiaries. My perception is that there is an industrial-welfare complex that diverts the money.
Its been done. Its called a funded welfare state.
> Show me a school model that's succeeding with the most at risk subdemographic within disadvantaged communities and then I'll be impressed.
Absolutely right, because it takes much more thatn just a good school to eradicate poverty. If you really need to help children, you need to start by helping their parents: national healthcare and decent well paying jobs.
Parents will have time to dedicate to their children if they are not busy and drained struggling to keep their head above water.
Seeing centuries of European history flash by reminds me of the rich history - whether you count it in blood, culture or intellectual progress - of the part of the world that I happen to live in, and rather proud of it.
Its one thing to know of the decline of the Roman empire, its another to see the rapid decline graphically.
The US Founding Fathers copied England, and Rome's model but replaced the sovereign with a President.
Representative democracies are necessarily republics - although some, like my country, skip the upper house. Rome introduced consuls / republican model because the population was too large, unlike the Greek polis, to be politically manageable. Rome of course was not a democracy.
*or monarchic. I am away from my books so cannot confirm exactly the term. Sorry.
* liberal here meaning political liberal (JS Mill liberalism), and not what is understood by "liberal" in US politics.
If Polanyi had considered the above he wouldn't have come to the conclusion that the two possibilities are either socialism or fascism.
The prescriptions - social welfare, etc - at the end of the article are known. The question is why they haven't been implemented in the US (they have in most other Western counties to various degrees).
I address other points in another comment below.
The Chinese Communist Party certainly was worried that capitalism would pose a threat. Turns out the Party is doing just fine.
"capitalism", i.e., a market-based economy is flexible and can be harnessed to serve whatever purposes a society desires.
So, no capitalism is not a threat to democracy, or communism for that matter.
Let's not forgot that capitalism is a recent invention. Kings and emperors were imposing their rule on their poor subjects without the help of free market economies for most of human history.
Right wing resurgence is back because the parties of the left forgot who gave birth to them - the working class. "Working class" is anachronistic now. The children of the working class became middle class. The new working class is now the middle class, increasingly being hollowed out.
What's to stop authoritarianism:
1. remove proportional voting. Coaltions allow parties to divide up the electorate. On the other hand, forcing parties to win 50%+1 of the vote forces parties to take broad-based policies that appeal to wide swathes of the electorate.
2. Invest in a social safety net. Education, healthcare and affordable housing promote social mobility, and more importantly, give peace of mind to those in the middle class who are afraid of losing the gains made by their parents.
3. Campaign finance reform. Its easier to turn out the vote and raise funding when parties turn to identity politics because nothing is more personal - and fires one up more - than appeal to one's identity.
Identity politics is cancer on democracy. Both left and right play the game and identity politics should be banned in a liberal (the John Stuart Mill kind) democracy.
4. Ban targeted political advertising. A liberal democracy needs a shared public space, and a discussion among all voters. Targeted political advertising breaks up that public space into millions of shards. Another option could be to force parties to post publicly all political adverts for everyone to see.
I ought, indeed, need to know what a party's policies are regarding pensioners or education even though I am neither a pensioner nor have children. Why? Because my taxes will be funding such items.
5. The left needs to be remember its origins. Sounds simple eh?
6. Finally, we need to drop the left-right way of identifying policies. It reduces policies which impact people and society into a basic for/against divisive manner. There is a better way.
Enough for today :)
Excel is indeed an excellent example, and excellent software. On a related note, pivot tables must be the next best invention after the spreadsheet itself.
I am trying to build this very thing but Facebook's recent privacy issues have caused it to over react and I keep getting the below error:
"Access to this data is temporarily disabled for non-active apps or apps that have not recently accessed this data due to changes we are making to the Facebook Platform."
The API call getting the error is to retrieve the list of posts from a page. Getting an error for that is just silly. If anyone can help please contact me!
"Community is the spoonful of sugar that makes the othering go down." was particularly evocative.
Justice.
The state should be providing these services to low-income people itself. Low-income people are not 'customers' - they are citizens and any money that is diverted to profit is money that is not going to the people who need it.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Propel, seeing the huge (in absolute terms) fed govt spend on programs, wanted a piece of that pie while draping itself in moral virtue. But that would be cynical...
How free are you when one of the parties is naive (in the context of the contract) and has little power, and the other party has the interest, the means and the power to force an unfair contract?
Freedom of association implies the freedom to NOT associate. Yet non-Facebook users are tracked by Facebook, without their consent.
Laws like GDPR are needed to help protect individuals from powerful interests.
Alternatively, is there a practical way to attach external DDRAM to an existing 64-bit SBC, perhaps using the GPIO pins?
I have zero electronics knowledge so forgive my questions if they are stupid.
Don't need display port, GPU, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPIO pins, etc - just a CPU + lots of RAM + an ethernet port to get stuff in/out.
A thought which came to mind would be for a country to levy an access charge (think of the BBC license fee) to access social networks based on usage. The money would then be used to clean up the negative externalities caused by the social network in that country.
Scale matters. Information inequality was inevitable.
Free trade led to growing concentrations of economic power and rising economic inequality. We also have information inequality to go with it, and because information transfer is much lower cost than trade, information inequality will be much higher and power more concentrated (social media stocks should thus be valued higher than companies which make real things)
Not sure the article understands that inequality is inherent in the structure of the web.
If you wanted to reduce inequaliy there are two options: 1. redistribution 2. raising the 'transaction' costs
In economics we know what those look like:
1. progressive taxation and a welfare state 2. legislation to raise environmental standards, increase minimum wages, etc.
What's the equivalent of a social welfare state and higher minimum wage when it comes to information?
Another way of looking at this is in terms of externalities: free social media generates both positive (connecting with old friends) and negative externalities (fake news, election mischief, etc).
One way of internalising both would be for Facbook to charge users. That is never going to happen. Carbon credits and the like make polluters internalise the costs that society would otherwise incur. So, what kind of legislation (and it will have to be legislation) would get social media companies to be pay for the negative externalities?
However, according to Wikipedia: "Some historians emphasize that the leagues were engaged in class struggle against a coalition of landowners and mafiosi and ignore evidence of strategic alliances between the Fasci and the Mafia."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasci_Siciliani#Mafia_involvem...
I wonder which is it. Perhaps the Mafia was opportunistic and would ally with the Fasci (the workers) or the landowners depending on the local conditions. Its not like the Mafia is one single entity but composed of smaller (themselves warring) factions.
To answer your question, while in my personal life I take a more deontological (Kantian) moral approach, if I were in a policy making role I'd take the pragmatic, utilitarian road; that bird would be sacrificed if it really did help advance science. Ecce homo.