spodek

If we disallow circumcision, what other traditions will we disallow next? Animal sacrifice? Stoning people to death? Cutting off thieves' hands?

Incredible miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. It advanced television and not with special effects or anything technical. Commenting on what it means to be a man, a woman, an American, human, and more.

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonesome_Dove_(miniseries):

Lonesome Dove is an American epic Western adventure television miniseries directed by Simon Wincer. It is a four-part adaptation of the 1985 novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry and is the first installment in the Lonesome Dove series. The novel was based upon a screenplay by Peter Bogdanovich and McMurtry, intended to star John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, but the film was never made after John Ford advised Wayne against it. The eventual television miniseries stars Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. The series was originally broadcast by CBS from February 5 to 8, 1989, drawing a huge viewing audience, earning numerous awards, and reviving both the television western and the miniseries.

An estimated 26 million homes tuned in to watch Lonesome Dove, unusually high numbers for a Western at that time. The western genre was considered dead by most people, as was the miniseries. By the show's end, it had earned huge ratings and virtually revamped the entire 1989–1990 television season. A favorite with audiences, as well as critics, Lonesome Dove garnered many honors and awards. At the 1989 Emmy Awards, the miniseries had 18 nominations and seven wins, including one for director Simon Wincer. Lonesome Dove also won two Golden Globes, for Best Miniseries and Best Actor in a Miniseries (Robert Duvall).

I prefer the software under a free license. I consider the distinction between free and open source relevant.

I expect that a free as in speech phone ecosystem would eventually overtake non-free ones like Wikipedia did Britannica.

All that craving. If only they learned they could satisfy it best by acting in service of others. As one of my role models and Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Frances Hesselbein says, "To serve is to live."

They're doing the opposite.

I've been singing a song every day since November, part of my power-off activities. I recorded before and after about two months. Before then I'd never sung more than Happy Birthday so I expect most people can sing better, but I love it.

Here's a recording, which includes a story about how This Land Is Your Land brought me to tears at the litter everywhere https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo.... I also pick up litter daily, though I've been doing that since 2017.

Reminds me of general relativity because of the advancement of the perihelion of Mercury.

Also join a CSA (here's a guide https://www.localharvest.org).

I've bought nearly all my food for a few years from my CSAs, farmers markets, and food co-op. Nothing from any of the companies listed in the article. Much of the food I know the farmers and vendors.

As a side effect, the last time I emptied my garbage was Christmas 2019. I buy almost nothing packaged. I calculated my annual food expenses and it's a bit under the national average, but that includes feeding at least 50 other meals since CSAs provide so much food.

For people who don't have access, I've led workshops to people in food deserts, but the most effective way to improve access for others is to support CSAs, farmers markets, and food co-ops yourself.

If your area lacks them, it takes effort, but my family helped form a food co-op when I was young and it has become a cornerstone of the community. Every community benefits from healthy, delicious food.

Hard not to wonder if the endocrine disrupting chemicals we haven't banned but are changing sexes of many species, likely including ourselves, contributed.

> I really want to do this, but it seems impossibly hard. For example, almost all the food I buy is in plastic containers.

Hacker News: colonizing to Mars is straightforward and natural. Buying vegetables fresh or organizing a farmers market is impossibly hard and goes against human nature.

While the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity.

It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time.

The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years.

We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect.

I did a podcast episode expanding on this, "How to Fix Texas" https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

I just hope it's the first planet with intelligent life.

While the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity.

It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time.

The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years.

We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect.

The opening sentence:

> There is something about social media that human beings are not psychologically prepared for.

I would state it: Engineers and business people have distilled what creates craving and then satisfies it by creating more craving.

No different than distilling the sugar, heroin, or cocaine from otherwise healthy, innocuous plants. We regulate some of that distillation. Even what we don't regulate, as a society, we generally look down on people that addict others. Why we reward programmers as we did the Sacklers doesn't make sense to me. I would think we would consider employees and investors of antisocial media companies villainous pariahs.

While the nuclear family most common for most of recorded history, since reading Sex at Dawn and a few related books, I've come to believe that for most of human history -- that is, hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture -- we lived in communities where all adults helped raise all children.

A lot longer than 30 years.

I'm reading Exposure by the lawyer who helped blow the case open, Robert Bilott, portrayed in the movie Dark Waters, which I recommend -- the book and movie.

What DuPont knowingly did, sacrificing our health for their profit, would be unbelievable except that it happened.

Over 99 percent of us have these known carcinogens and causers of birth defect in our blood. As they knew, our bodies don't know how to get rid of them nor process them into anything benign.

And that's just one class of known-to-be-dangerous but profitable chemicals they create and dump. If they had to pay the externalities, Teflon would cost . . . well, what price do you put on testicular cancer, or a baby born with half a nose or eyes in the wrong place?

Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out?

Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?

If you're going to say exploiting people to suffer violence with a racial bias is racism, will you at least mention that that perspective points out much more sexism? Any racial bias is smaller than the 100/0 sex difference in who gets hurt.

Nothing prepares us for exponentials in life, even those of us who work with exponentials.

When the rate of change of something depends on its quantity, you get an exponential. The rate of change of machine learning depends on how much machines have learned.

We can use analogies and graphs all we want, exponentials always confound us.

I just posted about The Power Broker and Silicon Valley to my blog: Elon Musk and the Environment https://joshuaspodek.com/elon-musk-and-the-environment. I'll repost it here in case people find it meaningful or relevant.

Many New Yorkers know Robert Moses from Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which won every award it could. At over 1,000 oversized pages, I thought I’d browse it at first, but couldn’t put it down.

Robert Moses may have shaped New York City more than any other person, holding multiple offices from the 1920s to the 80s. Residents loved him early in his career when most knew him for creating public parks and reforming crony, corrupt government. Not many drove then and traffic congestion barely existed so people appreciated that he built new roads.

It made sense as highways grew to think a road becoming congested meant that demand exceeded and conclude that adding another lane or road would meet that demand. Today we know that adding roads leads people to adjust and take advantage of uncongested roads. We move, buy more cars, take more trips, and so on until we reattain a level of congestion worth complaining about. In other words, traffic congestion is often an arch problem, where building new roads is like supporting the arch from below. Eventually you reach the road version of “the bureaucracy expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”—no longer serving people. Increasing roads also brought pollution, split communities, and distanced people.

For decades after people recognized this pattern, Robert Moses held enough political power to keep building roads. His public image suffered. Eventually the public stopped him from building a parking lot in Central Park and highways that would gut Little Italy, Soho, and Greenwich Village. If his original intent had been to serve the public, he had crossed a line to mindless growth and dated ideas whose counterproductive unintended side-effects dwarfed the intended effects.

Elon Musk is today’s Robert Moses. Reversing our environmental course means fewer cars, electric when not reducible. Musk is promoting more cars. He is pursuing growth primarily. The purported solution increases the problem, creating more perception of ruinous demand, though not among those who see the systemic problem he’s exacerbating.

Likewise, most Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and corporate initiatives promote growth first, often including self-aggrandizement for founders and ignoring unintended side-effects, that amount to stepping on the gas, thinking it’s the brake, and wanting congratulations.

A Greenwich Village resident, Jane Jacobs, came to personify the movement who saw that Moses was serving himself, ignoring his work’s actual effects, not his intent. Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, focused on people, what made communities livable and desirable, and how highways in cities did the opposite. Maybe you or I will become her equivalent.

Meanwhile, The Power Broker recounted Moses’s life and career, revealing his drive for growth, power, self-aggrandizement, and contempt for the people he pretended to serve, belying his claims of modesty and service. An enduring legacy results from personal integrity. Moses saw his crumble, as DiCaprio and Gore are seeing theirs, as will Musk if he continues in Moses’s erroneous path to grandeur.

Sorry to see people downvote your statement, which is clear and obvious to those who can step outside the mainstream system and its values of material growth, externalizing costs, extraction, comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

Many cultures have thrived with complementary values of personal growth, responsibility, sustainability, meaning. purpose, and resilience. Those values reinforce each other just as much and lead to health and happiness just as much, with the added benefit of not destroying Earth's ability to sustain life and society.

Many people defend the former way for creating more material wealth, which they erroneously believe necessary for health and longevity. It also creates craving and addiction, not such great happiness.

The HN community is like Robert Moses and his engineers before Jane Jacobs, thinking building just one more highway will relieve all this traffic, not realizing their would-be solutions are creating bigger problems. I'll suffer the downvotes too, hoping at least a few will reconsider their devotion to a destructive culture anyone can see is making Earth unlivable, even if we happen to be living at peak extraction, enjoying the last of the abundance. We can switch cultures. Humans have done it before.

A dirty secret about ICE cars: they benefit from huge subsidies and the public paying its externalities too.

We'll ride a lot more public transit and bicycles when cars of all types pay their true costs.

Another dirty little secret about Tesla and Musk: they aren't helping the environment. Helping the environment means fewer cars and of those we can't get rid of, make them electric. Their strategy is more cars. That is, the tactic of electric is useful within a strategy of de-growth, but they have a strategy of growth. In fairness, they are a car company. A meaningful strategy to shrink the market would require changing the playing field, which would likely have to come from outside the field -- government or leadership at the level of Mandela or Dr. King.

As a New Yorker near some of her favorite places, who also picks up litter every day, I see the plastic these places generate, as will people 500 years from now. I wish they would find an addiction that doesn't pollute so much. Not that they're any different from Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, and peers, but they certainly contribute their share.

"Lose" sounds passive, like it just happened. We "lose" our keys.

"Smothered" or "Cast away" might be better terms. Like what we're doing to beaches with plastic. We worked hard to create what blocks out the stars and covers the sands, as well as much of our other connections to once pristine nature. We know when we launch satellites, build smokestacks, drive where we could walk, and choose to fly.

We can fool ourselves that we didn't know, but as Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.", but also "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Yes, I was being ironical.

It begs the question, irregardless of whether we want to maximalize understanding or minimilize confusion.

Watch Dark Waters if you haven't, which tells the story of a lawyer who broke the case against Dupont producing forever chemicals in huge quantities long after the evidence was overwhelming they cause cancer, birth defects, endocrine disruption, and more.

Also read the Intercept series, The Teflon Toxin: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti....

Other important pieces out there.

When the Senate questioned General Austin, today named Secretary of Defense, they asked him about forever chemicals because they've contaminated military bases so much.

Non-paywalled: https://outline.com/BhvmzU

DeSantis couldn't do a better job of turning her into a hero and himself into a villain.

What do you think will come next? I see her winning a lawsuit against him or some part of the state.

While Native American rights seem more than enough reason to deny the government granting the land, it is a travesty that it's our last line of defense against the inevitable destruction Rio Tinto would bring.

> In the days before smartphones, streaming services, or even affordable books, people innovated ways to get around the total boredom of being confined to the house.

I suspect smartphones and streaming services lessen our ability to handle solitude and make us feel more miserable.