Pacifists also are willing to sacrifice themselves, or things they love, rather than resort to violence. This means leaving arguments unanswered, not in order to avoid conflict, but in order to show that there is another way. It means being willing to look like a coward or fool, like someone who cannot compete in the arena or is too afraid to do so. It means being willing to look like a coward or a fool to both sides, the other side and your own. It means also being willing to look like a traitor to your own side, like someone who, by his silence, is helping the enemy. It means forgoing the thrill of victory, even just victory, because you do not trust yourself to handle that victory without being corrupted by it. The pacifist thinks that just war theory could only work if we were all angels. But as Hauerwas says: if we are pacifists, it is not because we are peaceful, it’s because we’re “violent sons of bitches.” The pacifist does not trust himself to argue justly; he is too tempted by the delight of victory to engage in anything like “persuasion.” He knows he will always be more interested in looking good than in serving truth.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/03/waging-culture-wars-justly/
Reading the fourth volume of Caro’s magisterial LBJ biography has me pondering if one of the big lies about the current state of the US, circa 2020s, is that we have never been this divided. When pro-lifers raise their cries to heaven over the approximately 60 million aborted babies since Roe v. Wade, and the bulk of Americans would prefer not to think about it, is that much more of a cultural divide than when the deep South simply ignored how their Jim Crow system seemed to the rest of the nation? I’m not sure. What I do know, especially from the historical record and evidenced by several slave rebellions pre-Civil War, when the disenfranchised try to rebel, they can’t succeed unless they get help. The issue with abortion, of course, is that the victims are the ultimate disenfranchised, who cannot even rebel. That is the fault line of the current cultural wars – and I don’t know how long it’ll take, mind by mind, person by person, to change that state of affairs. But the above is probably the only way to do it – the pacifist approach.
What’s the real harm in using the words “server” and “cache” ? The user who doesn’t care about understanding isn’t going to get much out of it either way, I can concede that. But those that do can and will google those terms, and maybe they will learn something. And you can be sure there WILL in fact be users who understand it who will absolutely appreciate it.
https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/feynmans-razor?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=cutting_room_floor
I think this is very much Feynman’s point: he didn’t have flowery unrealistic expectations of the average person. He just said, look, there’s a LOT of variance in the skill & interest of people. Why are we not even giving people a chance?
Few things are more ironic than the number of people who will tell you to give up trying to appeal to people’s intelligence because the average person is so dumb.
As I reentered the conference floor, I was still thinking about the tension between declared outcomes and actual implementations. All around me, the booths posed a collective thesis on the future. This was a future without busywork or buttons, a future of bespoke experiences, a future where the internet was an ambient thing we’d call upon with our voices — not a service we would use but a place where we would live. Beneath this promised future, however, was a shadow future, one that suggested itself at every turn. This was a future of screens in every establishment and no way to get help, a future in which extractive algorithms yielded relentless advertising, a future of a crapified internet, too diluted with sponcon and hallucinated facts to be of any use. In this future, if you wanted to use a product you would have to download an app and pay a monthly fee. It was a future of ultra-sophisticated scams and government surveillance, a future where anyone’s face could be spliced into porn. Our arrival in this future would be a gradual surrender, achieved through a slow creep of terms and conditions, and the capitulations had already begun.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
It’s hard to juxtapose the banal horror of the above scenario with how flawed and non-digital so much of the world still is. Sometimes I’m not sure the dystopian fears are warranted, because so many things still break both in the digital to physical and vice versa. On the other hand, surveillance states like London and Chinese cities exist.
Intercepting plastic in highly-polluting rivers is the fastest and most cost-effective way to clean the oceans and is the focus of our Rivers program, as we look to stop plastics from reaching the ocean. Our network of Interceptors is maturing around the world: our first prototype Interceptor 001 recently celebrated 5 years since deployment in Indonesia. We have also recently announced the arrival of Interceptor 019 in Bangkok, Thailand and a new partnership in India, starting in Mumbai.
https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/the-ocean-cleanup-makes-biggest-ever-river-catch-in-guatemala/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=cutting_room_floor
With over 9 million kilograms of trash extracted from rivers globally to date, alongside our recent return to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, we continue to advance our mission in both oceans and rivers. We are encouraged by this positive start to 2024 and expect to see our catch total increase dramatically this year.
There are good people doing good things pretty much everywhere, if you choose to look.
Inside are multitudes of everything: the rainbow of four hundred frame samples on the walls, those upside-down V’s we all recognize; a long side counter covered with tape guns, staple guns, spray bottles, glass gloves, art gloves, rolls of brown kraft paper and plastic bags and hanging wire, labeled and unlabeled drawers of hardware, hangers, screws, tools—and everywhere, littered about the store like ballpoint pens on every surface: razor blades. (In fact, we frequently run out of ballpoint pens, but we never run out of razor blades.) Soon I am grabbing blades casually, as all framers do, to pop a speck out of a mat, shave off excess paper or tape. Soon I have Band-Aids on all my fingers.
https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-124-spring-2024/don-t-bleed-on-the-artwork-notes-from-the-afterlife?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
Esoteric crafts and trades are also everywhere, if we only stop and think and realize – I discover a new one every year, on average.
Global leaders are seeking what they consider to be undeveloped land to meet a stated goal of conserving 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. Corporations want undisturbed forests in order to offset pollution. Western conservation groups, which refer to the Maasai as “stakeholders” on their own land, exert great influence, as does a booming safari industry that sells an old and destructive myth—casting the Serengeti as some primordial wilderness, with the Maasai as cultural relics obstructing a perfect view.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/maasai-tribe-tanzania-forced-land-evictions-serengeti/677835/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
The reality is that the Maasai have been stewards, integral to creating that very ecosystem. The same can be said of Indigenous groups around the world, to whom conservation often feels like a land grab. In the past two decades, more than a quarter million Indigenous people have been evicted to make way for ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and other activities that fall under the banner of conservation. That figure is expected to soar.
Increasingly, I think there is no realistic conservation without stewardship. Moreover, I think that the world is actually intended to be more of a garden than anything else, not some yin/yang, walled-off enclaves of urban density like Manhattan versus the complete wilderness of the Olympic National Park. What happens to the Serengeti when it is no longer semi-managed by the Masai cattle? It’s quite a shame when it is not commonly known or taught that the vast American prairies and famous Midwestern topsoil also primarily occurred due to millennia of Native American controlled burns and management to maximize buffalo grazing potential. Our human rapacity will not allow token conservation to truly offset anything, moreover, we need the resources. We simply must be stewards.
One advantage of encoding information in the states of individual atoms is that their coherence times are typically far longer. Moreover, unlike superconducting circuits, atoms of a given type are all identical, so bespoke control systems aren’t needed to input and manipulate subtly different quantum states.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-best-qubits-for-quantum-computing-might-just-be-atoms-20240325/?mc_cid=daab7c2b1c&mc_eid=f83944a043
And whereas the wiring used to link up superconducting qubits into quantum circuits can become horribly complicated — more so as the system scales up — no wiring is needed in the case of atoms. All the entangling is done using laser light.
Increasingly, a good rule of thumb is that the tools and designs for our improving understanding of the world are also already imprinted within it, like layered fractals of instructions, realizations, etc. Quantum computing with atoms as the flip-state blocks could be a game-changer. Now of course we just have to also figure out what it’s good for – though I think some very specifically defined computations will be useful for figuring out some challenging, mass-variable problems in the future with significant ripple effects.
That ability of feathers to twist in just the right way is what enabled slotting, which makes the wing much more efficient at low flight speeds. In essence, a slotted wing behaves as if it is longer and narrower than it is anatomically. Slotting also makes the wing tip very resistant to stall, whereby the airflow separates from the wing, causing a precipitous loss of the lift that keeps the bird in the air. It’s a vital adaptation that underpins an array of aerial acrobatics.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-feathers-are-one-of-evolutions-cleverest-inventions/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn
As a result, the major defense companies known as the “primes”—there are only five of them (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman) and together they account for more than 80% of the industry’s revenue—have no ability to build weapons systems with low-cost, high-performance software half as good as what’s been available on the commercial market for over a decade, let alone cutting-edge AI to power drone swarms, networked weapons systems, or instantaneous situational awareness generated by sensor fusion. In lieu of R&D spending (the primes devote about 1%-4% to it, compared to the 60%-70% a tech startup typically spends), they fling extraordinary resources at legions of lawyers and lobbyists—often recently retired military officers and congressional staffers—in order to shape requirements in line with the company’s existing, fossilizing capabilities.
https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril
(H/t to my brother Taylor for sharing this one.)
The thing that kills me about the JFK administration is that it reminds me sometimes of the Obama administration – a bunch of intellectuals who’d only really known the Ivy Leagues (well to give JFK his due, he’d actually been in combat, which is what helped him counter many of them) coming in and arrogantly destroying so many things they did not see the larger point of, in a great example of Chesterton’s Fence. Or, sometimes worse, doing some things right but touting them as the ultimate panacea.
This means I can’t tell you what order in which things happened: whether I felt Kadin collide with my boat or whether I was still unconscious when he dragged me to the surface. I just know I opened my eyes to the blue sky studded with clouds I thought I’d never see again, and that I felt the spring air whipping against my face. He told me I made a noise, a choking moan that sounded like a dying animal. He thought: she still might not make it.
https://longreads.com/2024/04/02/i-nearly-died-drowning-maggie-slepian/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=t5-2024-04-05&utm_medium=email
We heat our house and our water and our food with natural gas, and in many ways it’s a much cleaner source of energy than the readily available alternatives. It’s not like coal is a great option, and even on the rosy projections of industry boosters, it will be quite some time before we have reliable power generated by renewable energy. Even these technologies have their costs. Noah Toly is, unfortunately, right about the unavoidably tragic nature of our environmental choices. I’d willingly pay more for our natural gas if that meant responsible regulations would ensure the industry dealt with its waste responsibly, and there are some promising signs that Pennsylvania state lawmakers may place more restrictions on this waste. Still, it’s hard to imagine an effective regulatory regime reining in oil producers’ careless pollution when our country remains addicted to cheap energy.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/04/is-a-radioactive-trash-mountain-coming-to-town/
Part of the human condition is coming to terms with the fact we are inherently limited. Even if we somehow achieve something like a mini-sun, I’m sure we will have other problems. Right now, every choice we make has a cost. But it is undeniable some have fewer than others.
This tactic of being “in, but not of” the world of mainstream business has seen the Basque-based movement face charges of double standards. In particular, critics highlight its outsourcing of some of its production to low-wage countries with weaker labour standards, such as China and Mexico. Mondragón argues that it has checks and balances in place to ensure that its foreign business partners uphold workers’ rights, and that keeping costs low is part and parcel of staying competitive. “For us, workers will always come before capital. But capital is still important because without it we cannot fulfil our mission of social transformation,” says Javier Marcos, Mondragón’s director of communications.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/24/in-the-us-they-think-were-communists-the-70000-workers-showing-the-world-another-way-to-earn-a-living
More innovation is needed in our forms of governance and organization, both corporate and civil/political. Capital is a fantastic human invention – real capitalism is a pretty good system. Ironically, much like those who say “real ____ism” has never been tried, the reality is that no pure application of any “ism” has been tried, because humans are simply unable to conceive of a fully functioning system that can’t be perverted almost immediately into some janky, hopefully still mostly operational version of the pure concept.
The US’s biggest infrastructure project—bigger than the New Deal–era dams and the Erie Canal—was the highway system, which destroyed the American city and, arguably but I think not that arguably, American society itself. The country’s midcentury racist spatial self-destruction is a crime that will never be sufficiently atoned for. Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone is simply able to drive 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that what car culture is really about aren’t sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. What car culture is really about is death.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/auto-show-dispatch/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
A lot of interesting points, though as usual often sandwiched in the usual canards of leftist buzzphrases circa mid-2020s: genocide of Palestinians, etc. The highway system destroyed a lot of American neighborhoods (though mostly poor white people were displaced in many cities, not necessarily poor people of color, contrary to what you may have been told), but not the cities necessarily themselves, though I concur it is killing some slowly, others fast. The benefits of highways are glossed over – the ills of massive car culture (Hummers for example) are spelled out very well. The roads don’t kill people – in fact they enable a lot of commerce – but they may expedite the horrible failings of human nature. The biggest problem as always with socialism is that human nature simultaneously is never the cause of our ills but also is somehow the solution as a centralized bureaucracy run by humans will save us all. Car culture is more about freedom than death. But of course, to socialists, those two concepts are often the same.
Florida as an intensified microcosm of patterns that are unfolding all over the United States and other western countries presses upon us fundamental questions: What does the Florida-fication of the world do to human culture and community? Can people make common cause and find a common home in an environment so manufactured and imposed on the natural world? Florida’s rapid one-hundred year transformation—from raw, rugged, and expansive wilderness, into a largely artificial concrete jungle aimed at fulfilling the perpetual human appetites for quick, easy, and transient pleasures—is an experiment that offers some answers to these questions.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/06/against-the-florida-fication-of-the-world/
It’s gonna be fascinating to juxtapose demographic decline against the rewilding of much sprawl as suburbs both wax and wane depending on the health of the given state (California seems determined to try to whittle its population down, for example). But I don’t really know how the conveniences of urban life, with its sanitized, dirt-free existence can be reconciled easily with what we now know is true ecological health.
