I read most of this agreeing with everything the author was saying, sometimes in a "I already thought that" but often in a "huh, that's a really cool insight." I quite like the style too.
As a Brit though, I was completely blindsided by the inclusion of Dom Cummings. I'd forgotten he existed. Seeing his and Boris' attitude to PPE provision discussed in a positive light without any mention of the associated scandal[1] made me a bit uncomfortable. Without getting too political, they claimed to have solved a problem, but whether or not it was a justifiable, sensible or legitimate solution is probably going to be debated for decades.
>> We did that. But only the Prime Minister could actually cut through all the bureaucracy and say, Ignore these EU rules on Blah. Ignore treasury guidance on Blah. Ignore this. Ignore that. “I am personally saying do this and I will accept full legal responsibility for everything.”
> By taking over responsibility, Johnson loosened the accountability of the civil servants and allowed them to actually solve the problem instead of being stuck following the rigid formal process.
Of course this also can have pretty severe negative consequences. In the U.S., thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, the president has immunity from criminal prosecution under certain (yet to be fully determined) circumstances. If the president then "takes over the responsibility" for obviously illegal actions, and is immune from prosecution for those actions, you now have a civil service unburdened by any responsibility to follow the law. And there are some 3 million odd workers in the U.S. federal government.
That the conservatives on the Supreme Court did not consider this danger, especially in light of who occupies the office, is still astounding to me.
The problem in your case is the immunity bit, not the ability to cut through red tape if the situation is dire enough - which is like half of the job of the president (or similar post) !
I see it like a scale of how easy it is to deal with a problem.
The easiest thing is to stew and do nothing. Next easiest thing is to is to sit around and complain. After that comes actually doing something about the problem.
I think efficient, productive, optimistic people are people who don't have the ramp up time of stewing and complaining, and it becomes self perpetuating: they have a better life that's easy to be optimistic about because problems get solved by themselves without issues ("complaints").
I think self curation is a theme not directly discussed.
The recurring problem is other people trying to tell you what information you should see, resulting in suboptimal aggregations. If you don't curate your own stuff, you'll slide into whatever state of mind your curator wants you to slide into.
Algorithmic feeds are widely accepted to cause doomscrolling, and my experience with RSS is similar to the author: it goes well, but then whenever an aggregate source of any kind is added, it drowns out everything else. This wouldn't be a problem if everything from the source was a good read. The issue is any aggregation by someone who isn't you isn't going to be perfect for you.
My brain wants to make a link between collateralised debt obligations causing the recession, and aggregate info sources and algo feeds causing the collapse of the modern internet. Basically, everyone realises 90% of what they have in their feed/inbox is actually worthless and we only have it because the people who we get stuff from mixed it with a few good/relevant pieces of information so we trusted/assumed the rest would be good/relevant.
Life takes effort, if you outsource the effort, your life requires less effort but is less likely to be what you want. The same applies to curating the content you consume. It's easy to accidentally outsource.
I've recently been playing around selfhosting a small single user activitypub server to see how it works. I can't understate how satisfying it's been to wallow in compared to a static site or serverless setup. It unexpectedly tickled that special "oooh, a _system_" part of my brain, a lot.
It's a perfect representation of CSS: it looks and feels like it should do what you need, but it doesn't _technically_ do what it's supposed to do, so you spend a few hours _trying_ to make sense of it, falling back to just random fuzzing and trial and error, before concluding it's all broken and finally accepting it in its current wonky form, trusting that in some browser, somewhere, it works.
I'm pretty good at handling the cascade and knowing how things work, so this experience you are describing is not mine where CSS is concerned, I doubt I've had to do several hours of trying to make sense of any CSS for probably 5-6 years.
As such that the game does not actually allow you to use the cascade as it should be used is a downside.
"I understand cascading and so I know it isn't what should be done with Cascading StyleSheets. It is right this tool to simulate CSS doesn't support CSS' nominative feature "
I'm glad we agree CSS is unintuitive on many unique and creative fronts.
It must be maddening working as a browser dev knowing that the very first thing most devs worth their corn do is immediately go to abstracts so they are able ignore your work as much as they can.
pydry commented that The Economist is "is Rothschild owned", which is partially true but quite misleading. The Rothschilds are minority owners, but other investors have much more control over the company than they do.
avshalom seems to have interpreted that as anti-Semitic. For what it's worth, I also interpreted the comment that way at first, but I think that it's best to assume good intent here, so in that spirit I would say that pydry probably just meant it to represent rich people rather than Jews.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the Jewish/antisemitic angle at all, but that's my own ignorance in that area.
The "represents rich people" angle was the only interpretation I could see. Still not sure I fully understand why the conversation has gone in the Jewish/antisemite direction though, but again this is a topic I choose to remain ignorant on.
Well yeah, the baffling leap from "young adults are having a hard time navigating life" to "the real problem is interest bearing loans but they won't let us talk about that" is the other clue that pydry is a nazi.
Indeed. This was the only interpretation intended. Anti semitism, like all racism, is a scourge on humanity.
The rothschilds are not representative of jews theyre a representative of rich capitalists.
Some people (usually rather extreme racists who support/deny the ongoing genocide in gaza) see anti semitism everywhere, especially where it doesnt exist, however.
These people's rather extreme racism has become increasingly bold and obvious in recent times and almost always comes dressed up in faux concern for anti semitism.
I think there's a personality type for old/high maintenance houses.
Having said that, a first time buyer will always be a first time buyer, and a house will probably suffer initially whilst they learn the skills to support their purchase.
This is what makes old houses a thing though: they're tough and built to tolerate a certain amount of stupidity - they wouldn't still be standing otherwise.
I try to take notes about things I do to my old house that I don't hear my peers with newer houses talk about, and if I do sell this house, I probably would offer to share all the notes when the buyer picks up the keys. Notes are also beneficial for my partner and future me.
I do this occasionally, and have done for years. On earlier or lower resolution headsets with Fresnel lenses, it does force you to look at a screen slightly differently - everything has to be a bit larger, you have to move your head/eyes a bit more to deal with blurry edges.
Pancake lens devices like quest pro is fine though. I tend to favour one large virtual screen in vr though, whereas in real life, I prefer one large and one portrait second monitor. Being able to touchtype is useful.
Haven't tried virtual desktop recently, but immersedvr has always been the best work vr app, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because the company is a bit of a joke. They are a case study in everything wrong with silicon valley tech over the past decade. Name a shitty money making buzzword, and they've pivoted towards it and failed at it.
Yeah to be more specific I mean I'm sure I'm not unique, there's a whole class of people who can create something easily but who don't have the personality or wherewithal or desire to sell it or pretend it could be a unicorn or seek out a formal co-founder.
But who'd be happier tending to the day to day of keeping their own service growing and running well than other kinds of employment.
The problem is that unless you have something very valuable and hard to replicate - which is by far the exception - any businessperson who's willing to do all the work of bringing something to market can typically hire developers to implement it for them, and be in total control of the product, instead of depending on someone whose motivations don't align with the business they're building.
In short, there's nothing in it for them except a hard to manage risk.
As a Brit though, I was completely blindsided by the inclusion of Dom Cummings. I'd forgotten he existed. Seeing his and Boris' attitude to PPE provision discussed in a positive light without any mention of the associated scandal[1] made me a bit uncomfortable. Without getting too political, they claimed to have solved a problem, but whether or not it was a justifiable, sensible or legitimate solution is probably going to be debated for decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_regarding_COVID-...
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