It's one of those traps where the people who need the philosophy the least are most drawn to it.
If you're really emotionally disconnected, stoicism has an intuitive appeal because it justifies what you already do. Although, there a distinction people miss here, observing an emotion and letting it pass is far different from denying the emotion in the first place.
On the opposite side, people who go through life dumping and blaming their emotions on others are very quick to label stoicism as toxic, when it's the philosophy that could help them the most.
It's just one of those things, by definition we can't see our own blindspots.
The food companies accused of gouging are mostly publicly traded corporations that publish their finances...if profit margins shot up we would be able to see it, but everyone who does the analysis finds margins are mostly steady, slightly down overall. Yet the bullshit claim persists.
Here are some better explanations:
- the "breadbasket of the world" (Ukraine) is at war
- wages are up in the agricultural sector (a good thing overall but it's not free)
- egg shortage
- years of government deficits have massively increased the money supply...(more money chasing the same economic output)
My take: if a law and it's enforcement almost universally lead to a worse outcome, the burden is on the lawmakers and enforcers to do better. You can yell about the websites all you want but being mad at most of the internet at once is a losing game.
To say you have fallen for a political play is not a personal attack. It is not some sort of personal failing, but a trap set for you. Informing you of that is a nice thing this person has chosen to do for you.
My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members.
He cannot control how people choose to spend their own free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt, there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily do this for free.
This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.
You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things.
That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.
And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.
Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.
So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
They can publish their "how much carbon did this WordPress instance burn" plugin without any approval from Matt, under the name of their own organization. Since they weren't being paid to do this in the first place, the only thing Matt was giving them was a chatroom which they can replace for free.
If they were actually being paid for this, which is contrary to numerous other comments in this discussion, then it actually does make sense for Matt to cancel that work. But I have been assured they weren't being paid, so they didn't have any money on the line and can just walk away from Matt's org while simultaneously continuing the work they are supposedly super passionate about.
In one level,yeah you're right- a) I don't know if it's really super important work and b) the physical payout is probably the same for those folks doing that work regardless of if it's done in the context of WP or not.
You might consider, though, that the context of a bit of work does matter. And to other folks working in that context might take that capricious dismissal as a mark of how their own contributions might be seen.
Like yeah, they weren't getting paid, but that also means it wasn't a big cost to keep them volunteering- there are people up and down the WP ecosystem doing a lot of work for the exact same reasons. It's why- to my original point- I never tried to participate in the larger development efforts: the thing is locked up by one person so ultimately those folks are working on someone else's toy.
He can't stop them from doing stuff on their own as they like. That is true.
However once the publish: He has the trademark, and unless this group of people was very careful in their wording, to only state technical facts and not opinions, he can sue them for perceived damages and based on recent action he seems to have chosen the aggressive approach, despites potential trouble for his company and product.
That's an excellent article. Another quote I found especially relevant:
>Every step that law takes down the enormous hierarchy of bureaucracy, the incentives for the public servants who operationalize it is to take a more literal, less flexible interpretation. By the time the daycare worker interacts with it, the effect of the law is often at odds with lawmakers’ intent.
Put another way, everyone in the chain is incentivized to be very risk averse when faced with a vague regulation, and this risk aversion can compound to reach absurd places.
I generally agree that we shouldn't armchair diagnose people, especially not for gossip's sake. But in this case Bryan is actively promoting a lifestyle which looks symptomatic of a disorder, so it's probably in the public interest to point that out.
The post author did so in a thoughtful and respectful manner.
Exhibiting symptoms of a disorder is not the same as having a disorder which is why it's irresponsible and inappropriate to diagnose people based on their social media.
The article mentions a maths exam, and of course the answer to the hats puzzle is very straightforward if you convert to statements about sets and logic in the way the teacher expects.
But converting ambiguous language into logical statements by taking everything extremely literally is the opposite of a useful life lesson, so I think it's a terrible exam question.
I hate that the 4th power law is called a law. It's not a law of nature, it's a lazy curve fit.
Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
If it's wrong by a factor of 8 in the simplest thought experiment it's not a law. You can obviously make a heavy load act like many small ones, or concentrate a light load so it does a lot of damage.
Constant * X^4 just coincidentally went through the data in a single 1950s dataset...and for some reason we're calling it a law 70 years later, when it's really just a loose trend that we could easily break with a little engineering. And we probably have broken it...tires, roads, and vehicles have changed a fair bit in 7 decades.
If you're welding the two cars together connecting the axles you're still having 8 contact patches instead of 4, so the axle load is the same as 2 separate vehicles they're just moving in tandem.
You'd need to stack the two cars on top of each other to increase the axle load. In which case I'd say it's not obvious how much more the road wear would be without looking at data.
I'm not saying the 4th power law is absolute truth, I truly don't know what the wear patterns would look like on a modern surface. But your example isn't proving it wrong at all.
> Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
Are you removing the two inner wheels from the axle? Those would also support weight
Well for starters, Xi Jinping being the most powerful person on Earth is probably a bad sign for democracy.
In their time as the dominant world power, the US hasn't always used their influence for good, but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge. I much prefer that to having a country with a permanent ruling party where critics go missing being the dominant force in world affairs.
America only cares about spreading democracy if some country they have beef with isn't democratic. America had no issue replacing democratic (and sometimes secular) goverments with dictatorships if dictatorship was more friendly to the US.
If you're really emotionally disconnected, stoicism has an intuitive appeal because it justifies what you already do. Although, there a distinction people miss here, observing an emotion and letting it pass is far different from denying the emotion in the first place.
On the opposite side, people who go through life dumping and blaming their emotions on others are very quick to label stoicism as toxic, when it's the philosophy that could help them the most.
It's just one of those things, by definition we can't see our own blindspots.