The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it’s really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.
It’s disheartening.
All logic breaks down at the grocery store.
One of life’s profound truths!
I used to think that as well. But what if it turned out that over-showering was actually the thing that makes you stinky?
I’m picturing testicles wearing a cowboy hat.
Simple: Visibility and speed. You look at a parking spot, and if it’s empty, it’s definitely empty. It’s virtually guaranteed to stay that way as you back in, so you don’t need to monitor what’s in it. No cars, cyclists, pedestrians, emergency vehicles, et cetera, are going to enter the parking stall as you back in. That’s not true of a street or lane when you back out into it. It’s often difficult to even see traffic coming, as backup cameras don’t have the wide-angle coverage, and there’s always the possibility that you didn’t see somebody.
As a result of both of those factors, with practice, backing in can be done in seconds, and pulling out is a breeze. Pulling in forward is a breeze, but for most people, backing out is a slower, more nerve-wracking maneuver. (At least that’s my assumption from watching how long it takes.) On the other hand, the people who just YOLO it back out into traffic are psychopaths.
You can use UTC, right now. Nothing’s stopping you.
I would go further. Most cars don’t belong in places where people live. They injure and kill people on the regular, the noise pollution causes mental and physical health problems, the light pollution disrupts sleep, the particulate pollution causes cardiovascular disease and dementia, as well as damaging ecosystems, driving adds to obesity and issues related to a sedentary lifestyle, the physical space they take leads to sprawl and ecosystem destruction, and the sprawl also bankrupts cities and towns. As well, driving in traffic just plain sucks as an activity, and makes people angry and miserable.
And you should back in.
It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!
On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.
I’ll go extra-spicy and point out that there’s no such thing as “ownership” as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can “own” land that I’m only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it’s backed up by a court system and police force that’s constituted and willing to enforce my title.
I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the “taxation is theft” whiners.
Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.
It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.
At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.
Honestly, this argument comes across to me as a horrible mangling of different pop-sci concepts to construct a victimology. There’s good evidence of the mechanism by which stress and trauma induce epigenetic changes in organisms. (Selective methylization regulating expression of genes.) There’s some evidence of epigenetic changes due to physiological trauma passed down through germ cells. But it’s a huge leap to ascribe mtDNA damage to psychological experiences.
The mitochondria have a degenerate genome, a tiny amount of DNA with (looking it up) 37 genes to support the processing of energy into ATP to power the cell. It is susceptible to epigenetic changes, which leads pretty directly to a number of metabolic disorders, but I can’t find any evidence that those changes result from life experiences of an animal. The idea that mtDNA has accumulated generations of damage from sexist trauma beggars logic, too, because there’s just not a lot of room to collect damage, and that damage leads to health problems fairly directly. If one got every cell of life from one’s mother, in turn, she got it from her mother, and so on all the way back to the first eukaryotic life. All of those generations of trauma, how are we even still living?
Furthermore, the assertion that “men created the patriarchy” ignores actual history and context. One simply cannot ascribe a singular intent to a class comprising billions of individuals across time and space. At best, one could describe patriarchy as an emergent phenomena of societies and cultures. About half of the individuals in those societies and cultures were women, so you’d have to conclude that women helped create patriarchy, unless you deny their agency or intelligence.
Should we also show “empathy” to Klansmen who joined up because they claim to feel disenfranchised by society?
Well, yes. No qualifiers. Full stop. Ask anybody who’s successfully done it. Arno Michaelis is particularly good at turning white supremacists back to the light because he was one, and knows the mindset.
Changing somebody’s mind and world-view always starts with listening empathetically. What you don’t offer is sympathy for abhorrent beliefs. It’s hard to make the distinction, but that old saw about education granting the ability to hold a notion in one’s mind without accepting it is relevant. I would argue that maturity means learning to offer kindness while maintaining strong personal and moral boundaries. Self-righteous fury might feel good, but it’ll never get through to a Klansman, or an incel.
So, yes, you have to show empathy, but certainly not a pat on the back. Those are two different things. It’s hard to hold the line between them at times, but it’s the only way to effectively reach people with backwards belief systems. Frankly, I feel like a lot of people would rather be self-righteous than effective, because it’s easier and feels good, and that’s what I see in the too-common conflation of understanding with approval.
I think so? I used to browse the site over breakfast, and one morning, Apollo couldn’t connect. I don’t want to cause trouble by trying to log in, if I’m banned, so I have not tried to log in another way.
🤭
Both the real President and the fake President have a long history of reneging on deals, and not paying up. DGE seized the Treasury’s payment system, so they could remove money from the people’s bank accounts. The tariffs have a good chance of plunging the U.S. into recession, and $1 million really isn’t that much compensation for taking on the risk, especially if inflation gets going in earnest. They’d be on the wrong side of trade barriers with the economic bloc that’s geographically easier to trade with. Would this regime bail them out?
In short, trustworthiness matters.
One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.
A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.
Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.
In the same vein as A Short History of Wine, there’s also And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis, Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The last one goes way, way back, and focuses on scientific topics, but it’s an entertaining read, and helps provide context to the pre-modern era.
That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That’s just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!