As a software developer who found myself elected to state level public office and had to spin-up my education around the legislative process and all of politics, I concur.
Their are only a couple of things I'd add.
As much knowledge as I brought in about technology and the idea of being aware of system thinking, I also brought in a great amount of ignorance about all the other areas that are legislated (healthcare, interplay between local, state, and fedearl issues, budgetary concerns, tax policy, banking, etc.). Good legislation is truly collaborative.
Sadly, for the second part, good legislation is rarer than it should be as much of legislation is about politics and perception of the voters. And voter perceptions are not necessarily logical or reasoned.
This makes it all the more important, IMHO, that everyone who is reasonable, logical, and educated spend their precious, valuable time involving themselves to advocate for elected officials who behave similar in what is essentially a zero-sum game.
p.s. Have faith. I saw enough during my time that gave me reason for that faith. (But that faith requires time and effort -- we don't get good government or democracy for free.) I'm glad to hear you're getting better.
I'd say much good legislation is collaborative, but some necessary legislation is not. FDR's changes for instance. Industry did not want it. Arguably health care in the US needs this too.
That case, to me, is indicative of a larger problem - it's 75 pages of arcane justifications, and yet I already knew how all of the justices had voted just from reading the premise, because like every Supreme Court case in a politicized area it was decided by personal conviction and the rest is post-hoc rationalization.
There is no hallucination on the part of the humans involved, only intellectual dishonesty.
OK, but that doesn't excuse things. There's a problem with journalism and its mostly about how they are incentivized and compensated. I don't know what the fix is but its clear that trust is so low, and rightfully so that journalism has largely failed as an industry at its job.
Journalism is paid for by ads, mostly. For online journalism, unless people click there is no money to pay the producers. Hence clickbait. This is a problem but there are worse problems.
I've seen many cases where mods revert an informative title in favor of a less informative one. Also, the idea that the title of a submission should match the title of the resulting article is quite silly, since often the article is written for a different audience and the informed HN submitter can sometimes craft a title that better summarizes to HN readers why the story is interesting / worth reading / controversial.
In the referenced book, the author details how the aluminum cartel was dismantled under the threat of WWII needs because of their failure to promptly address the needs of the United States.
My recollection was that the Washington Monument has an aluminum cap on account of the material's status as a precious material at the time. What I found at the below link is a story of "fake it until you make it" pushing of materials science and self-promotion worthy of an HN read.
Yeah, until the Bayer process was discovered to pull aluminum out of bauxite in the late 1880s, it was worth more than gold. Tutankhamen had an aluminum ankh very close to his body for that reason.
And even for a long time after that, before we had a critical mass of aluminum for recycling, it was still extremely expensive because of how capital and energy intensive the Bayer process is. For that fifty or so years it held a similar niche as aluminum in practical materials science.
The ability to make Aluminium would be alien technology to the ancient Egyptian culture. There’s a good reason it’s production was only discovered in modern times.
My guess is that you were thinking of Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_... “Nineteen iron objects were discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun, including a set of blades which appear very similar to those used in the Egyptian opening of the mouth ceremony (a ritual performed for the benefit of the deceased to enable an afterlife). These blades are also intricately linked to iron and stars, being described in temple inventories as composed of iron and were themselves frequently referred to as the stars. The other iron objects were wrapped with Tutankhamun's mummy; these include a miniature headrest contained inside the golden death mask, an amulet attached to a golden bracelet and a dagger blade with gold haft. All were made by relatively crude methods with the exception of the dagger blade which is clearly expertly produced. This suggests that the dagger was probably imported to Egypt perhaps as a royal gift from a neighboring territory, indicating that at this time Egypt's knowledge and skills of iron production were relatively limited. Only further analytical testing can confirm if all of these artifacts are made from meteorite iron but they do appear to suggest that iron was a material used to indicate high status at the time of Tutankhamun's death in approximately 1327 BC.”.
Depending upon how your brain works, i.e. if you're neurodivergent, you may find value in understanding how your brain processes with respect to neurotypicals.
The second half of this claim is a demonstrably weak generalization as to the source of power.
The counter example is Georgia, where the Board of Regents is beholden to the politics of the Governor. See recently the fiasco with the pandemic i.e., mandated vaccines and mandated masks.
Proof? The companies run by the members of the Board of Regents implemented different policies than the members themselves voted for the universities in the state of Georgia.
