What it will take is for the US to start prioritizing human rights, at all? I mean, they're currently running concentration camps for children at the Mexican border, in their own country.
It would be a bit rich if they start telling other countries what to do regarding human rights before fixing their own issues.
Do you have some statistics to back that up? Without statistics it's pretty just s much meaningless about how kids these days are lazy... A complaint which every generation has made since long before smartphones existed.
Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.
That's possible, but this area of archeology is still undergoing a lot of change in understanding. Göbekli Tepe is a recent example of organization around (presumed) religious lines without writing or math (maybe)[0]. The farming systems of the Egyptians were largely preformed by illiterate peoples with some wirting and math in the priestly classes and aristocracy [1]. The Inca used a very different system of combined writing and math in their quipu [2]. The quipu are still nearly undecipherable today and may have been just memory aides and not a true writing system at all.
In the end, there are very good arguments against the necessity of writing and math for 'civilization' to occur. It's a very active field still.
This is interesting, and you could also make the argument that without perfect records the early societies without writing might have been very widespread and we'd simply never know because no information was passed on to us.
Still, I think your examples support my sloppily presented idea more than they discredit them. So there is that.
I'm sorry that my examples led you to believe that your idea was supported. I meant no such thing.
What I did mean to say was that your idea is possible among a multitude of other ideas and that the field is still very active in this area; we can neither confirm nor deny that math and writing are necessary for civilization at this time; more data is required.
This would have been a lot faster if you had just made that argument in the first place.
I'm still waiting for a single counter example. We might rephrase my argument to the more honest: "We don't have concrete examples of this type of social structure without writing and some form of mathematics."
While you're here to quibble, could you perhaps look at the parent thread? This whole notion that markets and authoritarian social structures are the human default is at least as concerning as my statement, surely. There are many forms of this argument being displayed here; some quite subtly. If my statement is merely unverifiable, the idea that markets represent an asymptotically optimal modeling of society is positively counterfactual and you may have stake in correcting that.
So much that it has its own power plant, as far as I know.
Environmental issues aside, pretty cool to stand there in swimming trunks when it's -10 outside and there's half a metre of snow against the glass walls though.
I’d not be surprised if they have a power plant. Not because they need a huge amount of electricity, but it’s a bit remote, so it might have been more economical to just build a generator hall than to get grid access and they can use the waste heat from generators to heat the building which substantially improves their energy efficiency.
Googled government office performing investigation, call general number, ask for someone assigned to case X. "I have documents and electronic data that might be pertinent to an ongoing investigation you have open. Where can I send them?", which led to an in person meeting.
"Hello, I have information that would likely be useful as evidence for the antitrust lawsuit against Google."
"Thanks, but I think we have it covered" -or- "Thanks, let me take a note so we both feel good about this interaction and never actually follow up on this."
When one wonders how the status-quo came to be, they need look no further than the dismissive attitudes they wield.
When the GP said "Doing something > doing nothing", try to see the value in such a mindset, irrespective of whether or not some action was taken by person on the receiving end of the information.
If nobody voices their concerns, the people have no voice.
Do you imagine or do you have experience? My contacts with the government has been okay, not amazing but okay. Shouldn’t we try to increase communication between the government and its citizens?
That's true, but that issue isn't specific to CSS inches. Pixels aren't pixels, points aren't points, etc.
It's not even an HTML/browser issue. There's a general problem with knowing in software the real-life physical size or length of something displayed on screen. The calibration information available isn't generally reliable, though I think people are paying more attention these days with the growing interest in AR.
