Unfortunately, the surest way to kill a culture is to make it irrelevant. By that I mean, it has to be information that's incorporated the current cultural context, not just the context as it was when the custom arose.
Teaching children history and customs is great -- it informs how they live within society. But forcing them to only heed the customs of the culture back then makes them ill equipped to survive in today. That's many times more so in a multi-cultural society, as everyone's culture goes into the so-called melting pot.
I have respect for where I come from, but that knowledge alone is absolutely not enough to equip me for living in today's world. My parents (and many others) say it all the time "when I was X it was different ...". Yeah. It was.
Edit: to emphasize my sincerity. No disrespect intended and I hope non-taken.
It appears the project hasn't optimized for production (yet?). For now, I can't help but think it may be possible to cobble together a Sprig using inexpensive Pi Pico HATs and 3D printing. Here's the schematic:
Yeah, I'm sure it could. But even being able to buy a fabbed board (it's all through-hole components) would move things along. And I find the non-optimization pretty endearing, since it enhances the approachability and ability to understand the whole system.
Yeah this should be linked in the top comment because I couldn't really grasp what Polis was even for by going to the link on this topic. This article really does a great job of clearing up its purpose and benefits. Thanks a lot for linking this!
I think in the US our situation was pretty dire from the start in regards to misinformation: the president and his staff were saying a ton of crazy crap from day one, from denial, to downplaying to telling people to effectively drink bleach. Pretty clear cut why we have trust issues right now and people denying any information about Covid at all. I mean the article raises great points, but the US hasn't had that problem, because its' been blatant misinformation with no attempt to tether it to any reality from the start. The trust was never there and I'd love to read more articles about how to repair that.
But it has been interesting to see these dynamics described in the article in play out in other Western countries. I have to agree that we have to trust the public, but its conclusion -- that the people will not trust the government otherwise -- is sage. US currently is struggling to claw back any trust. We're in very dire straits.
As another commenter also observed, "volunteer" is a very poor description of the situation. What exactly are the options here for the prisoner involved?
And I think this is worth distinguishing: a slave is always prisoner of their enslaver. The reverse need not be the case, and yet our system turns prisoners into slaves through forced labor. There's no volunteerism involved here. It's about those with power, those without. Slavery can be understood best by how the powerful behave, not the powerless. No one would volunteer for this or prisoners wouldn't have to be forced to do it.
I'm always disappointed that the lessons of slavery still aren't understood in this country. It's painful and shameful.
I missed this, very interesting read. He's not entirely wrong.
But why are these protocols frozen? I've never developed one so I may just be ignorant of the challenges there, but if, for example, I wanted the XMPP protocol to be able to work with rich media, what's stopping me from updating said protocol to work with rich media instead of relying on optional extensions? In my mind, users of the protocol will receive the update (if they choose of course), thereby making the feature a default for the protocol that isn't reliant on extensions.
I admit I don't fully understand why protocols are frozen in this way, even though I agree with the author that the ones we currently have are definitely frozen. Any insights appreciated!
Your point about optional extensions vs a protocol update isn't really as clear-cut as people think it is. To add a non-optional change to an open protocol in a decentralized network would necessitate blocking people from the network when you roll it out. That's not going to make for a good communication network.
The alternative is what XMPP does. The protocol evolves by adding new extensions, and deprecating old ones. Each extension generally has fallback considerations.
For example when group/offline media sharing was added many years ago, it was designed such that clients implementing the extension could render the media. Older clients, or clients that can't render media (e.g. terminal clients) simply display a URL.
The XMPP Standards Foundation annually publishes its "compliance suites", which (versioned by year) guides implementations on what they need to support. https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites.html
Another way of saying the same thing is enough people just havent died to justify the cost. We can't keep reasoning about how to safely build cities by how much money is justifiable. It's madness.
It is a city on the ocean, surrounded by bays and lakes. The investment is justified. The political will, however, remains to be seen.
Why do you believe this? It seems it depends heavily on
- How many people would be injured or killed by the event.
- How much financial damage the event would cause.
For example, if nobody ever dies, and 10 million in damage/problems occurs each time the event does, then it's almost certainly not worth spending 1 billion dollars to to fix the problem.
Obviously, those numbers are ridiculous, but the point is there. The numbers need to be considered.
And yes, human life is a number, too. It's just harder to quantify because there's a lot of opinion involved. But if it the expectation is that such an event will kill 1 person each time, and it would cost 1 Trillion dollars to fix/prevent... it's almost certainly not worth fixing. It's harsh, but spending a Trillion dollars for a single life would be unreasonable.
Now those numbers are actually pretty reasonable. If Nobody ever dies, there's 10 million in damages each time an event like this occurs (around once every 10 years now), and with climate change we can expect the intensity + regularity to increase over time, then 1 billion is likely a good price to pay for solving the problem.
Now with mitigations like those that would be used here (like the storm water systems used in Tokyo), the sooner you implement them, the easier/cheaper they'll be to implement/maintain long term.
At the end of the day the best time to start adding the mitigations is now and expand later as necessary rather than wait until the cost is high enough and go into a mad dash to complete them before the next disaster.
Edit: For context, the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel in Tokyo cost 2 Billion USD to build and is able to easily handle this volume of floodwater.
I was the original poster suggesting the Tokyo System - but I did the math and I was wrong.
The total underground capacity of the Tokyo consists of the Cans, (250K cubic meters), Cistern (248K cubic Meters) and Tunnels (575K cubic meters) - for a total underground capacity of 1.07 million cubic meters.
New York City was hit by 35 Billion gallons of rain during the flash flood, which = 132 M cubic meters. The Tokyo System has .38% of the capacity of the rainstorm, and is capable of draining at 200 cubic meters/second which would take 7-8 days to drain all that water.
What happened in New York was epic - and no underground system imaginable would have been able to handle it. The only solution to this type of problem occurring in the future is going to be around things like zoning (don't build where it's going to flood), landscape (lots more greenery), architecture (lots more void decks, first floor resilience to flooding, no basement suites, etc...)
I believe this because when I see people dying from living in flooded basement apartments -- a *well known*, documented risk of flooding from natural disasters -- I don't see "the cost was not justifiable", because it would have cost almost nothing to save their lives.
I'm not saying we can prevent any/all deaths -- that is impossible. I am saying I want responsible planning and policy that centers human life, not money, as the very point of all this planning and spending in the first place. But some of the deaths, such as the basement situations, from this disaster were very needless and do not cost trillions to prevent.
The black community in America has known this forever. We've had to rely on these kinds of businesses, not just as sources of goods and services, but as literal community centers that help people out, sometimes for free. Thats still true, same for salons, corner grocery stores, churches etc. Growing up, these little pieces of community were amazing and still are. While people are of course a little different, I still see these things in the community where I live and they still have the same compassionate professionals most of the time. They dont just sell things. They also give.
