How are you defining a successful democracy? If 20% of a nation elect a philosopher king type leader, is that more "successful" than 90% of another nation electing a tyrannical despot?

One man's activist is another man's bigot.

Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...

Socrates' social circle were free Athenian citizens. They wouldn't have "gone to the marketplace to buy food", because food shopping was the task of slaves. Free Athenians went to the agora largely for socializing and hearing the latest news, so philosophical dialogues were less annoying and disruptive than you assume. It was certain of Socrates' ideas that got him into trouble, not his public philosophizing per se.

No wonder they asked him to kill himself.

Man is the measure of all things.

He translated the new testament from Greek to German. That helped the poor more than anybody else.

And how many people could read his 95 Thesis in that era again?

Nitpick. Socrates was given a choice. His decision to kill himself was his own. I'd probably do the same. He was 70+ anyway. A lifetime of annoying dialectic tends to make lots of enemies quickly.

You are right. My point was that there is nothing magical in Greek ancestry, but a mixture of great and stupid individuals, as in all societies.

What was the choice? Wasn’t he sentenced to death?

They sentenced him to death to force him to leave the city. No one expected him to decide to die rather than leave.

I thought they literally sentenced him to death, and he had the opportunity to escape but refused to take it?

Yes! The point is that everyone, friends and enemies, wanted and expected him to take it.

Signal still requires a phone number. That alone should make it non-usable for people who are serious about their privacy.

My alternate solution: stop using smartphones altogether. Technology is not a good solution to the privacy problem, especially when a collective such as the government can read your data anyway, or beat it out of you.

If you're worried about drowning, don't go near water. There are no fullproof life vests.

What's the "privacy problem"? I suspect yours is different from many other people's.

In many countries (an ever-expanding list), you cannot purchase a SIM card without showing ID, and a copy of your ID is made and sent to the state authorities. That is, mobile numbers are always connected with your identity, you cannot have an anonymous phone number. Consequently, the state can easily determine which of its citizens are using Signal.

While communications on Signal are end-to-end encrypted, in authoritarian states merely using a secure messenger can draw police suspicion.

Some people might not want to give a phone linked to them to certain people while attempting to remain anonymous.

I don't disagree this is less then the userbase of Signal, but I assume it shouldn't be hard to use a randomly generated ID (or similar) system as a fallback options for identifiers, and leave phone numbers as the default and recommended setting.

That's a good point about privacy, but then you're throwing the baby away with the bathwater, since all your secure communication now requires you to operate a laptop at the very least. You'll have more privacy, but significantly less operational capability (ie to communicate with your friends while walking around).

Phone number is convenient to find people and uniquely identify them with a standard info that you have anyway for most friends. If not for the phone-based account I'd have missed that many friends do already have signal.

Rightly according to your subjective experience.

There's no reason to complicate your thinking about tastes and aesthetics. There is art that you like, there id art the you don't like. Then there are criteria by which you judge the quality of the things you like/dislike.

For instance, it becomes hairy once you get down to make any sort of meaningful comparison between the quality of musicians you like, even if the criteria are pretty meaningful. Is Chopin better than Katy Perry because his works are harmonically richer? Bach because of superior use of counterpoint? Maybe Ivan Wyshnegradsky for his use of non-standard tuning systems?

Something is good if you are able to appreciate and enjoy it. Trying to justify why you like/dislike something is not going to be very fruitful in thr grand scheme of things, unless you just want to find similar things that you'd enjoy.

Rust docs is decent. Elixir's is pretty good too! OpenBSD man pages.

And of course, ArchWiki has saved my life a few hundred times so far. It's really comprehensive.

Good to see Rust in there, as it's on a list due to WA and Deno