Yellow Mountain Imports is great.

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

“Done is better than perfect.”

The only thing I hate about Winter is not Winter’s fault, and it’s basically what you said:

Work is somehow perfectly scheduled so that you’re inside, staring at a brick wall for 90-100% of the daylight hours for 5 out of every 7 days.

Winter is beautiful in ways that are completely unlike the other seasons, but unless you’re very fortunate you only get a few glimpses of it.

I feel like if you were designing a society to make people suffer, that’s how you would do it.

Extraneous apostrophe’s

A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org

We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.

An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.

Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will

In an emergency, you can also exit widdoutershins.

Surprising number of people taking this seriously.

Looks more like an egg to me

As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.

Aren’t MP3s just a statistical correlation?

Besides, you really don’t need to zoom in on “but muh license agreement” to roast these AI turds.

They’re very clear: We’re gonna put creatives out of work, we’re gonna sell a unified product to replace them, and we’re gonna use their own labor to build their replacements.

That’s anticompetitive.

Nail em on that instead of trying to thread the needle on reining in the tech lords without damaging e.g. linguistic analysis researchers.

Crash reporting, probably.

But how does this happen?

It’s destined to happen, according to Normal Accident Theory.

Aren’t there programming teams and check their code or pass it to a quality assurance staff to see if it bricked their own machines?

Yes, there are probably a gigantic number of tests, reviews, validation processes, checkpoints, sign-offs, approvals, and release processes. The dizzying number of technical components and byzantine web of organizational processes was probably a major factor in how this came to pass.

Their solution will surely be to add more stage-gates, roles, teams, and processes.

As Tim Harford puts it at the end of this episode about “normal accidents”… “I’m not sure Galileo would agree.”

First show was probably Voltron. First film was probably Vampire Hunter D.

Toonami became a big part of my life, and there was a small theater downtown that did showings of Miyazaki and such. I remember seeing Metropolis there, too.

I owe a lot to those scrappy little enterprises, taking a gamble that there would be an audience for this stuff.

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, after all.

To libertarians, yes.

We probably wouldn’t name them until they had reached a certain age

Added some links to my original comment.

It’s not instead of central currency, but in addition to it.

The advantage is that businesses can transact with less conventional liquidity so they don’t have to rely on bank loans. This allows them to charge less to customers who use the local currency.

In the long term, this makes money [in general – both kinds] move slightly faster within the local market, which makes the money [both kinds] more valuable [within the community]. And since the money [again, both kinds] is staying in the local market, the community’s wealth is less likely to be drained by external speculators.

I think Rushkoff’s notion was that new local currencies would be in addition to central currency. It just allows businesses to give a discount to transactions that will keep the wealth inside the community.

It’s a neat idea, I just don’t know how you would protect it from financial services turning it into yet another abstract tradable asset that undermines the original purpose.