Do people put a value on time when not doing value added stuff? When they go for a walk, do they instead run? Do they try to only meet up with friends who can return an investment on their time? Do these people not shoot the shit? Are they busy beavers at all times maximizing wealth?
I dunno, man, It's rumored they have this thing called cellular telephony technology allowing just such a thing while in traffic --I could be wrong though, thems being wealthy and shit.
If poor people aren’t driving in then it means that they are not a source of the reduction in traffic. On the other hand, if only the wealthy drive in then are we saying the wealthy are price sensitive? That seems very unlikely! Someone is not driving in as much.
There's a very large lower-middle to upper-middle class that is going to be price sensitive.
And that's the point. Maybe I'm pretty well off but $15/day is still painful for me to drive in every day. But! Occasionally I REALLY need to drive my car in to the city, so instead of driving in five times/week I just drive in once/week. That's 80% fewer trips, a huge reduction.
The people who aren't driving as much is the large group of well-connected assholes who have been abusing the city's parking placard program for decades.
You'd sort of have to live in NYC and observe it first hand to know this, since for curious "reasons" (like the existence of NYP plates) the NYC media doesn't cover it this way either, but it's true.
The other group not driving as much is the people who are semi-indifferent to driving versus transit but the money tips them one way instead of the other. Which is tons of people.
I think your explanation makes the most sense. getting the slack out of the system and reducing corruption plus driving some marginally middleclass to opt for commuter rail because $50/week puts them under.
For many commuters, though, it would suck if you're used to driving in but now have to take the LIRR (and xfer at Jamaica or whatever) or now drive to the PATH station and take the commuter rail in.
Sure, but that's because you can "squeeze" the price on people. You can't squeeze the price on something where there is no negotiation or haggling.
If you can get your plumber to do the 400 job for 250, are you gonna say, nah, here man, take 500? Who would do that, only lonely people looking for some company. (pool boy/wealthy lady, waitress/guy with too much money)
My point isn't that this isn't a biometric or something.
My point is that it is the weakest biometric, full of noise, constantly contaminated, easily forged with no skill set or technology required, with a very high false-positive rate when used for anything privacy-related.
There are so many more things (technology, policy, etc.), literally violating people's right to privacy at this very moment, that trying to spin this as a theoretically privacy-damaging technology strikes me as a bit ridiculous.
Cameras, license plate readers, air tags, phones, literally just stalking someone, and that sort of thing is great for tracking people.
They are easier, vastly less prone to false positives, etc. Your wife/husband isn't going to use a DNA air sniffer to figure out if you were at the strippers. They'll just follow you from a few car lengths back, or ask one of your friends, etc.
And if your concern is government, there are way easier, scalable, way more accurate ways to invade your privacy that are already proven to work and have the infrastructure already setup.
Not to mention that if you are innocent, and the government wants to fuck with you in particular, they won't need to go through this dog and pony show to do so.
They'll just send a half-dozen masked men to disappear you and then say to anyone that asks that you were an illegal immigrant with an unpaid parking ticket from 2005.
All of this stuff only matters if they are stupid enough to ever let you see the inside of a courtroom. And if you do, you're free to raise the obvious, believable defense that this is the flimsiest, most circumstantial of evidence imaginable. If that's the best evidence they have, you should ask for a bench trial, no judge with an above-room temperature IQ will convict you.
Of course. How do you detect or protect against when the FBI/NSA/three-letter-agency has a warrant for your cellphone (or Google, car, local coffee shop cameras, Ring cameras, credit card, etc.) information alongside a gag order?
How often do you check your cars undercarriage for GPS monitors?
Do you know how many times your car has been imaged by a license plate camera recently?
Again, I'm not saying that this technology is useless. It's just a lot worse, on several dimensions, than technology that is already invading your privacy this second.
If this technology was seriously beginning to be used to track people, a handful of people can thwart it by carrying around an air filter and shaking it every now and again.
Not just that. I touch a door knob and shed some skin cells. You touch the door knob and pick up some of my skin cells. You touch another door knob I’ve never seen and leave my DNA there.
At the time the materials they were using were kind of experimental in the use case. Likely materials science, and definitely computing power have advanced to make the design viable in an operational vehicle.
It’s true; however it’d probably be a nice parenthetical to add context to the division bring referenced. Kind of how it’s good manners to initially spell out any acronyms at the beginning of a text.
In truth, I was a bit surprised to see the piece written in English, because it feels like the audience should be German-speaking. Whilst there is an initial paragraph discussing the different situations within the Holy Roman Empire in the 1100s, the Holy Roman Empire itself is never explained, merely assumed (in fact, it is not even mentioned by name). Perhaps it comes natural to Germans themselves that their history of unity is far smaller than their history of division.
We spent years on this area's history between elementary school and high school, and I'm from rural Kentucky. The eastern Franks. Henry V and the Pope. Barbarossa. Luther and Anabaptism. The Fredericks and Prussian civil order. Romanticism. Moltke and Bismarck. The Christian Democracy movement. Weimar. Before the obvious stuff from more-recent history.
That's an absolutely enormous amount. Your history curriculum must have been heavily influenced by a few educators of German stock or with a big interest in German-American history.
As soon as I saw the title my thoughts went to the old divide between Lutheran High Germany and Catholic Bavaria. But that's a lot because I had a coworker (from Berlin) whose grandfather was from Bavaria and ran away to sea to avoid becoming a priest, which his mother had promised God he would become for sparing his brother in WW1.
I'm not sure if this quote takes into account mob rule. Take ethnic strife in Myanmar or in Africa or rural Mexico, etc. It's not governments doing it --it's mostly grass roots after a grievance is unaddressed and explodes.
Yeah, 1984 and its source material tend to reduce everything to monolithic dystopias, which indeed was relevant and happens when top down power bends truth. But maybe enough pent-up bottom up emotion can also override reason and decay truth the same way. It feels like the latter is also closer to a lot of the world today, we're seeing more chaotic competition for attention than some centrally planned dictation of truth.
That’s your interpretation from high school. The reality is it’s about information control, and an all powerful state was the most understandable model for Orwell.
Today, carefully crafted messages lead people to self-select propaganda. The stereotype of the MAGA uncle is the result of an appeal to fear, resentment and nostalgia.
Everyone must have a MAGA uncle. I myself have two, my kids have one, perhaps two. They are the ones we always had questions about, and would often introduce strange ideas at the table, like a return to the gold standard, or joining Amway, or something. It's scary how easily they bought into it, and how easily manipulated they are. I would imagine they would be easily hypnotized or something. They seem to be the ones that want someone else to tell them what to think, or what to do. My sons call them 'NPCs', and I think perhaps they are somewhat correct. What do we do about the NPCs?
But it's easy to see when someone is falling for propaganda, because they believe what they are told, and do not check sources. They do not critically think. So I do not 'other' my uncles, but no presented facts seem to change their minds. It is disturbing to me how they are manipulated by false information that supports their gut instincts. Clearly there is a mind hack at work here. I would love to see them wake up but as long as the propaganda outlets they watch are left unchecked I don't believe it will happen.
Our fathers understood the danger of propaganda. They must have understood the mind hack. It used to be that the only TV news that was allowed was at specific times every night, and it was required to always be factually correct. It was carefully controlled by the FCC for a good reason.
We've really messed up as a society, and we are going to pay dearly now.
Society goes through these 50 year cycles where the collective memory is erased with generational churn.
We've forgotten about the impact of the big life changing technology of 100 years ago -- the radio. Radio demonstrated that mass media with extended reach can only be tamed by the leash of state authority. I'm in my 40s and remember boring radio of the 1980s and earlier. You might ask yourself... why was radio so boring? Why did it turn into a wild west in the 90s, then into weird right wing blah?
The reason is simple -- and it happened before. If you look back to the 1920s and 1930s, you had figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin developing massive reach and exterting problematic influence. Cults of personality like Ron Paul and ultimately President Trump are really the same model. Getting out of it and saving the naive uncles depends and further media consolidation and regulation.
My guess is that's one of the reasons why the web plutocrats are moving so blatantly to establish dominance -- the free money era will get shut down by the kickback of MAGA's eventual demise.
African fears and ethnic strife were invented out of whole cloth by colonial powers to divide and conquer the local populace. Myanmar I am less familiar with, but I believe that region has been under military junta rule for decades, and I believe religious tensions have been stoked by both the military rulers and armed insurgent revolutionary groups to rally support for their side.
African tribes were the same as any other tribe on earth. They fought each other, they had animus against other, etc. even before Europeans explored Africa, even before Arab colonization too.
The scale of the colonial horrors inflicted on various regions of Africa is poorly told, and was the pregame for the horrors of WW2 in many ways. The British and Germans “innovated” with the concentration camp in the early 20th century, for example.
The most obvious depravity was Leopold’s depredations of the Congo, but many many examples exist. The generational trauma on society is hard to fathom. And of course the arming and covert intervention of Soviet & western proxies during the Cold War fueled unrest and hostility.
Is that not the history of just about every country of consequence? They were conquered and vanquished multiple times with wealth extracted by foreign powers throughout history? Africa, Asia, Europe, Asia Minor, etc? No continent was free from this history. Have you read the history of Asia before the age of exploration or the history of Europe before the age of exploration or the history of the middle east of the Caucasus before the age of exploration? Every one of them experienced things similar to what you mention. Subjugation, atrocities, imposition of culture, etc. and lest you think Europe is free of this behavior I would reference our modern day Balkan region.
If there are guilty parties, we ought to name them, not stay silent out of a misguided sense of justice simply because other guilty parties go unnamed. How is your comment indistinguishable from whataboutism?
I’m not saying your factors aren’t also present either, in addition to the ones I mentioned, but if your factors are present everywhere all the time, what’s the point in bringing them up in this thread?
Upstream someone was saying the problems in Africa are due to conquest, subjugation, colonization, etc. I'm saying just about every country of consequence experienced this over the last half dozen centuries so it's not attributable to that -that is it's too facile a response.
I wasn’t saying that all bad things were attributable to the colonial powers, but those powers orchestrated the spread of propaganda that led to the “mob rule” as a backlash against colonial meddling and empire. I agree it was a sweeping statement, and glosses over a lot of nuance. I don’t mean to minimize man’s inhumanity to man due to local innovations.
That's an argument that's ultimately based on whataboutism.
I'm reasonably acquainted with history in all of those places. What happened in Africa happened. The results are speak for themselves.
In no way did I say that the depredations of past tyrants and conquerers didn't take place or were insignificant. If Ceasar's accounts of Gaul are even partially true, his armies probably butchered a sizable percentage of the human race in that campaign and the years to follow. The Spanish conquest, subjugation and genocide of Latin America utterly obliterated mesoamerican culture and was sweeping in the size and scope of it's brutality.
So why is Africa different? Well, for the most part it took place in the immediate pre-modern and "modern" era. There were coastal outposts previously, but the colonialists really exploded in the latter half of the 19th century. Disease wasn't a factor as it was in the Americas, but technology had a far greater impact -- tribesman vs. machine guns and steam engines ends the way it ends. You also had a different focus, private interests were interested soley in raw material extraction. Cultural imposition wasn't a priority -- it was extract value above all.
I would encourage you to read about the Congo. "The Rest is History" podcast did a series a few months back that is a good introduction. Nasty business.
Japan did some very nasty stuff in the pacific, rivaling leopold in depravity. Do we attribute polpot to the Japanese, or the stuff in Burma to the Japanese? Moreover they really fucked up Manchuria and Korea, yet I don’t see the same legacy of strife due to a foreign powers legacy so reverberating so debilitating…
Sure, but the specific conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis and many others were orchestrated by colonial powers and that is a fact of the matter. I’m not sure what you are referring to, but it doesn’t contradict my statement.
It’s absolutely sad and heavily ironic that this book now gets slapped with trigger warnings[1] What in hell has happened to people?
How in hell is any adult supposed to read any book of consequence if routine things trigger them? Moreso for such an iconic book that criticizes crass authoritarianism.
> George Orwell’s estate has been accused of attempting to censor 1984 by adding a “trigger warning” preface to a US edition of the dystopian novel.
> The new introductory essay describes the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith as “problematic” and warns modern readers may find his views on women “despicable”.
How is this different to something like the PEGI or ESRB labels? Because to the extent that I can tell, nohow, apart from being more verbose, although I wasn't able to find the actual text.
And how is an additive change censorship? Like that's a new one, even for me.
Why not? I expect they're already categorised to some extent - after all, how many straight men would want to read the ones where gay men are fucking each other and sucking each other's cocks and whatnot? - and this would just be an extended version of that.
(EDIT: after stepping away from the keyboard, I was struck by the question of how many men of any orientation would want to read erotic novels anyway! - when they could just load up private browsing mode and watch more videos of people doing their favourite nasty shit than they'd ever be able to muster the urge to view to completion. But my view is that the question was dumb enough as posed already without needing to think about it any more. But maybe there's more to unpack here, if anybody is so inclined, which I'm not - though I'll admit that I've instinctively taken a male perspective here, even though that was never specified. Apologies.)
If the erotic novel you were reading suddenly included a whole bunch of the wrong type of erotica for your sexual preferences, you might be somewhat upset that you weren't warned in advance (which should be obvious: story tags have been a thing since Usenet).
I dunno man, I think if I went through a bout of suicidal thoughts for a few years, even attempted a few times, I might want to skip on media that features suicide for example. And the only way to do that is if you're given a heads up about it ahead of time.
This trigger warning stuff in my view is literally just content labels with some political coating on top. Reminds me to folks rediscovering vending machines in the form of overly complicated and brittle AI robotized fast food restaurants.
It's pretty pathetic to include a scolding essay at the beginning of the book. Their sanctimonious drivel stands in total contrast to the work of a brilliant author that they feel the need to mar with the inclusion of their commentary. Nobody would ever read it if they didn't include it in a book that people actually care about.
Orwell was not a good writer. 1984 in particular is a slog. His work was mostly popular because it conformed to anti soviet narratives, so schools naturally added them to the curriculum to stamp out any communist sympathies. Now that the soviets are no longer a threat, it's not surprising that his work has gradually fallen out of fashion. Yet every pseudo rebellious edgelord thinks the ideological order of 1984 is being enacted because of progressive college kids and trigger warnings.
"Nineteen eighty-four" is probably his most famous book, but many would say that "Animal farm" is a better book and that Orwell was best at writing essays, so make sure you've read a collection of his essays before you decide whether he was a good writer!
You're not wrong about Orwell being posthumously enlisted as an anti-Soviet propagandist, but "Animal farm" is beautifully written and makes perfect sense to a reader who knows nothing about (and has no interest in) the early history of the Soviet Union.
Now that’s some intellectually dishonest sophistry.
The study on coping approaches shows how avoidance leads to maladaptive outcomes, but it also says that exposure in itself isn’t helpful either.
What is helpful is learning how to process and express your emotions, but the study does not address whether english class is the place to be taught good coping strategies (because it’s not, obviously.)
I can only find references to this in very conservative medias, used to lying and creating narratives out of thin air all the time. So don't get on your high horses. Those same "journals" are perfectly fine with Trump's unprecedented wave of censorship and state violence.
You should probably read 1984 again, Orwell wasn't concerned by "trigger warnings". He was afraid of an authoritarian force creating and maintaining an alternate reality they can change on a whim, to manufacture consent for whatever they want to do. Like how Trump said he would be "the most peaceful president ever" but now screams about how Tehran should be evacuated, to presumably level it to the ground. Or how he said he would take care of the economy, utterly destroyed it and now claims it's doing better than ever.
Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.
