Anyone suffering in the loneliness epidemic should have a copy of The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg. The entire point is that you should be putting yourself into socially active areas in your community.
This includes: a church, a local pub or coffee shop with regulars (ideally walking distance from where you live), a rec sports/game league or club.
Knowing this, I've perused it in my life and it seems very effective. I'm a regular at a Trivia Night one night per week (I don't go every week, but enough to know both the bartender and host by name). I'm a regular at a bar three blocks away from where I live, even if I consume only one non-alcoholic beverage and one alcoholic beverage per visit (a couple night a week), that leaves me plenty of time to chat with my neighbors. I'm a member of a local golf club (a very cheap municipal course), and play there every other week, and after a couple years have very good relationships with many of the other members even if we don't interact much outside of the club. At my last apartment, I was a regular at the coffee shop enough to know multiple baristas by name, it wasn't exactly a third place situation, but it was getting close before I moved. I'm not religious, but I'm very familiar with academic institutions and open lecture series that I used tot attend in grad school.
I do this intentionally. My partner had never been a regular at a bar before, and she really, really enjoys it now even though she doesn't really drink. When she joins me, she will maybe consume one-half of a light beer. You don't have to be an alcoholic to be a regular, this is a major point that Oldenburg discusses when he contrasts German-style drinking culture with English-style drinking culture.
This shit needs to stop. If you have any Republican representatives right now, you might consider writing them every day.
We can disagree on tax policy, immigration policy, even very strong issues, and I'm happy to fight about those issues and respect disagreement. But in the last month, the president has invaded a foreign country without even notifying congress, has used literal thug tactics to try to get lower interest rates, and now he's obviously illegally entering the home of a reporter to take information which is clear violation of the first and fourth amendments.
This is unamerican. It's a violation of the clear principles of the constitution. It's against the law. It's trivially deserving of impeachment.
Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
>Strongly worded letters to one's Congressperson are the equivalent to "thoughts and prayers". It doesn't matter how just (you think) your cause is; it will never achieve anything.
Your assertion isn't supported by, well, anything. The problem is that constituents think they can't affect their representatives' positions. They can.[0][1] Especially if there's a concerted effort to do so.
For every constituent who writes/calls/emails, there are at least a half-dozen more who feel the same way.
The problem isn't that contacting your representatives isn't effective, it's that by not doing so, you're ceding power to those that do.
I'd be like a bookstore banning "AI books." Like, yea, you can probably use AI in making your book and they'll sell it, but they're mainly targeting users who just happen to be publishing a book every single week, or day, or hour.
At a certain resolution it's not actually the artist doing the work.
I think folks attempting to build a unicorn could just do what nextdoor did -- require a modicum of proof of life -- but for clones of twitter, reddit, etc.
The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
In the US, it used to be that if you made credible threats against people you could/would be prosecuted. Social media made it so common in that no district attorney goes to the trouble of actually finding prosecuting people for doing this.
We can expect the same level of institutional breakdown with regards to various types of harassment, misappropriation, libel, and even manufactured revenge porn from AI.
His term ends on May 15, 2026, so it's almost pointless to file these charges now.
I see what's happening now as game-theory signaling, not as a real threat to Powell. I would suggest that this action is better seen as a latent threat to the next Fed chairman to let them know that they will either enact Trumps desired Fed policies or they will be prosecuted for anything that the administration can manufacture.
It's also important to remember that Powell is not the only Federal Reserve Board of Governors to have very odd accusations of wrongdoing and investigations launched. He's also done this with Lisa Cook. It seems pretty blatant at this point what's really happening.
> His term ends on May 15, 2026, so it's almost pointless to file these charges now
His term as chairman ends in May. He remains on the Board of Governors after that. Following this fight, he may remain the most prominet voice despite losing the chairmanship.
This will continue until people actually get hurt. Trump is exactly what decadence looks like: people willing to vote for "their team" against any better judgement because nothing really every happens to hurt them.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago.
Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them.
There are 9400 active Starlink satellites & they can be launched 28 at a time on a partially reusable rocket. The orbit they operate on is largely self cleaning due to being quite low. The satellites operate in many planes and bands + form a mesh network with laster interconnects.
Sure, if you want to try that and bankrupt Iran even more via its militarry rocket program, you can do that and maybe destray a handfull satellites, provided you can actually hit them and the rocket/s does not fail. And you might even get a nice casus belli as a free extra.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but I guess even a single lunch in the retrograde direction should be enough. You lunch a box of ball bearings with a plastic explosive to spread them out, and then just wait. The cloud will pass over Iran every 12h or and will stay in orbit for quite a few weeks, since the orbit is even higher than ISS reboosting once a month, and balls are highly aerodynamic compared to the Starlink flat sails. The cloud won't be very big, but it will repeatedly swipe through quite a lot intersecting prograde orbits. I guess the chance would be quite high. Iran can also split payload into smaller boxes and "deploy" then in sequence while the second stage is firing, then detonate them, to spread out even more.
As a student of philosophy of language, I obviously agree with the author (against the quoted thesis).
The structure of a language matters to the ease and feel of its use, despite even being logically identical. One parallel would be the syntactic benefits of something like Hintikka’s independence-friendly logic vs first order logic, even if they are equivalent.
The sentiment shared is that we should sacrifice benefits to the next generation to make our own lives easier. This is a common sentiment, but a sad one. The goal should be a natural language based programming language, that everyone can use, along side a technical programming language that makes unambiguous the interface between the language and the machine.
Everyone seems to endorse their happy medium, and those languages are also perfectly fine.
Anyone suffering in the loneliness epidemic should have a copy of The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg. The entire point is that you should be putting yourself into socially active areas in your community.
This includes: a church, a local pub or coffee shop with regulars (ideally walking distance from where you live), a rec sports/game league or club.
Knowing this, I've perused it in my life and it seems very effective. I'm a regular at a Trivia Night one night per week (I don't go every week, but enough to know both the bartender and host by name). I'm a regular at a bar three blocks away from where I live, even if I consume only one non-alcoholic beverage and one alcoholic beverage per visit (a couple night a week), that leaves me plenty of time to chat with my neighbors. I'm a member of a local golf club (a very cheap municipal course), and play there every other week, and after a couple years have very good relationships with many of the other members even if we don't interact much outside of the club. At my last apartment, I was a regular at the coffee shop enough to know multiple baristas by name, it wasn't exactly a third place situation, but it was getting close before I moved. I'm not religious, but I'm very familiar with academic institutions and open lecture series that I used tot attend in grad school.
I do this intentionally. My partner had never been a regular at a bar before, and she really, really enjoys it now even though she doesn't really drink. When she joins me, she will maybe consume one-half of a light beer. You don't have to be an alcoholic to be a regular, this is a major point that Oldenburg discusses when he contrasts German-style drinking culture with English-style drinking culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Good_Place_(book)
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