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When the simulator reaches the breakpoint it should print the name of the LORD

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then shall they call upon me, but I will not cause any information to be accumulated on the stack.

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We are now eight time units from the beginning of wisdom

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evaluating the operator might modify env, which will be the hope of unjust men

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It’s Survivability Onion Sunday

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ate solid food & went on a walk and i'm normal now

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the air traffic controllers union could destroy any politician if they had the discipline. if plane crashes suddenly became more common, and stayed more common, after someone was elected, the american public would get spooked and freak out

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Tekirdağ, Turkey by Meriç Tuna

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Sometimes when I'm homesick for California I sublimate it by looking at the Wikipedia articles for municipal transit agencies for towns I never lived in

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Book 1: This is my friend MASON. He's crazy.

Books 3-4: Reader, we could not handle the crazy.

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The first published proof was given by Moses

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8:1 But the very simplest programs rely on the LORD

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If anything, one of the "lessons" of both ancient Greek and ancient Roman history is that self-government and republican values simply don't scale well beyond the level of the city-state. If a city acquires an empire, like Athens or Rome, it will be corrupted by it in one way or another. And if you fail to acquire an empire, well that just leaves you vulnerable to your more aggressive neighbors. And confederations of self-governing units are simply too weak and fissiparous to compete with more centralized states. It's a somewhat well known fact that the founding fathers in the US were concerned by this. There weren't any good historical examples of republics working on as large a scale as the early United States so they had argue a positive case for why this time would be different.

And it was! It turns out that this lesson, if it was ever true, doesn't really hold in the modern era. You can argue about why (and it's something I'd like to read more about myself) but some of the obvious explanations are 1) better communications technology, 2) better constitutional theory, and 3) nationalism creating a wider sense of shared community. (There was never much sense of Greek nationalism in the ancient world until it was far too late.) But now, big republics are common enough to be banal and hardly worth notice.

Anyway, I find it interesting how an obvious conclusion that a smart person might draw from a careful reading of history can just turn out to be wrong like that. It's a useful lesson in humility. There are always going to be new things, and new combinations of things, for which history will only ever provide an imperfect analogue. And perhaps it's also a lesson about being too fatalistic about human nature. Something which has never succeeded before may one day do so, given the right environment.

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Something fun about this top post is that it closely parallels Hobbes' Leviathan, except Hobbes was warning us not to slide back from dictatorship (good) to war (bad). Whereas OP (accurately) warns us not to slide back from democracy (good) to dictatorship (bad). So perhaps War & Dictatorship are like very-bad & bad valleys that human communities can naturally fall into, & Modernity is somewhere uphill of Dictatorship. Perhaps (pure speculation) there is even some 3rd valley ahead that is better than Modernity!

I really wish that people had a better grasp on what The Average Person's Life was like pre-industrialization. If you're living in the global North the odds are good that your life is, in fact, better than a medieval king- yes, even with the political stuff- and would make your ancestors cry wild tears of envy.

The things that suck about your life are things that suck about the baseline human condition (at least since the invention of agriculture, but that's 10,000 years of humanity). Yes, including all the political stuff.

The baseline human condition is "being terrified of losing the harvest and starving", compared to that, losing a job is no big deal. (It's bad, it can be life-upendingly bad, but it's still not "you are guaranteed to die if you screw this up" bad for most people.)

The baseline human condition is "getting kicked around by a tin pot dictator", whether that be a king, a baron, a warlord, or a chief; it's taken centuries of social technology to get the world to a point where that's Not Normal.

The baseline human condition is "losing multiple siblings and/or children at a young age to diseases that are entirely preventable". That's a shocking tragedy now. The baseline human condition is "being in the pathway of said tinpot dictator's wars of conquest" and having to deal with soldiers' pillage, looting, and worse (even if they're nominally on your side). That is, again, a shocking tragedy-- it still happens, and happens in way too much of the world, but no one is going to tell you that it's normal.

I'm not saying that we can sit back and rest on our laurels. We can't. I've been calling the pre-industrial world the "baseline human condition" for a reason- unless you're very, very careful, that's what your society eventually reverts to. It takes a lot of people working very hard to make sure you don't have to live at the baseline human condition, and if you start slacking on that, you start backsliding into it.

How we treat each other- and how we use the technology, material and social, that we've developed to make things easier- matters. We can make the world even better than it is now. We can also make it significantly worse. The choice is ours.

...But if you know that you can reliably have food regardless of the season, you don't live in fear of a random attack killing you tomorrow, and you can listen to music on command whenever you want? You do actually live a better life than a medieval king. Because even kings and emperors were much closer to the baseline human condition than a random farm worker in Bumfuck, Iowa is today.