As probably the most historically impactful example, consider the nationalization of the East India Company, where Britain had long relied on a highly favoured private entity, but eventually it felt that its interests would be better served by bringing that entity under direct control.
> They should be commended, not seen as a threat to the US
¿Por qué no los dos? Recognizing that a private endeavour is a commendable achievement, but then nationalizing it so that it conforms to the nation’s interest (whether the direct interest of the populace, or more oblique national-security interests) has played out again and again throughout history.
The quotation in the GP’s post does seem to evince little appreciation (if not outright disdain) for ties to family and local community across the generations. But what if the potential harm caused to some kids by bad parents, is an unavoidable part of the social-cohesion benefits to all society that would be caused by young people not moving far away?
I don’t necessarily want to have a dog in this fight myself. But I immediately thought of how that quotation would jar with some cultures represented on HN, where children stay close to parents all their lives and it is widely felt that the West is doing it wrong.
I have never been sympathetic to the notion that copyright has just been extended too long. Copyright itself is the problem. For example, for an academic from a poor region trying to keep up with publications in his field, even the short length of copyright set out by the American Founding Fathers, is too long.
Plenty of hypothesizing recently that literacy as we know it might have been a merely an intermediate phase in human civilization, between total lack of literacy and future human–human communication or human–computer interfacing through emoji-rich shortform text and voice. And even well before the rise of the smartphone, one might have occasionally heard in nerd circles that boring prose literature is superseded by manga: “look at what Japanese people are reading on the train, and their society is doing fine”.
Doing longform writing on a laptop is something that, at least in my experience, has become much harder on a plane: economy seats are now so close together, there is no room to properly extend one's arms to type, and the tray table might be so small and flimsy it barely accommodates even an ultrabook.
"I've never met anyone that regretted on 'traveling too much'."
I have traveled as lifestyle since my late teens and am now in my forties. (I went to uni in a country where lecture attendance isn't compulsory, so many students only come in for the exams, and then I began remote work already in the early millennium.) It is just who I am, and I wouldn't necessarily say I regret it. However, I and loads of people I know struggle with the negative consequences: inability to maintain romantic relationships since a partner will inevitably want to settle down; difficulties with connecting with the local people because conservative societies are suspicious of older men who don't have a conventional family life or focus on a career; and mutual frustration with your sedentary friends back home since your lives are now so different.
You don't see this discussed much on travel media, because the modern ad-supported internet wants positivity and rainbows. However, this is absolutely a frequent conversation topic whenever I meet up with other nomadic travelers.
There can be no one ultimate map app because use cases differ. For example, OSMAnd has many power-user features that are very useful for people who also contribute to OSM, but would only clutter the interface of an app for normies.
The vast majority of Google Maps users are capable of using A-GPS data, they are not reliant on a clear GPS satellite signal alone. And Google’s A-GPS data for Manhattan is extremely detailed. Again, this makes sense for a one-size-fits-all product like Google Maps.
Younger generations are much less likely to navigate by comparing a map to the street names at an intersection. Instead, people navigate by searching for a particular destination and then following the line that the router generates.
When Google Maps is a one-size-fits-all product, you can't blame them for choosing an approach like this. Fortunately, the OSM ecosystem lets you choose (or develop for yourself) whatever approach you prefer.
With a work of a size like "Voices of Fire", one has to consider the possibility that it hits differently in real life versus seeing a reproduction in a book or on the internet. For example, some people who were sceptical about the value of Mark Rothko’s paintings (which are fairly comparable in style) were won over once they saw the works in person. Or consider how Arvo Pärt, a composer who writes music in a style that could be labeled anti-modern, was moved almost to tears at seeing Anish Kapoor’s modern-art sculpture Marsyas.
Museums like the National Gallery of Canada like having in their collection pieces that might make people go wow, and tell other people who in turn might visit the museum.
Yes, Greek has substrate words, but people who are not closely involved in the field must be cautious about this material. Wikipedia is, as always with historical-linguistics issues, well behind the state-of-the-art in the field. Also, the largest works on Pre-Greek were Robert S. P. Beekes’ 2014 monograph Pre-Greek and his 2008 etymological dictionary of Greek and it is easy for a layman to accept these claims. However, Beekes’ work has been savagely reviewed; sadly, he was succumbing to dementia in these years and this affected his work. Subsequent scholarship, for example, has highlighted the fact that many of Beekes’ non-Indo-European words in Greek are not limited to Greek after all, and were presumably borrowed into an Indo-European dialect farther north.
I wouldn’t expect any mythos to be perfect, because they have often been constructed quickly and hastily due to external pressures for national unity. Various countries that saw a surge for independence during the 19th century age of nationalism, often based their mythos on Romantic-era poetry that sometimes has aged well (e.g. the Kalevala), and sometimes has aged quite badly (a few Eastern European countries).
I think that such “fat positivity” is not necessarily an organic grassroots phenomenon, rather it might be a consequence of the modern ad-driven internet. Celebrating personal expression, underdogs and minorities (and the obese can be slotted in alongside these) is something that advertisers love. Perceived negativity and judgement, on the other hand, could threaten advertiser relationships.
Surely American exposure to toxins from plastics pales next to countries in the developing world, where locals have historically eaten from non-food-grade plastics since there was insufficient enforcement to ensure sale of food-grade plastics, and plastic is regularly disposed of by burning that fills the air of whole villages and cities with fumes.
I think the problem is that American politics has become so polarized, that humor anywhere is more likely to be partisan political and written directly in reaction to that week’s events. The development has been observed for late-night television, and it’s not a new thing with The Onion either: already over a decade ago, friends who had grown up on classic 1990s Onion were bemoaning this shift. Sure, The Onion had used political figures in jokes before (“Congress Debates Rush”, “Clinton Declares Self President For Life”) but those politicians could have stood for anything; there was very little reference to specific policies or controversies.
Right there in the first paragraph: “At the time, Starship's most famous member, singer Grace Slick, was 46.”
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
Firefox and uBlock Origin definitely make the web more usable and I’m shocked when I occasionally see what a non-techie friend’s browser screen looks like. However, adblock is only a band-aid over the dying of the web overall. Blogs are dead, forums are dead, ostensible replacements like Reddit or microblogging sites suffer from the decline in longform text and nuance (as their userbase is overwhelmingly contributing from mobile devices now). So much information that would have once been presented in efficient text is now in time-wasting video, etc.
Thanks to LibGen and Anna’s Archive, I find myself reading actual books more these days, many published long before I was even born, to scratch my itch for learning. Wikipedia aside, a bunch of pirated grayscale scans from university libraries is suddenly more fulfilling than the information superhighway that the web was hyped to be.
Is using uBlock Origin or NewPipe, which have made YouTube an ad-free experience for more years now than I can remember, a “Boomer marker”? Granted, it isn’t unusual to see claims in tech circles that younger generations today are less aware of certain customizations or certain forms of pirating content, but it would be a real shame.
Global Underground never entirely went away. However, the famous label run by the “Boxed brothers” ran into severe financial difficulties in the early millennium. Since then, I have assumed that Global Underground is a mere brand that any prog-ish DJ can pay money to use, to aid in promotion.