clairity

dunno? do you think there could be an easy answer?

for me, it boils down to keeping the brain open and helping others do the same. but that's a personal heuristic. most people don't want to pay the socioeconomic cost of being an independent thinker.

in my personal css framework, i only do fluid type on headers, not body text, as i found the effect to be too subtle to matter. but header text can be overwhelming on small devices without it.

then you can let the user (agent) set the default font size on root/html.

browsers have been working on multiple column text for a while now[0], so by employing a container/media query, you could have multiple columns for wide screens and content containers. i experimented with it a couple years ago and found quirks (which i can't remember offhand) that made it not quite ready for primetime then.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns...

i've settled tentatively on the notion that nothing simplistic works for societal truthseeking, but a series of principles like education, community, (institutional and economic) fairness, etc. do work in concert to combat mediopolitical narratives that are wholly unconcerned with truth but rather control. this need for multidimenionalism is why change is so grindingly slow, but it's totally worth continuing to support and advance these principles at a local and state level against motivated, moneyed interests.

i should note that i do believe in science and the scientific method but reject scientism and expertise. part of this faith is understanding that no one person can embody the truth of a field, but all of the practitioners together can tell you insightful things about it. it's still ultimately up to the discernment of the observer to reach reasonable conclusions based on that imparted knowledge though.

oyster mushrooms exist right now in the supermarket and can eat plastic. that's something you can literally set up yourself.

it's not like "in mice" studies, L5 self-driving, or grid stabilizing battery storage for renewables, which are actually far from realization.

oh, yes, i'm not saying all is lost (even if that's how it may have seemed), but that it's frustratingly slow to get people to discover and coalesce around actual truths, when special interests[0] are highly motivated to undermine truths and the general welfare time and again for personal and outsized gain.

it's tempting to throw out simplistic solutions like "let's skepticism!" but almost impossible to actually change people en masse like that. which then points to your second course of action, changing processes (via the systems that implement them), and that's something i truly believe in, but still find frustratingly slow.

[0]: plus the expert fallacy, which i mentioned before. i was just having this conversation last night about doctors, who know next to nothing in comparison to how complex biology is, but we still as a society feel compelled to venerate (and remunerate) doctors irrationally because they hold people's lives in their hands (understandably). but that outsized veneration (and remuneration) often leads to egos that can't admit ignorance or doubt and that leads to millions of unnecessary deaths and countless people with worse health outcomes. and that's not a condemnation of doctors, but a realistic understanding of where our collective knowledge lies relative to the long arc of evolution, but the societal distortion persists nonetheless.

> "Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before?"

there's a potential fix for that that's being tried in australia: rezoning windfall taxes (https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ ; posted here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896)

my frustration is that we can never even come close to living up to our ideals as a society because our selfishness and greed constantly undermine the process of improvement. i used to subscribe to the term "progressivism" for this process, but even that's been undermined by tribalism and political propaganda.

i'm actually not too concerned about end of the world scenarios. we, like cockroaches, will find a way to survive as a species, even if it's very suboptimal. that may sounds cynical, but it's mostly an optimistic perspective about our resilience.

and i know climate change is all the rage these days, but i'm way more concerned about pollution (literally killing millions now and for the past century+), which is what the climate change narrative tries to divert our attention away from (because it wholly fulfills our need to do something about, and our attentive capacity for, "environmentalism"). it's the same playbook used by sugar against fat, but perverted back against itself. the fossil fuel and auto lobbies seems to think they can do something about CO₂ (probably token efforts), but not all the rest of the pollutants they spew, so they're reluctantly on the climate change bandwagon as a risk mitigation and diversion strategy.

that's great detail to add, but i'd still contend chihiro's journey is squarely about placing the self without the context of family and tradition, which is a super common theme in eastern cinema and literature. the spirits together form her past and come together to shape her (future) identity, something she's not even aware of before her journey.

her self discovery is certainly initiated by an uneasy transition point in her life (moving), but i'd argue that geting beyond that discomfort is not the main point of the movie. and for sure, the spirits are mischievous, but they all carry their own baggage that they try to dump on her (sometimes literally), which is what she's directly and figuratively resisting via all the hoop jumping. she's picking and choosing who she's going to be based on what her ancestors (loosely speaking) are trying to foist onto her. the yokai[0] are stuck in the past but she's not, and she must move beyond her ancestral past to escape back into her real life (which is symbolic of her forming the kernel of self identity). this is where your point about the future (and moving forward) dovetails nicely.

in that way spirited away is a story about a young human going through the process of realizing that they are a self-aware and self-actualizing person destined to become an adult (who much couch themselves in family and tradition), and not simply a child who can play and not care about the world (and her parents especially) anymore.

[0]: it's neat to see the parallel with yaoguai, which is the chinese version of these little demons/goblins, as i've more recently been watching wuxia/xianxia dramas.

> "The degree to which humanity runs on tautological reasoning is the part that I find interesting."

yah, this is the amazing part. societies are much more resilient than we might otherwise give them credit for. we can endure a lot of suboptimality and hardship, and even reasoning our way into tenacious consent, because the activation energy for change is so high and the final outcome so uncertain. perhaps this is the best we can do--find stable local optima for limited spans of time.

but regardless, being able to uncover poor rationale like tautologies is one effective tool in the toolbox for reshaping political narratives. it's a slog for sure, but you do sometimes see narratives change (covid response being a vivid example). being indenpendently-minded (skeptical) helps a lot too, as you're not personally invested identity-wise in any given narrative, and are willing to change your mind more easily as new information rolls in.

we have hugely invested interests working against such reforms, but some of these will come to pass one day for sure, just because enough people will be fed up and demand it, despite the personal cost[*].

[*]: most people are wholly unsuited for conflict (even the constructive kind) because it's so uncomfortable and risky, and in developed countries as we're constructed, the payoff seems so disporportionate (a lot of gain going to others, a little going to you, but you seemingly taking much of the personal risk).

this is a decent take, but i think you're missing a crucial centerpiece, which is the child's direct connection to the past, as represented by the kami (spirits) and her own parents. the bulk of chihiro's journey is discovering where she fits in within that past, so that she can then uncover her own sense of self within it, and thereby ultimately find the resolve to take action (find her agency). without this base understanding of eastern social/philosophical tradition, much of the journey seems like senseless obstacle-jumping, and that sounds like the context that the GP is missing to appreciate the movie.

"tautological" comes generally from logical reasoning as a field (in which i have interest but no formal training). is that what you're asking? it's "circular reasoning": a (usually hidden) premise comes around to "prove" the causal chain, which means it's not really proven at all, but merely reasserted. it's a pretty common logical mistake to fall for, because it's hard to detect without that close reading (the platitude that "falsehoods can travel the world before truth has had breakfast" comes to mind here as well).

i think political scientists do research the multidimensionality of issues all the time. it's just that politicization (as in partisan politics) wants to collapse the problem space into memes that can lodge in people's brains without further thinking, and simpler (binary) memes are more easily remembered and propagated. in any case, the standard remedies certainly include voting reform (to lessen the incentive towards this binary collapse), parliametary systems (accommodating multiparty coalition-building), federalism (smaller governments are more responsive to the local populace), direct democracy or finer representation, etc.

no, that's post hoc rationalization. the world is more complex than 2 points on a line, always. sure, our brains like 2-dimensions the best, because they're easier to reason about, but there's no law that says that that simple reasoning translates into either an accurate read of a given situation, or an accurate prediction about the future (which is what we want models to do).

that's why starting with the "political spectrum" is bound to give you false information. it compresses too much of the complexity down into a simple model that doesn't predict the world in any meaningful way. it may aid conflict, but that's exactly the trouble: couching sociopolitical challenges purely in terms of conflict itself perpetuates, rather than helps to solve, problems.

and as others have noted, you can just as easily have multiple political coalitions coming together to solve problems without devolving into dualism. humans prefer but don't require binary political stances as you're asserting. moreover, even binary issues won't all fall neatly into a single left-right spectrum without active coercion (which is most of what we see in mediopolitical theater).

this is why fair competition is so important in markets (not "free"). it's literally what makes markets efficient, not omnicient capitalists, as they'd love for you to believe. the market works because mistakes become directly apparent in the catchall metric that is price (and its derivatives, revenue and profit).

yes, as you move toward more intelligence, you tend to move toward the edge of human knowledge, which by definition, are at the extremes (not in everything of course, but in areas of more intense focus).

anything that starts off with "left" and "right" as an underlying political model is already hopelessly lost in poor thinking. this particular model is especially prone to tautological "evidence" of its own potency but it's simply uncovering a bias embedded in its own premises. start with a more realistic multidimensional model of political space and then maybe we can have productive conversations about things like intelligence and economic attitudes.

yah, after a while, asking for help feels like reaching frontline tech support (or first-page google results) over and over and getting the "did you restart?" answer. it's often not only not helpful, but a real drag on finding a useful answer.

in daily life, folks intrinsically tend to curate others who give them good answers (information), and that's how such 'masters'[0] gain real esteem. typically you realize through experience what questions these 'masters' can answer well and what they can't, leading to genuine social bonds (trust is the real social currency but trust and good information tend to go hand-in-hand). this esteem is so valuable that others game our social systems to get it falsely, which is why social media is such a shitshow (not because of poor moderation as many seem to believe, since moderation doesn't actually change what people believe, except maybe at the margin, but esteem does).

basically, people who can answer questions well deserve esteem. the social awkwardness you describe come from people who don't deserve the esteem but want it (or worse, think they deserve it) anyway. and incidentally, the prevalence of this awkwardness is a dependable sign of social degradation (low-trust to low-ethics vicious cycle), as people generally have no problem admitting ignorance in high-trust environments.

[0]: i resist the term 'expert' for being thoroughly subverted by fake esteem seekers and mediopolitical propagandists.

abstract:

> "This paper presents evidence of the disruption of a transition from fossil fuels to nuclear power, and finds the benefits forgone as a consequence are substantial. Learning rates are presented for nuclear power in seven countries, comprising 58% of all power reactors ever built globally. Learning rates and deployment rates changed in the late-1960s and 1970s from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment. Historical nuclear global capacity, electricity generation and overnight construction costs are compared with the counterfactual that pre-disruption learning and deployment rates had continued to 2015. Had the early rates continued, nuclear power could now be around 10% of its current cost. The additional nuclear power could have substituted for 69,000–186,000 TWh of coal and gas generation, thereby avoiding up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions. In 2015 alone, nuclear power could have replaced up to 100% of coal-generated and 76% of gas-generated electricity, thereby avoiding up to 540,000 deaths and 11 Gt CO2. Rapid progress was achieved in the past and could be again, with appropriate policies. Research is needed to identify impediments to progress, and policy is needed to remove them."

full text: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169/htm

“could” being the operative word. so much could happen, but what’s currently realistic is more sobering. currently, we have no way of realistically storing the magnitude of grid-stabilizing power required by intermittent renewables. even all the car batteries in the world are not anywhere close to enough, and that’s after 2+ decades of mining and manufacturing. pumped hydro is similarly limited. molten salt storage? decades. kinetics? decades.

but no one is saying we stop renewables. what we need to be saying is that we resume nuclear (primarily a mediopolitical problem) and do away with coal as fast as possible while we sort the storage issue out over the coming decades.

storage (and grid stability in general) is always the crucial achilles heel to renewables and it's always handwaved away with fantastical arguments positioned squarely against nuclear (here, springing up a whole global hydrogen economy out of nowhere). it's frustrating to see so much needless internecine fighting when nuclear plus renewables is the most viable answer we have right now to a fossil fuel free future. we need to be laser-focused on removing coal from our energy present, let alone our energy future.

coal is still nearly 30% of the electricity generation in the US (and 11% of total energy consumption). if we'd just kept building nuclear like we had between the 70s-90s, we'd be coal-free right now (other than that the bit used by industry, which is about 10% of the total coal use, and 1% of total energy consumption).

apple is still the least bad option, but make no mistake, their longer term strategy is all-in on services and content, which means becoming more invasive over time.

i'm planning to get one more iphone (a 14 pro) but it's likely to be my last because of this direction. really hoping that the independent phone developers (pinephone, fairphone, etc.) have a decent consumer (not just techie) offering by the time i need the next phone after that.

i'd incidentally just learned about this a few days ago, posted here (with no traction): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32782944 , which in turn links out to https://simplelogin.io/blog/simplelogin-join-proton/

they have a limited free tier and a paid tier. i felt a little uneasy about the emails seemingly going through another set of servers (in plaintext?) for the filtering so i didn't sign up, but would love to hear other perspectives.

combustion (burning) byproducts are the primary harmful particulate matter created by cooking, whether that be from gas or food. like most issues, incidental contact isn't enough to worry about, but if you're a cook (commercial or home), then you're likely getting meaningful exposure. it's not an issue for kids unless they're doing the cooking every day. the range hood should either be vented to the outside or sufficiently filtered (or both), but most filters are inadequate, so venting to the outside is the more foolproof strategy.

but this is likely a very small factor for nearly all people. cars (oil) and electricity generation (coal and gas) create most of the harmful particulate matter in the air (and water and ground), so that's where we should focus our anti-pollution efforts first and foremost.

you can instead use the <html> and/or <body> tags as extra containers for that.

cards are better represented as <article> elements: independent blips of content that are regular and largely self-contained (in a given section). an aside is literally something that's not part of the regular flow of information. it's not included in reader mode for instance.

especially with rapid prototyping, you don't want your stylesheet dictating quirky usage of html.

of course linux was created to compete with other unixes. it's literally baked into the name. competition transcends 'product' as you seem to be using it, which seems to be something akin to 'formal market offering'. linus meant to create an OS for a segment that he thought was underserved (OS hobbyists). it competed from the beginning with other OSes for mindshare and usage (but not necessarily for end-use). so you're really just distinguishing the segment served, not competition (other than to say it likely won't be competitive outside its niche).

more than that, i don't think this framing does you any good with the segment this browser is targeting, as developers still want others to recognize their (good) work. but that's fine, as there's plenty of time to develop the brand (and yes, brand also exists outside of being a formal product).

carbon (i.e., CO₂) isn't the problem anyway, so let them waste their money on virtue signaling. pollution is the problem. let's focus on coal plants first, where getting rid of the top 100 polluters would already palpably improve air (and water) quality that would in turn measurably reduce death and disease.

it's a carveout and preferential treatment of (certain kinds of) capital. that's a subsidy, no matter the mechanism of return.

depreciation is certainly a subsidy to capital, which is entirely unnecessary and distorts markets by upsetting the pricing mechanism. financial firms will happily provide upfront capital to any future profitable project.