honzzz

I am vouching for this comment. The choice of words seems interesting to me too. You don't have to agree with it but I do not see any sign of commenting in bad faith - I think this comment should be unflagged.

Although your opinion seems reasonable, I disagree based on my experience growing up in a communist country. The problem is that there is some weird moral feedback loop; each little steep towards complying with something problematic makes you change, you rationalize it and this makes you more likely to walk further in that direction. The concept you describe, comply and liberalize... I never observed it in reality. People do not change the system from within for the better. The system changes people trying to compromise for the worse.

Czech volunteer group Covid19cz involving some big Czech companies and in cooperation with the Czech government are going to launch their tracking system which they claim is GDPR compliant, based on experiences learned from other countries like South Korea and packaged to be rolled out to other countries. I am not associated with them, I just think it is worth mentioning here.

https://bit.ly/394M4w3

Any estimate when the book will be released? Thanks :-)

>>> If you have trouble seeing why some would find a forest full of crying animals who has been partially burned to death sad or troubling with more to come, maybe you’re someone who has trouble feeling empathy?

I have no trouble seeing why some would find it troubling - what I do not get is why you would think this is a reason to put there the warning. You say it yourself - we are going to have a lot of problems. Shouldn't you encourage people to face them? Is it not a good thing to be disturbed by disturbing things? What is better - that people face the hard truths or that they cover their eyes in front of them? This is what bugs me on those warnings - that I perceive them as making our society more fragile and less able to handle the problems. There is such a thing as too much sensitivity. Coddling is not good for us.

I am not the one who finds what you wrote condescending but I would like to ask you a question - you seem to believe that being disturbed by an article is something bad - where does this come from? Is this common where you live?

It is just that this view seems to be gaining popularity and I don't get it. Being disturbed by something is an emotion and emotions serve to orient us. They are useful - both pleasant and unpleasant. Filtering out unpleasant emotions is like wearing glasses that only let you see things you like - why would anyone want that? Do you believe this is a good thing?

And BTW, if you find that article disturbing, I would really like to know what would you think about things like reading The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell... or visiting Auschwitz?

I have to admit that the warning (multiple) for sensitive people bugs me. I believe you mean well but I think this meme should die. If this is not overprotectiveness then I do not know what is. You are not leading people to fire, you are leading them to an article about fire. Everybody reading it should be happy they can just read about it and they do not have to live it.

>>> Everything you mention can be born out of individualism, not just by blind conformity and having any fixed social structure.

Can it really? I feel like this would require further discussion and is not as obvious as you seem to think.

As someone who is not really young anymore, I would prefer not being shown those ads. They are not going to hire me anyway when I show up and they see me so I am just going to waste my time... and even if they were somehow forced to hire me, I don't want to work with people who do not want work with me. Some problems cannot be illegalized away.

Maybe it is just me getting old but when I was watching that part when she was talking about "getting out there, trying new things, making your mark", something really deep in me was screaming NOOOO!, this is not right :-/

I was always into tech but this video makes me want to throw all my devices away, move to some old house in abandoned Spanish village and grow my own tomatoes. And the disturbing part is that I am not even sure why - on its face value it seems great, you get to talk to people from all around the world and that is cool, right? But my intuition tells me that we are not wired for this and if it gains traction, something terrible will come out of this.

I am not saying meditation works for everyone. However, I would suggest that if you decide to give meditation another shot, try to approach it differently. You say that "it requires sitting still and doing nothing for a period of time" - I don't understand it that way, at least if we talk about mindfulness meditation. I am no expert but I would say the point is non-judgemental observation of what occurs in your mind. If what occurs in your mind is anxiety or restlessness, try to observe it without trying to control it or escape it and see what happens. You might be surprised. If you do not approach it with some preconceptions of what it "should" do and just try to accept what comes, it might make you feel better - it seems like a paradox but human psyche sometime works in surprising ways. BTW, that is also why methods like paradoxical intention (Viktor Frankl) work - when you feel anxiety attack coming, you don't try to calm yourself down. You try to be even more anxious... and surprisingly, anxiety subsides.

I have to admit that I fail to see any connection between that quote and the thing you wrote about sexual fantasies. Also, that thing about sexual fantasies... is it not obvious? Does anyone need to read a book to discover it? I might be missing something and I want to be corrected if that is the case but so far it seems like one of those cases when famous authors write something so vague or even empty that people project their own discoveries into it and get affirmative pleasure from that.

>>> someone will call the police on you

This may be a naive question but please bear with a non-US person - what would happen in the US if someone actually called police on you? Could you just say "these are my children and I think it is good for them to be unsupervised, good bye"?

Neurosis and human growth by Karen Horney

Neverending story by Michael Ende

It is interesting to read these two together - they are basically the same book, just expressed differently.

I think there may be a misunderstanding. Taxes may have nothing to do with this specific case because the surprisingly low price is for a foreigner who does not pay taxes in Croatia, that is why he had to pay in the first place. I am not a Croatian but I live in other EU state with similar system - here locals who pay taxes would not have to pay anything.

Interesting - I've heard this, but always as a joke. It never occurred to me that anyone could actually believe it. I am not saying that you did that but I can imagine how someone explaining to the laughing audience that this event did not really happen would be kind of anti-social.

> every aspect of Patreon is bad for creators

Why? What do you mean exactly?

Yes. And if I may continue with another old book that IMHO deserves to be mentioned: Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horney.

> Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting?

I do not want to speak for the parent but I think you might be on a different level of abstraction when talking about "explaining" things. Consider this for example: someone writes a letter to your boss that you should be fired. That someone does not need to explain the process of writing but probably should be required to explain why you should be fired.

How would you define outrage porn? I think that we have to be careful with definitions. Just as we do not define everything that produces sexual arousal as porn because we would have to call even meaningful relationships porn, we should be careful not to call everything that might produce a certain level of disagreement "outrage porn". If there is a well reasoned and substantiated article about something that is bad and should be fixed, what is your metric to distinguish it from outrage porn?

> Spain banned speech critical of the government

Could you please provide some reference? I seriously doubt that what you said is correct.

I have to say that it is mind boggling to me that someone can be surprised to realize that visualizing things is normal for other people - it feels like someone surprisingly finding out in their thirties that the other people are not blind - that's how ever-present it feels for me. Living without it is as hard to imagine for me as hard it must be for people with aphantasia to imagine seeing things with the inner eye.

If I can ask people with aphantasia...

How do you remember things? When I remember the past I see the ephemeral image of what I was seeing then. And there is a thin line between memory and fantasy - I can play with my memories and let them play out some other way than they happened.

How do you read the books without imagining what is happening? How else do you convert letters into meaning?

What happens in your head when someone says "a car"? I see a vague image of a car - right now it's a red sports car but I have no idea why and I am not sure about the brand and it's kind of general car without specific features but if you ask me, I can immediately imagine the details of wheels or whatever - and some other day it might be a black BMW.

How do you imagine your future? I can see myself sitting in a place (inspired by a photo I saw and liked) with big wooden bookcase in a bright room lit by setting sun - and that image makes me feel something and motivates me to work towards it.

And fear is also visual - like when I see myself getting hit by a car when I am on a bike, with the blood and dirt in wounds... I could continue like this for long time - it feels like seeing things inside my head is so "normal" that I cannot imagine functioning without it. It is fascinating though.

My experience is similar to what others have mentioned so I will just add a bit not mentioned yet - the imagery I fantasize is sometimes erotic in nature. For example when I see an attractive woman on a bus, I can visualize her naked, taking shower or whatever - you get the point.

> I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular

Nobody could make it popular after that infamous shower photo. Products need certain coolness to gain traction and Scoble made it go the other way (I live in non-English speaking country and I use that shot to explain the word "nerd").

> I watch movies at an accelerated speed

This sounds so depressing I want to scream.

As someone who was born and grew up in a totalitarian country, I hope I am not going to underestimate your risks but I would say that some bad law now and then does not mean you are on the slippery slope to a totalitarian government. It just means that we live in an imperfect world.

I admit that I do not know much about Australia, but AFAIK you are not on a strategically important location right next to a much more powerful aggressive neighbor, there is no major economic crisis (think "we cannot get enough food" type, not "we can afford slightly fewer iPhones" type)... do you really have enough reason to think about moving to another country? Did any rich and independent country in history just "slipp" to totalitarianism? I am not saying you should not be cautious... but this feels out of proportion. Just my $0.02.

I think the "when we were young" nostalgia might be an important part of the appeal - I rarely drink it now but when I do, it immediately brings back memories of those times when I was 12 and my grandmother managed to buy me smuggled "digitálky" on the black market - people from Western world can hardly imagine how cool that was, being a proud owner of a digital watch with 7 alarm melodies.

Are you not afraid that Australian laws will affect your employability even overseas? I am not sure if Australian citizens can be forced to comply with that anti-encryption legislation when they live outside of Australia but the insecurity itself could motivate some(?) companies to avoid employing Australian citizens. Can you estimate the impact?

I used Google Reader and Google Notebook. Since they discontinued both, I avoid committing to any new Google products - I don't want to rely on a company I consider unreliable. I even stopped using Firebase after they were acquired by Google. I wonder if they have any metric for that - can they measure how much business they lose because of the trust damage?

I have chosen a poor example and formulated my question in a misleading way. I do not work physically and I am more likely to lack willpower when I am mentally tired even when it is related to other things than physical exercise - for example I am trying to reduce my sugar intake and I am more likely to just give up eat some chocolate after a tiring (mentally) day. That is what I thought was the kind of obvious thing - that when people are mentally tired they tend to just watch a movie instead of originally planned language learning. This is what's disputed?

I am asking because either I do not understand the ego depletion concept or something that seemed really obvious to me is disputed, which would surprise me.