They don’t care about that. I mean it’s the opening paragraph…
> I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire.
Ok… so looking from the outside in Australia… a country with mandatory voting that always happens on weekends to make it incredibly easy for people to do their civic duty, thus allowing us to levy a fine against anyone who doesn’t vote… with electoral divisions and regional boundaries managed by a specific government department that has been structured so as to prevent politicians doing any gerrymandering…
In the USA it’s clear that voter suppression and gerrymandering have allowed for partisan groups of elites with both progressive and conservative views to hold onto power for decades as the voting public they represent feels more and more like their vote does not matter, or that they are unable to vote due to their financial situation (no time off, no money for transit, no money for required identification, required identification needs a fixed address and their homeless, etc)… it’s pretty dire… and I have always been kind of shocked how it’s managed to limp along with such statically low voter turnout for decades… money is speech (citizens united) and media are allowed to treat made up news as entertainment with no need to distinguish really from fiction (FCC vs Fox News)…
I don’t see any way the situation doesn’t eventually lead to demagoguery… because at some point your public is just so disenfranchised that a demagogue doesn’t have much work to do beyond “I’m not them, get the fuck out and vote for me so I can change things”…
But the problem with a demagogue is that even if they don’t turn dictator, they are by nature of their rise to power, going to be very dictator like, it’s their choice, their charisma, their force of will that motivated the voting public… the only problem is that the checks and balances to prevent the demagogue from becoming a dictator, have only been barely tested, first with FDR, then with Nixon, one who died before the change to the system was relevant, the other begrudgingly bowed out before the system had to fully engage with the issue...
Many political scientists believe that the parliamentary system used in most of Europe, and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, is superior to the presidential system in producing political stability and good policy
Many have also said that Latin America has experienced the brunt of the negatives of the presidential system, while the US largely escaped them due to wealth, cultural norms, and maybe even good luck. But over the last few years, things in the US have been degenerating to the point that maybe they aren’t escaping those negatives any more
Maybe one of these days it will get so bad that Americans will listen to these political scientists and switch to the Westminster system. Maybe what America really needs is a Prime Minister. The Westminister system doesn’t require a monarchy, see Ireland and Malta for examples of parliamentary republics with predominantly British political traditions. In a parliamentary republic, you have a figurehead President while the Prime Minister holds the real power. Other examples of parliamentary republics (albeit non-Westminster) include Austria, Germany and Israel
It’s about abstractions, and a lot of the time visual programming tools don’t get it right. Either they are too abstract and your limited to a set of nodes/blocks that are not powerful enough and adding more is challenging because the abstraction is so high there’s lots of overhead to get there, or the abstraction capabilities are too low and the ability to encapsulate and extend visually programmed code for reuse in other places or larger projects is hampered by the design.
About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.
And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.
Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.
Given how many people are struggling to find enthusiasm to voice support for Biden due to the situation in Gaza and how he isn’t trying to play hardball with Netanyahu in comparison to the hardball Reagan played back in the day… there is a lot of negative sentiment for Biden due to his age and intransigence on many issues… from the outside looking in (I’m in Australia, so I don’t have a vote in this, I just care about the foreign policy implications) … the situation in the upcoming election is very much looking like a lot of people view it as “narcissistic nut job who seems extremely keen on fascism” and “old politician who might be getting just a little bit senile from time to time… but is also not doing enough to try and stop a genocide” … oh and and throwing your vote out for a third party candidate who literally had brain worms
This isn’t an inspiring group… I expect a non trivial percentage of Biden voters are literally just going to the polls thinking ”he’s the least worst of these people and the others would be so insanely worse that it’s my duty to vote for this guy to make sure the people who believe in the other guys don’t destroy my country”
A mandatory age limit (which remember is enshrined at the other end, we have precedent for someone being too young for the office of president) would force the Democratic Party to nominate a different candidate, who Biden would be obliged to support out of party loyalty since he is being forced to retire due to the age limit, and we might see a less “Passive” Democrat campaign that would be holding the other candidates to the fire on their various problems, from brain worms and heavy metal poisoning to dozens of felony charges and a felony conviction pending the obvious appeal after sentencing…
As for the future when people might live longer…
again from the outside… I’d like the USA to be less dominant because the monopolar world has been a destabilising influence that has slowly allowed US based business interests to corrupt the governments of allied countries and pressure long term changes that have had devastating effects like the current NHS situation in the UK, and the various small countries whose governments have lived and died at the whim of US foreign policy due. While broadly speaking in the long long term the USA has been a good steward of its global power… it has been at its best when it was competitive against other global powers and not sitting on some global throne of power just deciding who gets aid funding or pressuring for treaties like the TPP which have deeply pro business anti consumer political protections built into their bones…
why the big preamble? Well in the long long term i imagine that by the time a healthy person is fit enough to run a global power at the age of 125 (extrapolating from the current age relative to the 80 year cutoff in question) i imagine we’re going to be in the situation where smaller powers have significantly asymmetrical influence… if space travel and eventual efforts at colonisation succeed… eventually they will assert sovereignty due to the classic cycle of colonial development… either the colonising power expands fast enough to maintain their control over the colony or the colony being at a distance (be that economic, logistical, political, or something else) the colony will eventually drift away from the parent developing its own identity and want independence… if we have lunar, asteroid or mars colonies… I don’t see how a lunar colony with enough mass drivers already built for cargo and logistics reasons… couldn’t make any government on earth sit the fuck down and grant them independence… the relative merits of that independence movement are for the future to decide as it’s entirely hypothetical… but my point is that the world will be different… and if the world is different and things have changed, maybe you could just change the damn law and update the age… it seems so obvious you would just raise the age if there was sufficient political support.
And thank you for anyone who followed my rambling short sci fi thread to its blunt and obvious almost non-sequitur ending, I hope it was at least a mildly entertaining read.
Yeah, I’ve started to get a bit cautious about the quality control in these papers too… not because I doubt there’s a problem, but that I suspect it’s all too easy to ignore the quality control necessary to ensure lack of contamination when the researchers go in looking for a positive result… it’s a “cheap win” and I don’t like it…
I’d like to see some reproduction research on the more wild microplastics results akin to the level of diligence put in when Clair Cameron Patterson was developing Uranium Lead dating and discovered that due to lead added to petroleum based fuels the whole fucking planet was tainted with a level of background lead … he had to go a long way, basically building a clean room before such rooms were considered a normal part of precision research… to get a clean environment with no contamination and get accurate results.
It doesn’t have to be quite that bad for a modern researcher, but I’d like to see a lot more of these microplastics papers where they document that they used no or as close to no plastic at any point in sample handling… if a liquid sample has gone from a plastic sample jar and a plastic lid to a plastic pippet to a plastic ampoule with a plastic lid into a machine that agitated it and so on… well of course there’s a damn chance the sample has more plastic in it! I’m not even going to suggest that all the plastic came from the containers that would be stupid… but when I start seeing results like microplastic found in human testicular tissue… I want to know how careful they were with sample contamination because it’s important that we know how bad the problem is getting, is it “1000” or “1002” on whatever scale is being used may not seem like much when the error bars might be +/- 10… but it does matter when this result gets aggregated into meta analysis and other modern “re-processing” that helps us understand the world at the larger scale where studies of aggregate data are the only practical way to approach the problems.
There’s also bulk triboelectric effects where the mechanical forces, and the subsequent physical movement of large blocks of material can build up static charges due to having different electron affinity, like a rubber balloon and a wool sweater… by rubbing one against the other a static charge builds up… one theory for earthquake lights is ground to sky discharge of triboelectric charge buildup due to different electron affinity between the two sides of a fault plane under stress… a large enough area can make a small enough difference add up, so even if it isn’t earthquake lights, the triboelectric effect could be contributing to what was measured in this case… fault “surfaces” are going to put square kilometres of differing materials against each other… a non zero effect per square meter, can add up quite a bit when applied to several square kilometres.
It is wild you do not have this… and it goes to show how cable tv destroyed normal free to air tv so thoroughly that there are houses getting built without even an antenna hidden in the roof space when constructed.
In Australia it’s basically impossible to get a house without it having a free to air tv antenna and coax cable through the house to several locations from that antenna… you would basically have to specifically build your own house without it… and doing so even in this day and age would probably hurt your property values at least a little bit even in a rich suburb, and hurt them a LOT anywhere else.
Eh. It's pretty typical in the States, and has been for a long time.
I've lived in a fair number of real, standalone, single-family homes over the last nearly half-century.
Out of all of them: Only two had either an antenna, or a provision for one.
One had a crusty old antenna in the attic, but it wasn't wired to anything. It worked once connected, but there was no remaining evidence of any coax or even twin-lead up there at the beginning.
The other one had a fairly unimpressive and old tip-up tower outside with no antenna. It took some welding at the top end to get it into a state where an antenna could be fitted -- someone had done some weird stuff to it previously that needed to be undone.
It's easy to assume that some other houses I've lived in had antennas at one point, and at least one even had evidence of having had a tower. But none of them did by the time I came to live in them.
(And yeah, it is somewhat unfortunate. Antennas are relatively inexpensive, and ATSC provides rather good quality if the signal is decent.
It's probably not going to get any better now that even the local cable company is proactively delivering their own TV services in-home via wifi to a small streaming box or a smart TV -- people will just remove whatever coax they might already have.)
Treatment for PTSD can sometimes involve years of therapy, conservatively assuming monthly sessions (it’s not unusual for them to be every two weeks for serious cases) that’s well going to quickly rival the cost of any private/underground services…
The biggest problem here is that the treatment will remain fringe for longer, get less research money, and people suffering with PTSD will continue to suffer…
> I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire.