I find the resistance to understanding these models so interesting. I talk to friend about this and few people are able to get over their initial optimism bias. Some of us who have familial experience with less ideal circumstances—war, poverty, genocide, and hyperinflation—do not hold the same biases.
I once created a website to catalog all of the out of copyright books in the Library of Congress and randomized selections so one could replicate the serendipity of browsing (locserendipity.com). In the process of doing this, Jessamyn West identified stickers or stamps on some of the books (https://twitter.com/jessamyn/status/1114333025716854784). Some of the staff at the LOC knew what they were—-stamps marking which books to take offsite in the the unlikely event the Nazis invaded the United States.
Wow, this is flagged? What was wrong with it, the suggestion we should not be intolerant of others? I will remind you of the paradox of tolerance, which explains why we shouldn’t tolerate intolerance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It is an important philosophical principle that is crucial to maintaining a free society.
Key points from this review of The Restless Republic by Anna Keay:
1. Very few people tuck very neatly into one historical ‘age’ or another” — one only has to trace the successful early careers of Restoration figures such as Pepys and Christopher Wren back into the 1650s to appreciate this
2. What may be a casual observation about other periods of history is of tremendous importance in understanding the Interregnum, which was consigned to official oblivion the moment the restored Charles II post-dated the start of his reign to his father’s death
3. Far from the dour, militaristic regimes of popular imagination, life under the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate emerges as innovative and exciting: the effect of the hitherto unimaginable act of abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords after years of transformative conflict being to unleash an energetic spirit of ambitious experimentation and industry
4. The complicated Civil Wars of the 1640s, and the 11 years of constitutional experiments that followed, have struggled to capture the attention of a wider public living happily on a diet of Hitler and the Tudors and content with Britain’s neat national story of kings and queens stretching along the schoolchild’s wooden ruler
5. But what is more striking is the strong current of forgiveness and future-proofing civility from all sides: the Parliamentarians were “remarkably unvindictive” in government, as was Charles II on his return
I spent most of my spare time either reading books or messing around on the internet - and for all you kids out there, this was the 1990s internet, when 'the internet' was mostly email, usenet and FTP, and you accessed it over a dial-up modem
One of my major criteria for buying things is whether they can do their job without a network connection I use computers for...well, I use them for reading stuff
Somewhere along the way, in the last OH GOD TWENTY YEARS, we - along with a bunch of vulture capitalists and wacky Valley libertarians and government spooks and whoever else - built this whole big crazy thing out of that 1990s Internet and...I don't like it any more
I actually don't use the internet the same way I used to. Now, I typically interact with it through a text-based version of the content collected through a commandline utility integrating Lynx.
It is amazing that this happened in the modern day. Paraphrasing the article:
Driven by a desire to be powerful and respected, and buoyed up by Stalinist ideas about gaining prestige through scientific acumen, Elena turned to the field of chemistry. Mircea Corcioveci, one of the top scientists at the Institute, eventually discovered that Elena "didn't know what a chromatograph was and didn't recognize the formula for sulfuric acid," which was "taught to first-year chemistry students." Nevertheless, on December 8, 1967, she obtained a PhD in chemistry after defending her thesis on the "Stereospecific Polymerization of Isoprene on the Stabilization of Synthetic Rubbers on Copolymerization." Romanian law decreed that doctoral candidates had to publicly defend their theses. To avoid the public defense of a thesis that she likely did not write, the law was changed so that she only needed to submit a written defense. Ultimately, she became Chair of the National Council for Science and Technology and controlled all scientific research in the country, although she knew nothing about it. "We were told: no paper can be written or published, no conference delivered without Elena Ceausecu's name appearing in first place...We were producing papers with words which, we knew, she could not pronounce, let alone understand." She was not even very bright—in fact, almost illiterate—but, through devious and fraudulent means, she managed to become one of the most lauded chemists in the mid-twentieth century.
I had to get the MMR, varicella, Mantoux test, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and several other vaccines to work in healthcare. Children need to get a host of vaccines to go to school and that has been true for a hundred years. The only thing new here is a politically driven disregard for human life.