80386
One year, not two.
There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".
A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.
But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.
The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?
Most of the people I know have been beaten or robbed at least once, or narrowly escaped being beaten or robbed. In almost all cases, the perpetrators were never caught. Are we the underclass?
The vast majority of cases of assault, robbery, and murder are not carried out by wealthy landowners or the police. If you're that concerned with people being beaten, robbed, and killed, your priorities should be different.
And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.
But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.
The first question on their list is about the 'problem' of wild animal suffering - and I've personally seen EAs argue that, because some animals are carnivorous, nature should be destroyed.
That's not even the weirdest position EAs take. Look up Brian Tomasik. Specifically, his paper about the possibility that electrons might suffer.
Concern about superhuman AI is one thing; bullet-biting utilitarianism is another entirely.
(This isn't the only place where their philosophical framework is stuck in the British Empire; they also tend to take a teleological view of history and moral development, and believe that their views are the self-evident progression of ethical development that every culture and civilization will come to eventually. They may not be as bad about this now as they used to be - there are questions about China now - but I don't think they're quite to the point of coming to terms with cultural contingency yet.)
This was also good for multiple accounts; most social media doesn't support clients anymore, or doesn't have good clients, and in order to keep separate topics separate, you need multiple accounts. So now I keep three different browsers open, because there's just no good way to do this otherwise.
I still mostly use Brave, but IMO it's much less differentiated from other browsers than pre-rewrite.
One of the points of metrics is to reduce the relevance of how savvy your parents are. But you have to have pretty savvy parents to take the SAT IIs.
Metrics get a lot of heat from people who don't realize what the alternative is, but I know a guy who got into Harvard because his grandparents go to the same synagogue as some admissions people and called in a favor. _That's_ the alternative to metrics.
In 2010 terms: let's say you want to write a web app. jQuery : your library of useful PHP functions :: React : Ruby on Rails. That analogy breaks down in many obvious ways (React isn't MVC and [modulo JSX transpilation and whatnot] uses the same language as jQuery, Rails is not easy to reason about especially if you're in 2010 and method_missing isn't considered harmful yet), but hopefully the basic idea comes through - library of functions vs. very opinionated framework that facilitates rapid development.
If you go to Amsterdam, you notice motifs from the flag of Amsterdam everywhere. They're everywhere because they're the sort of thing you can put everywhere.
If you go to Bremen, you notice the Stadtmusikanten everywhere. The flag looks like the logo of an oil company, so nobody uses it. The Stadtmusikanten are a little complex, but they're there and they're at least not lame.
You don't even have to go to Europe! What's Maryland's visual identity? The flag and a crab. You can't draw the flag from memory, but you know it when you see it, and it's not lame. It doesn't look like a gas station.
You could throw a dart at a book of coats of arms and land on something better than this Oklahoma design. It may not make sense for Oklahoma, but people would read sense into it over time, like they did with the flag of Amsterdam. Or they wouldn't. The Maryland flag has a complicated history, but there's no meaning that can be read off it without knowing that history.
Yet.
The PRC has been internationally relevant for a few decades. The US has been internationally relevant practically since its founding.
And for whatever reason, people don't think the PRC has continuity with pre-Mao China -- which has been internationally relevant since long before the US existed, and which doesn't have a very nice track record.
Google:
- dictionary.com
- knowyourmeme
- artsatmichigan.umich.edu
- urbandictionary
- thetab
Bing:
- knowyourmeme
- silvergames
- wikipedia
- urbandictionary
- joke battles wikia
Lycos:
- knowyourmeme
- urbandictionary
- silvergames
- youtube (BIG CHUNGUS | Official Main Theme | Song by Endigo) [this is the sixth result on Bing]
- joke battles wikia
Yandex:
- big chungus wiki
- youtube: big chungus (song)
- knowyourmeme
- memepedia.ru
- urbandictionary
Third option: don't display follower counts.
JS is nice because all you need to write it is a text editor and a web browser, both of which just about all computers have. I had an entry-level job that involved a computer once and automated a lot of the painful stuff with JS - I bet that if more people knew JS, more people would do the same.
I don't know if that'd be a good business proposition, but I think it could be a good on-ramp.
Some sort of orthographic device is needed - s between two vowels means the first vowel is long and the consonant is voiced, and ss between two vowels means the first vowel is short and the consonant is voiceless. So it's useful to have a different case for when the first vowel is long and the consonant is voiceless:
Busen /bu:zən/
Busse /busə/
Buße /buːsə/
Vowel length isn't predictable from spelling in cases of consonant clusters and other digraphs: Hand /hant/ vs. Mond /moːnt/, Bruch /brux/ vs. Buch /buːx/, etc. So ss could've been used for both - or sz, although there are some words spelled with sz as a sequence of s and z, like Szene /stseːnə/.
But drinking fountains add some funny flavors of their own. And what incentive is there to avoid that?
I also don't have reliably potable tap water where I live now.
If they're doing the filtration that the public infrastructure isn't, I'd hardly call that freeloading.
I've been thinking for a while that there should be something like a decentralized omni-Reddit. I liked forums, but people don't want to use them anymore, because there are too many different signups and too many different notification streams/etc. on too many different sites to bother with - so if you had something like Mastodon for forums, that could mitigate that.
But it seems like a consensus has set in that Facebook/Twitter-like social networks are the One True Model, and very few people are interested in things like forums anymore.
I've tried Haskell Platform. I had a lot of path problems in trying to install gtk2hs - it wasn't always obvious where things were (nor that Stack came with its own mingw, so I got my own, and that caused more problems... eventually I wiped everything Haskell-related and started from scratch with Platform), and there's also a known problem with gtk2hs where you have to edit some cabal files to make installation work on Windows, so I would've had to do local installs. I think I got gtk2hs to install at one point, and even to compile their sample hello-world program, but trying to actually run it gave a litany of obscure errors. WxHaskell has an installer batch file, but it just spewed errors at me. I spent about a week trying to install various GUI libraries, and the only one I tried that I managed to get working was gi-gtk... which doesn't have system tray support.
I'm hoping to avoid C++ and Java, but if I have to bite that bullet, I will.
(I tried to install some Haskell GUI libraries, but that's very difficult on Windows. I eventually got haskell-gi to install, but as far as I could tell, it had no support for status icons.)