I live somewhere where Brussels sprouts, broccoli, asparagus, spinach, etc were not available until recently. I grew up watching American kids' disgust towards them on TV. So I assumed that they tasted really bad. I had my first taste of them only within the past decade. And the experience couldn't be further from my expectations. Brussels sprouts and broccoli are some of my favorite veggies. I find both of them as pleasant as meat (personal experience, not an exaggeration). Even the common spinach [1] is palatable in its raw form, as is kale. I really do believe that their tastes changed drastically in the past two or three decades.
[1] We have our own varieties of 'spinach'. Or at least that's what we call them. However, they aren't edible in their raw form. And one very important observation is that they taste so much better and rich when they're homegrown. The difference is so significant that you can tell apart homegrown and market-sourced spinach just from the taste of their cooked dishes. There is something certainly wrong with the commercially farmed spinach. It's as if they're starved of nutrients.
> I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
People don't appreciate the role of a working executive branch and government bureaucracy in keeping the nation working, stable and relatively free from unfair practices, no matter how inefficient they may seem. In most cases, they are inefficient and have other problems because they're understaffed.
I absolutely agree about the billionaires. Not just because they're out of touch with reality, those government agencies are big hurdles to their pursuit of unlimited wealth by any means necessary. This was splendidly evident in the way Musk targeted the agencies that were either regulating or investigating his companies.
But what perplexes me is the hostility against government bureaucrats shown by ordinary people who are getting impoverished. I see them routinely complaining online that government workers are lazy parasites who live off their tax money. Some people take it further, saying that these workers are part of the 'deep state' out to enslave them.
Sure! Any bureaucracy will have some bad apples and corruption. But how do they miss the part that the government bureaucracy is the last line of defense blocking their all out exploitation? Like others point out, most government workers are too qualified and work too hard for what they are paid. They often take a pay cut to work on their passion and help everyone in the process. You can see this in the numerous bureaucrats who strongly resisted illegal and/or anti constitutional orders from the regime. Why are the people so oblivious to these?
Abstraction. They can't see how a functioning government benefits them. The only people who need a functioning government, in their mind, are the leeches and welfare queens, not the hard working rugged individuals like them who have never taken a penny in government aid (again abstraction. Tax policy that subsidizes mortgage holders, for example, does not occur to them as a handout. Or social security. It's not a handout because "I paid into it", not considering that they get back more than they contributed).
Makes sense. But why is that? Are they not educated enough to realize it? Or don't they bother to apply their common sense to such topics? Also, where do they get these weird alternative explanations from?
PS: I'm not from the US. What I know is from both mainstream and social media. I'm curious about the fundamental reasons on the ground too.
>where do they get these weird alternative explanations from?
Surely you're aware of cable news in the US, like Fox News, etc. but before that, for about 40 years now[0], AM talk radio has played a huge part in developing this messaging. I grew up with this as my main channel for awareness of current events, hearing about everything that happens through this lens.
I'm not sure if this [1] is accessible outside the US, but give a listen between 3 and 9 pm EST (GMT-5) though certainly not limited to these hours. You'll learn a lot about the American right wing mindset, and how the working and middle class is effectively messaged to. Talk radio is a lot more free form and ephemeral, so you'll hear a lot more improvised and extreme ideas than you would in a TV broadcast. It's quite a spectacle.
No, that's just going to reinforce that government doesn't work, which justifies starving the beast further. I don't know how one party has so successfully created this feedback loop, where the more they lose, the more they win. I guess its simply that destruction is easier than creation
As I understand it, this is to wreck the government oversight on the conduct of the rich and the powerful. They really want to establish a full blown oligarchy. And they managed to convince the poor people that the government is bad for them too.
> Unless they thought appearing to be complete morons would distract from their actual mission of stealing all the Federal data they could.
That and the fact that many of the targeted organizations were regulating Musk's companies or even investigating them for serious violations. I don't think that I've seen such a blatant display of conflict of interest quite like this one.
Americans should try living in another country for a while. You don't need to worry about school shootings when you send your kids there in the morning. You don't need to worry about getting shot up in the neighborhood restaurant. You don't need to worry about protests turning into into little armed street wars. You don't need to worry about the cops shooting you dead because they're so worried that you may be carrying concealed arms. Life happens on a different gear. You'll certainly gain an appreciation for gun control and how noncontroversial it is.
At what point is anyone going to say enough is enough? When will somebody stand up and call out their gaslighting excuses and insist on them stopping their false pretense of concern and altruism? When will see the perpetrators being confronted for their real criminal intent?
We used to carry paper pieces called 'bank notes' or 'bills' and round metal disks called 'coins' in a small leather pouch in our pockets called wallets. They were pretty effective for payments without much of an infrastructure. Even banks worked using paper documents and books.
I know this sounds a bit too condescending. But that's honestly not my intention. I just couldn't help it! Jokes aside, it's true that we often forget that these things can be done and were done without the internet. But more importantly, there are 2 dangerous implications for our over reliance on the internet for our financial activities. The first is that the government or a non-state actor can easily disrupt our commercial and personal activity unintentionally or as a retribution. We have effectively surrendered our financial autonomy to multiple powerful players.
The second major problem is if we ever face a post-apocalyptic situation with regards to modern technology. We already have only a few fabs that can meet the global demand for advanced ICs. We have already seen our vulnerability to one of them when a flood there caused supply chain disruptions and a slump in even automobile markets. HDD and SSD manufacturers have similar weaknesses. Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers are placing all their (gambling) chips in the AI hyperscaler market, threatening to disrupt every market from smartphones, laptops and consumer appliances to military and commercial jets, ATC, shipping, railway signalling, telecom infrastructure, etc. The technology apocalypse isn't that farfetched and we are extremely vulnerable to it.
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
<< We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
> had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?
Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that design because it started as a research project. The corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant question is if they had any reason to believe that it wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples where research labs and academia came up with products that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the possibility and were generous enough?
> Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose. I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite communication standard.
That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think. They would probably cooperate and create an open standard - but only because they want to compete with the dominant player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of being open, and only they can practically setup anything with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware, many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and easy-to-implement designs, ever.
[1] We have our own varieties of 'spinach'. Or at least that's what we call them. However, they aren't edible in their raw form. And one very important observation is that they taste so much better and rich when they're homegrown. The difference is so significant that you can tell apart homegrown and market-sourced spinach just from the taste of their cooked dishes. There is something certainly wrong with the commercially farmed spinach. It's as if they're starved of nutrients.