I think it's a flaw inherent to the current system. You have to make money to live and you do that, not by appeasing human readers, but by appeasing an algorithm. The world is not easily reduced into clear classifications but we're currently forcing it into them
Appealing to the decision of Montana’s Supreme Court does little to refute whether coal production in their state produces an imminent danger to your children. If you are a Montanan then excuse me.
I don't understand this refute at all. Coal cannot stay confined to Montana's borders in any real sense. The coal is mined to export, and it is then burned in coal plants, which are very bad.
asynchronous's comment was about whether coal jobs in Montana yield any measurable risks to your children, wherever you are. Referring to Montana's judicial decisions as if they are edicts that span beyond its borders is a weak counterargument.
This is the opposite of a weak counterargument! Referring to Montana's judicial decisions as if they are edicts that span beyond its borders is called stare decisis or legal precedent. Montana's supreme court decision can absolutely guide decisions beyond Montana's border.
This implies that every state constitution has provisions similar to the ones in Montana’s state constitution that were used to uphold the decision and have already given it the distinction of precedence. The ruling on its own is not legally binding on other states, they can refer to it at their own discretion.
This isn’t a question of the decision’s influence in the future or its likelihood. It’s about the decision’s effect today. Either way, as far as I could find, the text of the ruling does nothing to convey concern for the measurable effects that Montana’s coal industry could have on you or your children elsewhere. That’s what we’re talking about.
By law, your self interests were not referred to at all. The "good news" is that your country is governed by self interests, and I’m inclined to believe that The Powers That Be ® are catering to yours this time around.
And people wonder how Jim Crow became a household name…
This isn't about the facetious point that you're trying to make. It's about whether one state's specific judicial decision at all concerns what takes place beyond its borders.
OP’s comment is better suited to be taken in reference to the amount of domains banned rather than the “secrecy” of the list. I’m interested in how users are worse off with regards to anything by not knowing what sites are banned.
What’s happening in Baltimore shouldn’t merely be attributed to COVID-19. There’s evidence that their problems have existed way before it.
From 2021
> A Baltimore high school student failed all but three classes over four years and almost graduated near the top half of his class with a 0.13 GPA, according to a local report.
> Seibel: I’m thinking of the preface to SICP, where it says, “programs must be written for people to read and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
I’m wondering if the initial statement in SICP spoke from a time that was similar to a 1977 McGraw-Hill textbook, “Introduction to Computers”, that I picked up from a thrift store recently. A significant portion chapter on developing computer programs is dedicated to methodology; planning, the development life cycle, systems design, instructing users, processing methodology. The next chapter is about flowcharts and tables.
I mention all this to point out how intrigued I am by what looks like the emphasis that was placed back then on clarity from the human’s perspective, be it programmer, user or anyone else involved in the software’s development and use.
Another thing that’s interesting to me is how old code like Fortran looks like it’s made up of mostly just words, compared to modern languages I’ve looked at that use a lot of abbreviations and special characters.
My knowledge of programming and its history is excruciatingly minimal, but this blog post and that excerpt sort of remind me of what I just mentioned. I’m not sure why exactly, or if there’s any credence to it.
> I mention all this to point out how intrigued I am by what looks like the emphasis that was placed back then on clarity from the human’s perspective, be it programmer, user or anyone else involved in the software’s development and use.
I'm not yet born in the 1970s, but I think the fact that "code is written for people to read" is something that people in the earlier decades knew intimately, and that we have "forgotten" in recent years.
It hinges on a very simple fact - we know that machine code is for machines to execute, and they had machine code for as long as machines existed. And yet in subsequent decades, people spent so much resources in designing/inventing programming languages, so much resources in writing interpreters and compilers -- it's got to be for a good reason, right?
Once you think of it that way, the reason is obvious. Code written in programming languages are for people to read (and write), otherwise we'd just work on the binary executable.
I guess these days in the stacks of abstraction, we don't even know what's running on the bare metal any more, and for novices it might feel like "abstractions all the way down", and the point that the abstractions were originally for human consumption might have been lost or forgotten.
The approach in 1977 was that the problems we address with computer programs were static. It was up to the system developers to understand the problems well enough to learn their requirements and then implement the requirements as code. Writing the code was the last thing you did, after the problem was entirely understood, documented, flowcharted, signed off by the client, etc.
Now we understand that the problems often change as the code is developed, or in response to the code we develop. Priorities and requirements change as the work proceeds. We start writing code early, solving small parts of the problem, and building up a solution almost organically, the way a tree will grow around obstacles in its pursuit of sunlight.
The name Fortran is a contraction of "Formula Translation" it was developed to be usable by mathematicians and scientists. COBOL is another language that looks very wordy, as it was developed to be used by businesspeople.
I've spent a lot of time trying to make sure my code is commented and easily readable; and I haven't found any of that time to be wasted. I've often had to go look at code that I wrote two years, or five years, or twenty+ years previously, and I've greatly appreciated the work I put in when I wrote it.
Interesting piece. I don't think what we're dealing online with is anything new per se. Neil Postman expressed a take similar to yours when he said, "Information has become a form of garbage" in 1992. Things appear to be developing as intended; encourage the general public to develop an appetite for junk, make its consumption highly accessible with financial incentives for its makers, blind the public of any notion as to what the meaning of "food" is at all, profit.
The graver thing to ponder over is that the distinction between garbage and what isn't garbage is progressively becoming obscured to many.
I think what I define as the "trash" in this is all the stuff the attention economy wants to boost. It's never stuff that makes you think or teach you something meaningful. All you need to do is spend 5 minutes on TikTok to get what I mean. That is certainly much different from the 90s internet. Engagement is the internet's biggest, heaviest ball and chain.
I think what happened is that during the 90s/early 00s the internet was too immature to be affected by the garbage/attention economy campaigns that took place in more refined mediums like television for example. The internet was not yet a part of mass media. It was more like a “walled garden” of a different kind in spite of how open it was within the walls.
Watching the internet change may feel different to some people because the relationship that they’ve had with it is more intimate than with their television. What we’re dealing with now is just the intended development of media in society courtesy of The Powers That Be ®.
I wonder what your perspective would have been if you were living in the time of AT&T's monopolistic dominance. Would have that dominance have seemed inevitable and unchangeable?
I think it's better to not give into the hindsight bias and imagine an internet worth rebuilding. The giants who wrap their tendrils around our time and attention should be ripped to shreds. They don't deserve their power seeing as they use it to pedal division and addiction.
> The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.
I suppose that the reason that it's spoken about less is because there isn't as much as an incentive to do so outside of discussions such as this, especially when compared to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade for example.
The Western world, in particular the United States, bears the burden of their relationship with slavery being more well-documented and its effects are paid more attention to than other parts of the world. This is likely a consequence of their predominance. There may just not be much for most people to talk about with regards to the effects that the slave trade in historically Islamic countries had on England because they traded slaves too. Even if the Trans-Atlantic method didn't involve piracy (it appears that "Adam Smith's invisible hand" was more effective), the modern view of slavery for most is that all forms of it are terrible. Not only that, but at a glance, the Western world has virtually shorn itself of its history as an enslaved people, save a few beautiful buildings left in their formally subjugated territories according to Stealing from the Saracens .
Anyhow, slavery as a human institution is something that just about every society has both experienced and facilitated. The institution itself is more broadly associated with the West as slavers rather than the enslaved and most people are likely unaware or are indifferent to their history as the latter due to how well-know their involvement is as the former.
On second thought, maybe the book from the article is worth a read after all. Authors usually have no control over press releases on their book. She deserves a fair shake.
I think maybe the difference is that there is direct social and cultural continuity between today's people and the people who both perpetrated and were victims of the slave trade, and those same people live in a society with very different values from those of the past wherein slavery was common. The victim lineage also still is suffering from its negative effects. Which victims of the Islamic slave trade are still negatively affected by it? Who can even tell whose ancestors were enslaved?
I think in general we should be horrified by any mass scale slave trade. We just have a personal/social connection to one in particular.
> I think maybe the difference is that there is direct social and cultural continuity between today's people and the people who both perpetrated and were victims of the slave trade, and those same people live in a society with very different values from those of the past wherein slavery was common. The victim lineage also still is suffering from its negative effects.
Yeah, thank you! That's what I was trying to get across.
You do make a valid point and it's not something I'd thought about before. However I think if you consider when slavery was ended by year/country around the world:
https://vividmaps.com/abolition-of-slavery/
You can see that given how late so many countries were to end slavery that many peoples through out the world must still be directly impacted. Not just descendents of slaves in America. In fact in some places slavery still unofficially persists for these direct descendants.
My guess is that America gets more of the negative attention due to being the leader of the free world.
> in particular the United States, bears the burden of their relationship
sure except there were groups in the new Thirteen Colonies that were adamantly, ardently, and had always been, against the slave trade. The distinction between those that engaged in slave trade and those that did not and were against it, could not have been more vivid. Yet somehow now the powerful, financially succesful and English speaking USA gets collective responsibility for all Atlantic slavery. Where does that leave the culture, practices, efforts and lineage of the people in the USA that were against it at every stage? You cannot collectively pronounce guilt like that. It was certain actors, who wielded authority and weapons quite well also, to make it plain.
You made a really good point. I don't mean to delve into whether this burden is entirely fair for all, but rather I'm pointing out the fact that this burden can be imposed due to 1) The US being a global hegemon and 2) The extent to which slavery is woven into the cultural narrative of the country, to the point where on one end it's assumed become almost a poignant/macabre element of pop culture that spans well beyond its abolishment. This imposed burden is evident even in the form "antiracism" with regards to a collective pronouncement of guilt [1].
Maybe I could have done better in making my point if I had said:
The Western world, in particular the United States, bears [a greater] burden [in respect to] their relationship with slavery [because it is] more well-documented and its effects are paid more attention to than other parts of the world.
I'm not sure if "more well-documented" is a good phrase grammatically either but that's besides the point right now. My intention was to point out that a burden can be established against the US more so than other nations when the legacy of slavery is discussed. But my perspective is biased as an American myself, so maybe this isn't the case elsewhere. Either way, the fact of the matter is that to this day slavery remains a blight on American history. The conundrum is that, as I made note of, who doesn't have a history with slavery? The two points that I brought up were an attempt to address why this blight is so much discussed in the US at the expense of other regions.
[1]: A concept that I find regressive, for the same concern that I feel you show when you say, "Where does that leave the culture, practices, efforts and lineage of the people in the USA that were against [slavery] at every stage?" In that it engenders a sort of "self-flagellatory" performance that call upon entire nations and peoples to take a part in it. My initial concern over Stealing from the Saracens was that it possessed qualities such at this. But as I engage in different threads here and think more about it, that likely isn't the case with this book, hopefully.
As a major left-leaning outlet, you would expect the NYT to be capable of courting the ear of the greater Hip-hop community (mainstream artists, executives, critics, etc). This article merely glosses over the role that rap music plays in the attachment being a status symbol.
With the genre celebrating its “50th anniversary” this year, I imagine that a lot of outlets are highlighting the cultural significance that the genre has over communities, many which are more vulnerable to gun violence than others. This seems like a missed opportunity at trying to hold them accountable to a reasonable extent.
