> As in a lot of home automation actually makes things worse. Replacing a convenient light switch with an app? 100% terrible idea and actually makes things inconvenient, don't automate those.
The key to proper home automation is not to destroy the "normal" functions already in place, but to augment them with automation.
Smart switches that do not function without connectivity are not smart. I discourage new implementation of smart-bulbs too as they break the "normal" bulb-switch function. I discourage smart plugs for the same reason. Same thing with valves. Imagine a valve that cannot be turned on or off manually. Horrific.
An automated porch light that hasn’t been touched in 10years and blinds that had the schedule setup once and forgotten about for 5 years are examples of fantastic automation.
Same. Replacing all of my light switches with an app I have to use anytime I want to turn the lights on or off is indeed a huge step backwards IMHO.
Replacing all of the light switches with smart switches and monition sensors and things like this, plus automated schedules, to the point that you never need to switch any switches at all or think about lights, that is nice IMHO.
My lights are like this, I have a remote placed on top of each traditional switch. I never use the remotes, because most of it is automatic (e.g., dim lights for movies, turn off lights when we leave, turn on lights when we come home). Actually I do use my phone to switch to the "put child to bed" lighting.
I love my smart plugs and power strips! Mostly not for lighting or other high-touch purposes, but I do use a few Lutron Caseta plug-in dimmers for lamps that aren't on switched outlets as the remotes can go in a standard Decora-style wall plate and they work regardless of the hub being online.
I've got Zigbee and Wi-Fi/Tasmota outlets running the heating and lighting for my chicken brooders[0], my partner's plant lights, fish tank lights, probably more that I'm forgetting. At our cabin the mountains, an outlet + temperature sensor combined with Home Assistant's Thermostat helper gives us temperature control over an extremely basic window A/C unit and we cast an HA dashboard to a nearby Google Home screen. A smart power strip controls all of our "cabin intra" -- router, cable modem, LTE backup, etc. HA automations monitor them all and restart anything that stops working, and a Tasmota rule ensures that nothing can gets stuck in the Off state due to automation failure or operator error.
> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.
Hmmm... At a very high altitude extinction-level events have sufficiently sharp edges. But, as we get closer to things it becomes fuzzy. For examples: The Black Death (1347-1351), The Spanish Flu (1918-1919), The Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), each one of these events were extinction-level events for those in the middle of them. What year would you have selected to self terminate? Remember you would not have hindsight or knowledge that the events are temporary.
The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.
Luckily, I'll be killed by tidal waves if a meteor hits the Atlantic and I'll be killed in the firestorm if it hits land anywhere on Earth.
If it hits the Pacific or Indian oceans, it depends on the size. If large enough, I'll shoot myself in the head to avoid starvation after playing a few rounds of solitare.
> The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.
One of the possible causes of the Bronze Age Collapse (which btw was very non-local) is a prolonged drought that apparently lasted for decades. It's wasn't severe by itself but long enough for the fertile soil to keep shrinking year after year, decreasing the size of sustainable population.
I dwell on this sometimes and I think that probably we underestimate how fragile our food production system is. Feeding 8 billion people is not an easy endeavor. Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale. A global event that would somehow disrupt our ability to produce food for several years in a row will make the hell break loose. I'm not confident that humanity couldn't plunge in a couple of dark age centuries as a result, all bets are off in a truly global famine.
Then the curious question is how likely is such an event? Chicxulub -- yes, but these are extremely rare, once in millions of years. The Volcanic Winters however occur every few centuries, the "Year Without a Summer" was 1816. Could we have "3 years without a summer" at some point? And not just in the northern hemisphere but globally? I don't know, maybe.
After all, the way I think of it is this: modern food production at scale is sun + water + fertilizers. Production of fertilizers seem distributed enough to be resilient at a global scale. Water at the Earth scale is sun again -- as long as it's shining it will rain somewhere, even if the distribution shifts (with dramatic effects for sure, but not a completely desperate situation). But then the sun does seem to be the single point of failure. If there's dust or ash or something else shielding the sun then it is in fact desperate.
(disclaimer - I know very little about this, it's just common sense and theorycrafting)
> Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale.
I agree with the sentiment, but I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event. There are couple of reasons I feel safe about this. We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected. We already rely on global supply chains on a daily basis and for whatever reason while living in EU I'm eating garlic imported as far away as China. And then there's coffee, bananas, etc.
Sure, covid has shown that a massive shift will have a dramatic short term impact. Somehow Shkreli was sent to prison after raising price of a drug by 5000%, but when every pharmacy in my country did exactly the same with face masks everyone was quite ok with that, as long as they could get one. And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.
If anything, I'm scared about the water.
But all in all, when the shit really hits the fan, I envision scenario similar to McCarthy's `The Road` or for lack of better example `The Walking Dead`. People will be more busy trying to secure food and shelter rather than figuring out how to boot some obscure OS on a defunct computer.
I don't think COVID is a good benchmark. The whole matter was relatively minor, claiming lives of 0.09% of earth population (by WHO estimates). We can surely survive "COVID for plants" with little damage but that's not at all the scenario I have in mind. I'll try to clarify on specific bullet points.
> I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event.
The "western world" is definitely more prepared but if you want to rely on that during global and desperate famine you'll need to have the guts (and the heart) to machine gun hundreds of millions of refuges rushing into the western world to survive. Or nuke them before they depart.
> We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected.
Absolutely all the food we have is based on the ability of plants to absorb sunlight. Exception would be an electric light greenhouse powered by the nuclear plant. Or by the coal/oil (that's some sunlight we can actually store). Take away the sunlight and the whole food variety goes down with it.
> And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.
Try to imagine a desperate famine: your kids have nothing to eat and will die in a matter of weeks unless you do something. There's no reason to believe the situation will improve. In such times killing your neighbor who has some food left keep your kids alive a bit longer is not an unusual decision. Someone has to die anyway, that is so.
Now imagine that at a global scale, famine is everywhere.
In a sufficiently catastrophic event (major loss of infrastructure), one wouldn't be able to tell if the event is local or global. To the people suffering from the Black Death, the event must have felt global as everyone they knew was experiencing it.
Not OP, but I somehow share his sentiment and I'd say that out of your list any would do.
Terrible things are happening right now, and people find their way out, for instance the war in Ukraine. But then again, they have visa cards, they can book travel and accomodation online and flee from the country. A lot of jews have fled from Europe during and before WW2 when things were not so much connected, but still, it was modern day, people had access to press, radio, telegrams and telephones.
But if you live in a rural village and everyone you knew died to a famine that sounds like something you might not want to carry any further.
"The peoples of Europe are fair-skinned and reddish, because they live in a cold climate and are not scorched by the sun."
Source: Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places, 5th century BC.
"The physical characteristics of the Germans are consistent: blue eyes, reddish hair, and large bodies."
(Tacitus, Germania, chapter 4)
Egyptian tomb paintings from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) visually represent foreign peoples with distinct skin tones - "Europeans", in the form of Sea Peoples or early Aegean peoples (e.g., Minoans or Mycenaeans), were sometimes shown with light red or pale skin tones.
The agricultural revolution was roughly 10,000 BC, wasn't it? Your sources are more recent than that, and so don't disagree with the point the parent post was making.
According to [1] more like 6000-4000 BC for Europe. Granted, that's still before 1700BC.
From a cursory study of Wikipedia my rough summary would be: Europe used to be roughly divided in the "Western Hunter Gatherers" (WHG) and "Eastern Hunter Gatherers" (EHG). The WHG typically had dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes, the EHG were typically light skinned with brown eyes. Blond hair may have originated from EHGs in North Eurasia and spread from there. Around 6000 BC farmers from Anatolia (~modern Turkey) started moving into Europe, the EEF (Early European Farmers). Those were typically smaller than European hunter-gatherers, light skinned and dark haired. They migrated North, partially replacing the EHG and WHG, partially mixing with them, and in some places the EHG and WHG simply took up farming. But Easter Europe is less amenable to farming, meaning the dark-skinned WHG diminished the most while the light-skinned EHG and EEF became the dominant groups in Europe's genetic diversity
Yes, there was an agricultural revolution during the neolithic times. We have evidence this for the Southwest Asia aka Middle East, Asia around the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, South, Central and North Americas.
I am open to this hypothesis (conjecture?), it just lacks supportive evidence. On the other hand, we have ample evidence that agricultural revolution did not "turn people white" in the other regions.
Indeed they are towards the bottom, but not "tied for last".
Talking about statistics, take a look at the "Estimated % of Grads Tested" column. the top 20 do not break 20%, while the bottom is near 100% with the exception of Hawa'ii.
Thanks for pointing that out, they’re actually tied for second-to-last.
As for % tested, states that don’t mandate the ACT tend to have higher performance in general. They don’t have as compelling of a need for the mandate, and they have many students who’d rather just take the SAT on its own. There is an effect going the other way though - if you don’t mandate the ACT, then students who don’t want to take any standardised testing at all…won’t, and so they won’t depress the average score.
e.g., the section "Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All", "Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off."
In my experience, the two most important things to get "things done" is the other part of that sentence, the "things".
Without well defined scope and deliverables, you cannot get "things done".
Never-ending projects means the scope was not well defined, there is a constant scope creep, or the deliverables were not well defined. Or, worse there are good idea fairies in the organization.
I am still searching for the definition of "Intellectually Rich Life".
There are some compelling and imaginative calls in the article, but can we drop with the metaphors? I rather have the author develop deeper examples, instead of vague focus and practicality.
Maybe because I am not searching for inspiration, but detailed roadmaps.
The key to proper home automation is not to destroy the "normal" functions already in place, but to augment them with automation.
Smart switches that do not function without connectivity are not smart. I discourage new implementation of smart-bulbs too as they break the "normal" bulb-switch function. I discourage smart plugs for the same reason. Same thing with valves. Imagine a valve that cannot be turned on or off manually. Horrific.