That's correct. If i run `User.limit(5).pluck(:id)` the query it runs is `SELECT "users"."id" FROM "users" LIMIT $1 [["LIMIT", 5]]` and returns an array, not an ActiveRecord association
how is it a "virtue signal"? what are they signalling?
i'm curious where morality fits in to anything in your worldview if telling the (well-documented) history of a forcible displacement of a people is "virtue signalling" and "getting the morality into it".
Virtue signaling is the expression of a conspicuous, self-righteous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character. It doesn't actually have to be virtuous, it only needs to signal virtue to others.
Virtue signalling usually does not genuinely solve anything anyway it's merely supposed to impress upon you that "this person is good", that's the entire goal. Whether it's meaningful or not doesn't enter into it.
On the other hand, the article could also just be the expression of a strongly held personal belief about some injustice in the world.
The virtue signaling meme tends to be a way of denigrating strongly held beliefs that conflict with the person calling “virtue signaling” in some way, and frankly is a virtue signal of its own. There’s literally no need to call people out for “virtue signaling” other than to stand up themselves for other like minded (often conservative) folks.
Frankly I read this as more a strongly held personal belief that something was wrong and they are doing their small thing against it. They could have just done their actions in silence, but that’s not nearly as effective as enlisting your fellows in the cause you identify.
I personally didn’t know any of the history, and while I take the stated facts with a grain of salt. But I found it an interesting read, and if it is largely true, what happened is outrageous. I’m not divesting my TLD, but it definitely sickens me to know this happened and my country is complicit and actively a part of it.
Oh, oh yeah? W-well I am just so upset about historical injustice that I am boycotting ALL the TLDs. I just care so much more than the rest of you I guess. Yeah that's right, get on my level, shirtlords. I'm not "virtue signaling", I really care, like totally.
IP Addresses are very problematic as they were developed primarily by White Male Cis-Het Oppressors who undoubtedly incorporated their implicit biases into the system in order to cyber-colonize marginalized persons. They were developed in the United States which literally had legalized slavery for much of its history. If you use an IP Address you are literally supporting slavery and systemic racism. Wow just wow.
The phrase "strongly-held beliefs" brings to mind XKCD's "clinically-studied ingredient"[1]: flat-earthers, neo-nazis, and GWB's CIA strongly believe(d) in all kinds of things. I'm not sure being "strongly held" makes a belief undeserving of denigration.
I think most people (including myself) find virtue signaling annoying for two reasons: first, it's usually conveyed in a smug, self-righteous, and even accusatory attitude, and second, because it rarely contributes anything or furthers discourse. In fact, it almost always stifles it. It's useful to call it out for the discourse-limiting technique it is, right up there with whataboutism, sealioning, etc.
Secondly, there's a belief hinted at in your justification that one must have an opinion on everything - that "silence is violence". You're either for (or sometimes against) the Current Thing, or else you're a fascist puppy-kicker who wants the terrorists to win. There's no in-between, no nuance, no additional considerations allowed. (See also: "That's a [republican|democrat|communist|nazi] talking point!") Virtue signalers communicate in talking points, betraying their tenuous grasp of a subject they have (ostensibly) strongly-held beliefs on.
Furthermore, in my personal experience, the loudest virtue signalers always seem to be the worst humans, so there's a kind of stomach-turning hypocrisy when (e.g.) you see someone who you know kicked puppies all through high school and college never shuts up about what a dog person he is (because dogs are good and people who don't like dogs are Bad; therefore, they are Good because they like dogs). Or the dirtbag who creeps out girls constantly posting feminist memes, illustrating that women can definitely feel comfortable around him. That is, it's not the dogs or feminism that's disgusting.
The way that "wokes" (where "woke" = "shitlib", shifted left) employ virtue signals is distinct from leftists engaged in debate, starting with the complete lack of dialectics. The conversation exists not to exchange information, reach an agreement, elucidate facts, or any of the normal reasons people discuss and debate things. Instead, it appears only to serve the external image projected by the speaker/author, whether erudition or to assert they're a Good Person™.
Part of it can be blamed on "eternal September" of sorts, where each year, a new group of freshmen are learning for the very first time that the world isn't as simple as their parents and high school teachers taught them. That sometimes, what's written was written for political and ideological rather than factual purposes (e.g., Columbus). It should engage a healthy dose of skepticism or criticality - even outrage - but the trend here in America seems more contrarian than critical, and it manifests in daft conclusions[2].
To further illustrate my point, I have many friends and family that are Spanish-speaking-born-outside-the-USA hispanic. Many of them work with other immigrants from all over the world, and I've sat around with people who each speak a different language and had totally reasonable conversations on all kinds of hot-button issues. We share, we learn, we shake our heads at each others' misunderstandings, and sometimes even call each other names. It only becomes a hostile shitshow when a white, liberal, middle-class, college-educated dork shows up and starts trying to rank Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Nigerians, Ugandans, Albanians, etc on their overly-simple oppression ranking scale, or shitlibsplaining to a native Spanish speaker about how they should use "Latinx" because Genders Bad. Usually, they just get laughed at, but it's devolved into some pretty heated situations that could have been avoided simply by shutting up and listening, instead of explaining to Ugandans and Haitians that their struggles are basically the same.
Another anecdote was a local in town who routinely inserted themselves into things that didn't concern them, often with a great sense of moral superiority. One day, they appointed themselves in charge of telling homeless people which side of the street they should be on. After lecturing the homeless white lady on race and that she needs to give up her spot to the black homeless man, she informed him that he assaulted her and took her spot, and that's why she was cry-screaming on the corner. He let out a literal shriek and tried to back out of it with a feeble "can't we all just get along" before the homeless guy assaulted him for interfering at all.
It was "her" spot. She sat there damn near every day. The dude was acting erratically and ended up going to the hospital - but the facts didn't matter - his mental health didn't matter - her physical safety didn't matter - only this simple, stupid, binary scale of oppression (to be created and enforced by you-guessed-it: overeducated and underemployed upper-middle-class white kids), and - presumably - the ability to go home and post on social media about what a Good Person™ he was to teach this homeless lady about her privileges he just learned about last semester.
Their blatant ignorance and racism shows through when they start generalizing about these peoples' countries, cultures, languages, etc through their own distorted lens; they expose their colonizer parts by lecturing South Americans on how they should change their language to match The Correct Idea of Gender; flaunt their internalized white supremacy by asserting themselves as the ad-hoc police, etc, etc, etc. On the bright side, at least they understand they're not allowed to call the cops if they get punched in the face by anyone with darker skin or a thicker accent than they have.
In short, it's so often transparently performative and done with such a repulsive attitude that their lectures are frankly beneath contempt, even if some of their talking points are occasionally correct/agreeable.
A prime example: "Acknowledging that you're on Comanche (or whoever) land".
This "acknowledgment" never seems to involve paying any rent to the Comanche for being on "their land", nor doing anything else that actually benefits the Comanche.
Taking the 15 seconds to add this to your social media profile means you can signal to everyone what a Good Person you are without ever having to actually do anything.
I like your example. The Comanche were imperialists that almost exterminated the Apache....Raided a thousand miles into Mexico and into Tropical environments. Killed everything in sight. Wiped out thousands of naive white settlers. And when they killed it wasn't quick. Many accounts of them skinning people alive (some children). US was only able to get a handle on the Comanche by killing off their food supply, and that was deep into the 1870's. After they surrendered the war chief (who was psychotic) became a successful rancher and would go on hunts with US presidents. Which just goes to show how small the line between full blown raider and adjusted law abiding member of society is. And maybe that's why people feel the need to virtue signal. subconscious hedge.
Some indigenous people believe land acknowledgements are a good 1st step. Some believe they are a waste of time. But the 2nd group don't claim the 1st group don't exist.
Voluntary land tax programs exist.[1] They seem to benefit from land acknowledgements.
It doesn't matter what they "believe". They get little or no tangible benefit from someone posting that bullshit (and it is bullshit) on their Facebook or Twitter profile.
> Voluntary land tax programs exist.
I'm not seeing any actual dollar figures there, nor in any of the linked examples, except the Duwamish site which mentions some guy paying $18/month. The mean rent for a one bedroom apartment in Seattle is around $2,000/month.
Paying a token amount like that doesn't make it any less virtue-signaling.
Mind you, plenty of people blithely dismiss any stated belief that they disagree with as "virtue signalling." Basically implying that their opinions are so objectively correct that no one could sincerely disagree, only fake it to appeal to malcontents, who are presumably also faking it.
That's too charitable. People's usual motivation to complain about "virtue signaling" is that they personally are amoral pieces of garbage, and would prefer that other people not punish amoral-piece-of-garbageness in any way, because they would find that inconvenient.
I think you ably demonstrate the all or nothing fallacy that powers this type of bully advocacy. My way or the highway is used to get people on the same page at first. Then it's used to make more and more tenuous assertions about morality, assertions which coincidentally conform very specifically and in great detail to the needs wants desires and worldviews of the bully.
The sooner the victim rejects the entire program, the better. Morality is not and has never been a simple issue easily resolved by dogma. In fact, I'd argue the the worst periods of human misery are dominated by dogmatic thinking and righteous bullying. It is bitterly ironic that people who enjoy the fruit of freedom willfully seek to undermine that progress. It is everyone's right to be stupid if they so choose but so too. Is it my right to judge them self-destructive and contemptible.
sure? you get to make that decision. ".uk" and ".us" are more straightforward in what governments/histories they're linked to, and the origins ".io" is not as well known, hence the article.
My point is that nobody is thinking about historical conquests when picking a TLD, most people probably don't even know that some TLDs stem from territories, and after some research, we see that the money isn't even going where we the article states its going.
It would have been a stronger case to make outlining the history and then listing a couple ways to help support the islands. Not buying a .io domain does nothing for that region.
Geoff Manaugh, author of this blog, has a fun book called "A Burglar's Guide to the City", discussing how city layouts influence the types of crimes committed there.
One example that I remember talks about the differences between Los Angeles and New York City: at one point in the 1990s, LA was the bank robbery capital of the world, averaging over 1 per day for a while, but bank robberies rarely happen in NYC. When you compare their layouts, it makes total sense: LA was built around the car. The pattern of "highway offramp, bank next to the road, highway onramp" was everywhere throughout LA. Robbing a bank in NYC would be just so much harder: parking is more difficult, traffic is slower, way more people around to identify you, etc.
One of the early entries in this "genre" is Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos, from 1910.
"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects," Loos proclaimed, thus linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts. Loos's work was prompted by regulations he encountered when he designed a building without ornamentation opposite a palace. He eventually conceded to requirements by adding window flower boxes.
Loos is very interesting in the current context, as he associated ornamentation with savagery, while many contemporary "civilizationists" (take this label with a massive grain of salt) associate modernism with the International style and a supposed erasure of culture in favor of "globalism" (while also couching their negative views of an encroaching other in much the same language as Loos).
Ironically, you can read it all as a sort of window dressing for a core of xenophobia, as that's the only thing consistent across the two.
The title of the post immediately made me think about that book. (Not a coincident, as it became clear when clicking :))
I found the book too repetitive and cursory, employing pop-culture movie references too much.
The research that went into the book (as it can be seen from the bibliography) is immense, but for me the book was underwhelming for the potential it had based on the immense knowledge the author has accumulated from those sources. It is still worth a read for those interested in the topics of heists or city planning, but has wasted its potential in my eyes.
I wonder how it's going to balance out with lost sales though. The supercharger network is no longer a Tesla-exclusive amenity, so one less reason to buy a Tesla.
Tesla has nothing to worry about. Their sales will soften due to the macro and cost of money, their margins might compress, but they are still ahead of the legacy auto folks by leaps and bounds. They can lean into energy storage and other related power control businesses, that is their strength: they are an energy and power controls company. Cars are only one of the products. Legacy auto is selling autos, and only autos. Charger access deals unlocks revenue for Tesla out of legacy auto's pockets today while legacy auto has to figure out how to sell their own EVs in the future, and what choice do they have but to pay up if they want to sell EVs?
> After a decade of being trounced by Tesla Inc., this was supposed to be the year that traditional automakers finally put up a fight for electric cars. General Motors was committing its biggest brands to a new line of electric models; Ford and Volkswagen were ramping up production of EVs designed for the masses. It was, many predicted, time for the automotive world order to re-assert itself.
> Things haven’t turned out that way. Ford’s vaunted F-150 Lightning has been outsold by the R1T from Rivian, a startup that sold its first vehicle just two years ago. GM’s lineup of new EVs has suffered crippling setbacks in battery manufacturing. In July, Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Thomas Schaefer succinctly summarized his own company’s EV competitiveness: “The roof is on fire.”
> With just three months remaining, 2023 has been less a redemption story for legacy automakers than further evidence of their quagmire. In the US, Tesla has been expanding production about as fast as all of its competitors combined. The Austin, Texas-based EV maker accounts for 61% of fully electric cars ever sold in the US, making it more dominant in EVs than Apple is in smartphones.
Not only that, the market for electric cars is going to overtake the market for gasoline cars. They don't need to keep 61% of the market forever -- they probably won't -- but if they held 15% of the market once >90% of new cars are electric they'd be selling more cars than they do now.
i've been to this! my friend's family is obsessed with it. it is truly an institution there and a delightful car-free neighborhood springs up on the fairgrounds, nutritionally supported entirely by watermelon, loads of southern "salads" and deep fried garbage
What's going on with your blatantly racist comments throughout this thread? Are you trying to be a jerk and/or get banned or is this your usual behavior? It doesn't seem to be which makes me curious to learn what has provoked this diatribe.
> The fair’s inaugural picnic took place twenty-four years after the end of the Civil War. One of the founders was a Confederate veteran. In 1928, the second-place winner in one of the races was a horse named Ku Klux Klan. The pavilion has hosted a succession of segregationist governors and congressmen, and open support for the “Lost Cause” more or less continues to this day. On backstreets at this year’s fair, at least six cabins flew the Confederate flag. The fair allows it.
Why is it confusing that people talk about racism, when it flies free at the fair?
For an annual event in Mississippi that start 24 years after the civil war, I would be more surprised if any of that wasn't true, it also doesn't make the people or the event racist. Its just a southern cultural heritage. The fact that only 6 cabins of hundreds had a confederate flag means that its kind of an insane things to pick on.
>What's going on with your blatantly racist comments throughout this thread?
Pointing out racism is not racism. It is received as such by racists though, (calling a white person racist is the closest they have to what hearing the N word feels like).
Sorry for the lack of a "/s". But yes, this hit a nerve unfortunately.
I'm super excited for this -- it seems like it's perfect as an app-local cache of things that can be a drop-in replacement for some high-cost queries.
Are there any plans to support which tables get copied over? The main postgres database is too big to replicate everywhere, but some key "summary" tables would be really nice to have locally.
In light of the release of Oppenheimer, people have been talking about, basically, the other side of the development of atomic weapons.
John Hersey's "Hiroshima" article from the August 23, 1946 edition of the New Yorker came up as the definitive piece on the immediate impact of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and it is a gripping read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
Yes, although they touched on the impact of the bomb on Japanese civilians a little, they didn't really do it justice, and it's a shame because I think it would have really provided an important insight on why Oppenheimer's views changed over time.
The movie lacked a cohesive story anyway, so that would have added some meaning.
The movie was about the man, not the bomb, which is why it focused primarily on a man, and not a bomb. The actual testing of the bomb was a small part of the movie and the real deployments of it were but a couple sentences. The movie Oppenheimer was never a movie about Hiroshima and while I think there needs to be more coverage in general about our impact on Japan by dropping those bombs, I think giving the movie Oppenheimer shit about it isn't reasonable just because the man worked on it. It covered everything from the his view point, and what he personally lived. He read about the bombs being used the same as everyone else, and it wouldn't have fit the movie to suddenly jump to Japan to show the impact of his work. It did however try to visualize the impact and eventual realization of what he had played a part in, in the visuals at the compound when he's giving the speech to the fanatical coworkers stomping their feet (which was very Aronofsky like imo)
It’s still true to say the movie lacked a cohesive story — it may have been “about the man” but it was an incoherent battery of spoken facts rather than a personal journey with growth and progression.
Would you prefer that we only get biopics about people who have storybook personal growth or would you prefer that more of the biopics we get are fictionalized? 'Cause that's the choice we have, if we act on your complaint.
People tell stories. They are not themselves stories. Most people, even really important, impactful people, were just doing something interesting, or putting one foot in front of another, or pursuing short-term goals.
My complaint is that it was boring, not that it wasn't storybook -- although come on the scenes with Einstein (and many others) were terribly storybook.
That was a hard read. I also recommend Barefoot Gen, the comic series, by Keiji Nakazawa. The depth of the visuals added a lot to my understanding and empathy.
Post-war Japan has had some really good marketing. You'll never see films or comics depicting Nazi Germany under Allied bombing and the suffering of those on the homefront loyal to the Third Reich; anybody who who tried to create a "Barfuß Jens" or "Das Grab der Glühwürmchen" would be torn to shreds for being pro-fascist and few would consume anything so tasteless.
Yet ordinary Japanese people conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army committed the equivalent of the Holocaust across Asia, widespread atrocities terrible enough to revolt even Nazi observers. It's not like they would have treated Westerners any better either; look at what they did to Allied POWs. But whitewashing with articles and films, not even that many really, and today Westerners are expressing "understanding and empathy" to the wartime Japanese, loyal to their country and divine Emperor, receiving the consequences of a war they themselves started.
Understanding and empathy are good but let's not be uncritical about what their purpose is or unaware of the larger historical context.
I've certainly read pieces that were padded and tedious.
This one genuinely, truly is not. Take the first section: every vignette is tightly constructed; you get a sense of the person, the zeitgeist of fear they were living in, and the arbitrary moment that made All The Difference. This structure is repeated point-by-point for each of the survivors, deliberately, to hammer home each element.
Part II has its own structure, emphasizing the chaos. Each part flows well from one to the next. The entire article is an excellent example of writing. It's clear that the author himself is grappling with what to feel about it all. It's powerful stuff.
There are those articles which talk about a date, and in the process you get to know the whole extended families of the victims, together with a 30 years history of the families.
This is news writing in non-English plus translation. Translated text is always off-putting, especially beyond same language groups. I found the link to the original if anyone needs it, by the way.
