OK, but first you have to solve for X in the following example: The Romans would displace conquered peoples by resettling them in Rome while the Romans went out into the hinterlands. This allowed the new influx of slaves to become "Romanized" while giving Roman soldiers farm land they were promised to receive as the price of conscription.
This creates two massive problems for today's society:
Today "Romanizing" has a different name: Cultural Genocide. Whether intentional or not, you are eradicating the cultures you have displaced. Today that's considered a violation of human rights and human dignity. You can't do that and if you try you are at least going to have to find something to mitigate the problem. Do you create an intersectional matrix that finds the most marginalized peoples and leaves them as they are? How do you decide who is most marginalized if you have to move someone. What if their culture a kind of terroir? Can it not exist if you remove it from that place? If so what do you do? Even if they have their language, are the Gullah still the Gullah if you remove them from their diet and usual place of livelihood? Not to mention, when you move their their language will likely disappear and members become assimilated.
Then you have the Refugee Resettlement or "Oakie" Problem. You are introducing a new out-group who will compete for resources and power with an existing in-group. This always causes conflict. In theory, if the in-group view the out-group as either dumb and/or untrustworthy, they turn their judgemental views into critical views and their critical views into moral judgements. After all, value judgements never sit still. After a while they begin incarcerating the most marginalized of the out-group and the scapegoating starts. If not carefully calibrated and balanced the in-group start caving heads in with baseball bats, but the more you carefully calibrate it, the more you return back to the "Romanization" problem.
There are a lot of other problems that arise, but these are the two most consistent when dealing with humans.
It's not a panacea, but nothing is. When you have almost nothing to start with, there is always food.
I'm from the south and the foodie boom has been an enormous benefit for us. For most of my life there was a hard push to make a distinction between "southern food" and "soul food". It was a push from both ends of the political spectrum, as older white critics tried to keep it "white" and black critics in the 60s and 70s tried to get the taste of repression and feelings of stigma out of the menu.
It led to a lot of weird scenarios where a critic might call a plate of greens from Oakland "enlightened" and the same plate in Memphis "limp, servile, and impotent". That's still a thing. From a purely rational viewpoint this seems ridiculous, but from the cultural standpoint it makes sense. Still, it's reification, anthropomorphism, and all that jazz, like Harriet Beecher Stowe calling loblolly pines lazy and immoral.
The foodie boom offered a lot of mutual pride for a region that has always had an inferiority complex. As the lines blurred it was less "black" and "white" food and more "our" food. Everyone grew up eating collards, grits, cornbread, catfish, and okra. We all ate BBQ and drank sweet tea on the 4th. We all remembered eating tomato sandwiches with pepper and salt on cheap white bread as a kid. We all had pimento cheese. It was the one thing we weren't obligated to feel shame and resentment about in a region that is nothing but shame and resentment.
Not that it's all peach cobbler. As a retired shrimper friend of mine said after seeing a $24 bowl of shrimp & grits, "Man, this is what we ate when we couldn't afford food and now they are pricing us out of it."
"I think there are ISP options that net neutrality prohibits which are worth exploring for some people, and if repealing net neutrality benefits decentralization or creates a radical shift in the Internet design instead, I won't consider that a catastrophic outcome."
Like what? Any examples? Also the word "innovation" is not an example, even if it's the example I hear most. "You can't possibly understand because it's complicated" isn't an example either. If not I'm fine with the status quo.
Example from the most extreme end of what people hate about what the repeal might mean: I have no problem if an ISP wants to offer an extremely affordable Internet plan that explicitly doesn't work with streaming video for low income families. I'd rather ISPs gate the content by type than cripple them with a 5 Mbps or 10 Mbps throttle like a general low cost Internet line today.
I really hate the current speed tiering model used by most landline providers, because it means ISPs have the capacity available but are intentionally reducing your service quality because you haven't paid them enough to justify providing the best quality they can offer.
I understand why Google and Netflix would be strongly against something like that though, it reduces their customer base for YouTube and Netflix.
Because they are a bit of an untapped resource. The right are more likely to be open to conservation efforts rather than traditional crunchy environmental efforts, but they too often feel driven out.
From what I gather she is, my only point is that when you are in a dense field, generally your partner isn't too enthusiastic when you get into the minutia you've spent a 1000+ hours in that year, so when you get the chance to really talk about it, you gush.
Granted I've watched every QuakeCon keynote that was posted and enjoyed them all (along with reading every .plan). His enthusiasm is infectious. Yet even then he is breaking it down to the big things that happened that year, not the day-to-day stuff.
If it were over the dinner table every night, I'd probably lose my mind.
No idea why it was posted. I've only started this one, but what Scott seems to be advocating is essentially Anarcho-syndicalism.
Where Marx said that hunter-gatherers were engaging in Primitive Communism, Scott argues that they were engaging in Political Anarchy. He kinda has a point (at least when you look at hunter-gatherers who are still around 10,000 years later). We just assume that Marx must have been right since he was taking a diagnostic approach, but without archeological, genetic, and anthropological evidence, can we be certain that it was anything other than hypothesis? If Marx was wrong about man's "year zero", what else was he wrong about?
Not that I'm totally on board with Scott and his critique of civilization, but I do think he has some useful views when it comes to pre-history.
I have no real interest in ever trying to live in one, but as an outside observer, I find the question of turning one of these into a cheap habitat to be a fascinating question. Kinda like the whole Tiny House thing ("How are they going to fit a bed, dining room, computer desk and composting toilet in the same 6x5x6 space?"), except the shell of it is cheap enough that when one falls off of a container ship no one cares and now you have the question losing x inches of wall to insulation. It's a total ship-in-a-bottle kind of thing.
So yeah, it's the ultra esoteric functional programming language of housing solutions. Not as useful in the real world as you'd like and it may only have worth as an academic question, but it gets the creative juices flowing.
Really it all boils down to a lack of community. Yeah I know, it sounds like something the dad from Leave it to Beaver would say.
My favorite example goes back to the days of Quake(World). It was a surprisingly bright and sunny place. You'd pop on to a few community run servers to say "hi". Maybe play a few rounds of whatever mod you were into.
When bad actors showed up, they were punted. If they came back they were literally gunned down (whoever had admin access would put them on a team by themselves and everyone would finish them off). As a result of having access to self-policing the number of bad actors were generally low in a healthy community.
As time wore on the goal became customer retention. I can remember publishers selling this as "curated team building" around the time the first X-Box came out. It all went downhill from there. You weren't a member of a community anymore, you were a license holder and a subscriber, and soon the very concept of community largely dissolved.
A likely "better" internet isn't a world of several thousand descending on a single comment thread. It's a hundred at most aimed at the goal of useful interaction. The internet as it stands doesn't need more pan-continental megalopolises, it needs neighborhoods of people seeking common interaction.
>> A likely "better" internet isn't a world of several thousand descending on a single comment thread.
I cannot agree with you more! We have been thinking about this problem for a while, and recently started https://www.commonlounge.com/ because we genuinely believe a community-based approach is the right way to win the battle against trolls.
Most people don't realize how much care a community moderator needs to put in a community to keep it a healthy place, and building tools to make their job easier usually takes a back seat at most "community platforms".
the "community" solution only works at small scale/for niches. Given any degree of mainstream attention, 'just gunning them down' is like fighting the hydra.
Niche sites thus chug along fine, but any generalized effort to form communities falls victim to this. For niche communities on reddit, this has basically become a repeatable lifecycle (not including the countable-on-one-hand subreddits with leadership large and dedicated enough to wrangle their topics into submission.)
"WYSIWYG text editors, spreadsheets, desktops, and web browsers" are all more than serviceable in Linux. I seldom find Firefox less useful on Linux than any other platform. For the rest the problem is that they are moving targets whose spec is dictated by others.
You want Excel to act like Excel and you also want Libre Office Calc to act like Excel, but Libre Office can never really be Excel, so it's Excel 97.
This creates two massive problems for today's society:
Today "Romanizing" has a different name: Cultural Genocide. Whether intentional or not, you are eradicating the cultures you have displaced. Today that's considered a violation of human rights and human dignity. You can't do that and if you try you are at least going to have to find something to mitigate the problem. Do you create an intersectional matrix that finds the most marginalized peoples and leaves them as they are? How do you decide who is most marginalized if you have to move someone. What if their culture a kind of terroir? Can it not exist if you remove it from that place? If so what do you do? Even if they have their language, are the Gullah still the Gullah if you remove them from their diet and usual place of livelihood? Not to mention, when you move their their language will likely disappear and members become assimilated.
Then you have the Refugee Resettlement or "Oakie" Problem. You are introducing a new out-group who will compete for resources and power with an existing in-group. This always causes conflict. In theory, if the in-group view the out-group as either dumb and/or untrustworthy, they turn their judgemental views into critical views and their critical views into moral judgements. After all, value judgements never sit still. After a while they begin incarcerating the most marginalized of the out-group and the scapegoating starts. If not carefully calibrated and balanced the in-group start caving heads in with baseball bats, but the more you carefully calibrate it, the more you return back to the "Romanization" problem.
There are a lot of other problems that arise, but these are the two most consistent when dealing with humans.