We all remember the recent event where half the earth crashed because a security company sent an update, and there was an event earlier where solar winds had a bad cert that allowed bad actors to access dozens of companies carte Blanche.
Trusting an info sec company that can write to your network is bullshit. If these companies cared about security they wouldn't allow data to be sent back and forth like this.
Kaspersky antivirus just installed a while new antivirus to all their us customers without asking permission. This is all evidence that infosec is bullshit because it you get into infosec companies you get privileged access to tons of critical networks.
Trusting an info sec company that can write to your network is bullshit. If these companies cared about security they wouldn't allow data to be sent back and forth like this.
Kaspersky antivirus just installed a while new antivirus to all their us customers without asking permission. This is all evidence that infosec is bullshit because it you get into infosec companies you get privileged access to tons of critical networks.
If you're trying to get data from a secure network to a less secure one, there's a device called a data diode which can't be hacked traditionally because it can only send signals outward and not inward. Think of a fiber optic cable where you only have a transmitter on one side and a receiver on the other, or an AM radio -- you can't hack the radio station no matter how you turn the dial on your am radio because the info only moves from the station to your radio. Contrast with a 2-way link into a secure network from a third party.
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It makes people feel good until they find someone who is just objectively better than them by every measure.
I've met people who are better than me on every measure that I think I'm pretty good in, and if people are all equal then that means I'm just a failure who didn't work hard enough. Some people are just better. Sucks, but it's better to think some people are just more naturally gifted than to think you suffer from some personal failing that makes you fail that hard against someone who is by all measures your equal.
But kids don't realize that yet, or at least they pretend they don't.
I've met people who are better than me on every measure that I think I'm pretty good in, and if people are all equal then that means I'm just a failure who didn't work hard enough. Some people are just better. Sucks, but it's better to think some people are just more naturally gifted than to think you suffer from some personal failing that makes you fail that hard against someone who is by all measures your equal.
But kids don't realize that yet, or at least they pretend they don't.
Yes, it seems like that discussion of free will boils down to: "is a man a piano key who will play the same note when pressed every time?"
If a man is a gear, a cog who will always do as expected, then there is no free will. If instead A man might surprise you and choose to do something you didn't expect, then they do have free will.
I think many progressive ideologies deny free will and say that if a man chooses wrong it's because they were played like a piano key and they had no choice, whereas most ideologies through history claim you do have a choice and thus it is your duty to choose well.
I'm one of 6 kids. We had the same family, grew up in the same house, often shared bedrooms growing up, went to the same schools with often the same teachers, but everyone's path is vastly different. I can't experience that and believe we are piano keys.
They made their own choices which led to those external factors. If you choose to walk down a certain path, the road ahead has certain paths and forks. For me, I can see many people and how my life could have turned out more like theirs if I'd chosen differently, and those decisions were choices someone personally makes. In some cases you can see how similar our paths were until a critical decision that changes the paths we walk, and it's often not a circumstance but an actual decision we personally make. Whether those decisions are rational or irrational doesn't really matter in that respect from my point of view. Both are part of us and our minds and our will.
If a man is a gear, a cog who will always do as expected, then there is no free will. If instead A man might surprise you and choose to do something you didn't expect, then they do have free will.
I think many progressive ideologies deny free will and say that if a man chooses wrong it's because they were played like a piano key and they had no choice, whereas most ideologies through history claim you do have a choice and thus it is your duty to choose well.
I'm one of 6 kids. We had the same family, grew up in the same house, often shared bedrooms growing up, went to the same schools with often the same teachers, but everyone's path is vastly different. I can't experience that and believe we are piano keys.
They made their own choices which led to those external factors. If you choose to walk down a certain path, the road ahead has certain paths and forks. For me, I can see many people and how my life could have turned out more like theirs if I'd chosen differently, and those decisions were choices someone personally makes. In some cases you can see how similar our paths were until a critical decision that changes the paths we walk, and it's often not a circumstance but an actual decision we personally make. Whether those decisions are rational or irrational doesn't really matter in that respect from my point of view. Both are part of us and our minds and our will.
I think in general what I see out there in the world is a serious talent deficit. I'm certain that there are extremely competent people out there, but having worked for Fortune 500 companies and seeing what their best of the best looked like, if nothing else the market isn't connecting those talented people to the right jobs. Part of that could be the fact that the few megacaps sucked up generations worth of talent for so long that most Fields just don't have that much. I mean if you're talented guy, do you want to go work a real job for a real wage, or do you want to go work for prestigious Google and make 300K a year arguing on discord or whatever they do?
I don't think it's a problem with capitalism or socialism as much as a problem with the world: both prosocial and antisocial survival strategies are legitimate in the sense of both allow individuals to survive and reproduce, and there are times that one or the other will be more advantageous than the other. Ghengis Kahn (neither a capitalist nor a socialist) caused unimaginable harm to many people when he made his horrible invasion of Eurasia, but his genetics are now part of almost a billion people today. On the other hand, organized religion for whatever flaws you might assign it has become a powerful prosocial force helping entire populations survive and thrive under a common set of assumptions and rules about how to live "right".
The world is really complex and has a lot of paradoxes that you can't really easily resolve. Given the fact that industrialization can have a negative externality on the environment that everyone shares, you would think that we need to just make sure that we don't do that at all costs, but there's a cost to that decision as well. Much of the world was extremely conservative and didn't want to take any risks because things have been basically fine for a very long time, and then the tiny island of Britain started to take scientific risks, and there were definitely negative and externalities in terms of deforestation and air pollution but that tiny island nation ended up having the largest empire in the history of the world. Meanwhile, those extremely conservative places like China which wanted to just keep doing the things that they had already done ended up facing colonialization and in the case of china they faced the century of humiliation, in the case of India they were totally colonized, in the case of the Americas they eventually became effective extensions of the European continent.
About all you can do in a situation like that is try to find the best balance for the situation of the time. I think that one thing that the West is going to discover and perhaps is discovering right now is that if we don't burn oil then our global competitors will and if they outcompete us hard enough it won't matter what we want to do because we'll be speaking Chinese and Russian. On the other hand, what's the point of continuing to be a superpower if everyone has to live in Mordor because the entire world was burned to ashes to manufacture more junk? On the third hand, the fact is that industrialization and like our good for individuals in the aggregate to a degree. I mean, we are all on the fediverse which is pretty much definitionally a fruit of industrialization. We have access to computers which are truly magical devices, and we have access to home electricity and home internet which is amazing, and we are all literate which is unheard of throughout global history. Most people don't want to go back to sustenance farming.
I read a story about a waste dump that was built by just some guy in the mountains, and he would just take on whatever. And companies would pay him to take their waste. Eventually, the guy died and there was suddenly this massive environmental disaster that nobody was alive to care about. This story shows that just being local doesn't mean you are totally immune to ignoring externalities, but I do think that being more local does help. If you have to live in the same community that you are destroying, first you're going to have to deal with living in a worse place, and second you're going to have to deal with the people in the local community really not liking you very much because you're messing up their local environment. So it isn't a complete answer, but I do think that one of the things that needs to happen is we make it harder for businesses to get much much bigger. My first proposal for how to do this is to eliminate limited liability, so everyone who owns a company could be fully on the hook for the actions of that company.
Second, there would have to be rules everyone has to follow because otherwise the free rider problem doesn't go away. The guy who dumps a bunch of toxic waste on his land and then guys without any heirs, there's literally nothing you can do about that because there's no one after the fact to punish. Therefore, they would have to be some way that the government (it doesn't have to be the feds, it can be municipal or regional) can step in before someone starts causing all that harm.
The world is really complex and has a lot of paradoxes that you can't really easily resolve. Given the fact that industrialization can have a negative externality on the environment that everyone shares, you would think that we need to just make sure that we don't do that at all costs, but there's a cost to that decision as well. Much of the world was extremely conservative and didn't want to take any risks because things have been basically fine for a very long time, and then the tiny island of Britain started to take scientific risks, and there were definitely negative and externalities in terms of deforestation and air pollution but that tiny island nation ended up having the largest empire in the history of the world. Meanwhile, those extremely conservative places like China which wanted to just keep doing the things that they had already done ended up facing colonialization and in the case of china they faced the century of humiliation, in the case of India they were totally colonized, in the case of the Americas they eventually became effective extensions of the European continent.
About all you can do in a situation like that is try to find the best balance for the situation of the time. I think that one thing that the West is going to discover and perhaps is discovering right now is that if we don't burn oil then our global competitors will and if they outcompete us hard enough it won't matter what we want to do because we'll be speaking Chinese and Russian. On the other hand, what's the point of continuing to be a superpower if everyone has to live in Mordor because the entire world was burned to ashes to manufacture more junk? On the third hand, the fact is that industrialization and like our good for individuals in the aggregate to a degree. I mean, we are all on the fediverse which is pretty much definitionally a fruit of industrialization. We have access to computers which are truly magical devices, and we have access to home electricity and home internet which is amazing, and we are all literate which is unheard of throughout global history. Most people don't want to go back to sustenance farming.
I read a story about a waste dump that was built by just some guy in the mountains, and he would just take on whatever. And companies would pay him to take their waste. Eventually, the guy died and there was suddenly this massive environmental disaster that nobody was alive to care about. This story shows that just being local doesn't mean you are totally immune to ignoring externalities, but I do think that being more local does help. If you have to live in the same community that you are destroying, first you're going to have to deal with living in a worse place, and second you're going to have to deal with the people in the local community really not liking you very much because you're messing up their local environment. So it isn't a complete answer, but I do think that one of the things that needs to happen is we make it harder for businesses to get much much bigger. My first proposal for how to do this is to eliminate limited liability, so everyone who owns a company could be fully on the hook for the actions of that company.
Second, there would have to be rules everyone has to follow because otherwise the free rider problem doesn't go away. The guy who dumps a bunch of toxic waste on his land and then guys without any heirs, there's literally nothing you can do about that because there's no one after the fact to punish. Therefore, they would have to be some way that the government (it doesn't have to be the feds, it can be municipal or regional) can step in before someone starts causing all that harm.
Exposure to asbestos might not have direct effects for 30 years. The guy who sold the asbestos blankets to you might be dead before you know there's a problem.
Part of the downfall of the west is the short term view of success. People can claim the best people aren't breeding, but evolutionarily if they aren't breeding they aren't the best.
If the best don't breed then they have no future because they ended their story. Their genetics stop with them, their culture stops with them, the future is handed to someone else who survived and reproduced.
That's just reality. If the chain of life ends, it never restarts once it's smith is dead.
That's just reality. If the chain of life ends, it never restarts once it's smith is dead.
I've actually said something similar, that if you want to destroy someone, take away their reason to get up in the morning and go do something. You'll kill them more surely than putting a gun to their head and pulling the trigger.
Two things being a father helped me learn are:
1. There are things you do in life that are important and have nothing to do with money. Being a good father for example is a full time job and doesn't pay a dime.
2. There are important things in life you don't need money for. People think you need money to do things, but it doesn't cost money to go for a walk, to swim in a local river, to have a conversation, to read a library book.
Money is important but not all-important.
1. There are things you do in life that are important and have nothing to do with money. Being a good father for example is a full time job and doesn't pay a dime.
2. There are important things in life you don't need money for. People think you need money to do things, but it doesn't cost money to go for a walk, to swim in a local river, to have a conversation, to read a library book.
Money is important but not all-important.
We haven't moved past evolution. We're just arrogant and think the rules stop applying to us. That's why we're dying out, because we are filled with hubris and think we are the gods when in reality we are just men.
And so a lot of people will die out and their genetics and culture with them.
And so a lot of people will die out and their genetics and culture with them.
All the Trudeau "Canada has no culture" stuff reminds me of something I read Hitler said about the Jews.
He needs to be confined to the dustiest and most forgotten history books...
He needs to be confined to the dustiest and most forgotten history books...
Our current society has a problem of thinking on very short timeframes.
There's nothing to be done, most countries are facing 50% population declines over the next 100 years because of all those "evolution-proof" individuals who aren't having kids. South Korea is on track to have 4 grandkids for every 100 Koreans alive today.
Evolution is occurring right now, and many people who think they're superior are failing at it.
There's nothing to be done, most countries are facing 50% population declines over the next 100 years because of all those "evolution-proof" individuals who aren't having kids. South Korea is on track to have 4 grandkids for every 100 Koreans alive today.
Evolution is occurring right now, and many people who think they're superior are failing at it.
I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing for the overall population to shrink. In particular I also think it'll led to a more democratized culture as individuals have more impact on the world. thing is, when you have all these people darwinning themselves out of the gene pool, that's evolution at work.