I agree that it got appallingly little press, as do many large-scale human rights violations around the world. However, I feel like pitting it against "the rhetoric in Gaza" is wrong. Gaza is much more our war (where "we" is "the West"). Our governments directly provide the funds and weapons that are being used to commit the large-scale grave human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. In plain English: we're funding the genocide with our tax money. In a democratic system of government, I would therefore expect and hope for these issues to take up a much larger part of public discourse.
Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.
I don't think anyone really believes civilian deaths shouldn't be condemned. I think the main source of argument is who gets the blame. Hamas could've returned the hostages at any time, but they got rewarded by foreign money (and immensely successful anti Israel propaganda campaign by Qatar, Russia and China) to keep going.
The only real way to peace for gazans is to have a non Islamist government take over (like from the UAE) and re educate the population to not start training their children for intifada at the age of 3 or 4 and instead use some of the billions they've received in aid to build infrastructure and education.
Maybe the whole networked thought/Zettelkasten thing is just something that's only useful for a small subset of endeavours, and more of a hindrance for most.
Niklas Luhmann became one of the most productive sociologists of the 20th century with the help of his enormous paper-based Zettelkasten. If you look at the stuff he wrote, you can see why. He ties together publications from the fields of sociology, philosophy, legal studies, psychology, biology and surely many more, literature, journalism, film... Luhmann was a prolific reader (he did few other things as far as I know) and for him, stumbling upon a connecting thought he had ten years ago while reading a newspaper after having read a specific book, might have been crucial to maintain the density of ideas in his publications.
In short, these tools are probably only useful to you if you're in the business of generating novel ideas by interlinking a lot of other ideas that people have had in new, interesting ways. (This is the best tentative description I came up with and it's probably wrong around the edges).
If you're an engineer, or indeed also a scholar in the humanities but playing a different game than Luhmann, these tools may just be useless to you. A couple of years ago when I was thinking about this a lot, I asked one of my lecturers who was a post-doc in comparative political science about his toolset. He didn't really seem to understand the question, he told me that he sometimes writes notes on books in a Word document but mostly knows what's going on in his field and where to look for what. I later took a look at his dissertation and while I'm in no position to judge the quality of his work (it was probably pretty solid, he got it published with a reputable publisher), it seemed to have fever moving parts and threads of thought tied together than the bits of Luhmann that I've read.
My impression is that what's holding the ecosystem of tools for networked thought back right now is that the tools are not built for (or possibly even by) the people for whom networked thought may be most useful. They're trying to be better task managers, tagging systems, collection managers (as mentioned in the linked article), flashcard systems, etc. "Zettelkasten" by Daniel Lüdecke (a sociologist), the software recommended in "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens (himself a professor in the humanities), which is hailed as the bible of networked thought by many (Roam, Logseq, HN I guess), looks very different from these tools. It's an obscure piece of Java software, and while I've only briefly tried it out for a few minutes, it works very differently. Smaller notes, little structure within them, no titles. It has a "desk mode" where you can pull out notes and arrange them in a tree structure for when you're writing a paper or book (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIztPpFqCBw).
I would love to see what things could happen in the networked thought space if people who need these tools the most sat down with people who can write software. I have a few ideas, but I'm afraid I'm just not enough of a Luhmann to really know what these people need. Also, I would just be procrastinating actually writing my thesis (nod to the linked article :))
Yes, one category I left out is research. Turning a big DAG of citations into a finished monograph, basically. I feel that this is one of the few areas where a TfT with bidirectional links makes sense. But I can't really judge this because I'm not a researcher, and little of what I do can be called research.
Whether or not he was insured against this particular damage doesn't make the cost of the repair less outrageous. In the end, drivers will be paying for these repairs, whether directly or through "cheap" monthly insurance payments that hide these occasional events.
(I guess similar arguments could be made about other insurance markets)
Yes, as you noted, you’re basically describing the general principle of insurance. :)
I don’t own a Tesla but insurance for their cars is already relatively more expensive in several states. This can be readily seen in annual or semi-annual policies. Monthly payment policies that cost more per annum are a concern to me, but don’t factor into underwriting analysis at the make/model level.
I was under the impression that the cost in insuring Teslas was down to the slow repair times, since insurance companies were often on the hook for rental cars while parts are on back order.
I'm sorry that you're feeling this way - having to compromise on health for a job is never fun :(.
I don't know anything about your specific circumstances, but depending on what your daily route to work looks like, you might be able to make it work with a special bike. There are fast cargo bikes which fit two children and could even be outfitted with an electric motor (e.g. http://www.larryvsharry.com/). Or the obvious solution, road bike + trailer.
HEADLINE: A non-dangerous and fast release upgrade mechanism
Currently, the upgrade (as in do-release-upgrade) process takes long, very long if not on an SSD. In my experience, apps can crash during the upgrade. During a recent upgrade I did on a family member's machine, the machine was sent to sleep and the screenlocker crashed afterwards. After powering off the machine, the X session wouldn't come up anymore, I had to complete the upgrade manually on the command line. This was all on Kubuntu, but I don't expect the mechanism to be radically different in the standard flavor, it still puts the machine in a dangerous state.
Release upgrades should be as easy and quick as on iOS or Android.
Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do.
I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?
You have it backwards. Advertising works because advertisers know what people want. And people WANT social status.
"We even find that relative income is
more important than absolute income in explaining individual well-being. More
precisely, we find that the income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in
the same occupation group and living in the same region matters for happiness" [1]
"To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status." [2]
These conspicuous consumers are only fooling themselves. If my neighbor spends 4x on his car compared to me, it certainly doesn't make me feel inferior in any way. If anything it makes me feel sorry for him -- must be overcompensating for some other shortcoming.
Yes I've read Veblen so I understand the theory and psychology behind these tactics that advertising exploits (especially luxury advertising), but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom such shallow status markers have no effect.
These conspicuous consumers... are a very important part of the economy :) Think about how many engineering and design jobs there are just creating fancier/faster/prettier/etc versions of basic goods. And if the consumer if happy, whats wrong? A lot of that money would just be sitting in a bank somewhere otherwise. Yes, I know some people would donate it to charity.
"but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom "
Sorry, I didn't mean to generalize all people. I should have said "a large portion of people".
An old friend approached me with the idea and we have developed it together. He used to work for a media company which had these sort of clients already so we got a head start when they folded and we stepped in to pick up the slack. Subsequent sales have all been word-of-mouth. Product development has been entirely driven by customers: they need something, I put it in and then every player gets the new functionality once it's battle-tested.
When we first looked at the market, we realized that no-one really knew how it worked because it's still very young. So we decided to compete on price and reliability. Instead of lock-in contracts and up-front hardware purchases, we charge a small month-to-month rental and the hardware remains ours.
I have read the link you posted and I'm still not clear on how you would end up paying ~50% and not be able to get it back.
If your ETF is "ausländisch thesaurierend" ("foreign accumulating"), declaring it will be a bit more complicated but not that hard. Would you mind explaining your situation a bit better? Maybe I'm missing something (and I wouldn't want to, since I'm looking into this topic myself at the moment).
I got my license in Germany and was never required to go that fast during any driving lessons or my test. My driving instructor told me to go roughly the recommended speed of 130km/h to practice some real-world Autobahn driving.
That said, I know of one person who was told to go fast on the Autobahn during their driving lessons by their instructor. Definitely not part of the official test though.
The official test does not require you to go fast, it is more important to do the proper looks when going on/off the Autobahn and overturning other cars on it.
That being said, my instructor told me to "floor it" once in a driving lessons as well, just to see how it feels and how the car behaves.
Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.