Like the runup to COVID, everyone is just shambling along pretending that nothing’s happening. Even if the strait is opened tomorrow, inventories will continue to fall for some time. This is going to be a serious crisis.
I am really not looking forward to whatever bullshit laws they try to force through during the crisis.
And just like Covid, where I recall almost everyone on HN believed it'd be the end of the world, the world will adjust and will get through this just fine.
“Getting through” a crisis is almost guaranteed short of a planet killing asteroid. We also “got through” WWII, although it was an extremely unpleasant time.
Covid (and the response to it) caused the deepest global recession since the Great Depression. It was a big deal, very damaging to the global economy, and generally a miserable time for most.
Your recollection is incorrect, and besides that, Covid had a serious impact on the world that's still being felt today. We didn't simply "get through it just fine."
Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.
Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7.
There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.
Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
True, the USSR just had Lysenkoism (quite mainstream!), abiotic oil, deep research into psychics and telepathy, ufology, and Pamyat.
You can’t escape fringe beliefs, but admittedly it seems like there were fewer of them in the USSR. Or maybe they were just ignored, poorly documented, or still untranslated.
Ok yes, true. I guess Lysenkoism qualifies at best as 'pseudoscience'.
I'm talking mostly from a East German perspective in the late 70s and 80s (so quite late). I actually need to find out whether Lysenkoism was taken seriously in 1950's East Germany or whether it was silently ignored (open rebellion wouldn't have gone well with the 'Big Brother' in the East).
> Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly
But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.
Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].
> but nobody believed in communism either
I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.
This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive.
You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.
Oh look, private industry decided to solve the problem that all the authoritarians said we needed a law to solve. Seems like a pretty decent solution too, for those who want to opt in.
This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive.
You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.
You’re welcome. You’d probably appreciate its focus on long-term stability; the authors wanted an environment for their software that would ensure code could stay frozen in a working state forever. The only thing that may need updates is the VM, as the host OS and userland will shift over time, but the VM is designed to be exceptionally easy to implement and maintain. That comes at the cost of some capabilities, but they were specifically aiming for simpler software, so it works out.
What if the people decide that the one topic is the only thing they care about at the moment? Do you dissolve the voting public and elect a new one?
Many people seem to want democracy, but only if the public votes in the way that is acceptable to them. That’s not democracy! That’s rubber stamp technocracy!
> Many people seem to want democracy, but only if the public votes in the way that is acceptable to them.
Well, many people claim they want democracy, due to how our modern political discourse is shaped. But the amount of arguments of essentially "of course you can have any opinion, as long as it's the correct one" I've seen is quite astonishing.
I am really not looking forward to whatever bullshit laws they try to force through during the crisis.
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