I wonder how much of the bad decision-making that led to the US's wasting more than 2 trillion dollars failing to effect any permanent change in Afghanistan can be ascribed to the fact that it is career suicide to imply that the people of Afghanistan were any less capable of democratically governing themselves than the people of, e.g, Germany and Japan were in 1945.
>all this energy . . . might be better focused into social disapproval of the portrayals of murder, rape and the rest of the violence we inundate ourselves and our kids with on a daily basis.
I tend to agree, and the "rekt/gore" threads on 4chan strike me as particularly low-hanging fruit.
At least 4chan is in a narrow corner of the internet - most people don’t get exposed to it, ‘specially not like prime time TV and mainstream movies, which contain just gratuitous levels of physical/sexual violence and are readily and regularly accessed by the majority of society. 4chan is comparatively inconsequential I think.
"ACR is a technology that (with device-owner permission) reads pixels on a smart, internet-connected device screen as it delivers content to a . . . consumer—on a second by second basis. A recent Forbes article explains that the data is then shared with the manufacturer’s tracking software, matching them to a database that keeps track of local broadcasts and other [TV or video] content sources."
Good point. My explanation for the discrepancy is that Canada, Australia and western Europe are more homogenous racially and ethnically than the US is, which makes them less vulnerable to the excesses of an ideology or religion-substitute that revolves around race and ethnicity.
On some of the troop carriers going to Vietnam, soldiers starting fighting each other along racial lines; in response, the US military started a major initiative to promote racial tolerance in their training of soldiers and in their personnel policies. Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Also, starting with the Puritans of England, the western Europeans that chose to emigrate to the US were on average more religious than those who chose to remain in western Europe.
Your assumption would be wrong. Australia is highly diverse.
One in four of Australia’s 22 million people were born overseas; 46 per cent have at least one parent who was born overseas; and nearly 20 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home[1]
I think the key differentiator, is Australia, Canada and Britain have parliamentary democracies.
"Overseas" is kind of useless as a descriptor. When I was living in Melbourne, I knew a lot of kids with German, Italian, Macedonian, and Serbian backgrounds, most spoke their respective languages.
But on the street they were just generic white christian Aussies who were out to slam a few beers and grab a chick parm. Not generic Anglo, but still very white and very western.
> Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Unless said leaders have an interest in curtailing the institution's function or scope, in which case causing the institution to perform worse, or even fail in their mission entirely may be their intent.
For example, they might subscribe to an ideology that questions the legitimacy of the institution, or they may have previously been a leader in an industry the institution is supposed to regulate.
I'm not convinced that the US government is more broken than the others you list.
Most people killed by a government are killed not by police forces, but rather by armies, navies and air forces. And if you live in or near the US you have a lower chance of being killed in a war than if you live in or near Europe because although the US starts more small wars, it starts fewer big wars, and most people killed in war are killed in big wars.
Europe has started fewer wars and killed fewer people since 1945 than the US has, and this is a sign that Europe is safer for the average resident or neighbor than the US is, but that sign is more than cancelled out by Europe's record (and Japan's record) before 1945.
Over the centuries, most prolonged rivalries and most expensive arms races between European nations ended in a war. In contrast, the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race between the US and the USSR did not end in a war -- at least not a war in which the most lethal available weapons were used or in which civilians were targeted to the extent that civilians were targeted by European and Japanese governments during WW II. Surely, the USSR's government deserves some of the credit for that surprisingly good outcome, but so does the US government.
And if you want to claim that the US did not have to participate in the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race -- if you want to argue that the fact that it did is a sign that the US is badly governed, you have to face the fact that if it had not participated, all of Europe would've been overrun by the USSR. There was far less political will in Western Europe to prepare for yet another war than would've been necessary to resist an invasion from the USSR if the US hadn't paid for most of the preparations.
I do not conclude from this analysis that the US government is better than most governments -- only that it is not clear to me that it is definitely worse. And I think it is a mistake to draw a boundary at 1945 and claim that anything that happened before then was too long ago to have any bearing on the question of which of today's governments are better.
I would call the scientific revolution a blossoming, and although democracies (notably the Dutch Republic) participated, most of it happened in monarchies and principalities.
Wikipedia says that there were only 50 web servers in the world in January 1993, and my recollection is that were all at educational and research institutions. I don't think for example that any of the major computer companies, e.g., Microsoft or Apple, had web site that early. (They had internet connectivity, domain names, mail servers, ftp servers -- but back then, ftp servers did not have URLs.) Maybe one or 2 had web servers, but if they did, they were probably the personal projects of one or two employees.
Most of the world's web pages were about computers and the internet.
Yes. It was something of a surprise at the time. It was also in the UK, on the A1. I know the year because it was shortly after I started a specific job that required driving up and down the A1 often. It would have been late in the year because I think I started that job in November.
Here is the registered date from whois for ups.com :
Created Date: 1992-04-07
I think you (or Wikipedia) are quite mistaken about 50 web servers in early 1993. I remember giving a talk about the Internet in 93 where I showed examples of web sites that were available at the time. One of them was IMDB. If I think of the servers that I ran and my friends ran, I'd get to about 20 so I have a very hard time believing there were only 50 in total. Perhaps there was a huge amount of server growth during 1993?
Yeah, 1992 is way too early for that. Even then, it wasn't fully mainstream until advertisers felt able to drop the http://www from the url. When companies could just put coke.com at the end of their TV ads or on the can, it was as mainstream as anything.
Sleep deprivation would be a bad idea for me because sleep helps the immune system, and my immune system needs all the help it can get (because of my chronic infectious disease).
I have found however that _listening to music_ during sleep will prevent my sleeping a lot from having a depressant effect on my mood. I recommend avoiding music contain exciting or bracing passages; you don't want your sympathetic nervous system to become active during sleep.
If I learn something that I want to retain, then I don't listen to music that night, because the same process (REM sleep?) that tends to depress the mood also helps with the consolidation of new learnings and new skills.
