JulianRota
16hr ago
Well I personally agree that free will exists and so that is not a possibility. But several people in the linked thread were arguing quite vigorously that free will does not exist and individual behavior was therefore 100% deterministic. I do feel that, in addition to the more direct philosophical arguments that mostly took place in that thread, I should also point out what the natural consequences of that being true would be.
If that is true, we would be able to identify numerous specific people who we would have actual scientific proof will only contribute to society in highly negative ways, and we'll have to decide what to do with those people. Would we eliminate them? We could lock them away for life, but that's expensive, should we bother if we know they will never reform? Also our current criminal justice system in most of the first world locks people away for a pre-determined length of time when we prove they did a specific bad thing. It's rather a departure to be saying, our mind-scanning computer says you'll always be bad, so we're going to lock you away for life, or do actual brain editing on you to make you act right. Definitely can't see that one going wrong in any way.
JulianRota
17hr ago
I mean "had it coming" in a more immediate sense. Not that the person as a whole deserved to die in the abstract, regardless of what he had done at any particular moment. More that yeah if you try to beat or choke or stab or shoot a cop, he's probably going to try to shoot you, regardless of what motivated you to do that and to what extent it was understandable.
On the first, it's pretty standard for the leaders of a movement to be disingenuous about their real goals. It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.
JulianRota
18hr ago
I don't see that specific statement in there. Interesting discussion though. I think a more accurate phrasing would be:
If Free Will truly does not exist, it should be possible, if we were able to gather sufficiently detailed information about an individual's brain, to predict with 100% accuracy everything that person would think, say, and do, and this could be done for any individual you might choose.
The ability to read and write minds does not necessarily prove determinism or disprove free will. It does seem likely though that, if we were ever able to do such a thing, the details of how that process worked would give us considerable insight on those subjects. We can say now that it's still possible that free will doesn't really exist, but we don't have sufficient technology to gather detailed enough information about anyone's brain to fully predict their behavior. If we were able to reliably read and write minds, it would be very tough to say we just didn't have sufficient information. At that point, either we would be able to predict behavior and prove the determinists right, or we would still not be able to fully predict behavior and that would prove that free will actually does exist and the determinists are wrong.
I feel obligated to also note that pure determinism leads to some rather dark conclusions. If it were possible to scientifically prove that a person would 100% only do negative and harmful things for the rest of their life and it was not possible to change that, what else would there be to do except eliminate that person?
JulianRota
20hr ago
I started reading House To House by David Bellavia. It's a personal account by US Army Staff Sergeant David Bellavia of the battle to re-take Fallujah in 2004 during operation Iraqi Freedom. Reminds me a lot of JTarrou's posts on Violent Class. It's very heavy on the details of the combat that his unit engaged in, not much discussion of any sort of grand strategy, politics, etc. That's clearly the actual experience of the guys on the sharp edge. The kind of thing you don't see written about much.
I noted that the book has a listed co-author, John R. Bruning, who, going by his listed bio, is actually a professional author and journalist. Did he do most of the actual work to transform this into a well-written story? I don't know, but Mr. Bellavia appears to be no slouch in the writing department himself - according to the Amazon bio, he has also been published in "The Philadelphia Inquirer, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications". So I guess him and JTarrou are part of a relatively small number of people who are actual combat veterans and can also write about it in a highly articulate and insightful way.
I'm only about a third of the way through the book so far. The Amazon summary is all about some truly heroic badass feats that SSG Bellavia pulled off which earned him the Medal of Honor, but I haven't reached that part yet. The first part is more about the daily life of a Staff Sergeant, which is more about looking after the men in your unit, keeping them safe, well-equipped, and well prepared for the fighting to come. Stuff like evaluating who's good at what, putting the right guys in the right positions, making sure they have a good plan for the fight to come and everyone actually knows what it is.
He doesn't seem to have the generalized disdain towards officers. Some are seen as and portrayed as being useless douchenozzles. Others are, or have grown into, being decent quality combat leaders.
I do see portrayed here the notion that many actual soldiers, even highly skilled and experienced soldiers who volunteered to be in the infantry and have been promoted multiple times, are still a little bit reluctant to actually shoot the enemy sometimes. There's a passage near the beginning of the book where SSG Bellavia is on a rooftop during a battle, sees a presumed enemy on a nearby rooftop before they see him, gets him in his sights, but hesitates to fire. He has what sounds like an anxious feeling that the soldier he sees might actually be one of their Iraqi allied forces. He writes of watching the guy spot him, turn to face him, and start raising his own rifle towards him, all while he's dead on in Bellavia's rifle sights. He writes of thinking for a moment that the guy might actually be an ally who is trying to help him by shooting an unseen other enemy that's actually behind him, of wishing he'd just set down the rifle and go back inside. He does in the end manage to shoot the guy before the guy tries to shoot him.
JulianRota
1d ago
I'm mostly inclined to agree with you, at least on the modern view of BLM and related movements. But I've been thinking lately about the Communist movements of the late 1800s through early 1900s and wondering, to what extent did they actually have a reasonable point? I'm not going to say I support authoritarian Communism or anything, but it didn't come from nowhere, at least some of the problems they were complaining about were real at the time.
I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down. Around that time in America, that wasn't too far away from being the case as I understand it. It was the peak of the time of robber-baron capitalism, with lots of workers getting the shaft. Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay. Sometimes even worse when it gets into company towns and piles of other abuses that I haven't even heard about. I can see where those of a more angry, retributive, perhaps even revolutionary frame of mind might get the idea that overthrowing the whole system and giving this whole Communism thing a try might be a good idea.
Fortunately for all, we managed to improve things gradually and more smoothly. It turns out that further advances in industry, unionization, market forces making skilled workers more valuable, and relatively lightweight and limited government intervention while maintaining the fundamental tenets of capitalism did a much better job at improving the lots of the ordinary workers than any dictatorship of the Proletariat ever did.
Okay then, but what does that say about the behavior of modern Progressives? I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? If Lenin and the rest of the inner circle of Bolsheviks were taking advantage of a shitty situation with legitimate grievances to leverage in their authoritarian tendencies, are the elite of the modern Progressive movement leveraging total nonsense to support theirs?
JulianRota
3d ago
I'm not in a position to know for sure what the setup is on any particular nation's nuclear devices (and of course if I was I sure wouldn't post about it on a public internet forum), but from what I've heard, it's entirely possible to put in place arming codes that are not trivial to circumvent.
Implosion devices depend on extremely precise timing between all of the charges placed around the core. In early devices, this was kept simple by having the whole thing be spherical and all of the wires be exactly the same length connecting the conventional detonators to a single power source. There's no reason that needs to be the case though. Varying the wire lengths, detonator positions, core shape etc introduces complex timing requirements that might only be known by the software, or possibly even encoded into the arming code.
It's also my understanding that modern high-yield devices have more complex detonation chains, requiring mini-accelerators to be turned on, other gasses to be dispensed, etc at just the right time. So it's probably not trivial to get around coding issues like that without being a nuclear engineer yourself. At least, as long as the organization designing it wants to make it so and cares enough to make sure it's actually effective.
JulianRota
4d ago
I always thought, in a certain sense, it's kind of strange that this hasn't happened already. Possible reasons why, as far as I can guess:
- Nuclear weapons security worldwide really is that good, including in Russia, Pakistan, etc.
- Just too destructive to really be interesting to terrorist groups. How many of them really, truly want to kill tens of thousands at once? Not just the trigger-pullers, but every individual involved in getting the device to a target.
- Anyone who might possibly steal one, or be unofficially allowed to take one, is too afraid of retaliatory action to actually do it. Russian ultra-nationalists might not care about personally surviving, but they care if somebody nukes Russia back in retaliation.
Or maybe all of them at once. The idea is very popular in dramatic fiction, but somehow never seems to happen in real life. Or even has any stories leak out about it ever coming anywhere near happening.
JulianRota
4d ago
Mind if I PM you?
Sure, no problem
JulianRota
6d ago
In my opinion, you are way overthinking this. I think this ties back into the subject of this thread, but probably 90% of tests are written for people who aren't particularly intelligent by other people who also aren't particularly intelligent as a clumsy and ham-fisted way to see if they're good enough for something. They're meant to see if you can think along with the author's mid-tier thought process, not stimulate discussion and sophisticated consideration.
I solved it in like 10 seconds. Skim it, check the answers, go over it a little more carefully, the words of the story are obviously meant to be about being productive and peaceful, mark D, done, move on to the next one. If you've managed to make it through a first-world school, you probably have an idea how tests are written and how the people who will grade them want you to answer.
The Motte loves our overthinking things. Most of the rest of the world does not. You (metaphorical you) will frequently in life be judged by people who are much dumber than you, but have power over you anyways. It's to your benefit to learn how to appear to pass their tests while being submissive to them temporarily. Giving the answer that they want fast codes to them as smart; going on a long tangent about how technically true it actually is may actually be a sign of greater intelligence, but will signal to them that you're an uncooperative weirdo spewing what seems like gibberish to them, not a supergenius.
JulianRota
7d ago
The above isn't really right. If you owned Bitcoin before the Cash split, then you own the Cash as well, no actions post-split on the regular Bitcoin blockchain can affect it at all. To access it, you need to get a Bitcoin Cash wallet. You should be able to get a Cash variant of whichever Bitcoin app you are using and initialize it with the same key info that app is using.
If you're not into Cryptocurrency speculation, the simplest thing to do with it is send the Cash to an exchange that supports it, exchange it for regular Bitcoin, and send that Bitcoin back to your local wallet. Or set up a new Bitcoin wallet with the latest stuff, send your regular Bitcoin from the old wallet to that, as well as the Bitcoin you exchanged the Cash for.
I'm not a lawyer anywhere and have no idea what country you're in, so I have no idea what the legal or tax implications of doing this are. In a public forum and in the absence of any more detailed information, I can only suggest that you consult with a local lawyer and follow the law.
JulianRota
7d ago
As I understand it, the idea of using carriers against China would be to interdict shipping coming to and from them from far away, as well as any naval assets attacking Taiwan.
I'm inclined to think that China and Russia have more to lose in losing space-based assets than the US, even assuming no retaliation in other arenas. Gaza is tiny, the IAF can monitor them just fine with conventional aircraft and drones. Russia is vast, but I think Ukraine is mostly covered with AWACS aircraft operating outside of actual Ukrainian territory, and there probably isn't all that much advantage there from the ability to monitor deep inside Russia. Meanwhile, satellite surveillance is probably the best way Russia has to see what NATO is doing outside of Ukraine. Invading Taiwan is logistically complex, China would probably benefit greatly from having intact GPS to pull it off, as well as the ability to see where those carrier groups are and what they're up to, which would be tough to get any other way.
I'm not sure how confident to be in all that, but I think it's enough to make the case that all-out space war is not likely to be a clear win for the counter-US powers.
JulianRota
8d ago
I tried to look into this after the last time I read one of the EMP apocalypse porn novels. I get the impression that nobody really knows for sure, since it's really hard to test well. To the extent that anyone knows, they don't seem excited to publish anything about it.
Near as I can tell, EMPs tend to be hardest on conducting cables that are very long in straight lines, like multiple miles, and anything connected to such cables. I'm pretty sure that cars and other vehicles, phones, laptops that are unplugged, and other portable electronics are not likely to be affected at all. Most long-distance data cables have been replaced with fiber optics, which are also immune.
Probably the thing at highest risk is the electric grid and things attached to it. It may be rough on transformers, generating turbines, that sort of thing. I don't know if anyone has made or implemented protection cutoffs for these types of things. It's not clear to what extent it may affect household electronics - I'm not sure whether or not dangerous voltages would make it through the various types of power converters. For cell towers, the wired and over-the-air data connections will probably be fine, but the power supply may not be. I doubt the internet will stay up in the affected area, mostly due to power issues rather than data connections themselves. The trackside power supply for electric trains will likely have issues, but probably the diesel-electric freight locomotives will be okay.
So it's likely to be a bad day, but not nearly as bad as some would have you think. I doubt it would affect the effectiveness of a defending military it was targeted at much at all, other than the extent to which it caused civilian disruptions they might be obligated to address. From the perspective of an offensive military considering using it, it doesn't seem like a great strategy, since it's unclear how effective it would be, and likely to be most disruptive towards civilian activity rather than military.
JulianRota
8d ago
Better to provide light, and real information, than to throw shade. Could you tell us more about things like, what do these 10%ish parties actually believe and want? What's the range of opinion on them in other segments of Israeli society? To what extent is it, I really hate those guys, they're just making everything harder, versus, well I don't agree with them, but I don't mind using them - tell the Palestinians that we'll rein them in if they play nicer, or turn them loose if they don't. Or something else maybe.
JulianRota
8d ago
I'd lean against.
A serious move against Taiwan is likely to trigger a longer-term economic realignment away from Chinese manufacturing and towards all of their regional competitors. I'm doubtful that the Chinese economy is strong enough to weather such a thing. Main wildcard is to what extent Chinese leadership either doesn't believe it will happen, or doesn't care.
The PLAN and PLAAF don't have much recent experience AFAIK fighting blue-water naval battles, amphibious invasions, air battles against air forces that aren't total clusterfucks, etc. Trying for something like Indirect Control is taking a big risk that their bluff will be called. Their leadership will look pretty bad if they try it and it ends up being a flop. Even worse, a flop of the army and navy trying to assert control over Taiwan is much less likely to generate a strong Chinese domestic backlash against whoever did it, presuming they don't do something boneheaded like major attacks against mainland Chinese civilians.
If China wanted to be taken more seriously as a threat to Taiwan, I'd think they ought to get some practice in somewhere. They've been dealing with Africa for a while, why not pick whichever African country is being particularly annoying to them and go over and smash them? If they can't, or aren't willing, to pull that off, it makes it seem like they aren't really much of a threat to Taiwan.
JulianRota
15d ago
That seems very plausible to me. Do you know of anywhere I could read more about that? In addition to the sibling's mention of West Virginia.
JulianRota
15d ago
This seems like as good a place as any to write about something I'd been thinking about for a while, especially since it's at least kind of against your point.
Saying the Civil War was caused by Slavery never seemed satisfying to me. It's not exactly wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like it really captures the spirit of what happened and why. I think a better thesis is that Slavery was the lynchpin of the war, the thing that caused the pre-existing cultural split to become an economic split and a more specific political split, that gave rise to there being specific territories motivated to rebel.
I think the true cause is the cultural split that goes back to the founding of the nation. Albion’s Seed stuff. Borderers and Cavaliers vs Puritans and Quakers. (I've only actually read Scott's review of it, I probably should read the actual book sometime). In this view, it was the Cavaliers who really loved themselves some slavery. For reasons I haven't entirely fleshed out, the Borderers and Cavaliers came to be allied and to mostly occupy the same territory. I guess they could tolerate each other at least. Meanwhile, the Puritans and Quakers similarly allied with each other, and each side had at least a vague feeling that they didn't really like the other side and they were the Other, the Outgroup. They managed to ally with each other long enough to fight and win the American Revolution, but they never did really get along that well, not well enough to be comfortable building a more centralized state for them all to live under.
At the time of the founding of the nation, the plantation farming with slavery that the Cavaliers loved so dearly was in fact the most economically productive thing going on in the nation. This gave the slaveholder class tremendous political power, far too much to take any action against slavery. The cultures that made up what would become the North never really liked slavery. It became a rallying point for both sides - the whole proto-South became more and more into how awesome Slavery was, even the ones who would never be able to afford a single slave, and meanwhile, the proto-North became more and more into how shitty it was and how it had to go. And so both sides went on, constantly provoking each other about it. But it's just an excuse, the real cause was always the cultural split.
In the background to all this is the gigantic freight train of Industrialization. Slow moving but massive and inexorable. The proto-North and the cultures that made it up really loved them some Industrialization. They went all-in on that, in opposition to plantation slavery. It wasn't that great at the time of the founding of the nation, but it kept slowly advancing and gaining more power. That economic domination slowly but surely started slipping away from the slavers who, due to their own culture, were unable to see it coming and shift away from slavery and towards industry. But a slow shift of economic trends is tough to fight a war over. The election of Lincoln, though, that did it. A bright neon sign saying that the slaveholder class could no longer rely on their economic clout to dominate national politics.
And so, to war! A war actually motivated by that tribal hatred, but which the slavery issue had provided plenty of more rational-seeming Casus Belli.
Industrialization was still very new, and nobody really understood how it would affect war. In the old way of war, winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North. Hence why they did better than expected at first. The North was slow to understand the advantages that Industrialization gave them and how to use those advantages to maximum extent. But they did eventually. In the new way of war, non-industrialized opponents would be crushed under a mountain of manufactured goods. Individual courage and clever maneuvers mean little when your opponent out-produces you 10 to 1 or more. Parts of the Southern regime probably saw this eventually, but there wasn't much they could do about it.
Near as I can tell, the cultural effect of the war was to decisively crush the Cavalier culture for good - I don't see any sign of them being still around now. The Borderers are still around, and don't seem to have been that affected. I understand that many of them checked out of the Civil War when it really started going south for the South. Perhaps they said to themselves something to the effect of, hold on, why am I charging superior Union firepower to preserve the right of these other rich guys to own slaves? And the war and reconstruction era didn't shut down anything central to their culture. So I guess they survived.
I think this is all very relevant to today's situation. We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires. And so, it's not really clear what actually happens.
JulianRota
23d ago
This largely tracks with my understanding of the history of the region (plus a few new details), except:
Israel surprisingly wins the war and takes lands beyond even the 1947 proposed borders, many Arabs are expelled at this point and this is what is referred to as the Nakba.
My understanding was that the Arabs largely left voluntarily upon request by the surrounding Arab nations, who expected to wreak total destruction on those pesky so-called Israelis (in their opinion), and didn't want them to be in the crossfire. Possibly there was some small-scale local hostility and encouragement, but not anything that could be called a proper expulsion.
JulianRota
23d ago
For 1, I'm skeptical about that. I think it's very common in the US at least due to the scientific and social influence of the I think 70s-era belief in the "food pyramid", that lots of carbs and some meat were the height of healthiness and all fats were bad. The perception and trend wears on even as we've discovered that that isn't really true and nutrition is far more complex. I think any feeling of fulfillment is more due to some combination of it being what people are used to and perception of social approval.
For 2, I think it's about the overall state of society, which means that perceptions of what is attractive are more malleable than most people think. If getting any food at all is expensive and hard work, then being fat signals that you are a high-status person who has access to plenty of food, therefore you are attractive, for both men and women. In our current society where food is incredibly plentiful and much of it is not great for your health, being fat is nothing special as far as status in society, and instead being thin is a better signal that you have plenty of resources and status, in the form of time and energy to find and purchase higher-quality food and eat it in measured quantities. It also tends to signal that you have the free time and energy to exercise for fun.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Parallel to the sibling, do talk to your manager about how you're doing. What you should do depends on how they react.
If they recognize that you're getting burned out and cut you some slack, then great, you're at a good place to work and stay there a while.
If they say something to the effect of, suck it up kid, here's another assignment, then it's probably time to start looking for a new job. Put together a resume, talk to some recruiters, reach out to any friends or former co-workers. You might well be surprised how much more money and lighter workload you can get at a new job.
Either way, burnout is very real, don't ignore it. Take action now, before it gets too unbearably bad.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Probably a troll, but why not discuss seriously anyways?
If we wanted to investigate this theory, soccer doesn't seem like a good place to start. If women really do have social skills and body language and facial expression reading ability so much better than men that it might grant them practical skills, let's pick a game where that's the most important thing and physical ability is meaningless. Poker sounds good to me.
I have no clue offhand how high-end competitive poker works. A few quick searches show World Series of Poker seems to have separate men's and women's leagues. Somebody out there must be running high-end mixed-gender poker games though. If women really are that much better at those things, they ought to be cleaning up at mixed-gender poker tables.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I don't recall anyone actually being against body cams, aside from some griping about the cost. IME most cops want to wear them because they're great at rebutting false accusations of misconduct and brutality.
I haven't noticed the sibling's comment that BLM is actually against them now, though maybe I haven't been paying enough attention. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me all that much though. I still recall the case where the cops shot a black teenage girl who was actively in the process of stabbing another girl, it was caught on bodycam quite clearly, and BLM still threw a fit, though a bit more muted.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I think it's pretty well-accepted that an Iranian nuclear capability would likely result in a number of regional counter-moves, such as:
The regional Sunni Arab states may then perceive a much more serious threat from Iran. They would likely seek to either build their own nuclear weapons or come explicitly under the protection of one of the existing nuclear powers. We're talking Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Oman, Quatar, Yemen, Egypt, and Jordan. Iraq and Syria aren't usually seen as Sunni-aligned, but they may not necessarily take such a thing lying down either.
Israel has long maintained a policy of "nuclear ambiguity", refusing to explicitly confirm that they do have a nuclear arsenal. If Iran does openly have a nuclear arsenal, I would think Israel would change this policy.
It's also the status quo of nuclear geopolitics that nuclear powers are not allowed to attack or threaten non-nuclear powers with nuclear weapons. You can attack, invade, and conquer with conventional weapons, but nothing nuclear. Once you have your own nuclear weapons though, you're now fair game for other nuclear powers to more directly threaten.
So, maybe Israel and Iran openly pointing nuclear ballistic missiles at each other? Not sure if that's a good thing. At least they might both cool their jets a little with the constant proxy wars.
Maybe American nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia? It's possible. There's precedent in America defending them from Saddam's invasion, and the Saudis don't seem terribly interested in manufacturing their own high-tech weapons. Or maybe they would ally with an openly-nuclear Israel? Both don't sound very likely now, but it's hard to see the Saudis just sitting idly by with an nuclear-armed Iran right across the Persian Gulf.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Who decides what it's "supposed to do"? What gives any such person the right to dictate that?
For that matter, how do you know there aren't already sites that work exactly the way you think, but you don't know about them, because they aren't as popular or well-advertised? That would imply that the way all existing well-known sites work is exactly how their users and their owners think they should work. I think private chat groups, as exist in pretty much every messaging app, are much more like this, but by their nature aren't well-known.
So by saying you want a law, as an "interesting experiment". Laws mean people will be fined, potentially lose their livelihoods, get thrown in jail, etc. Somehow I don't think the people who would be affected by such a law will find this "experiment" quite so "interesting". Particular when you are forcing every site and all of the users to do things they actively dislike to satisfy your notions about how they "should" work, when there are already alternatives that work that way.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Android app? Almost certainly a bad idea, unless you already have experience in building android apps and getting them onto your phone. Just figuring out how to build a "hello world" level app and get it onto your phone could easily take 8 hours by itself, much less setting up even a fairly basic UI that's functional. Using GSheets as a data store sounds like a bad idea too, way too much work to interface with. What I'd do is, in this order, following the steps until you think it's good enough or get tired of it or whatever:
- Open up dev tools network tab the next time you use the form. Note down everything about the request to actually reserve a spot and what it returns on success and failure.
- Put together a CLI script on your developer machine to make those requests. Iterate on that until you are able to successfully reserve a spot without using the website directly. Doesn't matter what language, Python is fine, just make direct HTTP requests, you almost certainly don't need full browser emulation.
- Hard-code in the info for your regular visitors, implement a decent CLI interface to make reservations for any of them. This is probably good enough for most people.
- Turn that script into a basic web server, running locally on the developer machine. A few simple HTML pages to interface with it you can use on the browser on your developer machine.
- If you still really want to use it on mobile, rework the CSS etc until those pages look good on a mobile browser
- You could leave it running on your developer machine or some other machine in your local network and access it from your mobile any time you're on your home WiFi. Or you could deploy it to a proper web server somewhere, probably for free, maybe using Google Cloud Run or something like that, to be able to use it on your mobile from anywhere. It'll be on a weirdo URL nobody can guess, so you can probably get away with no authorization. And the visitors are still hard-coded, so you'd need a redeploy to add or remove anyone, but that shouldn't be hard enough to be annoying.
- If you're still feeling ambitious, add a proper DB on the server to store visitor info, and web interfaces for managing them. Probably ought to do authorization too at this stage.
- For even more ambition, set it up so other residents can register themselves on your system, enter their own visitor lists, and reserve spots too. Then advertise it to other people in your building, or even people in other buildings that use the same system.
I actually draw a distinction there. I have a greater level of sympathy and understanding towards actual black communities that are wary of trusting the police, since they've actually experienced historic oppression by them. For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct. I admit I don't have any great ideas on how to create law and order in black communities when the relationship with the police is already so poisoned in so many of them.
However, my impression is that I don't see a lot of those people or communities in the BLM movement. That, as far as I can tell, is mostly a wealthy white people movement. Whatever actual black people took part in it are mostly upper-class and already pretty disconnected from actual oppression, even if there may have been some history of it.
I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.
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