It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For my own drafts and areas of interest:
I have a draft trying to connect ice cream studies, outer-space rocks, chicken eggs, the original-generation Johns Hopkins IRB snafu, the Hirsch-Diaz feud, and copper++. The extent that modern scientific communication isn't doing great as letting people Know Things, either as a matter of political policy or as one of personal decision-making, is important, and hard to point to individual examples and not seem like cherry-picking.hereWaiting on a conclusion to Nordean, after Ymeskhout's Excel Chart Of Prosecutorial Misconduct piece. (I'm still giving better-than-even-odds of conviction for at least some of the charges, but wouldn't put much money on it. I wasn't expecting the jury to take this long.)hereFor things that I can't write, but wish someone with familiarity or sufficient nerdness would:
USB naming is confusing on purpose. They need to inform highly technical users what the situation is, so there needs to be naming. However laptop manufacturers don't want the average user to notice that the ports haven't been updated to handle the highest speeds.
Short answer, no one one is doing anything about elder fraud.
So at the dawn of wide spread telephone usage a social decision was made by the government. They'll train people to trust phone callers and to counterbalance that they'll introduce wire fraud laws and aggressively prosecute phone scammers. Long distance fees would prevent things from getting too out of hand. The scammers would likely be fairly close, international phone scams would be cost prohibitive.
However long distance fees came way down, which put a strain on the FBI. Then the telcos built up systems to allow internet calls to come in as local numbers. It made sense, it was the most straight forward way to do things.
But now American elders are vulnerable to scammers from around the world.
There are a lot of organizations who could do something.
Scammers operate companies openly in places like India. The State Department could come down hard on them in various ways. Make it difficult to get financing, block the employees and owners from ever entering the US, many other options. But DOS has a global empire to run and doesn't particularly care about the elderly in the US.
Telcos could do various things... Improve caller ID so that it's useful. Run a warning message before letting an internet originating call in.
But they aren't going to do anything unless the feds make them.
The biggest problem is due to the international nature of the problem. Cracking down on foreign scammers who go after old white people sounds vaguely racist to the modern liberal. Arresting a few as part of your job is probably OK, but anyone who dedicates their life to solving the problem is clearly a cryptonazi.
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