It's definitely not perfect but it's good enough to work for basic committing/rebasing flows and it's faster than booting up emacs for the same purpose.
What an arrogant and slavish comment. Truth may be the first casualty of any war, yet here you are celebrating its demise so that war may be waged more thoroughly.
I wonder what it's like to be so convinced of your righteousness of your cause that reality itself is seondary. What a joke you are.
If anyone works at bitwarden can you get your UI people to stop retheming for the upteenth time and instead make the "detailed view" of any entry read-only by default? Every time I need to access my notes on an entry I'm scared that I'll accidentally typo a letter into my password or a 2fa code or something
And then encrypted? Not sure, the known structure of tar (or zip) can help with decryption.
[edit] ...
This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped!
> He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.
You could call it an incorrect answer if there was a correct answer to division by zero, but it's undefined instead with no correct answer. Sounds pedantic, but in math pedantic stuff matters, and apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math, https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/
> apparently you can expand things to define division by zero as zero and not break math,
You really can't though.
> If x/0 is a value, then the theorem should extend to c=0, too.” This is wrong. The problem is not that 1/0 was undefined. The problem was that our proof uses the multiplicative inverse, and there is no multiplicative inverse of 0. Under our modified definition of division, we still don’t have 0⁻, which means our proof still does not work for dividing by zero. We still need the condition. So it is not a theorem that a * (b / 0) = b * (a / 0).
This is like saying there's nothing wrong with defining 2 + 2 = 5, and addition will still be associative because (a + b) + c still = a + (b + c) unless b = 2. Like, sure, you can redefine division to not have the normal properties that it does, and then argue that your redefinition is sound because the theorems only apply to things that have the normal properties of added numbers. But that's not what + means!
If these people really believed the arguments they're making, they would actually define x/0 = 5, or 19, or something on those lines.
Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning? You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero". Then everyone just goes on to do math as usual, unless there's something inconsistent in the new formalism that makes mathematical reasoning break down.
> Are you objecting to the formal system breaking down or to the deviation from expected meaning?
I'm saying that's a false distinction, because as soon as you have that deviation from expected meaning, you have valid theorems that silently stop being valid and your formal system quickly breaks down. And while you can redefine your way out of each individual instance of this, everything you redefine just means more and more theorems that don't have their normal meaning which in turn means more things that you have to redefine.
> You could just say something like "to simplify error handling, our programming language uses a 'zivision' operator that behaves exactly like regular division except zivision by zero is defined as zero".
This would be a much better approach, because then existing theorems that use or refer to division are obviously not necessarily true of zivision and if you want to use those theorems to talk about zivision then you have to check (and prove) that they're actually valid first.
Zero is a fine answer for integer division by zero. "Oh noes you can't do that math, my teacher told me so in a school" isn't a brilliant heuristic to work from.
How about modulo zero? That can be completely correctly define or a floating point exception if you decided to define it in terms of divide and also decided divide should do that.
What about floating point? It gave up on reflexive equality and yet programs do things with doubles despite that.
The integer divide zero industry best practice of promptly falling over isn't an axiom of reality. It's another design mistake from decades ago.
>Zero is a fine answer for integer division by zero.
It's not. Division (edit: of a positive integer) by zero is better approximated by +infinity rather than zero.
In real life to divide something into zero groups is nonsensical, thus the number system in programs should reflect this. In the exceptionally-rare case where you want to divide by zero and it makes sense (can't think of a scenario where that's true but let's stipulate), then you can use your language's equivalent of try/catch or (if (zerop x) ...) to get around it.
Don't fuck up normal mathematics for the rest of us just because some lazy programmer doesn't like to add error checking.
> Division by zero is better approximated by +infinity rather than zero.
No it's not. Division by zero is UNDEFINED. How does a calculation return +infinity anyway?
On the positive side of the graph, 1/x approaches +infinity. However from the negative side of the graph 1/x approaches -infinity. So at zero, 1/x is simultaneously +infinity and -infinity, which is not possible. The answer to 1/0 is "there is no answer" which is UNDEFINED.
A reasonable result for a calculation is to return "?" or possibly NULL or nothing, depending on what other parts of the system are expecting.
When performing integer "division" of x by y, you're finding a solution {q,r} to the equation y * q = x - r. When y=0 any choice of q works, and using 0,x is a perfectly reasonable and intuitive way of defining things.
Computer integers aren't the real numbers you learned about in gradeschool. INT_MAX+1 is not greater than INT_MAX. :)
x/0 = program explodes is also a justifiable choice. It is not however more or less fundamentally correct than making the result 0.
Floating point division by zero doesn't (typically) crash programs the way integer division by zero does (it typically returns a NaN-- and the programmer is free to turn nans to zeros if they like :)).
>Computer integers aren't the real numbers you learned about in gradeschool
Why would anyone think computer integers are real numbers? Anyone who's given it a modicum of thought will know intuitively they're a subset of "real life" integers, not reals.
>using 0,x is a perfectly reasonable and intuitive way of defining things.
I would argue it's neither reasonable nor intuitive. If you want to create some special data type then have at it, but if the behavior of `int` doesn't approximate the behavior of IRL integers, call your data type something else.
> When performing integer "division" of x by y, you're finding a solution {q,r} to the equation y * q = x - r. When y=0 any choice of q works, and using 0,x is a perfectly reasonable and intuitive way of defining things.
Nope. You forgot that there's a requirement that r < q. Otherwise I could say e.g. 5/2 = 1, which is certainly no less valid than saying that 5/0 = 0, but not something that anyone sane wants.
I think not, because in the y=0 case the only sensible r is x, because remove the mod 0 subset you have the unmodified set of integers itself-- the remainder can only sensibly be an identity in that case.
> remove the mod 0 subset you have the unmodified set of integers itself-- the remainder can only sensibly be an identity in that case.
What are you talking about? There are no possible remainders mod 0 (just as there is one possible remainder mod 1 and there are 2 possible remainders mod 2) and there is no sensible definition of the remainder function; defining it to be identity is no less silly than defining it to be, IDK, 7.
Yeah OP is suggesting that the answer to lim x-> 0 1/x = infinity and thus that’s an intuitive answer. Unfortunately that’s obviously not correct precisely because it depends which side from 0 you approach and why just 1/0 is undefined (you could argue about 0+ and 0- but I view that more as IEEE754 weirdness that is used in niches rather than something that would meaningfully change the situation)
> How does a calculation return +infinity anyway?
Not sure what your actually asking but floating point representations generally support a concept of +/- inf.
> A reasonable result for a calculation is to return "?" or possibly NULL or nothing, depending on what other parts of the system are expecting.
- I am a moron, and so are the developers of lean, coq and isabelle
- Most of the responders to this thread are failing to think for themselves
- Responders all think "number" must mean "real number"
Reading through the various responses, it's looking somewhat likely that "number" means "real number" for most people here. And divide zero on the reals is not well formed. Which is weird given it's a programming themed board and your language is far more likely to give you integers mod word size and floating point than real numbers.
By "number" I mean "the number your computer can represent", which appears to have been accidental trolling on my part. The reference to a mechanical calculator struggling was perhaps insufficient.
This is a much clearer argument to me. Theorem provers can be used to ensure certain constraints are met for all possible inputs. It doesn't matter to a theorem prover if 1/0=0, 1/0=infinity, or 1+1=3 so long as you can show the system stays within its constraints. It's not a question of math, it's about what you can prove the machine will do.
I believe most of us doing systems programming and building control systems use IEEE 754, so it's surprising to see a conflicting suggestion. I'd say the biggest thing is that programmers need to be aware of how 1/0 is handled, as 0, infinity, or an exception can all cause undesired results.
Ok now we're talking: important clarifications. Neat read on the type systems. But this part is extremely important:
> The idiomatic way to do it is to allow garbage inputs like negative numbers into your square root function, and return garbage outputs. It is in the theorems where one puts the non-negativity hypotheses.
The equivalent condition here would be for everyone to include "zero-ness" checks on their numeric inputs. But that's awful, because whereas everyone agrees that nullptr is a meaningless pointer, zero is in fact a perfectly good integer/float whatever. So now you have something worse than null pointers- which have course caused us a huge amount of pain ever since being inflicted on the world
So x / 0 = 0 is still a terrible, terrible, idea. But introduce something like the floating-point equivalent of NaN, and say x / 0 = NaN, and now your outputs will at least be obviously wrong, instead of just silently wrong
Thanks for an interesting read. I don't think it's a convincing argument for general purpose languages, though.
In Lean, the zero check is still there, just not in the arithmetic operator itself but in the various division related theorems you need to use in order to do anything useful with the division. But in C/Java/Python/whatever, there are no such guardrails, so 0 or 37 or whatever bogus value is returned from a division by zero will propagate to the rest of the program and cause subtler and harder-to-find bugs.
Throw an exception, because the input is probably invalid and the output definitely will be. Of course, it follows that you need to either plan for the program to crash or catch the exception. But that's still better than just running with wrong numbers.
> On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out? ' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I mean that seriously, is this just a random 78.6/0.0 or is it part of a string of computations based on spatially related measurements (ie. physics | geophysics processing).
The answer you're looking for is the behaviour to trigger when an undefined result occurs.
That behaviour can and does vary with respect to the bigger picture.
Instrumentation can return a NULL (no reading - not a number and not a zero), a zero (meaning zero was measured), a zero (meaning non zero was measured but smaller than the granulated bucketing of analog -> digital). Piped data can suffer a static burst, data in is good, data out is bad, may include zeroes.
Desired behaviour may well be to use every value that you can be 'sure' of and running filter replace values that are "bad" | suddenly spike | goto zero - a smoothed "bestguess" result is produced for use (or a local limit that a series was trending toward) and anomalies are flagged for highlighting | operator attention in some manner.
A ridiculous fairy tale. Dictatorships need hardly interfere with the "stability" of a society which launches a bloody and monumentally expensive temper tantrum in response to 9/11 but allows thousands more to die each year for want of basic medicines
It's just a ROI calculation. A Russian fighter jet costs $25 mil, so a rational course of action would to weigh the benefit of buying another jet vs. buying a dozen congressmen, or flooding social media with misinformation to cancel a multi billion dollar defense bill for Ukraine.
For example, Abrahamic religious leaders have made the concept of god toxic. But if you go by their dogma, then their god is responsible for the state of things.
Many of the non-abrahamic religions in the USA don't even have a god in the same sense, or they see their (equivalent to) god as the fabric of the cosmos and thereby not able to be abandoned.
I agree about the money though. It is the leading religion now.
The uninsured. The underinsured. People on the "wrong" insurance plan. People without the budget slack for $100s or $1000s per month for the medication they need. Poor people who don't bother going to the doctor to get needed prescriptions because they can't afford the initial visit. Rich people whose doctors fail to mention the drug that costs $250k because no past patients cleared for it could afford it. People going to the doctor who gets financial kickbacks from the inferior drug's drugmaker. People prescribed drugs that kill them.
If your question was actually serious, this is a non-exhaustive list.
When the GP said "basic medicines", they probably meant all the generic stuff that can be had without insurance for a few dollars; all the stuff that is on the WHO list of essential medicines[0], that is.
I'd venture that drugs that cost hundreds of dollars or more per month in the US are all cutting-edge stuff. I mean, sure, you have stories of people getting charged $10 for a pill of acetaminophen at a hospital, but that's a separate matter unrelated to the fact that you can get a bottle of 500 pills for single-digit dollars at your local Walmart.
> The uninsured. The underinsured. People on the "wrong" insurance plan.
Plenty to criticize about the US healthcare system, but let's remember that countries with nationalized medical care also suffer from their own ills, mainly in the form of long wait times. Ultimately, no place has enough doctors per capita that every sick person can be treated promptly and cheaply; so care must be gated one way or another. In America, you pay with money; in most other countries, you pay with time.
The WHO list of essential medicines is not just over-the-counter drugs. It includes things like the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. I happened to need that for testicular cancer ~10 years ago, and the treatment cost was $50k (as "payed" by insurance). That overall seems pretty reasonable to me for the treatment I received, but definitely not something I'd expect the median American to be able to pay out of pocket.
The median American would not have to pay out of pocket, as nearly every American has health insurance (since the ACA, it is actually illegal not to have insurance).
I think it's accurate to say that the median American is insured, with only 8% of the population uninsured [1]. Although, to put that percentage in perspective, that's 26 million people and likely thousands in excess mortality relative to the insured poplulation.
I believe you're referring to the ACA's "individual mandate", which imposed a federal tax penalty for being uninsured. I won't argue whether that makes it illegal or not, but I can say that the individual madate was eliminated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2019 [1]. There's no longer a federal tax penality for being uninsured.
This is purely anecdotal, but of that 8% (26 million), I would posit that most of those people are uninsured by choice. e.g., probably mostly young, maybe part-time workers without chronic illnesses.
I find it amusing that people are basically advocating for the government to become every citizen's Medical Daddy (the GP of this comment) backed by the threat of state violence in a thread that is ostensibly about freedom from the security state.
My question is serious. The US Government spends $2 trillion per year for health care for the poor and the elderly, and also spends a significant amount for for tax credits for health insurance for those that are neither poor or elderly. Furthermore, hospitals always treat regardless of the ability to pay.
How many more $ trillions and how many fascist medical bureaucracies would achieve your ends comrade?
I am not a fan of the American healthcare system. Navigating it takes brains and effort that shouldn't be required. But if you have them it is essentially not possible to die here from lack of healthcare, and it's possible but surprisingly difficult to go bankrupt (except from lost wages, which is also a leading cause of bankruptcy in the UK).
Yes, so this is where the brains and effort (and time, forgot time) come in.
The anecdotes in your links (that I read - can't get through all of them right now) have a common theme, which is that people died because they either needed very expensive and/or experimental treatment that probably would not be affordably provided to them under any plausible healthcare system, or else they got a bill, decided they couldn't pay it, and did without or tried to self-ration their healthcare.
The correct course of action in that case is to call the healthcare provider and negotiate A) a 90+% discount and B) a payment plan, both of which are pretty readily available in the American system. You have to know that's possible, and you shouldn't have to, but it is possible. Then you reach out to the charities, government programs, and/or nonprofits from my original link to cover what you still can't afford. Same deal if you get screwed by an insurance company as in the Guardian article.
This is, again, not something I'm trying to defend. It's not the way a sane healthcare system would run. But it is a system that works, more or less, for those who know how to work within it.
The anecdotes show that this is not an 'occasional' or 'edge case' thing but a systemic thing. The statistics show that at least 40,000 people die a year for not having enough money for healthcare and these are the people we know. The statistics don't include those who never go to the hospital to avoid risking medical bankruptcy for their families even if they die themselves. Just being in a hospital bed for one night without anything being done costs $3000/night, whereas waiting in the ER without anything being done can cost $100/hour.
This is a systemic thing. Its not 'not a sane healthcare system'. Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit. And it became like this only because people let it and justified this or that other thing in the system.
> Just being in a hospital bed for one night without anything being done costs $3000/night
No, it doesn't. It costs whatever you can negotiate it to cost. I've been without insurance; one experience isn't data, but in my experience just telling the hospital you haven't got insurance is, again, good for 90+% off by itself.
Hospitals (ed: non-profit ones, but I'm pretty sure similar rules apply elsewhere) in particular are required by federal law to have 'well-publicized' financial assistance policies.
> Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit.
If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit. It's not even that good. Healthcare margins in the U.S. are 0.7%, which sucks. If you're the proverbial evil billionaire or whatever you'd rather own almost anything else.
That's a really surreal proposition. People who are sick cannot 'negotiate' anything. People who are recently treated and are recovering from an illness are the same. Something that is life-critical cannot be up for negotiation to start with, but lets allow it for argument's sake.
What if you 'negotiate' and the hospital and the insurance company just reject? Do you have pockets deep enough to fight with their lawyers for years? Do you have the time? One person against corporate behemoths. That defies logic.
> If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit
It does. It keeps both the availability of doctors and hospital beds to create artificial scarcity. It does vertical integration and ensures that whatever you do in healthcare ranging from getting insurance to going to hospital, from medicines to secondary care stays within the corporate shareholdership network that owns the entire conglomerate.
> when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.
The reason that the system gets away with murdering people for profit is that people attribute to stupidity what should be attributed to malice. If large corporations are killing people for profit like they are, malice should be attributed to the actions of all the upper echelons of the corporate world rather than any kind of incompetence.
> What if you 'negotiate' and the hospital and the insurance company just reject?
If you are sick and can't negotiate, and no one can negotiate on your behalf, or the provider won't negotiate, and if they sue, and if you have no charity assistance, then you will be one of the folks who goes bankrupt from medical bills. I said it was hard, and you can see from that chain of conditionals that it absolutely is, but of course it does happen.
The effects of bankruptcy in the U.S. last seven years, at least as far as credit rating is concerned. Not great, but this is not serious in the way that killing people would be serious, if that happened, which again, it basically doesn't if you can navigate the system.
> It does.
0.7% is an absurdly low profit margin. It just is. The rest of your paragraph is basically true, but doesn't change that. At the same time, the U.S. spends a much higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than most developed nations. Ergo, what the U.S. system is really optimized for is wasting money
Since that is not a rational goal for anyone, it's stupid. Evil at least achieves something for the evildoer. I'll leave it at that.
> 0.7% is an absurdly low profit margin. It just is. The rest of your paragraph is basically true, but doesn't change that. At the same time, the U.S. spends a much higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than most developed nations.
Where do you pull out that profit margin. The healthcare sector does vertical integration - they keep the patient inside their services - from insurance to hospitals - and milk them.
Your system is not inefficient. It is. The efficiency is for the shareholders. Not for you.
It's probably worth pointing out that some of the largest American insurance companies are mutuals. They don't have shareholders, or profits. Admittedly this is rarer in health insurance than some other kinds, but State Farm, for example, does a huge health insurance business and sends its excess revenue, if any, back to its policyholder-owners as dividends.
Insurance companies that do make profits do much better than 0.7%, but then imagine how much worse that means doctors and hospitals are doing in order to drive the average down that far. And this was originally about hospital bills. Americans with insurance don't typically get bills from the insurance company, just statements of what they aren't going to pay.
> The healthcare sector does vertical integration
Here you have a point. American antitrust hasn't been good for some time, and tends to be less effective on vertical than horizontal integration. Nevertheless, while I can't immediately find a number on what percentage of American providers are owned by insurance companies, I'm pretty confident it isn't high.
I'm not a lawyer and I've heard of more ridiculous laws than that, so quite possibly, but even if that's the case, I wouldn't think it would cover billing x and collecting 0.1x when you realize someone can't pay x.
And even if I'm wrong about that, when lacking insurance I didn't encounter a medical provider, including big ones with big compliance offices, who wouldn't do it. But others' mileage may vary.
It's not like mental health problems are fringe lately.
It feels to me like you're speaking as though you are in the middle of the bell curve, but from my perspective people who can navigate this system are an exception.
That whole EpiPen debacle springs to mind... I'm sure if you looked into it you'd find other examples of basic medicines being unavailable to large sectors of the population purely due to the cost.
There are many people that don't qualify for free health care (and some that do!) but can't afford co-pays and co-insurance, and must go without that medicine.
And yet they do interfere and are actively engaged in sowing dissent, discord, and wacky ideas by utilizing the power of social media. Your comment is at odds with reality. The rise of people being against something as obviously beneficial as the polio vaccine is an indication of just how powerful disinformation campaigns can be.
The reactance of those against vaccines had completely different sources. It wasn't China or Russia that are responsible here, far from it.
They of course noticed and certainly tried to reinforce that message, because they indeed became aware of the split. But the initial reason was a lack of trust in media and domestic politics and not some external propaganda channel.
And expect this to get much worse if you now increase surveillance. That said, NPR just suspended a journalist that did notice some form of propaganda from domestic sources, which might explain why people were distrustful in the first place.
In fact, you might be a victim of propaganda. Maybe read up on it.
The effectiveness of the polio vaccine has been demonstrated for many decades. That now polio is on the rise and the number of morons who are opposed to that vaccine is due to “propaganda”. State sponsored information warfare has taken what was once kooky ideas and spread them in such a way that a significant portion of the population buys into them.
It is wise for you too to read up on state sponsored disinformation campaigns. Obviously the U.S. and others are involved in such campaigns. Obviously the U.S. government and institutions like the NYT have collaborated to sell a version of events. For instance the NYT endorsing the invasion of Iraq.
The polio vaccine in particular had some hiccups where people got infected with polio due to insufficiently neutered pathogens in the past. Today the vaccine is created differently and this isn't a problem anymore. But still this is a reason why the vaccine might have a bad reputation in some places in the world.
That is has returned to developed countries has probably other issues instead of propaganda. But there aren't any propaganda campaigns in western nations that disincentive vaccination that would create the need for government to spy on your devices. These alleged propaganda campaigns would be easy to find, no? Since they target a broad audience?
You just can’t agree that being opposed to the polio vaccine is entirely idiotic. It’s amazing. It’s been an effective vaccine for over 50 years. There is overwhelming scientific and statistical evidence that it is a good thing and that it should be required. Being opposed to it is entirely moronic.
That people like you are willing to rationalize anti-vaccine sentiments on the polio vaccine is quite illuminating. And you suggest of me that I’m the victim of propaganda!
I have made no such argument. My original comment above was a response to someone saying that Russia/China don’t need to engage in what I call information warfare. My response was that they do engage in it.
And your first paragraph above was to rationalize why some people are opposed to the polio vaccine. You just couldn’t equivocally state that this is an example of people being duped into believing something that is entirely idiotic. It’s not the main point you are trying to get across but it’s worth addressing this since you suggested I might be a victim of propaganda. I think, in our exchange, you are more likely to be a victim of propaganda since you can’t just say, “yeah those people are being duped”.
China and Russia are not responsible despite actively enforcing the lack of trust of the people for their governments and authorities with disinformation. Got it, got any more gems to drop on us plebs?
No external force created the John Birch society that transformed into modern Trumpers. Its purely an American thing.
And, the investigations into election meddling ended with finding out that external forces spent some $100,000 on bad Facebook ads before the 2016 election. Not even a drop in a bucket. A simple blog network that the American conservative capital funds among the tens of thousands that they fund has more reach than such an ad.
What is even worse, even non-conservatives do it for money and make millions out of such activities:
Trump openly asked for Russia to hack the DNC. And they did so. Cleary Russia interfered in our election. I don’t blame them for doing so. We interfere in other nations’ elections but one should not deny the obvious.
> Trump openly asked for Russia to hack the DNC. And they did so.
Says the Democratic side. They are a party in the political fight in the US and they cannot be taken as an objective source. This includes all the 'inquiry committees' that are propped up in the congress and senate whenever the party that wants to persecute the other side has enough majority.
>A <$insert hyper emotional disparagement>. Dictatorships need hardly interfere with the "stability" of a society which <$insert random example some democratic failure>.
And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea.
And in some cases they've been successful at destabilizing formerly fairly sane and stable democratic countries. The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.
However, as a "short term pessimist, but long term optimist" (Hitchens), I'm optimistic that we will start to introspect a bit more as societies and begin to be less easily manipulated. It will take a while, but I believe even now the tide is turning.
> "And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea." (Emphasis; Mine - To single out the bit I'm replying to specifically.)
I still can't believe how readily so very many people continue to fall for it time and again, despite the lessons of history.
Your answer seems a bit vague to me, so I can't follow what your objection is.
But just to be clear, my surprise at their abilities stems from the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward* (look at a night picture of N. Korea, for instance, 80% dark, with no basic streetlighting), that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country.
The Doublethink needed to pull that off must be staggering (thank you Orwell for giving us a vocabulary to express the concepts and experience of living under totalitarianism).
*I know they have ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, also I'm pretty sure their internal surveillance tech is also top notch.
> the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward
A totalitarian country can invest billions of dollars from the federal budget into propaganda in another countries. You don't need technological supremacy to pour money into something. Tight cotroll and insulation makes the task easier, not harder.
> that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country.
Isolation and elimination of infected individuals helps prevent the spread of the disease through hte population
This is certainly an issue, but apart from environmental legislation (e.g. please may I pump raw shit and tonnes of pesticide into public waterways) their main interest is at least in preserving public stability, general wealth and happiness.
Dictatorships though have a more macroscopically sinister agenda against successful democratic rivals.
Foreign interference is almost always bad and against the interests of national security. Lobbying on domestic policy actually has some important uses.
I haven't read much about the domestic capitalists and lobbyists attacking our critical infrastructure with cyber-attacks. Please tell us more about this.
They're the ones that cost-cut the operations of aforementioned critical infrastructure to the point of it being so vulnerable...
Just look at catastrophes caused by PG&E in 2018, ERCOT in 2021, or First Energy in 2003. Not a single one was caused by an attack on critical infrastructure, they're just cutting corners!
They don't have to, they just buy politicians that remove safety laws and break strikes against unsafe working conditions. The Ohio rail disaster was just one example of this happening.
> The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.
Please look away from the curtain hiding rising wealth inequality, cost of living, and the financialization of daily needs. There are no material explanation for the rising contradictions. It is simply our boogymen misleading our population.
It is good we as a society make bets on housing! Who needs to sleep under a roof when you can own shares!
I agree with you that things are currently quite bad, and need to get better. From my UK centric viewpoint, over the last decade Brexit, climate change and the pandemic have proven fertile ground for diverting peoples' attention away from societal issues that have not been addressed, or have even exacerbated by wilful neglect of basic services by Government.
But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry, and people are becoming more wary of being drawn into endless fruitless debates about these things. And after looking up form their smartphones they've finally seen all of the signs for Food Banks, noticed that the weather has gone insane and that the price of biscuits is inhumane and asked themselves 'how did we get here?' 'how do we get back to a better place?' and will hopefully agitate again for a better society.
I'm confused by your comment. First you call climate change a distraction; then you list it as something people are finally becoming aware of? The endless debates were to try and stop it. The population not being able to is just a reflection of the majority.
It's odd how people are trying to divide politics into "culture war" and real problems; it wasn't that long ago climate change was considered a culture war. Labeling something a "culture war" is just the first kneejerk reaction from the right when they appose something.
Creating a culture war is often the first reaction of the right to things they don't like in order to blunt their effect.
"loonie lentil eating lefties", "greenies", "mad Greta" (I'm making these up, but I'm sure I'm sure there's plenty of similar examples). People used to be comforted by these ad-hominems, and it allowed them to continue buying aspirational 4x4 off-road vehicles and 3 flights abroad a year without touching their conscious. They could laugh, share memes, ignore news stories about forest fires in Canada in December or massive loss of ice shelves in Antarctica and carry on as usual.
But as the pot starts to boil harder I get the feeling people are looking away from these distractions and beginning to look more critically at the information they're getting, and beginning to wonder if it's not such a funny joke after all.
>But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry,
Honestly, I don't believe that statement. I think many people equate the culture war issues to the issues later in that second paragraph with the economy and climate (if they even see an issue there). If our leaders are failing at [insert culture war issue here], then that explains why they're failing at [insert economic issue here].
So the culture wars are very interesting. The core of the the idea of a culture war is that class is divided by culture, rather than position in society.
You can look to old propaganda from the early 20th century in Italy and Germany where characters would speak to this. They would deny class lines based on wealth or capital holdings and insist the true class was defined by in and out cultural identifiers.
These culture wars we've been seeing are not organic. They're seeded by orgs that can make money off the outrage. It might be dramatic sounding to say, but the increasing prevalence of culture wars is indicative of the rising tide of fascism. Our societies have done a lot to weaken unions and redefine the meaning of class.
Because we redefined class boundaries to be cultural, we've created an artificial alignment, where say a working class queer urbanite and and a working class non-queer rural worker get shafted by many of the same mechanisms, but are seen to be in different stations because one has access to a bus and the other drives a pickup.
At the end of the day, material issues are what hurt people, but now the rural working class will blame the urbanite, rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their town, and the urbanite will blame the backwards bumpkin rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their city.
While I wont argue pointlessly, I am curious what the median values look like for these stats.
In the US, averaging falls short due to said inequality. A smaller group of people have vastly increased wealth, while others stay stagnant. This moves the needle for certain statistics that don't give a full view of the issue.
Its easy to say "hey the average is fine" when you're talking about NYC where stock brokers and high end real estate really drags up that average.
From the 2020 census, the average income was 107k, where the median income was 67k.
Can you give a tangible example where disinformation from China impacted any domestic topic in the US?
Sure, there is propaganda and attempts to influence certain topics, but I wouldn't want to give up privacy because I don't like some content on TikTok.
I think the divisions are of domestic origin and this argument is more or less FUD.
And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.
Propaganda messages are quite easy and public. And yet I don't think you can name a single instance where such a message would have influenced the beliefs of a significant portion of the domestic population. If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?
I think an example of propaganda is that you need to give up your freedoms for security because of "disinformation". A wrong statement on the internet became a threat to democracy.
>I think the divisions are of domestic origin and this argument is more or less FUD.
I agree, many divisions are definitely of domestic origin. However we definitely know that foreign interference has been at play to identify and amplify those divisions.
>If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?
5G - weird one I know, but agitators gonna agitate.
Climate - Russia was a massive oil exporter, de-carbonizing efforts threatened that.
Atomic power in Germany - Russia definitely didn't want Germany achieving independence from their gas imports.
BRICS - China would love to de-dollarize the world.
>And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.
And this is the advantage of democracies, big shifts can happen. With Dictatorships however it usually takes violence. A lot of violence.
5g? why would china be anti-5g? how is the whole BRICS thing propaganda or foreign interference (is NATO propaganda or just an association, don't even get your point since BRICS isn't even that organized)? I was on the fence but this response put me super firmly into the "this argument is FUD" camp
Hah! Cars have been around for just a hundred years or so, and yet serious efforts to reduce our dependency on them are
"near impossible." Talk about recency bias.
No. But we're talking about cars, not computers, and their novelty is just one among many strong pieces of evidence that a much less car-dependent society is possible, even desirable. Perhaps you can refute the existence billions of people on the planet who live without commuting via car, or the dense networks of public transit which they often rely on?
> Perhaps you can refute the existence billions of people on the planet who live without commuting via car, or the dense networks of public transit which they often rely on?
You have to remember that the infrastructure they depend on to have drinkable water, stores with food on shelves, power and other media, itself is built around cars and trucks, and depends on them being available and able to drive everywhere. Cars are intertwined with everything else in modern civilization - you can't just rip them out. Even if everyone other than critical infrastructure operators suddenly got rid of their cars, this still wouldn't let you eliminate roads from the city, as the trucks and construction equipment and ambulances etc. need to be able to go everywhere.
It’s funny because you’re actually arguing against yourself. Those of us who want to reduce car dependency think exactly that: the use of cars, trucks and roads should be reserved for the less able, the elderly, delivery and emergency vehicles etc. Everyone else who don’t need to be there shouldn’t be. Imagine how much easier and safer everyone’s life would be if roads weren’t gridlocked by the countless million people making unnecessary trips in single occupant automobiles who don’t need to.
Not much? Do you drive? Do you see the number of consumer vehicles on the road versus the number of trucks/delivery vehicles? If we could work towards a huge reduction in consumer vehicles on the road, even if we just replaced them all with busses, that'd be a huge improvement in gas consumption, traffic, (sub)urban sprawl, and more.
So in my .profile I've got
``` alias gg="NEOGIT_SLAVE=1 nvim" ```
It's definitely not perfect but it's good enough to work for basic committing/rebasing flows and it's faster than booting up emacs for the same purpose.