1\ It is well to ridicule those who dip into the third world for a few instagram moments and come away with a "transformative" experience
So I would like to submit myself for ridicule!
2\ I flew into Dubai last month to meet, of all people, a Twitter friend
He hired a guide, and we drove into the desert for one of those curated came rides
It was amazing!
3\ And it was all the cliches you'd expect
The dry heat was a "force pressing down on you" etc. etc.
But it really was eye opening
Every. Single. Thing. in the desert lives on the knife's edge of existence
4\ Of course, that is true everywhere in nature, but in the desert the fact is visually apparent, because desert is 99% nothingness and 1% tenuous existence
5\ Anyway, when you are lurching through a timeless landscape on a dromedary, watching lizards skitter across the dunes, a lot of things click into place:
Chattel slavery, the in-group / out-group dipole, bride price
6\ And oddly, there are many ways you can go with these vignettes:
Relativism: "Every culture is a priceless artifact!"
Presentism: "Modernity is morally superior!"
Realism: "Wow, I'd have owned slaves back then. Thank god I'm alive now!"
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Listening to an Amy Chua book lament that capitalism has only let a few crumbs fall to the world's poor
While literally driving by African cow herders on their smart phones
Even if it were true, which it is not, that capitalism mostly enriches the rich, Steve Jobs' table scraps did more for an entire continent than it did for itself in 10,000 years
Chua argues that ethnically homogenous China's lack of economic persecution is the exception that proves the rule of "market dominant minorities" catalyzing their own extermination
Uhhh, there was this thing called the Cultural Revolution...
2\ A distributed network is only as safe as the cost to attack it, which means that miners/validators must be paid to be honest by users via transaction fees and/or seigniorage (inflation)
Crypto fans don't want inflation so let's assume Musk's dream coin will only have fees
3\ Let's also assume we want a $100B annual security budget. That's 2.5x $BTC's current security budget (but still paltry compared to the US' $700B military spend)
Musk proposes 100x more transaction throughput than $BTC, or ~10B transactions per year
There are many types of personality, but only one type of intelligence
What would it be like to live in a world reversed: a single personality, but many intelligences?
I still see modish pieces about "fluid" vs "crystallized" intelligence. Apparently fluid intelligence is just g in disguise, and crystallized is just picked up by culture loaded tests?
1\ An urban legend that refuses to die is the idea that "BIPOC patients are more likely to die in childbirth" and that this must reflect systemic racism
This idea is taken so seriously that it's now the subject of proposed legislation:
1\ Been reading Gennep's "Rites of Passage", about the conserved forms of human ritual across time and space
One of the most primal concepts for the human brain is the "crossing of thresholds"
Thresholds are central to rituals of all types (birth, marriage, war, diplomacy)...
2\ And COVID-19 hygiene rituals are no different
This morning we breakfasted at a place where the Karens emerged from their cars already masked, walked masked to the hostess...then happily unmasked once past the door...
3\ After breakfast we went to a public playground with no obvious entry point or threshold. *Everyone* was masked on slide and swing
Later we drove to a private playground with an entry gate. Same Karen demographic, same masks, but they all unmasked once past the gate