As someone who lives in New York, I don't understand why Cormorants get so much hate from bass fishermen. There can't really be that much pressure from cormorants on the small mouth fisheries. Cormorants are beautiful birds and the idea that they are a pest is...pretty dumb.
> I don’t think websites were ever intended to be made only by “web professionals.”
I absolutely agree with this, in both directions - the tools we have kind of suck if the web WAS meant for professionals, but also that I remember learning HTML from tutorials in 1995, and back then there wasn't much of a difference between a good website or a great website except that a good website used a table based layout and didn't have prev/next navigation.
Everything becomes blurry when institutions accept public funding (for research, etc.) as well as accepting tax breaks or exemption status.
I'm of the opinion that we actually require far too little of organizations that accept public money. We should be getting more public-good guarantees to go along with that money. (I'm thinking stuff like: any research done with public funding should have free-to-access results, published under a permissive copyleft-like license.)
"The only way to do this is to give the person a place to live."
The people who are homeless are homeless because they, due to drugs, alcohol, or mental illness aren't safe to have around others of extreme poverty.
My friend operate several halfway houses. Almost weekly he has to kick someone out because they are a danger to staff or other clients. Generally this is at 2am, and the police are involved.
Our society has decided that institutionalizing people is inhumane. Well, if someone isn't safe enough to be in a halfway house and institutions are inhumane, the only place for them to go is the street, and, eventually, if they are lucky, prison.
"When the compassionate revolution came, he wrote, it would 'mark the termination of the past 50,000-year epic of evolution.'"
This is one of the scariest sentences I think I've read in recent memory. We are living it today.
The problematic sentence is here: "I propose to make an ape out of a rat,"
What intellectuals (in my experience, almost all intellectuals) fail to realize is that they are a tiny sliver of the human population. And they are relatively insular. And they deign to design social frameworks that service only their small, insular sliver of humanity.
Most people have more in common with the ape and the rat than the intellectual. Even the intellectual, though he doesn't know it, is mostly driven by the same motivations as the ape and the rat.
Design a framework that works for single moms, burn out high school football players still reliving the glory days, and people working dead-end jobs squirreling away for their short, dismal retirements.
Every time you try and treat the whole of society like intellectuals, you will create a system the falls short.
Literally this. The reason I like night skies and tall heights is that they serve as a grounding rod of sorts, a reminder that I am not the whole, and the whole is not me. That beyond a single degree of separation, I cannot hope to reliably guide the lives of others. No system exists independent of others, nobody lives in a vacuum or on an island, and everything we do is of monumental import to someone else’s existence even if neither party realizes it.
To assume the intellect of others is folly when designing solutions or systems. Instead, a more reliable and scalable indicator of outcomes are actions, not words, and that is something we can shape or control with sufficient stimuli.
Or to be more blunt: we should cease assuming that if we enlighten others that the world will be better, and instead build a better world absent the requirement for enlightenment.
reply