Climate engineering is pretty risky, and in the current stage, so small scale, by the time we are able to actually do something it will be too late.
And relying on just investments and market also wont get us there fast enough.
Nuclear is definitely part of the solution, but also much more targeted regulations that outright limit fossil fuels, and initiatives that reduce/ban cars, rewild massive swats of nature, massively scaling down overproduction of goods, and also pushing for reduced consumption in the global north.
Re: first law ... one thing I have been thinking a lot lately is just how much like gardening software is. But in gardening we are not afraid to trim the plants and put them in shape as we go. In software we end up just adding stuff on top, without regard for the overall design. There is this bias towards always adding rather than removing things, and the key to keep things in order is to remove things, to say no, etc.
I don't really agree with this take. Similar to knolling [0], refactoring the code you're working on and that around it should be a natural part of every development flow. If you see a design choice that no longer makes sense, restructure. If code is unused, remove. Etc, we have plenty of powerful tools at our disposal in modern times and always cleaning things up as you go is the only way you will ever keep a code base maintainable. There will never be some magical future where you have time to clean up and refactor those thorny bits, the time is now. Similar to gardening, if you're pruning roses and you see a weed taking root, just pull it out, it's right there. You won't get all the weeds this way and sure, it would be nice to have more time to deal with them, but surely it will help a little.
I think we can look into the notion from complexity theory of attractor states. If you want to make a change, you need to shift your system enough that it moves into another state.
In more normal words - the codebase will fight your changes. And that means that small incremental changes may not be enough, and you will need at least a few big leaps.
> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.
Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking
I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth.
My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.
Rental also enables economic and educational mobility, and provides (some) shelter against severe economic losses that are risks when you own property. For my own part, renting enabled me to move across the country as an 18 year old for a higher education. Even if "affordable" housing could have been owned at that point in my life, I had no idea if I was going to stay in that area or move. And it turns out I did move, quite a lot. I moved almost every 1-2 years, sometimes chasing lower rent, sometimes to move closer to a new job (allowing me to save money and time on commuting). Having to sell a house or even a condo every 1-2 years would have been a nightmare at best.
And that doesn't account for all the economic risk that comes from owning property. When I was renting there was no way I would have been able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars I've had to outlay as a homeowner for everything from water main replacements, roof replacements, plumbing repairs, mold remediation and remodels, HVAC repair / replacement, appliance replacement, tree removal etc. As a renter, all of that is mandated to be repaired by your landlord. Sure, it's possible (and even likely) that your rent will go up next renewal if your landlord is outlaying $20k+ for an emergency roof replacement, but the best part of renting is you can just leave and go somewhere else. Where as if you own property, even if you put the roof repair on credit so that you have a similar "rent" increase, you can't just up and leave if you can't afford the rent anymore. That debt stays with you, not the property, and it just got harder to sell if you used the property as collateral for the loan.
Oh and that changing rent payment, yeah my mortgage payment is 50% higher than when I started. No it's not an ARM, thats just the increase from property taxes and insurance (see aforementioned emergency roof replacement and tree removals). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love owning my own home, and there have been times in the last handful of years that being in a stable location without needing to move or (mostly) worry about significant rent changes has helped me through some situations that would have sucked as a renter. But equally having been a home owner, I absolutely look back on my time as a renter and laugh at how naive I was to think that owning would have been a better deal for me. Renting enabled a degree of flexibility I no longer have. I don't necessarily need that flexibility as much as I did, but I also accept a commute that I previously would have considered moving to reduce.
If houses were just a commodity to be bought and sold we'd have much less of a problem. There were very few homeless a hundred years ago. Efforts to ban residential hotels aka "flophouses" were mostly an effort to remove undesirable people from their communities by making it impossible for them to find housing there they could afford. And the fact that many if not most voters don't want housing for what they consider undesirables in their neighborhoods is a huge problem for the construction of homeless shelters and affordable housing to this day. So I don't think that even completely socializing housing would do all that much to help with the problem.
An alphabet is connected to a language. And controlling the language and its writing, especially related to religion is a very powerful tool. How you do communication, what culture is relevant for you, etc.
And that happens even today - just think of the role English plays, and then American cultural artefacts. And compared it to French at the turn of the 20-th century
Yes, spreading the language creates a lot of opportunities. But not the script. Tadjiks are taught Russian. Both languages use Cyrillic, but in another country with different language but same script, you'd be almost as helpless as transitioning between Cyrillic and Arabic (Iran, which has Farsi, which is almost identical to Tadjik).
And in this regard, the west should be happy: Russia has poor culture of spreading its education. In Central Asia, Turkey has put a lot more effort in building and financing its schools and universities, where they teach English and Turkish. Putin's Russia is just ridiculous in this sense: it keeps "Houses of Friendship" with balalaikas, bear mascots and free vodka on holidays.
One of my friends hitch-hiked from Russia to Iran in the mid-2010s. Despite the countries being sorta friends, he had to speak with the local in broken English, not Russian. That's just ridiculous. Another friend hitchiked to Tajikistan, and there they do learn Russian at schools and can have a bare minimum of a conversation.
During the USSR, the Soviet government pushed the cyclic script on populations that speak very different languages, sometimes forcing them to abandon other scripts, i.e. arabic. Same during the Russian Empire.
Some Central European countries adopted the Latin script as a part of their alignment with Rome, and thus making a stronger political alignment.
Scripts and languages are very powerful political tools. In many cases what script a language uses is not a coincidence but a result of conscious choices and policies at some point.
In these examples, political will and power came first and brought scripts after them. And in all examples, literacy was miniscule.
Also, this would mean that countries using latin, like Indonesia, should be more pro-Western. I guess there might be a correlation, but a tiny one.
Although, same script does help readability and translating things, I'm sure current emphasis on Cyrillic by Russian government (while I lived in Russia, I haven't noticed it at all) is just because it's another occasion to remind the narratives. Not because it's such a super powerful tool. At least, in Russia, in late 80s early 90s, pro-Western narratives spread easily, despite everything.
> So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide.
It's a mix of accurate and inaccurate. It is based on a 1000 years old anti-western politics, but also anti-Eastern politics. And it didn't just get lucky, but there was a massive, massive effort on part of the First Bulgarian Empire to spread it via missionaries and the like, which is what set the foundations for its later use up North, where later the Russian Empire became a thing and so on ...
I want to point out that spreading the script back then meant spreading it in churches. I don't know for sure, but it might have come with first translations of Bible into local languages.
We nowadays instead perceive the question like whether or not a whole country will 99% literacy should switch writing system.
It's a bit more complicated. The OG cyclic was the the Glagolitic - which is very different from the greek alphabet.
The proper Cyrillic, while based on the greek alphabet, was developed then specifically and consciously as a political project against Byzantium, as of course the byzantines would much prefer to use greek for church and business ...
I think some inhibitions or blockers fall off, and you kind of run on dream logic. I had some major surgery and my sister was supposed to come in and help out right after it. She came right as they were bringing me back in to the room, and apparently I was commandeering the doctors to give her space and make her a coffee cause "Im a fucking queen, and you will do as I tell you"... I don't remember any of it.
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