In other words, if everyone in a mutual aid society is a crab who crossed half the world and an entire ocean to escape the bucket, eventually said crabs stop acting like you'd expect crabs in a bucket to act, and their social dynamics are consequently less suffocating.

The amount of energy in your brain it takes to do this basic thing versus the amount of energy in a datacenter somewhere, and the slide into cognitive atrophy that must result...

There are things I'll happily use LLMs to accomplish, but offloading day-to-day executive function will never, ever be on that list. And every day I understand and sympathize with the ethos of the Butlerian Jihad more and more.

Our politicians did then and do now frequently miss the trees for the forest when assessing foreign crises (and I'm inverting that saying deliberately). Ho Chi Min was a nationalist first and a communist second, but all our leaders could see was a monolithic, global communist bloc. In fairness to them, hindsight is 20/20 and the Sino-Soviet split wasn't obvious to outsiders until the late 60s or early 70s.

We still don't trade with Cuba, and that is a clear sign of ongoing foreign policy failure. But who knows, in a year's time we may be trading with Cuba again. We're trading with Venezuela now.

I'm getting at outcomes, whether or not a war is a good idea in the first place. War is never a good choice, IMO, but can sometimes be a necessary choice or an inevitability.

It's perfectly reasonable to point out that a war initiated for the wrong reasons had good (or some good) outcomes, or that a war initiated for the right reasons had bad (or some bad) outcomes. And that all war is ultimately terrible.

Our own Civil War was initiated for the right reasons and yet it became the bloodiest war in our history. More Americans died during our Civil War than during all our other wars put together, and Britain was able to end slavery across their whole empire without any war at all, though at great national expense (continuing payments until 2015 or so) and with some bloodshed on the seas.

Strange. I don't remember writing that trading relations afterward justify the initiation of a war. Instead, I only remember writing that it is a better metric to assess the outcomes.

It's stranger still that you read these things between the lines, when my comment specifically includes a recollection of my own disquiet with the Afghanistan War, probably the most justified war of the four enumerated, that I felt while the war was happening.

Korea: the south became an economic powerhouse with whom we now trade for critical computer components and is a generally reliable ally in the region.

Vietnam: we now trade with them happily and enjoy generally productive relations, largely because they fought us for less than two decades but fought China for centuries and centuries.

Iraq: we aren't yet a generation past, but the government they have now is better than what they had under Saddam Hussein, even if it was almost immediately subverted by Iran. And jury is out on Iran because that hot war just started.

Afghanistan: we aren't yet a generation past, but very likely the most clear failure in this list. I remember thinking in high school (during the active phase of the war): "if we actually want to make a difference, we'd have to stay a century or more, and we don't have the will to do that the way the British or Russians tried to, and even they ultimately failed to make any local changes."

Europeans also need to realize that everyday Americans don't actually care about Europe very much and never truly have. It took the Lusitania to get us into World War I, Pearl Harbor (and Hitler's declaration of war) to get us into World War II, and the credible threat of the Soviet Union to keep us in Europe for decades after the war. The husk of Russia at the center of the Soviet skeleton isn't a credible threat to America, and the American reversion to the mean of isolationism began as the Cold War ended. That reversion completed sometime between 2010 and 2015. There is a new credible threat, but that is China, and even to well informed Americans Europe is slipping from their attention.

Most people in Trump's government probably don't care that much about reopening Hormuz quickly. Gas prices are only truly spiking in U.S. states where local environmental regulations have obstructed access to domestic and regional supply, and the largest of those states (i.e. California, New York) have broken against Republicans in every Presidential election (9 of them in a row) since the end of the Cold War.

It is: disable CH encryption because the owner of this device, to whom we are leasing connectivity, has set the "isChild" flag for this device to true in her account with us so that we can filter the Internet for this device.

There's no such standard signal right now. But I'd prefer such a signal strongly over code that I cannot control running on my own device to enforce legislation. If we're going to enforce these things somewhere, code on my devices is the last place I want that enforcement to happen.

> ...and why would any device respect it?

Because if they do not the ISP drops all further packets and the connection dies.

If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liability.

Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard set of controls to their customers informing the common person (in common language) who is using those connections and what they are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a router with robust access controls, designating some devices (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure (e.g. the ONT for fiber connections). For cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents' devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging to children (based on IMEI).

When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a presentation about these tools, and about the liability the parents face for allowing their children unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content, no different than allowing children to drink alcohol.

It may even make sense to require ISPs and cellular providers to track MAC addresses and IMEIs of devices their own customers designate as "for children" and make those providers liable for not filtering Internet for those devices, and also liable for allowing targeted advertising against those devices.

I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it, but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to do it right. It's a dead-end, losing strategy to blanket oppose one solution to legislators and provide no alternative. I write all of that as someone who values privacy and liberty, both in meatspace and cyberspace.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Regiment

I think this experience is now rare if you are computer-adept, though it was more common even just a few decades ago. But the first thing I do when I see a totally unfamiliar UI is stare at it for a bit until I think I understand the information hierarchy. And then try to verify that understanding by clicking things. Eventually I acquire that "perceiving the screen as a whole feeling", but I still suspect that it's something resembling the human vision process generally, under the hood of conscious perception.

When introducing non-computer people to a new application, I find it helps (or is sometimes necessary) to walk them through each part of the screen, explaining what it is for and how it relates to the others. If someone doesn't or can't retain that explanation, usually nothing will help them. But if they do/can retain it, I find even non-computer people are much quicker in noticing particular updates to the application's or OS's GUI.

The hero of the novel, Martin Padway, gets his start teaching Arabic numerals to a Syrian banker in Rome, and then distilling brandy. By the end of the novel he's running a newspaper and has a semaphore telegraph network set up throughout Italy. Good fun reading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so have too many open source software advocates. But all the free software advocates I've read and listened to over the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you describe.