That seems like a naive take on technology to me. Once having/using a smartphone was a simple matter of personal choice. Once, having a car was a choice. If society as a whole adapts to something it's hard to be against it.
I don't know, it seems like it's a weird argument but it's definitely a thought I've had too. When I was eyeballing the Egyptian dynasties I was bit shocked to notice how short lived they all are, compared to what I expected. The majority struggle to get to 150 years, no one gets past 300. In fact old man America will soon be an older polity than all of them except the much maligned Ptolemies (275 years). Same deal for the (well documented) Chinese dynasties. People think kingdoms and states are long enduring, measured in multiple centuries, but they're actually pretty unstable.
It seems like a weird unexamined law of the universe. Dynasties/polities struggle to make it past 300~ without some major interruption or something going wrong, if they haven't imploded earlier. There are exceptions. The Korean Joseon managed an eye watering 500+ years. And the Catholic Papacy has been going on continuously for closer to 2 millenia. But still, 249 years is pretty long in the tooth.
For that matter, look at Europe. France has gone through 5 republics and an empire since 1789 and they got a new constitution around 1958. (West) Germany has had three governments in the past 120 years, most recently in 1945. Spain has only been democratic since 1975. All of Eastern Europe has an entirely new state since 1989. Most of the smaller western countries got conquered by Germany in WWII. Even the UK in its current state is only since 1922, although that's a little unfair since I believe that was evolutionary; the last discontinuity was in 1660 if my history is correct.
I am guessing that the problem is worse where power is inherited. Just because the first guy in the dynasty was capable enough to make himself king and stay in power, doesn't mean his successors are.
That's pretty lame criticism considering many of those things were contemporary SOP for all countries. The USA remind abnormally libertarian despite this. Now it's getting abnormally authoritarian.
I don't care about accusations of xenophobia. I don't like it because I don't like pointless historical revisionism. It's been called Gulf of Mexico since the 17th century, before there was a USA.
And I don't like the stink of arbitrary dictators renaming things for ego or propaganda reasons. This is the sort of thing North Korea or Turkmenbashi would do, and I think that's pathetic for America.
50 years is honestly not that long. When you look at historical dynasties even the shorter ones tend to be ~100 years, if they don't immediately implode.
That was a lot of suffering and chaos of what's actually a fairly trifling dynasty in the grand scheme of things.
Well you have been. The consent was always being manufactured. A certain controversial fellow by the name of Chomsky pointed out decades ago that media would inevitably reflect biases of their owners and staff, and the needs to be a for profit business.
It would seem you didn't care or notice because there previously wasn't an opinion conflict with the owners.
Sensible change. But I wonder if it will encourage retailers to treat the secondary now more food safety related "use by" date as the real "best if used by" date.
If you're like me and slightly paranoid about food expiration dates and sometimes checks things in corner stores, you might notice they like to sell items that can be razor thin on the "sell by" date.
That's exactly the problem attempting to be solved. There should be no problem with a retailer selling a product up to the sell by date, but you are still not keen to buy it because we don't know how much longer after that we have.
Instead you will be able to decide how close you want to cut it to either date.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.
Lebanon is very generous. They have their zones, mostly in the South, Bekaa, and a specific part of Beyrouth. It is also true they have a political wing. But they also have covert enforcers outside those zones and that is what everyone else is most fearful of. They have been involved in sectarian killings tit-for-tats, for many years. Most famously, the murder of PM rafik hariri.
So, otside of those Hizbullah zones, its actually not common to see the Hizbullah yellow flags openly displayed. Or a car bumper sticker. It is for good reason. There was a civil war before, and memories run deep.
I have never heard anyone refer to Neanderthal as a human unless they are talking in a "those are cavemen, early humans" way that's wrong. Where is this coming from? Is it a non-English world thing?
Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.
> Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since...
There's no such rule and Neanderthals are not notable as an exception. Fertility is just a very rough proxy for genetic distance, which is correlated to our arbitrary "species" buckets but by no means a real line or hard rule. Many, many reasonably closely related species can interbreed, like jaguars and lions. Most of homo that had the opportunity could probably interbreed.
It seems to me nearly every story about robots that gain sentience in human storymaking has them eventually turning against their human creators. Even the word robot itself comes from a Czech play were men develop an artificial human and these "robots" then ... usurp and destroy their creators. Am I the only one that finds this interesting and odd?
I also suspect this narrative repetition is not totally unrelated to the current popularity of AI Doomerism.
I think it’s indicative of human psychology. We realize we have the capability to deceive and destroy and be “evil”. We realize that, if we were to judge ourselves impartially, we would probably not come out un-condemned. If we can’t satisfy our own judgmental criteria, it’s doubtful an actual third party set of criteria would be satisfied either.
I agree, I think we make all of this up because we don't know what to expect from the future, except we've learned quite a bit about our own motivations and drivers and so all we can do is look in the mirror and use whatever comes back at us.
Unfortunately we seem to have learned we're really not a very benevolent bunch of people because we've basically plundered the planet, hurt our fellow living creatures and so now all we can do is look at something called "AI" and expect it to the same.
That seems like a naive take on technology to me. Once having/using a smartphone was a simple matter of personal choice. Once, having a car was a choice. If society as a whole adapts to something it's hard to be against it.