613 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2022
    1. No additional considerations for iOS, macOS, or tvOS.

      Believe it or not, finding this sentence, just now was actually a huge breakthrough in my iPhone Keyboard Reference project...

      Proud of you, bastards, for actually saying one sentence!

    1. As long as all the states on the planetwere equally weak, a certain balance prevailed. But from the momentthat several European states developed a significantly greater fiscal,administrative, and military capacity, a new dynamic emerged.
    2. But it was pre-cisely this fiscal, financial, and military capacity that was to provedecisive for the rise of Europe’s power.
    3. In concreteterms, a state that levies taxes amounting to only 1 percent of the na-tional income has very little power and capacity to mobilize society.
    1. O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors cannot assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. We may see such an act in America.

      Oh the ironies of this as he was talking about a small proportion of the population at the time, a large swath of which (namely enslaved persons with no power) had no arms to protect themselves against him.

      His definition of "freemen" was painfully limiting for someone speaking about freedom in such lofty terms.

    1. Harness collective intelligence augmented by digital technology, and unlock exponential innovation. Beyond old hierarchical structures and archaic tools.

      https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

      The words "beyond", "hierarchical", and "archaic" are all designed to marginalize prior thought and tools which all work, and are likely upon which this broader idea is built. This is a potentially toxic means of creating "power over" this prior art rather than a more open spirit of "power with".

    1. In 1968, he resigned as Secretary of Defense to become President of the World Bank.

      Similarly Paul Wolfowitz was U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense running the U.S. war in Iraq before leaving to become the 10th President of the World Bank.

      McNamara was the 5th President of the World Bank.

    1. https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/4-types-of-power/#comment-122967

      Given your area, if you haven't found it yet, you might appreciate going a generation further back in your references with: Mary P. Follett. Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, ed. by E. M. Fox and L. Urwick (London: Pitman Publishing, 1940). She had some interesting work in organization theory you might appreciate. Wikipedia can give you a quick overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett#Organizational_theory

    2. Power within is related to a person’s “sense of self-worth and self-knowledge; it includes an ability to recognize individual differences while respecting others” [1] (p. 45). Power within involves people having a sense of their own capacity and self-worth [2]. Power within allows people to recognise their “power to” and “power with”, and believe they can make a difference [1].

      I've seen definitions of the others before but not "power within".

  2. May 2022
    1. The cycle thermal efficiency (net power/heat input) for a supercritical vaporgenerator will exceed that for a subcritical cycle.
    2. A possible advantage to using the recuperative preheaters is that they reducethe heat load on the condenser and cooling tower. The lower capital cost for asmaller condenser and cooling tower must be compared to the extra cost for therecuperators; over the long haul, the resulting higher efficiency should meanlower operating cost
    3. The features that distinguish the Kalinacycles (there are several versions) from other binary cycles are as follows
    4. Given thesmall size of turbines using organic working fluids, practical considerations maylead to an alternative design using two separate turbines; see Figure 8.13.
    5. Dual-pressure binary plant: pressure-enthalpy process diagram
    6. Dual-pressure binary plant: Simplified schematic flow diagram
    7. The Carnot efficiency is the highest possible efficiency

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    1. By exam-ining how movement toward equality has actually been produced, wecan learn precious lessons for our future and better understand thestruggles and mobilizations that have made this movement possible,as well as the institutional structures and legal, social, fiscal, educa-tional, and electoral systems that have allowed equality to become alasting reality.

      Understanding the history of inequality and how changes in institutional structures in legal, social, fiscal educational, and electoral systems have encouraged change toward equality, we might continue to change and modify these to ensure even greater equality.

    1. I originally said: It feels like the principle of least power in action. But another way of rephrasing “least power” is “most availability.” Technologies that are old, simple, and boring tend to be more widely available.

      This is also the reason that space platforms are built on incredibly old computing systems, we know what all the problems and issues are. Then when the satellite is up in outer-space where it's not accessible and not easily repairable, it will hopefully work as expected forever.

    1. therefore the gases should be removed from the condenser. This can be achieved byinstalling vacuum pumps, compressors, or steam ejectors. The condenser heat removalis done either by using a cooling tower or through cold air circulation in the condenser.The condensate forms a small fraction of the cooling water circuit, a large portion ofwhich is then evaporated and dispersed into the atmosphere by the cooling tower. Thecooling water surplus (blow down) is disposed of in shallow injection wells. In singleflash condensation system, the condensate does have direct contact with the coolingwater.
    2. Single flash power plants are classified according to their steam turbines types, i.e., theturbine exit conditions. Two such basic types are the single flash with a condensationsystem and the single flash back pressure system. In the first type, a condenser oper-ating at very low pressure is used to condensate the steam leaving the steam turbine.The condenser should operate at low vacuum pressure to maintain a large enthalpy dif-ference across the expansion process of the steam turbine, hence resulting in a higherpower output. The geothermal fluid usually contains non-condensable gases which arecollected at the condenser. Such a collection of gases may raise the condenser pressure,
    1. Whig history (or Whig historiography), often appearing as whig history, is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]

      Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.


      It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

      Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

    1. GS11=Γin=Z02−Z01Z02+Z01

      According to the definition (2.4.11) and (2.4.10), GS11 should be :

      (Z_02 - Z_01^*)/(Z_02 + Z_01)

      There is a complex conjugate of Z_01 at the numerator, which is a consequence of the power-wave definition.

      Of course there is no change is Z_01 is real, but I think it should be mentioned, since the power-waves definition may lead to unexpected results for complex-valued impedances.

    1. Section 3.3 indicates that the parameters most correlated to suitable geothermal sites are carbon diox-307ide, earthquake density, elevation/depth, global heat flow, sediment thickness, and surface air temperature.

      How is carbon dioxide a parameter? Is it talking about the carbon dioxide emission of the plant?

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    1. instead of the “Mastodon appraoch” we take the “Replit approach”

      I'm confused by the continual references to the Replit. Once you have Replit-style power, you can do Mastodon interop—but it keeps you dependent on third-party SaaS. Continuing to violate the principle of least power isn't really any improvement. If you're going to shoot for displacing the status quo, it should be to enable public participation from people who have nothing more than a Neocities account or a static site published with GitHub Pages or one of the many other providers. Once you bring "live" backends into this (in contrast to "dead" media like RSS/Atom), you've pretty much compromised the whole thing.

    2. What happens if - maybe! - there’s a model of decentralization that feels more like a bunch of weird Replits networking with each other.

      Get rid of the networking, and make it more like the RSS/Atom model.

      ActivityPub, for example, shouldn't really require active server support if you just want publish to the clear Web (i.e. have no use for DMs). Anyone, anywhere can add RSS/Atom "support" to their blog—it's just dumping another asset on their (possibly static!) site. Not so with something like Mastodon, which is unfortunate. It violates the Principle of Least Power at a fundamental level.

    1. I wrote about my idea for Library.json a while back. It’s this idea that we might be able to rebuild these monolithic centralized services like Goodreads using nothing by a little RSS.

      See also this thread with Noel De Martin, discussing a (Solid-based) organizer for your media library/watchlist: https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin/105646436548899306

      It shouldn't require Solid-level powers to run this. A design based upon "inert" data like RSS/Atom/JSON feeds (that don't require a smart backend to take on the role of an active participant in the protocol) would beat every attempt at Solid, ActivityPub, etc. that has been tried so far. "Inert"/"dead" media that works by just dumping some content on a Web-reachable endpoint somewhere, including a static site, is always going to be more accessible/approachable than something that requires either a server plug-in or a whole new backend to handle.

      The litmus test for any new proposal for a social protocol should be, "If I can't join the conversation by thumping on my SSG to get it to produce the right kind of output—the way that it's possible with RSS/Atom—then the design is fundamentally flawed and needs to be fixed."

    1. Theoretically, there are many plugins for webservers adding support for scripting using any scripting language you can name. These are sometimes used to host full-blown web applications but I don't see them being used to facilitate mildly dynamic functionality.

      All in all, despite its own flaws, I think this piece hints at a useful ontology for understanding the nuanced, difficult-to-name, POLP-violating design flaws in stuff like Mastodon/ActivityPub—and why BYFOB/S4 is a better fit, esp. for non-technical people.

      https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22black+and+dead+is+all+you+need%22+user:mrcolbyrussell

    2. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.

      Unnecessary violation of the Principle of Least Power.

      No active server component is necessary for this. It can be handled by the user agent's content negotiation.

  3. Apr 2022
    1. The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor

      Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.


      On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx

      Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)

    1. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a network technology that allows us to deliver both data and power over a single standard Ethernet cable. So we can use network cables like Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6/Cat6a cables to provide data connections and power to a Wifi access point, IP camera, VoIP phone, PoE lighting or any other device.

      Power over Ethernet (PoE vs PoE+ vs PoE++) makes money Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a network technology that allows us to deliver both data and power over a single standard Ethernet cable. So we can use network cables like Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6/Cat6a cables to provide data connections and power to a Wifi access point, IP camera, VoIP phone, PoE lighting or any other device.

    1. Even as he was critical of overabundance, Gesner exulted in it, seeking exhaustiveness in his accumulation of both themes and works from which others could choose according to their judgment and interests.

      Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

  4. Mar 2022
    1. An early example of a timber circle witnessed by Europeans was recorded by watercolor artist John White in July 1585 when he visited the Algonquian village of Secotan in North Carolina. White was the artist-illustrator and mapmaker for the Roanoke Colony expedition sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to begin the first attempts at British colonization of the Americas.[2] White's works represent the sole-surviving visual record of the native inhabitants of the Americas as encountered by England's first colonizers on the Atlantic seaboard.[3] White's watercolor and the writings of the chronicler who accompanied him, Thomas Harriot, describes a great religious festival, possibly the Green Corn ceremony, with participants holding a ceremonial dance at a timber circle. The posts of the circle were carved with faces. Harriot noted that many of the participants had come from surrounding villages and that "every man attyred in the most strange fashion they can devise havinge certayne marks on the backs to declare of what place they bee." and that "Three of the fayrest Virgins" danced around a central post at the center of the timber circle.[4]

      Artist, illustrator and mapmaker John White painted a watercolor in July 1585 of a group of Native Americans in the Secotan village in North America. Both he and chronicler Thomas Harriot described a gathering of Indigenous peoples gathered in the Algonquian village as part of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Colony expedition. They describe a festival with participants holding a dance at a timber circle, the posts of which were carved with with faces.

      Harriot wrote that participants had come from surrounding villages and that "every man attyred in the most strange fashion they can devise havinge certayne marks on the backs to declare of what place they bee."

      Secotans dancing in a timber circle in North Carolina, watercolor painted by John White in 1585


      This evidence would generally support some of Lynne Kelly's thesis in Knowledge and Power. A group of neighboring peoples gathering, possibly for the Green Corn Ceremony, ostensibly to strengthen social ties and potentially to strengthen and trade knowledge.

      Would we also see others of her list of markers in the area?

      Read references: - Daniels, Dennis F. "John White". NCpedia. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - Tucker, Abigal (December 2008). "Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - "A Selection of John White's Watercolors : A festive dance". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2017-12-19.

    1. Refinement is a social process

      The idea that refinement is a social process is a powerful one, but it is limited by the society's power structures, scale, and access to the original material and least powerful person's ability to help refine it.

    1. it’s even less clear if the current war in Ukraine will speed up stalled federal climate policy. But the war might convince some consumers to retrofit their own homes.

      Community scale efforts can play a big role now....mobilise the commons!

  5. Feb 2022
    1. Understanding the effects of introducing Solar PV and how it can affect “Power Factor” on complex Industrial/Commercial sites
    1. First, consider who gets to make the rules. Tenured scholars who, as we’ve noted, are mostly white and male, largely make the rules that determine who else can join the tenured ranks. This involves what sociologists call “boundary work,” or the practice of a group setting rules to determine who is good enough to join. And as such, many of the rules established around tenure over the years work really well for white scholars, but don’t adequately capture the contributions of scholars of color.

      Boundary work is the practice of a group that sets the rules to determine who is and isn't good enough to join the group.

      Link to Groucho Marx quote, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

  6. Jan 2022
    1. Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.

      —Viet Thanh Nguyen

    1. Figure 1. Autocratic leadership transitions, 1946 to 2014.

      peaceful vs. unpeaceful power transitions:

      From 1946 to 2014, only 44 percent of autocratic leadership transitions were peaceful and resulted in the continuation of the regime after the departure of the incumbent.

  7. Dec 2021
    1. Pratt persuaded tribal elders and chiefs that the reason the "Washichu" (Lakota word for white man, loosely translates to Takes the Fat) had been able to take their land was that the Indians were uneducated. He said that the Natives were disadvantaged by being unable to speak and write English and, if they had that knowledge, they might have been able to protect themselves.

      Example where literacy provides perceived power over orality.

    1. But we often find such regional networks developinglargely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having anexcuse to visit one another from time to time;33 and there are plentyof other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

      There is certainly social lubrication of visiting people from time to time which can help and advance societies, but this regular visiting can also be seen as a means of reinforcing one's oral cultural history through spaced repetition.

      It can be seen as "trade" but in a way that anthropologists have generally ignored for lack of imagination for what may have been actually happening.

    2. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence ofobjects – very often precious stones, shells or other items ofadornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Oftenthese were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would laterfind being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world.

      Is it also possible that these items may have served the purpose of mnemonic devices as a means of transporting (otherwise invisible) information from one area or culture to another?

      Can we build evidence for this from the archaeological record?

      Relate this to the idea of expanding the traditional "land, labor, capital" theory of economics to include "information" as a basic building block

  8. Nov 2021
    1. “Evangelical militancy is often depicted as a response to fear,” she told me. “But it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”

      This sort of power dynamic in smaller individual churches sounds like the problems of power in the centralized Catholic church. In this case it's decentralized into thousands of smaller churches.

    1. “(T)he 2020 election revealed that, at least with respect to an administration’s senior most officials, the Hatch Act is only as effective as the White House decides it will be. Where, as happened here, the White House chooses to ignore the Hatch Act’s requirements, then the American public is left with no protection against senior administration officials using their official authority for partisan political gain in violation of the law,” it reads.
    1. It’s not just the hyper-social and the flirtatious who have found themselves victims of the New Puritanism. People who are, for lack of a more precise word, difficult have trouble too. They are haughty, impatient, confrontational, or insufficiently interested in people whom they perceive to be less talented. Others are high achievers, who in turn set high standards for their colleagues or students. When those high standards are not met, these people say so, and that doesn’t go over well. Some of them like to push boundaries, especially intellectual boundaries, or to question orthodoxies. When people disagree with them, they argue back with relish.

      How much of this can be written down to differing personal contexts and lack of respect for people's humanity? Are the neurodivergent being punished in these spaces?

      Applebaum provides a list of potential conflict areas of cancel culture outside of power dynamics.

    2. Once it was not just okay but admirable that Chua and Rubenfeld had law-school students over to their house for gatherings. That moment has passed. So, too, has the time when a student could discuss her personal problems with her professor, or when an employee could gossip with his employer. Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky.

      Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

      I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

    3. In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.

      Note the power here of Applebaum providing very specific and citable examples.

      The specificity is more powerful than the generality of these sorts of ills which we know exist in these regimes.

    4. Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

      While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.

      These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.

      If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.

      Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.

    5. Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.

      Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

      Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

      Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

      It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

      Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

    6. One of the people I spoke with was asked to apologize for an offense that broke no existing rules. “I said, ‘What am I apologizing for?’ And they said, ‘Well, their feelings were hurt.’ So I crafted my apology around that: ‘If I did say something that upset you, I didn’t anticipate that would happen.’ ” The apology was initially accepted, but his problems didn’t end.

      Even in cases where one apologizes for offences which don't break existing rules and the apology is accepted by the transgressed, the social ostracism doesn't end. This is a part of the indeterminate length of the social sentences that transgressors suffer.


      What exactly are these unwritten rules? In some cases they may be examples of institutional power wielding influence in cases where people aren't giving the full benefit of humanity and consideration to others. Some may call some of these instances microaggressions or social constructs similar to them.

    7. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor. This—the convicting and sentencing without due process, or mercy—should profoundly bother Americans.

      There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

      In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

    8. There is a reason that Laura Kipnis, an academic at Northwestern, required an entire book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, to recount the repercussions, including to herself, of two allegations of sexual harassment against one man at her university; after she referred to the case in an article about “sexual paranoia,” students demanded that the university investigate her, too. A full explanation of the personal, professional, and political nuances in both cases needed a lot of space.

      Definitely unfortunate for Laura Kipnis (to me on the surface), but are these growing cases helping to deconstruct some of the unfair power structures which we've institutionalized over time? Dismantling them is certainly worthwhile, but the question is are the correct institutions and people paying the price and doing the work? In Kipnis's case, she probably isn't the right person to be paying the price, but rather the institution itself.

      Another example of this is that of Donald McNeil in the paragraph above (in the related article).

    1. There was no ancient poet called “Homer,” he argued. Nor were the poems attributed to him “written” by any single individual. Rather, they were the product of a centuries-long tradition of poet-performers.

      Are there possibly any physical artifacts in physical archaeology that may fit into the structure of the thesis made by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies?

      What would we be looking for? Small mnemonic devices? Menhir? Standing stones? Wooden or stone circles? Other examples of extended ekphrasis similar to that of the shield of Achilles?

      cf: Expanding Ekphrasis to the Broader Field of Mnemotechny: or How the Shield of Achilles Relates to a Towel, Car, and Water Buffalo

    1. I will use Drexel’s treatise asrepresentative of the basic principles of note taking that were widely sharedin sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe across national and religiousdivides.

      Religious and national divides were likely very important here as authority from above would have been even more important than in modern time. Related to this is the change in mnemonic traditions due to religious and political mores around the time of Peter Ramus.

  9. Oct 2021
    1. Analog zur Struktur des Zettelkastens baut Luhmanns Systemtheorie nicht auf Axiome und bietet keine Hierarchien von Begriffen oder Thesen. Zentrale Begriffe sind, ebenso wie die einzelnen Zettel, stark untereinander vernetzt und gewinnen erst im Kontext Bedeutung.

      machine translation:

      Analogous to the structure of the card box, Luhmann's system theory is not based on axioms and does not offer any hierarchies of terms or theses. Central terms, like the individual pieces of paper, are strongly interlinked and only gain meaning in the context.

      There's something interesting here about avoiding hierarchies and instead interlinking things and giving them meaning based on context.

      Could a reformulation of ideas like the scala naturae into these sorts of settings be a way to remove some of the social cruft from our culture from an anthropological point of view? This could help us remove structural racism and other issues we have with genetics and our political power structures.

      Could such a redesign force the idea of "power with" and prevent "power over"?

    1. We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

      The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

    2. example from your colleague, Victor Lee. We began a recent talk about Annotation.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(57, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Remi Kalir with Victor’s tweet. His perspective on access, ownership, and power helped us to discuss a tension between readers who can and do write annotation —whether in books or the built environment— and the cultural rites of annotation, often unwritten, that also constrain where and how notes are added to everyday texts.

      Ipsa annotātiō potestas est.

      (Annotation is power.)

    1. Today, countries, municipalities and NGOs are the entities that supposedly take care of common goods, but their capacity to do so is very limited due to their centralized structure. They are limited by the relative ineffectiveness of centralized constructs — in sense-making, scalable action, engagement and alignment of interests, and more severely, by the personal interests of the people steering them, which often override their interest to take care for the benefit of the community they are in charge of steering. Indeed, neglecting such common goods is one of the biggest problems of humanity in almost every possible domain and circle we can think of.

      Pith articulation of the central problem of central, hierarchical human governance systems.

    1. One major problem with top-down hierarchies is that they contain concentrated points of failure, since individuals are subject to bias and have limited bandwidth. The interests of the powerful few are often misaligned with those of the less powerful many, leaving the decision-makers frequently incentivized to act against the common good.

      An emergent property of top down hierarchies.

    1. As a result, cloud-rendering servers typically face utilization issues due to the need to plan for peak demand. A cloud-gaming service might require 75,000 dedicated servers for the Cleveland area at 8PM Sunday night, but only 4,000 at 4AM Monday. As a consumer, you can purchase a $400 GPU and let it sit offline as much as you want, but data-center economics are oriented toward optimizing for demand.

      Power generation metaphors; peak vs off-peak demand; can off-peak generation be stored / repurposed? What would a computing power battery look like?

    2. And even at ultra-low latency, it makes little sense to stream (versus locally process) AR data given the speed at which a camera moves and new input data is received (i.e. literally the speed of light and from only a few feet away). Given the intensive computational requirements of AR, it’s therefore likely our core personal/mobile devices will be able to do a ‘good enough’ job at most real-time rendering.

      Data streaming rates, computing power, video displays, etc, all the technologies will progress at different rates, and this differential will play a role in determining the best solution for advancing

    1. time as the new currency

      Marilyn Waring

      Time: The New Currency

      Women tend to be excluded from the national economy because their work is not paid and therefore not value or factored into the Gross Domestic Product of a nation. Money, then, is a mechanism for disempowerment.

  10. theliturgists.com theliturgists.com
    1. THE SUNDAY THING

      The Sunday Thing

      The love of money is the root of all evil

      This week, Michael Gungor asked us to discuss money in our breakout groups.

      Money is power

      We outsource our power and authority to those who claim to have greater access to capital, because we underestimate and undervalue our own social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism). https://hypothes.is/a/667dOC0bEeyV6Itx3ySxmw

      Indigenous cultures in Canada were disempowered by outlawing the cultural practice of generosity (potlatch) and replacing the practice with centralized power over the medium of exchange: money. Money is a mechanism of disempowerment.

      Money is a shared story we tell ourselves about what has value. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/795246685

      We translated “ekklesia” as church. It is the deliberative body of the experiment in democracy in Athens, Greece. The people who are figuring out how to live together in the commons. The work of the people. The Liturgists.


      The Story of Money

      In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

      On the Media: Full Faith & Credit


      Squid Game

      People were also discussing Squid Game.

      Squid Game was on my mind today before the call. “The reality of the history of Canada’s mining industry makes #SquidGame look like child’s play.” https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449726452098682881?s=20

      The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.

      Commons: Mining

    1. journalism historian David Mindich

      The View from Somewhere

      Hallin’s spheres

      At 11 minutes into this podcast episode, David Mindich provides an overview of Hallin’s spheres.

      Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

      Wikipedia: Hallin's spheres

      I learned about this podcast from Sandy and Nora in their episode, Canada’s democratic deficit.

    1. As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the sameway they had always perceived servants . . . shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful,ungrateful, dishonest. . . .”

      Interestingly, this is still all-too-often how business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations view their own workers.

    1. The real conspiracies are hiding in plain sight.

      The big difference between the paranoiac's conspiracy theories and the real ones is that in the fake ones the conspirators are "in it together" and form a like-minded group. In reality, the billionaires would be very happy to through each other under the bus if they could.

      So it's not so much that there are real conspiracies as there are a known set of methods and tools - known to everyone, everywhere - that allow this gross power imbalance to be created. These methods and tools are known to all but can only be used by the rich because they are themselves very costly.

    1. power doesn't give up power easily. Power doesn't topple very easily. All of these organizers are working in tremendous conditions of uncertainty. 
  11. Sep 2021
    1. At the most foundational level, everything in the world is named: dwarves, elves, fortresses, fell beasts, books, artifacts, lands, and even the world itself are all given custom names, often in fictional languages complete with English translations.

      if it's important to someone, it's got a name. It's fun, but Tolkein's extensive use of incomprehensible names was always an unpleasant challenge for me.

    1. Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'

      Formal, sharply defined terminology to describe this class for academic writing.

    1. A Congolese leader, toldof the Portuguese legal codes, asked a Portuguese once, teasingly: “What is the

      penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?”

      Was this truly a joke or is there more cultural subtlety here than provided?

      Compare this with Welsh mythology from the fourth branch of the Mabinogi and a tale from Cpt. James Cooks' travels

      The Fourth Branch pivots upon the towering figure of Math, Lord of Gwynedd, son of Mathonwy. Math was almost certainly of divine origin. His story is distinctive in Welsh mythology because it may reflect a pre-Christian myth of Creation and Fall. A condition of Math’s power – and indeed his life – was that, unless he was away fighting his enemies, he must stay at home and, bizarrely, sit with his feet in the lap of a maiden: the girl’s virginity was imperative. The name of Math’s foot-holder was Goewin. This strange prohibition on Math’s rule can best be explained if his origins lay in the pagan mythic tradition of sacral kingship so prevalent in Irish myths, wherein the mortal king ‘married’ the land in the form of the goddess of sovereignty. In a Welsh twist, the virgin status of the ‘goddess’ appears to reflect the perceived power of undissipated female sexuality, whose concentrated potency was necessary for the land to remain prosperous.

      But the connection between royal feet and the land may have even more complex roots. When Captain Cook explored Tahiti in the mid-18th century, he came across a tradition in which a Polynesian chieftain journeying outside his own lands had to be carried because any territory on which he set foot automatically became his, thus risking war between him and neighbouring chiefdoms. Clearly it would be outrageous to suppose direct connections between early medieval Wales and 18th-century Polynesia. But Cook’s observations inspire us to look for deeper ways of interpreting Math’s situation. via chapter 4 of Aldhouse-Green, Miranda. The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. (Thames and Hudson, 2015)

    1. n the extraordinary Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works. Here, at the very birth of the large-scale unit in manufacturing industry, the old autocrat, Crowley, found it necessary to design an entire civil and penal code, running to more than Ioo,ooo words, to govern and regulate his refractory labour-force.

      A historical precursor to the company-town. One wonders if this was used as a model by Hershey, Pullman, Levittown(s), etc.?

    2. mill dam, attending a Baptist association and a public hanging.56 This general irregularity must be placed within the irregular cycle of the working week (and indeed of the working year) which provoked so much lament from moralists and mercantilists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu

      The irregularity of the work day of the common people in the 17th and 18th centuries ran counter to the desires of both moralists and mercantilists.

      What might this tension tell us about both power structures both then and today?

      While specialization since that time has increased the value of goods we produce, does it help in the value of our lives and happiness?

    3. ry. The debate provoked by the attempt to impose a tax on all clocks and watches in 1797-8 offers a little evidence. It was perhaps the most unpopular and it was certainly the most unsuccessful of all of Pitt's assessed taxes: I

      William Pitt (the younger) assessed a tax on clocks and watches from July 1797 to March 1798 and it didn't go well. One would suspect it was the case that those who purchased them were the richer upper-classes (as argued above in the piece) who had the power and wealth to vitiate against such taxation.

      Presumably if the masses were the target, the tax may have stayed.

      This sort of power seems to ensconce racist policies.

    4. paid urban artisan. Recorded time (one suspects) belonged in the mid-century still to the gentry, the masters, the farmers and the tradesmen; and perhaps the intricacy of design, and the preference for precious metal, were in deliberate accentuation of their symbolism of status

      Recall that we measure what we find important. This fashion of timekeeping was a tool for wielding power over others to acquire wealth.

    1. “The scroll is written in code, but its actual content is simple and well-known, and there was no reason to conceal it,” they write in the Journal of Biblical Literature. “This practice is also found in many places outside the land of Israel, where leaders write in secret code even when discussing universally known matters, as a reflection of their status. The custom was intended to show that the author was familiar with the code, while others were not.”

      Ancient scribes sometimes wrote in code even though the topics at hand were well known as a means of showing their status.

  12. Aug 2021
    1. RemoteStorage requires the server to support a subset of OAuth, and that's the only kind of authentication supported. It also requires WebFinger support
  13. Jul 2021
    1. The statement helped set in motion a way of thinking that places the struggle for justice within the self. This thinking appeals not to reason or universal values but to the authority of identity, the “lived experience” of the oppressed. The self is not a rational being that can persuade and be persuaded by other selves, because reason is another form of power.

      The struggle for justice can be found within the self (rather than the group).

      Reason is another form of power.

      How does the idea of justice and self in the first connect (or not) to the Woodard's idea of self with respect to God in the Protestant evangelical America?

    2. Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.

      Critical theory versus Englightenment

    1. Powerful suppliers, including suppliers of labor, can squeeze profi tability out of an industry that is unable to pass on cost increases in its own prices.

      Suppliers with bargaining power can squeeze the profitability out of an industry by raising prices on industry participants that cannot pass on cost increases in their own prices.

    1. Forty years ago, Michel Foucault observed in a footnote that, curiously, historians had neglected the invention of the index card. The book was Discipline and Punish, which explores the relationship between knowledge and power. The index card was a turning point, Foucault believed, in the relationship between power and technology.

      This piece definitely makes an interesting point about the use of index cards (a knowledge management tool) and power.

      Things have only accelerated dramatically with the rise of computers and the creation of data lakes and the leverage of power over people by Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al.

  14. Jun 2021
    1. black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform

      This has been a powerful source of inspiration for me since day immoral

    1. it is not about the product

      it is not about the product, but about the process—Christopher R. Rogers

      In humanity there is no product. We're collectively about the process.

      Similar to the idea of human "being" not human "doing".

      Sadly corporations have been exerting power over people and turning us into products or inputs in their processes and dramatically devaluing and erasing our humanity.

    2. that sometimes we don't give you know uh you know credit to or sort of like survive underneath in the subterfuge of what's happening

      you could kind of go deeper with that is um do the work of like fred moten and stephanos harney's uh black study or radical study in in the undercommons of of this idea of like um there are these molds intellectual practice you know that sometimes we don't give you know uh you know credit to or sort of like survive underneath in the subterfuge of what's happening—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

      He's talking about work (scholarship) that may sit outside the mainstream that for one reason or another aren't recognized (in this case, because the scholars are marginalized in a culture mired in racist ideas, colonialism, etc.). At it's roots, it doesn't necessarily make the work any more or less valuable than that in

      cf. with the academic samizdat of Vladimir Bukovsky who was working under a repressive Russian government

      cf similarly with the work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

      Consensus can very often only be consensus until it isn't.

      How do these ideas interoperate with those of power (power over and power with)? One groups power over another definitely doesn't make them right (or just) at the end of the day.

      I like the word "undercommons", which could be thought of not in a marginalizing way, but in the way of a different (and possibly better) perspective.

    1. One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning

      This is a big lesson. As a field, we still have not thoroughly learned it, as we are continuing to make the same kind of mistakes. To see this, and to effectively resist it, we have to understand the appeal of these mistakes. We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.

    1. This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.

      What if we look at meritocracy from a game theoretic viewpoint?

      Certainly there's an issue that there isn't a cap on meritocratic outputs, so if one wants more wealth, then one needs to "simply" work harder. As a result, in a "keeping up with the Jones'" society that (incorrectly) measures happiness in wealth, everyone is driven to work harder and faster for their piece of the pie.

      (How might we create a sort of "set point" to limit the unbounded meritocratic cap? Might this create a happier set point/saddle point on the larger universal graph?)

      This effect in combination with the general drive to have "power over" people instead of "power with", etc. in combination with racist policies can create some really horrific effects.

      What other compounding effects might there be? This is definitely a larger complexity-based issue.

    1. One pastor, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, put it to me this way:Having grown up in the South, [I think] Southern Baptist culture is probably uniquely this way, but working in a church that isn’t in the South, this stuff still rears its head. Not as much the same presenting issues, but you still fundamentally get people who are in love with power and will take any means necessary to beat you down so they have power and you are subservient to them, not the Gospel.

      A searing indictment of power within religion...

    1. Firmina will be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable—a resilience boost at a time when reliable connectivity is more important than ever. 

      i was going to ask what good it is having a cable that has power, but not the data center behind it.

      i guess the situation is that the fiber optic cable also has power cables running along it too, powering the repeaters, and it's the power cables that might break. in this case, having single ended power would be very useful.

      i'm most curious to know how power is sent. is this 48V dc? higher? how much? kV?

    1. Of the different instantaneous HRV indices computed by the point process technique, we selected the instantaneous high frequency power (HF) as our representative HRV metric. Heart rate HF power has garnered the greatest consensus for reflecting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) modulation by parasympathetic activity
    1. one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment

      hmmm...this needs to be unpacked...I might start by suggesting that critical theory does indeed often explore how judgements of quality and truth are shaped by politics, power, desire, knowledge, etc, but that's not a point against such work, but rather a recognition of part of its main practice.

      Cleverness is another matter...there's quite a bit of cleverness here in Morningstar's post, so should we judge it less worthy?

  15. May 2021
    1. an iterative process of knowledge production through reference, review, and refinement

      After reading Chapter 5, "Annotation Expresses Power" in Remi and Antero's book, Annotation, I know there is more lurking behind this idea of scholarship as a "great conversation", iterating and refining, but also inscribing, foreclosing, opening, diverting, eliding, obscuring, (dis)empowering, apologizing, justifying, (de)mystifying, and in so many other ways being so much other than a collective project toward greater enlightenment...

    1. Right now, fewer than half a dozen tech firms concentrate huge resources on a small number of global post-graduate AI programmes around the world. They directly and indirectly influence the training and content of those programmes, especially through access to data-sets. Compliance of senior academics is easy to gain, however they individually rationalise it.

      The dominant culture being in a position of power and wealth makes it far easier to direct the future to ensure that the dominate culture stays in power and wealth.

      How does one "break this wheel" of power?

    2. I know tech policy pretty well, and this absolute dumpster fire of a policy area isn’t just a cool new place to build a blockchain-based commons, but a hard-right haven of male libertarians asset-stripping the social democratic state to build global monopolies that re-run nineteenth century colonialism, but bigger.

      A well stated version of our current problem.

    1. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
    2. he new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

      new society, new aristocracy, total power, television, technology

    1. Prominence as a critic tends to reinforce itself. The person who appears on news shows is the person who gets to star in a documentary is the person who gets to testify before the Senate is the person who gets invited back onto the news shows, and so forth.

      Another specific example of this has been noted by Zeynep Tufekci of an economist becoming the face of criticism of the education space being open or closed during the coronavirus pandemic. The woman, who had no background in public health or epidemiology, became the public face of the argument about whether schools should be open or closed.

    2. Which brings us back, once again, to the question with which we began: why does it matter who gets to be seen as a prominent “tech critic”? The answer is that it matters because such individuals get to set the bounds for the discussion.

      The ability to set the bounds of the discussion or the problem is a classical example of "power-over" instead of power-with or power-to.

    1. the three types of power commonly discussed in management theory: power-over, power-with, and power-to. These three types of power were first identified by the Mother of Modern Management, Mary Parker Follett. You may also recognize her as the person who coined the term “win-win.” Here are the three types of power: Power-over is extractive. Power-over is extracted from other people, the natural world, etc. Power-over means getting more of the pie. Power-with is gained when we work together, i.e, collective action. Power-to is generative. Power-to is the power we have to create new things. Power-to means making the pie bigger. 

      An interesting break down of power.

    1. When asked if she has a message for her fans, Williams pauses before reassuring them not to worry. “The main thing is I can still sing. I’m singing my ass off, so that hasn’t been affected,” Williams says. “Can’t keep me down for too long.”
  16. Mar 2021
    1. satire

      Satire was often times used as a method of critiquing the power structures of the day, as well as making comments on other aspects of society. Direct criticism was frowned upon, and often times punished, but you could get away with veiling your criticism as humor.

    2. Franklin thereby invented the first newspaper chain. It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers since he believed that the press had a public-service duty

      Long before the internet, and even national level newspapers, Franklin understood the power of the written word. His, and other like minded individual’s words were distributed in the form of pamphlets, that extolled their ideas on liberty and justice, and spread those words to all who were interested.

    1. Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent.

      This is what happened when 125 participants were given $500/month over two years to see what would happen.

    1. Democrat Chicago to allow the economy to open up less than a week after Biden's inauguration...it's all planned to make Biden appear successful! Democrats allowed millions of people to suffer and lose businesses all for their own greed and power!
  17. Feb 2021
    1. Further, when using a dumbbell, the diameter of the dumbbell plates puts the weight forward of the axis of rotation of the shoulder, placing high levels of stress on the muscles involved in external rotation (such as the teres minor and the infraspinatus) that help stabilize the shoulders.

      Justificativa pela qual não é interessante utilizar halteres e Kettlebells no Power Clean. Além da carga ser consideravelmente menor.

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jack Jamieson</span> in I really appreciate @emmibevensee’s r… (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 12:36:00</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Whoever controls the third place controls the community. If the third place is a building, and they decide to renovate, tough luck. It's being renovated. The third place is where the community lives, it's where they go by default essentially. If you own that place, you own a considerable amount of power in the community.
  18. Jan 2021
    1. Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users. If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck.
    1. I've already said this, but if you think the average desktop computer user thinks a sentence beginning "I just make a chroot..." makes any kind of sense, you haven't been paying attention to the level of intelligence of the general public.
    2. Well, that user can safely stay with Windows. Hiding these things from me makes wish that.
    3. Linux on the desktop won't take off until it is equally easy. Snap may be dumbed down, restricted and all the rest of it, but for ordinary users it's easier - and more secure - than the alternative.
    1. What will it take to break this circuit, where white supremacists see that violence is rewarded with amplification and infamy? While the answer is not straightforward, there are technical and ethical actions available.

      How can this be analogized to newspapers that didn't give oxygen to the KKK in the early 1900's as a means of preventing recruiting?

    1. Most users frankly don’t care how software is packaged. They don’t understand the difference between deb / rpm / flatpak / snap. They just want a button that installs Spotify so they can listen to their music.
    2. In addition, PPAs are awful for software discovery. Average users have no idea what a PPA is, nor how to configure or install software from it. Part of the point of snap is to make software discovery easier. We can put new software in the “Editor’s Picks” in Ubuntu Software then people will discover and install it. Having software in a random PPA somewhere online is only usable by experts. Normal users have no visibility to it.
    3. While you may have some objections due to your specific setup, please consider you’re not the usual use case. Most people install Ubuntu on a single drive, not separate /home, and not multiple disks. Most are quite happy with automatic updates - in line with how their phone is likely setup - both for debs (with unattended-upgrades) and snaps (via automatic refresh in snapd). Experts such as yourself are capable of managing your own system and are interested in twiddling knobs and adjusting settings everywhere. There are millions of Ubuntu users who are not like that. We should cater for the widest possible use case by default, and have the option to fiddle switches for experts, which is what we have.
  19. Dec 2020
    1. The effort of confronting that machine, day in and day out, compounded over a lifetime, leads to stress so corrosive that it physically changes bodies

      How does this highlight questions of power? Is it hard or soft power in evidence?

    2. They were the very people communities would have turned to first to help recover from the pandemic: entrepreneurs who were also employers; confidants like coaches, pastors and barbers; family men forced into a sandwich generation younger than their white counterparts, because their parents got sick earlier and they had to care for them while raising kids of their own.

      We often think of systemic racism and inequality in more concrete terms and ways — policing, schooling, access to money and power. What ideas about systemic inequality can you draw from this sentence and paragraph?

    1. It is quite large, the letters along its spine are big and bright, and readers are required to own it in print, because Mr. Caro, who still uses a typewriter, has refused to distribute the written version in any other way.

      I've always wondered why there wasn't a digital edition available after all this time.

  20. Nov 2020
    1. What’s truly sad (but not shocking) about this whole situation is that this person, James Damore, a Havard educated, seemingly well-intentioned fella, had steadfast beliefs based on his complete misunderstanding of how “sexism” or “discrimination” actually work.And that’s the problem with the way we talk about diversity and inclusion in the business world.People are learning about unconscious bias WITHOUT the foundational knowledge of the cycle of socialization.People are learning about microaggressions WITHOUT the context of power dynamics.People are learning about “diversity programs” WITHOUT true understanding of concepts such as privilege or allyship.

      While there are some people with good intents in the [[DEI]] space - it's starting to become apparent that there are some [[foundational concepts]] that we are missing, such as understanding how [[cycle of socialization]] impacts [[unconscious bias]]

      or not understanding the role of [[power dynamics]] and [[microaggression]]

    1. If this is populism, it’s an aggressive strain. Left-leaning historian Rick Perlstein calls Trump’s general appeal “herrenvolk democracy.” It’s not conservatism at all. It’s big government, and big government programs, but only for the deserving.
  21. Oct 2020
    1. And would a hip hop fan question, much less downvote, a “verified” Genius annotation authored by Kendrick Lamar that explains the meaning behind his music?

      But if we're going to consider music as art, isn't a lot of the value and power of art in the "eye of the beholder"? To some extent art's value is in the fact that it can have multiple interpretations. From this perspective, once it's been released, Lamar's music isn't "his" anymore, it becomes part of a broader public that will hear and interpret it as they want to. So while Lamar may go back and annotate what he may have meant at the time as an "expert", doesn't some of his art thereby lose some power in that he is tacitly stating that he apparently didn't communicate his original intent well?

      By comparison and for contrast one could take the recent story of Donald Trump's speech (very obviously written by someone else) about the recent mass shootings and compare them with the polar opposite message he spews on an almost daily basis from his Twitter account. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/teleprompter-trump-meets-twitter-trump-as-the-president-responds-to-mass-slayings/2019/08/05/cdd8ea78-b799-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

    2. Selectively redacting Weinstein’s words, O’Hare’s entire poem reads: “I came of age in a culture of demons I respect more than women.”

      Do her words have even more power in doing this because she's using Weinstein's actual words against him?

    3. “Every Cambodian... including the King has the right to express freely their view.”

      While I like the sentiment here, a lot of the power of the message comes from not only the medium, but the distribution which it receives. Many daily examples of "typical" annotation done by common people are done in a way that incredibly few will ultimately see the message. The fact that the annotations of the emperor were republished and distributed was what, in great part, gave them so much weight and value. Similarly here with the example of the King's blog or Alexandra Bell's work which was displayed in public. I hope there is more discussion about the idea of distribution in what follows.

    1. In fact, if you do the math, if failure equals knowledge and knowledge equals power, then failure equals power by the transitive property.

      But first we have to prove that this system has the transitive property to begin with!

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
    1. Refusing advertising is refusing to privilege moneyed speech. The increasing equation of money with speech—that is, those with the most money can be the loudest and most persistent voices in contemporary media—is denied when advertising is refused.
  22. link-springer-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at link-springer-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at
    1. The approach proposed here can allow us to examine howthe deployment of future-oriented grammars reflect (or, in fact, help to discursivelyconstitute) differential authority, access,and influence in relation to decision-making processes, at various levels of institutional power
    2. The approach proposed here can allow us to examine howthe deployment of future-oriented grammars reflect (or, in fact, help to discursivelyconstitute) differential authority, access,and influence in relation to decision-making processes, at various levels of institutional power
  23. Sep 2020
    1. Our technology is like a universal translator, driven by switches, eye gaze, and jerking screen touches.

      I think it is amazing that technology has this much power in order for people with disabilities to communicate.

    1. I can’t do without Gabriel Betteredge

      This is such a strong remark, and I assume that it’s intentional and purposeful as we learn more about Betteredge’s role (beyond his butler role?) in this story. On another note, this also brings up the social norms in the Victorian era, especially the power dynamic between servants and their employers.

  24. Aug 2020
  25. Jul 2020
    1. "Other office suites are focusing on the 'power user' which is a valuable market, for sure, but the real power and range for an open-source office suite alternative is the vast majority which is the 'rest of us. Sometimes we all forget how empowering open source is to the entire world."
  26. Jun 2020
  27. May 2020
    1. However, distributing such Ruby apps to inexperienced end users or non-Ruby-programmer end users is problematic. If users have to install Ruby first, or if they have to use RubyGems, they can easily run into problems. Even if they already have Ruby installed, they can still run into problems, e.g. by having the wrong Ruby version installed. The point is, it's a very real problem that could harm your reputation.
    1. All of the features of NLS were in support of Engelbart's goal of augmenting collective knowledge work and therefore focused on making the user more powerful, not simply on making the system easier to use.
    1. I will need to find a workaround for one of my private extensions that controls devices in my home network, and its source code cannot be uploaded to Mozilla because of my and my family's privacy.
    2. I believe that beginning to distribute tools that patch Firefox and give back power to users and allow them to install unsigned extensions is necessary when an organization is taking away our rights without giving us a compelling reason for doing so.
    3. I appreciate the vigilance, but it would be even better to actually publish a technical reasoning for why do you folks believe Firefox is above the device owner, and the root user, and why there should be no possibility through any means and configuration protections to enable users to run their own code in the release version of Firefox.
    4. I will need to find a workaround for one of my private extensions that controls devices in my home network, and its source code cannot be uploaded to Mozilla because of my and my family's privacy.
  28. Apr 2020
  29. Mar 2020
    1. expect to see more support from Democrats, Republicans, academics and diplomats for the notion that government has a much bigger role to play in creating adequate redundancy in supply chains
    1. The main forces that restricted public health police powers were: (1) the advent of civil rights jurisprudence; (2) the rise of patient autonomy and the rapid expansion of state personal health services expenditures; and (3) federal encroachment on state authority.
    2. Historically, the communitarian bases of the American legal system supported the subordination of individual rights when necessary for the preservation of common good. Quarantine measures were subjected to a deferential review supporting the states' right to substantially limit individual rights for the community's benefit.
    3. The legal principles employed to sustain state public health police power were sic utere tuo ut alterum non laedas (use that which is yours so as not to injure others) and salus publica suprema lex est (public well-being is the supreme law).12 The principle of sic utere describes the power of the state to prevent or prohibit “the use of private property or the commission of private acts in a manner harmful to others.”15 The principle of salus publica, on the other hand, recognizes police power as a means to “prevent or avoid public harm even if the action has not harmed others.
    4. Generally, the courts reviewed police power measures only when the degree of restriction of personal liberty was found to be unconscionable.
    5. Remedies included regulation of private property and behavior and the power to detain and hold individuals without pre-intervention review
    6. communitarian philosophy underlying this approach was carried into later judicial holdings, further consolidating states' exercise of public health police power.

      "Communitarian"