Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

Yeah, people forget that form follows function.

The parameters for making a USEFUL plastic that ALSO degrades gives a narrow band. Too degradable, and the function of fulfilling all the areas plastic is currently used for can’t happen. Not degradable, and we have the current situation.

Plastic being is in use not simply to fuck the planet over or something, but because compared to other materials it has physical qualities that things like glass, wood, fabric, etc. don’t have, that’s why it’s ended up in so many things. It’s lightweight, strong, and “plastic” (that is to say, more easily shaped and molded than other materials, and I suspect there’s a labor component too where maybe it needs less labor to shape and form).

I’m eventually going to write a story about a sci-fi world that’s under quarantine because they successfully made a plastic-eating bacteria that never stops eating and breaking down plastic. Go there and most of your technology/clothes/etc. are eaten away. I might throw in wood, too…a world with no wood or plastic because the local bacteria is like, “Yum, yum, food!” and gets into every nook and cranny. I anticipate I’ll have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how drastically technology would change under these parameters…I imagine a lot of it would be very “brutalist” because you’d have to rely on heavy-as-balls metals and cement and stone and such. Unless there’s an Aluminum Future or something, where everything that can be made out of aluminum, can. Of course, there’s also the byproducts of intense metals mining to think about on a fictional world like that. Anyway, lots of details to pick apart for worldbuilding.

I second this. I’m a very light sleeper and earplugs filter out most of the small sounds so I am not awakened by them.

Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts

I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.

That’s a really good point. There were individual trolls and general cruel maladjusted scum, but they hadn’t yet been courted or manipulated by political orgs and fed collective marching orders to sow discord.

Yeah, I’ve come to realize even in the medieval world, people had a huge impact on the environment even then. Esp. regarding wood. There’s a reason cutting wood and gathering sticks was valuable–people needed daily cooking fires, and heat in the winter.

Add industry, even just smelting iron, bronze, copper, or firing bricks, and that’s an even bigger need for fuel.

I imagine natural game was under similar pressures, which is why people moved to herding/farming instead of relying on hunting and gathering. And game was also affected by trees being cut for industry and fuel.

Given family holidays can be very stressful and violent in bad families, I have to wonder if that poor kid said something dad didn’t like, or cried, or whined, or otherwise was a completely normal kid and the dad lost his shit and shot him for it. Then came up with “I thought I saw a thief!” to get away with it.

Like, everyone in this thread is assuming the dad actually heard a thief. But I think that should be questioned, too. It’s so common for bad families to slap kids around during thanksgiving. My uncle once lost his shit over something stupid and threw his half-paralyzed mom (she’d had a stroke not too long before) out of her chair onto the floor.

I remember the early days of social media. Once upon a time, Livejournal was THE social media site. A lot of fandom stuff took place on there.

Then it got sold to Russia, and there’d be days when LJ was weirdly down and unstable (this was before Cloudflare and DDoS protection) for some reason–and I’d learn there was some political strife going on on the Russian-speaking side, because their politicians and thinkers and radicals had made it their online home (long before any politicians in the USA used social media). But I was too young at the time to understand what was going on. All I knew what my fandom space where I talked about books and stuff was having outages due to stuff going on on the Russian-speaking side.

Basically, Russia was using the platform to perfect manipulating social media on its own citizens. Then it turned around and used it on the English-speaking and western world–and other nations have been watching very keenly, and seeing how effective it’s been. That China would do it too is basically like, “Duh, of course they would. It WORKS.”

Yeah, I looked at this comment section when the article was first posted, and then looked at it now–and boy is it a mess.

One part astroturfing, one part “useful fools” who actually do genuinely believe what they’re saying. Then all the rest of the other people wandering around, adding to the chaos.

Insofar as “warfare” goes, dropping some English-writing locals into a chair with a cheap chromebook or laptop is basically a ROUNDING ERROR when it comes to defense and military budgets.

For how effective it is, it’s so fucking cheap. And beancounters and accountants LOVE cheap. Dude over there wants expensive weapons requiring expensive manufacturing facilities to be made, and THIS guy here wants an office space with an internet connection in bumfuck nowhere? Let’s fund the bumfuck nowhere propaganda guy.

And the US, the UK, Canada even, many western European countries have shown their populations are vulnerable and weak to online misinformation. So from a real-world monetary angle, it’s SUCH a great bang for your buck.

If I were running a country that couldn’t compete from a weapons standpoint–due to any variety of reasons…poor country, or a culture of corruption, or lack of scientific manpower or knowledge because of brain drain or something…whatever–and all I had to do was pay some poor folk who desperately needed income to feed themselves and their families, and they’d sit in front of cheap chromebooks or laptops or whatever and monitor certain sites for keywords or certain discussions, and it’d have AS MUCH EFFECT on western countries as we’ve seen it’s been having over the past 10 years…yeah. It’s a no-brainer. I’d do it.

Like, a country that already feeds its own citizens propaganda from cradle to grave isn’t going to flicker an eyelash of doing the same thing to its enemies. ESPECIALLY not when it’s so fucking cheap. And given American and western culture is so prevalent that people actually say “America has no culture”, other nations might even see messing around on social media as nothing more than fighting back, so it’s not just some military spy-thing driving it, but a sense of pride, of David taking down a Goliath with nothing more than a few stones made of words on the internet.

Yeah, it’s happening. It makes too much financial sense not to. It’s cheap AND effective. Any aggressive power is going to make use of that tool, esp. if they’ve having trouble obtaining other tools.

I’d laugh my butt off if somehow Oklahoma got cancelled after that backwards-ass school “reviewed” its suitability or something like they seemed to be threatening to do in that article…and then got replaced by Peter Pan.

Peter Pan with a trans man in the lead would be so damn good.

It’s a bit depressing to me that we’ve known this for at least twenty years, and possibly more and it’s still a problem.

A major concern has been busing. Even in normal times, districts use the same buses and drivers for students of all ages. They stagger start times to do that, with high schoolers arriving and leaving school earliest in the day. The idea is that they can handle being alone in the dark at a bus stop more readily than smaller children, and it also lets them get home first to help take care of younger siblings after school.

If high schools started as late as middle and elementary schools, that would likely mean strain on transportation resources. O’Connell said Nashville’s limited mass transit compounds the problem.

“That is one of the biggest issues to resolve,” he said.

This is basically it, school systems not wanting to buy the extra buses or hire the extra drivers they’d need.

Unfortunately I don’t see this ever being solved without a major cultural/financial shift in the USA towards properly funding education. Too much financial pressure to have fewer buses and fewer drivers. If my high school and middle school had started at the same time as the elementary, that’d be like 14 new buses alone at $60k-$110k a pop, not including driver wages and the diesel for each one…and we had more than one high school and middle school in our district. So it’d be more like 50 new buses, just to start HS and middle school at the same time as elementary. The cost would eat smaller districts alive. It’d be several million just to procure the buses new.

I was going to reply, stopped to look at this guy’s comment history. I’m not seeing a lot of worth in it, it’s mostly one-liners about this or that, no real engagement. Some seem mildly divisive simply for division’s sake.

Ah-ha! Knew there was a reason I was scratching my head over it. Thank you!

Huh, so it is.

https://www.sonicperspectives.com/news/sonata-arctica-returns-to-power-metal-roots-with-new-digital-single-first-in-line/

Hey, since you’re familiar with pinball machines, I have a question…in his video above, some of the solenoids seemed to have a motorola logo on them.

But I don’t know enough about electronic parts (or replacement parts–or hell, blue tape with a motorola-like logo on them) to know how to interpret it. I was mostly like, “Wait, motorola did solenoids in the 70s? Or are those replacements? Or just branded electrical tape?”

What are your thoughts?

And I thought I’d heard all of their stuff. Somehow I’d missed this one.

Thank you!

I like all his videos, but I particularly like this one because it kind of feels like the “missing link” between clockwork machines and electronic machines that I didn’t realize I was missing a ton of stuff about.

I’m not in a spot to listen to the audio, but Cory Doctorow is always insightful on these things.

Amazon has been fucking over the book industry and small authors since its inception…Amazon literally began as a startup that massively disrupted publishing. Any author that can diversify their small business (because most authors are one-person small businesses making modest livings or below-poverty livings, the Stephen Kings and J. K. Rowlings are rare) to get some of their work out of Amazon’s grip should.

And audiobooks sell well, so if you can sell them without handing a big ol’ chunk of profit to Amazon, you should try.

Some authors find a way to game Amazon’s system now and again to make profits, but it’s very perilous locking all your income to one predatory distributor. You never want all your eggs in one basket.

This is really cool.

Basically, these are a bunch of burnt scrolls. When you try to open, they’re just carbon and they crumble really easily.

The AI was trained on some of the ruined fragments, then the intact scrolls were scanned, and the AI is able to decipher spots that were basically “differently wrinkly” because of the organic ink that had been used on top of the papyrus, which caused it to wrinkle a bit differently when burnt.

So in this case, the AI actually helps us read scrolls that would be destroyed if a human were to try to pick apart the burnt remnants.

This whole thing is significant because this library of burnt scrolls might have original writing by both known and unknown authors from that period.

There’s a lot of classical works we only know of because other writers referenced them. The originals are lost, and the citations are the only remains. Also, some works we only know because scribes copied and re-copied books over the centuries to preserve them. And with copying and re-copying, mistakes or changes might happen.

It’s possible in this library of burnt scrolls that we might find an original uncopied/unaltered work so we can compare the ancient version of it with versions copied and re-copied over centuries, or a work that we know from citations but don’t have an actual copy of.

It’s really exciting.

AI has been really exciting in general where it comes to deciphering lots of old text. Personally, I’m waiting for tons of unread/unstudied cuneiform tablets to be scanned/auto-translated, because even if the AI has some errors, being able to text-search in English (or whatever language) for certain keywords will make it easier to realize one of those unstudied tablets might hold something unusual or interesting. Basically, it’d give an easier way to triage which ones might be useful for an actual human to study.