I like a lot of what other people have said here (faith backed by a trusted party, representation of debt, etc), but I just want to drive home the point that money has value because we said it has value. Under a system of barter, you end up with people valuing things differently. So we switched to the gold standard, but then that constrained growth. Now we have fiat currency which is based on faith.

The reason why we chose gold was because it was relatively useless at the time, only good for making things look pretty essentially. It was valuable because it was rare, and since it was rare, a central authority could control the supply because it takes a lot of capital to extract and process. Modern fiat is similar, but the rarity (making it a good substitute for value of other goods and services) comes from the government being the only person who can issue it. It’s honestly kind of a weird paradox. It has to be cheap and ubiquitous enough that the supply isn’t limited, but rare enough that we accept it as a stand in for value. In an alternate universe, we could have chosen river rocks (not useful for other purposes, so no one would be tempted to take supply out of the system to use for other means, and pretty ubiquitous), but we couldn’t effectively control the supply.

I think Libertarianism is incompatible with the way that humans operate as a society. Almost all flavors of libertarianism puts an individual’s right to live as they choose as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of others through force or fraud. Humans like to associate themselves into groups, and in almost any group there will be an imbalance in power, whether that’s economic power, physical power (strength), or even something as abstract as eloquence or how outgoing you are. The issue then becomes that someone somewhere has to enforce the right to not be forced into giving up rights. In the classical construction of how libertarians view government, it is very easy to become more powerful than those meant to enforce limits on power. Even in our current political system, you see this when companies will spend more on their anti-trust court cases than the entire FTC spends total in a decade. Libertarianism has no mechanism to keep the enforcer the most powerful party involved

I’m interested where this comes from too. Is it just because they aren’t a FOSS project?

Similar idea to how the Dao works in Daoism. “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao”

For audiobooks, I personally use Libro FM, though audiobooks.com is also an alternate source. Unfortunately if you’re looking only at price, you won’t be able to move past Audible because they employ so many shady and bad-for-authors practices that their prices are artificially low. If you’re only interested in getting DRM-free Cory Doctorow books, Craphound.

I’m not some great logician or anything, but in its most basic framing “You don’t need to worry about surveillance if you have nothing to hide” would be along the lines of a proving too much fallacy as the conclusion is much too broad for the argument of just having nothing to hide. As with a lot of informal fallacies (fallacies made due to content and/or context of the argument), you could probably ascribe a few of them to this statement, for example you could probably correctly state that this is a thought-terminating cliché as well.

Depending on how it is deployed, as described in one of the comments of the linked post, this could also constitute a formal fallacy (reasoning with a flaw in its structure), specifically denying the antecedent. As a TL;DR, the structure would have to be “If you have something to hide then you should worry about surveillance [if p then q], therefore if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t worry about surveillance [if !p then !q]”.

In my personal view call it a fallacy or not, the strongest arguments against “nothing to hide” have nothing to do with its fallacious nature or lack thereof. Additionally, demonstrating that an argument is fallacious just demonstrates that the argument needs to be reconstructed, rephrased, or better supported, not that its conclusion is false (else you fall victim to argument from fallacy, aka the fallacy fallacy).

Not sure about Volla Phone, but it looks like FuriLabs will run on T-Mobile or their MVNOs (see here)

Don’t know much about xTiles, but Joplin is my go to for notes and things

Idiocy, Actual

Fellow American convert to the metric system. Converting, in my opinion, won’t get you very far in actually understanding the measurements. To this day, the conversion rate is something I have to dig through my memory for.

For me what helped with the temperature scale was breaking it into chunks based on what I would wear, 10°-15° would be a pullover sweatshirt, 15°-20° a track jacket, etc, which got me to stop focusing so much on the conversion. Eventually you just get a sense of these things, I think that most people can only really feel a difference in air temperature of about 1°C. 0° being the freezing point cutoff is super helpful for judging things like potential road conditions if it’s wet.

For distances I first got the sense of how far things were in kilometers by being a runner and knowing distances around my neighborhood as to how they lined up with running a 5k, 10k, etc. For meters, at my height and gait, my stride length is about a meter long. A little bit on the shorter side of things, but it still helped me get an idea as to what a meter looked like in physical space, even if it’s off a bit. Centimeters and millimeters are a different story. Hard to find perfect analogs in the world, but you’ll find something eventually. I think for example long grain rice can be ~1 cm in length for example.

The biggest lesson in my own journey and seeing a lot of people online talk about trying to do the conversion is that people get overly concerned with precision when first making the switch. If you actually think about most of our daily interactions with measurements, they’re much more approximate. For example, the difference between whether it’s 71°F or 73°F is rarely pointed out. The temperature is just “in the low 70s”. We say that something is “about 20 miles away” which is almost an implicit 7-8 mile range. I would guess 80% of the time, this is how we interact with the units we use, so focus on that. No one is going to get upset if they ask the temperature and you’re off by a few degrees C.

In terms of mnemonics like US kids get in school for some of these things, everything in the metric system is a multiple of 10 from everything else, which is what makes it great. Also remember that at room temperature, water’s density is 1 g/mL, so if one of capacity or weight is easier to visualize for you, it’s a shortcut to the other. Standard disposable water bottle in the US is 500 mL or half a kilogram of water.

If only metric time had caught on too…

You know it. I’ve found that most of the news sites still do RSS feeds for their stuff

Some other good ones are Semafor and 404Media

NPR, BBC, and RTÉ primarily. Subscribed through RSS

Seems like they don’t have federation turned on either, unfortunately

Not very up on biology, so not sure if this would even be a thing, but I would say some kind of internal structure like plants allowing animals to overcome the square-cube law

Don’t forget that these restrictions also apply to the Americans living in Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands, as they all have the same status as Puerto Rico. It’s interesting too because citizens of the 50 states can vote absentee from other countries, and American Astronauts have voted from space. That would make Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa the only places in the universe an American can’t vote for President

As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing

I would check out Semafor as well