392c91e8165b

I wonder how much of the bad decision-making that led to the US's wasting more than 2 trillion dollars failing to effect any permanent change in Afghanistan can be ascribed to the fact that it is career suicide to imply that the people of Afghanistan were any less capable of democratically governing themselves than the people of, e.g, Germany and Japan were in 1945.

>all this energy . . . might be better focused into social disapproval of the portrayals of murder, rape and the rest of the violence we inundate ourselves and our kids with on a daily basis.

I tend to agree, and the "rekt/gore" threads on 4chan strike me as particularly low-hanging fruit.

Good point. My explanation for the discrepancy is that Canada, Australia and western Europe are more homogenous racially and ethnically than the US is, which makes them less vulnerable to the excesses of an ideology or religion-substitute that revolves around race and ethnicity.

On some of the troop carriers going to Vietnam, soldiers starting fighting each other along racial lines; in response, the US military started a major initiative to promote racial tolerance in their training of soldiers and in their personnel policies. Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.

Also, starting with the Puritans of England, the western Europeans that chose to emigrate to the US were on average more religious than those who chose to remain in western Europe.

It is just as cheap to access a telnet server half way around the world as one next door, so bringing up telnet is changing the subject.

I'm not convinced that the US government is more broken than the others you list.

Most people killed by a government are killed not by police forces, but rather by armies, navies and air forces. And if you live in or near the US you have a lower chance of being killed in a war than if you live in or near Europe because although the US starts more small wars, it starts fewer big wars, and most people killed in war are killed in big wars.

Europe has started fewer wars and killed fewer people since 1945 than the US has, and this is a sign that Europe is safer for the average resident or neighbor than the US is, but that sign is more than cancelled out by Europe's record (and Japan's record) before 1945.

Over the centuries, most prolonged rivalries and most expensive arms races between European nations ended in a war. In contrast, the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race between the US and the USSR did not end in a war -- at least not a war in which the most lethal available weapons were used or in which civilians were targeted to the extent that civilians were targeted by European and Japanese governments during WW II. Surely, the USSR's government deserves some of the credit for that surprisingly good outcome, but so does the US government.

And if you want to claim that the US did not have to participate in the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race -- if you want to argue that the fact that it did is a sign that the US is badly governed, you have to face the fact that if it had not participated, all of Europe would've been overrun by the USSR. There was far less political will in Western Europe to prepare for yet another war than would've been necessary to resist an invasion from the USSR if the US hadn't paid for most of the preparations.

I do not conclude from this analysis that the US government is better than most governments -- only that it is not clear to me that it is definitely worse. And I think it is a mistake to draw a boundary at 1945 and claim that anything that happened before then was too long ago to have any bearing on the question of which of today's governments are better.

I would call the scientific revolution a blossoming, and although democracies (notably the Dutch Republic) participated, most of it happened in monarchies and principalities.

Are you sure it was 1992?

Wikipedia says that there were only 50 web servers in the world in January 1993, and my recollection is that were all at educational and research institutions. I don't think for example that any of the major computer companies, e.g., Microsoft or Apple, had web site that early. (They had internet connectivity, domain names, mail servers, ftp servers -- but back then, ftp servers did not have URLs.) Maybe one or 2 had web servers, but if they did, they were probably the personal projects of one or two employees.

Most of the world's web pages were about computers and the internet.

Interesting. (But the Pixel 2 was discontinued 11 months ago, and there is no replacement, i.e., no Pixel 3.)

Sleep deprivation would be a bad idea for me because sleep helps the immune system, and my immune system needs all the help it can get (because of my chronic infectious disease).

I have found however that _listening to music_ during sleep will prevent my sleeping a lot from having a depressant effect on my mood. I recommend avoiding music contain exciting or bracing passages; you don't want your sympathetic nervous system to become active during sleep.

If I learn something that I want to retain, then I don't listen to music that night, because the same process (REM sleep?) that tends to depress the mood also helps with the consolidation of new learnings and new skills.

That's fair. I now wish I had resisted the temptation to post something sarcastic.

Is the following comment any better than my previous one?

The greatest cultural strength of the US IMHO is the belief, which used to be widespread, that the best way for most people to improve their lives and to improve the world is private enterprise -- action other than political action, in other words. And I consider Apple, Inc, a shining example over the decades of the use of other-than-political action to improve the world.

Cook's memo is a sign that the US is becoming more like France, where almost every important action requires national political influence, and the majority of college students want to be civil servants.

Since, at least according to Peter Theil, information technology is the least regulated part of the US economy, it makes me sad to see one of the leaders of the information-technology sector wrapped up in national politics. Unlike for example the heavily-regulated health-care sector, Apple does not need to be concerned with politics to do good work. At least that is what I always thought.

Well, that's a relief. I was worried about the possibility that a fraction of Apple's workforce would not accept the results of the election.

OK, sorry for the sarcasm; please allow me to restate my point without sarcasm:

this memo reflects badly on Cook, IMHO: CEOs should be focused and more importantly should keep their workforce focused on the corporation's mission.

They were homogeneous for centuries, then non-homogeneous for a few decades. Maybe it takes a few decades for the adverse effects of the non-homogeneity to become apparent.