levinb

> To die with zero and an overflowing funeral attendance is success.

great comment. However, you could say that about alot of horrible people as well!

I live in a place where alot of those that claim the title 'Democratic Socialist' seem more drawn to 20th-century style identity politics rather than a philosophy of 'the world is complex and we need ethical and competent people to use the power of government to solve problems that markets don't solve', which is a way I might encapsulate my views.

Accepting the premise of my framing, how do you square the two?

As someone who disdains hyperbolic, motivated framings of everything in the news cycle, I normally don't like to use words like that. But, it was interesting to see the news discuss the "first time since world war two" component of this event, that by WWII standards, would have been seen as a cowardly violation of the rules of war.

The were in allied water, on a regularly scheduled drill, unarmed.

A different model of war and Empire.

Yes brutal, for the defenders of the castles and fortified cities they conquered.

But again, very targeted at key sites so as to assert an Imperial-vassal relationship. Not to really to metamorph the populace, and run the day to day, which was left to local leadership.

Their point was to demonstratively subjugate for the purposes of control and tribute, not to kill, replace, or even miscegenate. They were the mob-bosses of Eurasia, not the crusaders or jihadis.

They had a very kludgy, homegrown, but generally well-liked and cost effective EMR calls Vista.

The fact that it was cost effective, but required internal expertise was exactly what led the Trump administration to kill it.

Now they are transitioning to Cerner, the worse of the two major commerical EMRs by a fair margin, for many billions of dollars to the Kansas-based company, now owned by Oracle.

You can fill in the details of why this is happening by looking at where the CMS appointees at the time have landed in their post-government careers.

I am trying to use more neutral language when I comment, so that the underlying assertion of facts are more likely to resonate with someone who may disagree with me.

I agree with your characterization, but I just wanted the parent comment to look up the ILWU, where they would probably see some of those facts for themselves and be more likely to understand my position.

As the human internet dies, I feel like it's more important for those of us that want some of it to survive to participate constructively.

Much more frequent conflicts, yes.

Much less total death and dying as well, though. Battles were short and small scale until the Civil War (maybe the Napoleonic Wars prior? Debatable). The largest battles of history prior to the industrial revolution were in the thousands, 10s of thousands of people. Forces were usually broken and defeated or fled after brief engagements. Brutal in experience, but smaller in scale.

It was that perception of war as personal, intimate, chivalric, by old men that let to the peak atrocity period (PAP? Did I coin a term?) of ~1850-1950. WWI was really the first modern reckoning of industrialized, globalized war, that led to the staggering scale of suffering. Incomprehensible to the men that commanded it, as they were born and acculturated in pre-modern war era culture.

But then the epoch-defining tool of the atom came along, and war has gone back to smaller scale, focused, targeted, "precision".

So here we sit, straddling two eras again. Pre-drone and post drone. We have not fully reckoned with what the new era means. But it will come quickly, like most modern tool-culture cycles.

Stryker holds monopoly supplier positions for a number of medical products, esp including surgical implants and associated OR tools.

If Stryker stays down, supplies of some things will run out soon and many people will find themselves without medical procedures available.

The ILWU controls labor at all west coast ports, including LALB, which is responsible for a majority of consumer imports from the Pacific. It has bargained effectively to block developing container handling automation systems.

I've been telling people for 15y that a phone is just "A TV that watches you back"

And at last, the market has finally caught up with me :)

Lot's of good thought here but I will reiterate; helping others doing something you enjoy or are good at is almost always the way.

Remember, the Cerner acquisition enabled an essentially permanent beachhead for Oracle in the VA. It will pay off over time in 'we already run Oracle' across many dimensions of government.

See the career of Seema Verma from last DT admin.

Cue bandwidth conversation.

human.