shadowgovt

I think, with this many decades of hindsight, it is not unfair to claim The Inner Light is TNG's City on the Edge of Forever.

It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.

ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.

There's an (and I'm reluctant to use this word, but I can't find a better one) weird kind of misanthropy in this post. The author seems only capable of connecting to people through shared work and shared large task.

Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.

If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.

I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).

Most of the improvements have been keeping it running in the face of being the place everyone stores and retrieves video, and that's a lot of invisible work (but is the real reason you don't really see working YouTube competitors; it's a technically challenging big-iron problem).

It's not a moat because it's a commodity.

Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.

That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.

It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.

The devastation in question is that their total revenue is up 25% over last year.

This isn't Google search diminishing; Google is serving more search results this year. This is their other ventures catching up to their oldest one.

This has been the plan for a long time.

I remember 10 years ago that Google was extremely paranoid about having the whole company propped up on one revenue tent-pole.

It is, ironically, a situation where the best solution might very well be a lighter touch.

US immigration policy used to be simply... Less. You could pretty much come and go as you please along the southern border. So people did, and therefore there were simply fewer issues because folks didn't feel the need to "sneak in," not when getting in and out of the country was as easy as a day-pass. People would live in Mexico and work a job in a border city.

The tightening of the rules began in (if I recall correctly) the '80s, and with it the actual crisis; if you could come and go as you please, it was no issue to live in Mexico, but people, when forced to choose, stayed where the economic productivity was.

It's also known that ICE on the street right now differs from ICE in 2024.

To meet the unrealistic (practically, per resources) targets for arrest and deportation that the administration set for itself, they greatly loosened the training constraints and qualifications for new ICE agents.

Analogies to the German Sturmabteilung of the '20s and '30s are not entirely inaccurate.

For a couple of reasons.

One is that America is exceptional. It's a huge country with massive wealth, resources, and land. It fundamentally lacks the back-pressures that some other countries have against immigration - in fact, it currently has a declining birthrate amongst its native populace and needs labor-age people to backstop an economic inversion.

The other, regarding ICE specifically, is simple trust. People know that the executive branch is, at this time, extremely white-supremacist-adjacent if not just actual white supremacists (Stephen Miller is currently the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), so any claimed purpose for immigration crackdowns is fighting an uphill battle against the presumption that (a) the actual reason is racial segregation (you'll note a disproportionate enforcement on Latinos as opposed to native Germans or Italians or Slovakians) and (b) this administration will not treat people in its care humanely (because they don't follow rules as a general principle).

(a) is the larger "national identity" issue that makes it difficult to build a coherent national immigration policy (because even some good ideas meet an uphill battle against "Does that stop us from serving as the keepers of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"). But what you're likely observing is (b); American intelligentsia is looking at current events out their window and hearing the echoes of clergy in Europe before and during World War II reading from the book of Exodus and asking their congregation "Who are today's midwives?"

History suggests this is a short-term solution, not even a medium-term solution.

A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.

This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.

Franz Kafka told his friends, in no uncertain terms, that upon his death, his unfinished works should be burnt. This included The Trial and The Castle.

We never had the right to tell the future what to do. That was never part of the deal. We barely have the right to tell other people what to do with the ideas we breathe into the world, and that right was only carved into the US Constitution (and English common law before it) because it was believed that it heavily incentivized creating more ideas.

In the era where information flows as freely as it does... I'm not even sure that incentive works the way it was intended to anymore.

When I'm thinking about this, I usually flip the script: why should Disney have the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do and not do with a picture and audio of a cartoon mouse for a person's actual entire life?

It's a strange kind of conceptualization of slavery that extracts zero work from the victim.

It's one of the parts of the story that highlights the tragedy of it: Swartz going through the process and out the other side could have bent mainstream politics. His story restonated, and continues to do so, with a technocratic community that itself gained a lot of political sway in the subsequent decades.

Sadly, we'll never know.

And ultimately, we'll never know what a court of law would have said because he chose (to the extent that anyone wrestling with the mental illness that is suicidal depression really chooses) to never have his day in court, unfortunately.

We've been impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to verify ad network integrity for I think two decades now, at least.