throwaway8879

How are you defining a successful democracy? If 20% of a nation elect a philosopher king type leader, is that more "successful" than 90% of another nation electing a tyrannical despot?

One man's activist is another man's bigot.

Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...

Man is the measure of all things.

He translated the new testament from Greek to German. That helped the poor more than anybody else.

Nitpick. Socrates was given a choice. His decision to kill himself was his own. I'd probably do the same. He was 70+ anyway. A lifetime of annoying dialectic tends to make lots of enemies quickly.

Signal still requires a phone number. That alone should make it non-usable for people who are serious about their privacy.

My alternate solution: stop using smartphones altogether. Technology is not a good solution to the privacy problem, especially when a collective such as the government can read your data anyway, or beat it out of you.

If you're worried about drowning, don't go near water. There are no fullproof life vests.

Rightly according to your subjective experience.

There's no reason to complicate your thinking about tastes and aesthetics. There is art that you like, there id art the you don't like. Then there are criteria by which you judge the quality of the things you like/dislike.

For instance, it becomes hairy once you get down to make any sort of meaningful comparison between the quality of musicians you like, even if the criteria are pretty meaningful. Is Chopin better than Katy Perry because his works are harmonically richer? Bach because of superior use of counterpoint? Maybe Ivan Wyshnegradsky for his use of non-standard tuning systems?

Something is good if you are able to appreciate and enjoy it. Trying to justify why you like/dislike something is not going to be very fruitful in thr grand scheme of things, unless you just want to find similar things that you'd enjoy.

Rust docs is decent. Elixir's is pretty good too! OpenBSD man pages.

And of course, ArchWiki has saved my life a few hundred times so far. It's really comprehensive.

Nukes may shorten an otherwise prolonged war. "Better off" is obviously very subjective, but I don't see how nukes aren't better off if they end up saving lives. Let's also consider all the direct wars avoided in the last ~75 years, an outcome of nuclear MAD.

The reality of our situation if that we will keep fighting each other, that's a given. Best to test our nukes to make sure they work. Nukes that won't work can't save lives.

And what about the rest of us non-Americans who have our respectjve local media misleading the public? Perhaps we all have our own mini Fox News entities that drive this narrative?

I don't intend to bring too much cynicism in here, but if you outright believe any media in current year, whether mainstream or alternative, you are being misled. Everyone has an agenda.

The SerenityOS author makes fairly regular videos related to the OS, bug fixes, and other dev and life things. It's cool and inspiring to see a highly productive hacker do their thing on stream, kind of like watching Steve Gadd do a drum solo.

Every individual has their subjective valuation of "decent reasons". Please do not proclaim yourself the sole owner of objective value. It is incredibly naive, and dishonest too. Reasons that do not seem decent to you will be so to others.

There are almost 8 billion of us. You don't speak for everyone. And I say that as a non-american who has no horse in the race.

This is actually a good indicator for understanding the issue of privacy/surveillance. There are enough hackers and engineers who care little about being spied, despite understanding some of the inner workings of how the spying is done - as long as the benefits of a free service outweigh the slight privacy-violating annoyances.

Now try to understand why the average person cares even less.