Some time ago, about 25 years ago, I realized that travel had become a status symbol. Wearing gold bracelets and flashy clothes, driving a fancy car, and doing other showy things was no longer cool. Telling someone that you went to Budapest last month was now the thing. And those that didn't go to Budapest were very sad that they didn't. Maybe that's why you're also sad for those that didn't travel?
That's reading too much into my comment. No, it's not about bragging, wearing gold bracelets or driving expensive cars.
It's about not being a shut-in and understanding there's more to life than what you can see on your computer screen. Google and Wikipedia are just excuses for this kind of people, anyway.
I cannot go into details because I don't want to overshare.
What did you hate, the act of traveling or the rest of the world?
I'm not being facetious: I really enjoy being other places, but the physical act of traveling, preparing luggage, etc, feels stressful to me. I hate airplane travel, as many people do.
But being there, when I'm not carrying heavy luggage... I love it.
It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go.
Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public speaks English. Now traveling to another country is how traveling to another city was 60 years ago.
Learning is effortful. People can travel and not learn anything, but people can not learn from many things they should learn from. Travel is something you can learn from no matter where you go, but you typically have to put in the effort.
That isn't really true though, unless your itinerary is focused on the centre of major cities and you're determined to stay in chain hotels, eat international food and get taxis everywhere (if your main experience of travelling overseas is business, it might look like this)
Sure, Premier League branded football shirts turn up in the unlikeliest of places and it turns out that actually people don't wear what the internet says is their national dress all that much - that's one of the first things you learn when you travel - but there's plenty that's different, even if you can only communicate with the English speakers.
It's difficult, and you detainly have to step foot outside the tourist trails for 5 minutes, which most tourists maybe don't. If you stick to the brunch places and the tourist trap museums, then yes. But the world is still incredibly diverse; if you travel you can experience this diversity, but you have to make an effort, including research and probably learning a bit of the language.
And they didn't work on a nuclear bomb, because Iran only has a civilian nuclear program, since they were not uniformed. It's all very convenient when what something is is defined by the label on it rather that its true nature.
In any case, North Koreans are not taught that South Korea is just like any other part of North Korea. The idea that the North Korean people and leadership are all buffoons who make the weirdest of lies possible is already Orwellian enough.
It's a sign of an uneducated populace that a political campaign's success depends on visual design. The good thing for that kind of populace is that it can be made to think it's doing better, or on the way to better, when it's actually not.
Marketing works and propaganda works. It's as much of a science as it is an art. When done effectively, both leverage characteristics that:
1) exploit known aspects of indivdual human behavior (more reliable when based upon aspects that stem directly from physiological processes)
and
2) play to the the social climate of whatever emergent phenomena are presently occuring in society.
Strategies for 2) tend to be less evergreen. Many people are always hard at work doing reaearch to bolster techniques for 1) and 2).
I agree with you that education helps build immunity against "cheap tricks" used to influence human behavior.
I also want to add that if one has the privilege of decreased susceptibility to these strategies, it's only that: decreased susceptibility and not immunity. At which point, if the goal is not to be influenced, then a useful strategy for the "marketed-to" is to maintain a healthy respect for the power these techniques can have.
No, they're not electrically powered, but given that you can buy an electrically-powered 5-horn kit from eBay for $20, it's certainly the cheapest way to go for a typical HN-reading hobbyist/hacker. Getting 14 horns is then $60, and the rest is relays a microcontroller, and a bit of 3D printing for the horns.
ok, so not some paradise. Next step, it's Europe so they could just make a law preventing this, perhaps disallow locked apis, or having to publish the details if they do end of life things.
The us should do this too. But we aren't. We have problems like John Deere locking down fixing farming equipment - replace some electric part of your gear and you have to haver an API key to "unlock it" to work. This problem already exists on car parts. It can reduce motivation for someone to steal such car parts, but it seems to mostly be a revenue line for car makers, prevents third party replacements too.
PBS and other stations represented the center for a long while. The Overton window just keeps moving. Nowadays basic stuff like getting vaccinated has been politicized along with a zillion other things that used to be considered “normal”. Makes sense if your main mission is to expand attack surfaces but sucks for the rest of us.
When I listen to NPR, I know what their angle will be regarding almost every topic that comes up. I used to listen to them frequently, but they're too ideological, something that people that agree with them often fail to see.
There used to be more nuance 30 years ago, the discussions smarter. It's now boring because it's predictable.
I disagree with you but damn I don't get the downvotes. Every news org has an angle, and that angle often (but not always) follows revenue. I like to believe that NPR's angle follows the revenue they generate from their listeners. All that said, I don't listen to them either and only occasionally read the site. The best public radio news comes from the local reporters anyway.
I didn't downvote, but if I did downvote, I might do it because: middle ground is a fallacy. Or, rather, middle ground being more correct than extremes is a fallacy.
The idea that, on every issue, there are two extremes and the "right" answer is somewhere in the middle is just sort of made up. It makes a lot of sense, though.
If I say China is 1 mile away from the US and you say it's 1 billion miles away, then the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. It makes sense. Except, the middle is not constant. The middle is constantly moving. What was middle 10 years ago is no longer so. What was middle in Confucius' time is no longer so.
If you take a look at history, you'll notice the people in the middle are almost always wrong. The 3/5ths compromise is the perfect example of this middle ground fallacy. Well... that turned out to be wrong, very wrong.
It's possible NPR hasn't changed their positioning at all, but rather, the window has shifted and now what was previously middling is now "extreme". But they could have been right all along. It happens sometimes. There were people around during the 3/5ths compromise who wanted no slavery at all. They were right!
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