While these things come in waves, I think there has historically been a massive amount of effort and funding by US state agencies to show the CIA, FBI, and/or DoD in a positive light in mass media. Targeted leaks to "safe" journalists, high profile cable TV spots, op-eds that are written by department leaders, etc. That stuff still happens today. I agree that Russia is probably putting money and effort into sowing distrust in US institutions, but I think their capabilities are overrated, especially considering the funding and effort on the other side. Distrust in institutions is a global phenomenon now, with Brexit, Covid, Trump, Euroskepticism, war weariness over Ukraine, etc. But the FBI really doesn't have a great domestic track record and is called out every so often by all sides. Was this post influenced by a Russian campaign? https://twitter.com/aoc/status/953090887613140993
There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships:
"Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered."
It doesn't strike me as surprising that the sail would take longer than the boat. The skill to make a boat is impressive but the mechanics of getting it done aren't enormous.
Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.
I encourage you to watch some videos online of traditional (mostly hand-tools) Shipwrights. Even with the use of a bandsaw to do the rough milling, it is an arduous and lengthy process. Shipwrights also work with some of the longest planks of wood any form of woodworking does. In the days before machines, there would be scores of workers simply preparing the wood and getting it ready for the ship building.
My hunch would be the reason shipbuilding is faster is it is easier to scale to multiple workers, and there are parts you can do in parallel.
The sewing of sail fabric is something different. You need to use heavy duty needle and force it through the fabric. It is somewhat similar I would imagine as dealing with leather.
I bet weavers fought like hell against textile industrialization. I'm not an historian, but there must have been such a conflict, and given the scale of it I bet it was bloody. Industrialization freed them from this toil, but at the cost of centralizing the means of production. It is a strange thing, progress.
The Luddites were a movement of British textile workers who fought industrialization, at first with sabotage then with open rebellion that was violently put down [1].
“The Luddites were a secret oath-based organisation of English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery”
All of human history is the same at its core. Suffering, exploration, profiteering. Yet we have progressed, bit by bit. We have a ways to go, but the arc of history is bending towards less suffering.
Less suffering for some of us, at least in the physical toiling sense and in the short term, but with more humans on the planet than ever before, and so many servings to funnel wealth to a minority, I reckon we’re still collectively suffering quite a bit, with more to come as climate change exacerbates weather extremes and aberrations. And then there’s the suffering of non-human animals. What we’re doing doesn’t feel like progress if I value ecological resilience through diversity, deep connection with the environment and my community, and a history unbroken for thousands of years.
You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days?
While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in about 3 months. Spindle spinning is very portable and something a woman would do during pretty much every spare moment when her hands were not busy doing something else. Making sails would have been a drop in the bucket when it came to yarn consumption since she also had to make all the clothes and cloth for other uses like sacking, ticking, blankets, etc.
“The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier.”
I think you can call that plucking. People use tools to pluck grapes, too.
And 100 a day without a powered tool? Is that realistic?
Plucking is the ancient form of sheering. You literally pull the hair off the sheep by hand. You aren't yanking it out by the roots, the shaft generally broke rather than the root put out of the skin, but I doubt the sheep enjoyed the process. In short: gathering wool from sheep was very different before ready acess to steel shears.
"Before the invention of shears, the sheep were plucked or “rooed”, a Scandinavian word for plucking, and this tradition was still carried out on the Shetland Island until about forty years ago."
If you have ever encountered a sheep's fleece you would realize that it's not possible to pluck. It's a solid mat. It's not hair. Even paleolithic people had sharp knives and scrapers capable of shearing a fleece, so it's not stretch to imagine iron age people having equipment at least as good as their ancestors from 25000 years prior.
100 sheep per day ... with a flat blade since you don't have sheers yet ... while doing all the other chores required to maintain yourself ... accounting for the time it takes for the sheep to grow a coat long enough to sheer in the first place?
You'd have to cut the trees, get them from the forest to the build site, and then make lumber out of them and dry them. Can't imagine it would be that much different.
In those times, chances are they moved the build site to the trees, and made sure the trees were close to the water (with more forest and a much smaller population, such trees could probably be found fairly easily)
“Timber was used green – in other words, shortly after felling. This is different to more modern practice, where the timber is "seasoned" – left to dry for several years. Green wood is easier to work, and more flexible, which can help with some of the more complex shapes found in Viking boats. Wood can be kept "green" for several years by keeping it immersed in water – a stem (or stern) of a Viking style boat was found on the island of Eig in what, a thousand years ago, had been a lake. As it had never been used – there were no indications of rivet holes – it was probably made up when the boat-builder had got a spare piece of suitable timber, and he was waiting for a similar bit for the stern (or stem) which never arrived.
It is also possible to steam green wood without complex equipment like the steam boxes used today. Simply by heating a plank over a fire, the moisture inside the wood heats up and causes the fibres to loosen. This means that – for a few minutes – it can be twisted into shape with less danger of it splitting and breaking. It is highly likely that this was done during Viking times – we know the technique was used to make "expanded" log boats, for example.”
There's been some good research into the history of legal systems. See David Friedman's book Legal Systems Very Different From Ours [1]. There's a small section about prisoners. But a new chapter could definitely be written about cyber-criminals!
Personal anecdote: quite a while ago I got thrown in jail in Thailand (80 people in a cell, a hole in the ground to shit in, one bowl of rice per day, sleep on the concrete floor kind of place).
My embassy was quite helpful in negotiating with the guards to get me in a "VIP" cell, which was a room within the cell run by some Iranians. They said if I paid them a certain sum, I'd be under their wing and they'd protect me.
Couple days later one of them woke me up and asked me to check if I had any cigarettes missing, which I did (not that I cared much). Someone had seen a Russian guy take some of my smokes while I was asleep and told the "boss". They went and beat the crap out of him.
The Iranians also had a line to the cleaning crew who would pass in front of the cell once a day. Every morning you could place an order for (almost) anything you wanted from the outside world. They'd take the payments, write it all down and pass it to the cleaning crew through the bars of the cell who would deliver it all the next day. So while most of our cell mates fought over bowls of rice, in the VIP room we had feasts of curries, fruit, soft drinks. It was like a banquet every day.
The main Iranian guy even had Russian girls come over but they couldn't enter the cells.
The day I got out one of them approached me and ever so gently and politely asked me "You are going home yes? Could I please have your towel?". He could have just taken it along with anything else I had but he stuck to the rules.
So yeah, these guys definitely had a legal system!
I think the reference is MSD partners, the family office (private investment company) of Michael Dell's fortune. They have been described as "patient capital" informally. I can't seem to find any articles using that phrase in reference to MSD Partners, but I've hard it thrown around a lot in discussions of their overall investment approach.
Giuliani met[1] with Andriy Derkach[2] on his 2019 Ukraine trip. Derkach is the target of a long-running US counter-intelligence operation. In September 2020 the Treasury Department sanctioned[3] Derkach for his work against American interests on behalf of Russian intelligence services. Prior to the sanction, US national security adviser Robert O’Brien personally advised President Trump that Giuliani's information should be considered tainted by Russia[4].
I wrote something very similar for reddit a while back using an extension called Tampermonkey. Reddit uses the same CSS classes on all their promoted content so if twitter does this same this could work.
Basically, you make an eventlistener on the scroll wheel and do document.getElementsByClassName('promoted-css-class-name'). Loop over the array of elements found and set the element style to 'display:none' for every element found every time you scroll.
Oh, adding the event listener to the scroll is very clever. I was trying to do it "right" and using a MutationObserver to find when they added nodes to the document but this gets too convoluted fast.
This doesn’t work. I have blocked over 26k accounts and I still see ads. I don’t have blocked Apple or DuckDuckGo and most of the time I see those, but every single day I’m blocking more and more sponsored accounts because they keep appearing. You can’t block all of them.
Here’s my Block List. Not sure why it didn’t update for two months, maybe it doesn’t work anymore:
For promoted, you'll need to use like a browser extension or something 3rd party to remove those. I would be VERY surprised if they gave native ways like this to mute the main income source of their platform (promoted tweets/ads). haha
They have the "See this less often" option if you click the options chevron within the promoted content. I'm convinced it's a placebo feature but...that's just me.
Yeah, that (placebo), or it could mean "see this less often" of this TYPE of ad. So more about the content than the actual ad. Again, I highly doubt they are just going to let users use the platform without any ads.
My assumption is that is only for the particular ad or company and that they will just show you ads from other places instead. More of a way to nudge the system into showing you more "relevant" promoted tweets than actually removing them.
The change I've made is that I set the display of the promoted tweets to none, rather than setting their opacity to 0: article.setAttribute('style', 'display: none');
Agreed - there are companies that specialize in ad-hoc towers to provide service. Example: Mobilitie in Chicago. Very important piece of mobile data infrastructure, but a rogue tower is still a real security risk.
While I agree with humane treatment of prisoners, that's a very slippery argument. Every prison is technically inhumane enough to send some people to attempt suicide.
It’s not slippery at all. Life isn’t fair. Keeping prisoners means you’re responsible for them, and that means that sometimes you’re going to be responsible for problems. There doesn’t have to be a way out of this.
Make your prisons humane, don’t force-feed anyone, and accept the condemnation that occurs when one of your prisoners decides to starve himself to death anyway.
I read it as implying that all prisons are inherently inhumane, and therefore that nobody should be in them. But that's one of the problem with drive-by questions like that - you can't tell for sure what their actual point is.
I love this type of list. I'm frugal, super busy (read: lazy), and powerlift so I try to make a minimum-cost, high-protein, easy meal-prep every week. Having a high protein / calorie ratio is primary, but keeping it low-cost is a close second. I normally use a pressure cooker, 5-6 lbs of chicken breast, brown rice, and lots of veggies. It may sound boring, but it's great when you add stuff like chickpeas, delicious sauces / salsas, and try out different regional styles of cuisine. Check out the author's protein / dollar list - it's very helpful for the protein-obsessed.
If you can tolerate lactose, milk is the cheapest way to eat a good balance of high quality protein, fat, and carbs. 2400 calories for less than $3 at most grocery stores.
Then chicken is the lowest cost per calorie meat, so you're good there. May I also suggest large quantities of cheddar cheese and heavy whipping cream from Costco? Amazing value per dollar spent. Cheddar cheese (we have Tillamook at Costco out here on the west coast) is basically entirely protein and fat and then whipping cream is all fat.
I love the Costco Tillamook cheddar and my girlfriend loves the whipped cream we get from there. I used to drink 2-4 cups of whole milk / day when paying off my student loans and bulking but it seemed to affect my stomach poorly. So I switched to almond milk for my protein shakes.
Some of my favorite ways to make tasty chicken + rice dishes from Costco is the Maya Kaimal simmer sauce the frozen stir fry vegetable mix. The simmer sauce isn't the cheapest option, but I pay extra to make my normally boring/cheap food taste good enough to eat for 5+ days straight. I use my pressure cooker and end up with super tasty Indian meals without the chicken being overcooked.
Kirkland Signature unsalted mixed nuts are also a lifesaver and a part of my daily breakfast. Decent calories / dollar (400 ish depending on the price) but great nutrition density.
I love people who geek out about optimizing their diet.
> The simmer sauce isn't the cheapest option, but I pay extra to make my normally boring/cheap food taste good enough to eat for 5+ days straight
This is a great example of something that is more expensive in theory, but probably cheaper in practice, since it increases overall adherence to your diet plan.
> I love the Costco Tillamook cheddar
If you can't do lactose, then the pricing on Tillamook cheddar is basically the protein & fat portion of milk, without the very cheap carb calories. Carbs are always cheap to add via other sources anyway...
I don't understand the protein/dollar column. Flour has protein listed as "3" and price as 1.68 but I can't see how to get 134 protein/dollar from these numbers. The calorie/dollar column works the way you would expect.
Good question. There's data missing in the table to determine how that column is calculated. Essentially, it's how much protein you would get in that total amount of calories while "protein" is how much protein you would get in a single serving. I looked at eggs and that's how things made sense.
Chicken thighs are much cheaper than breasts, are much more forgiving of over-cooking, and (IMO) taste better too. They presumably have a higher fat:protein ratio than breasts, but I imagine not enough to make a tangible difference.
