The simple slogan of "defund the police" in fact leads to vociferous disagreement among individual activists and organizations about what that means, i.e. whether simply refusing the police military hardware and funding levels, or ending the existence of police outright and replacing them with an unarmed, locally organized neighborhood patrol.
"The war on drugs has been a failure and should end" seems like a similar can of worms. Should the state take the approach of decriminalizing drugs but still aiming to reduce their use by allowing addicts only recourse to medical treatment in special centers? Or should things take a libertarian path and allow citizens to put whatever they want into their own bodies whenever they want?
In Europe, more and more banks have been slashing opening hours and the number of clerks at physical locations, or even closing locations outright, because customers are expected to do nearly everything through online banking. Many forms of interaction with the state require using their online portal, and even if you visit the government office, they may just show you how to do what you need through the online portal instead of helping you directly. Programs to assist people who do not have a phone and internet, now focus on giving those people a phone and internet; there simply isn’t willingness to make technology optional for that tiny demographic that eschews internet use.
Yes, the Amish have managed in the USA so far, but I think that even those days are numbered. Just as many Amish already own mobile phones, though they limit their use and keep them stashed away most of the time, they will be forced to do online things, too.
Much like the Amish will probably have a community mobile phone rather than a personal one a good middle ground for the rest of us could be public libraries. Government services and banking typically don't need frequent access so you don't need a personal internet connection just for them.
I'm ashamed to admit I didn't think of this earlier recently when I needed some printing/scanning done. I went and bought a cheap hp cloud printing (they don't even come with cables anymore) abomination. After trying to get that to work, screwing around with HP accounts, configuring a cloud printer from a linux desktop, installing an app on my phone, etc I ended up going to the local library and got it all done in 30 minutes It was cheaper, easier and better option for something I need to do a few times a year.
The problem with recommending public libraries is that government and banking services may require specifically a mobile app on one’s phone, not a website that can be used from any library computer.
>Programs to assist people who do not have a phone and internet, now focus on giving those people a phone and internet
This is smart though, since it costs very little to give someone a smartphone with internet these days (ALDI talk in Germany is 8€ a month with a bit of data, a cheap smartphone maybe 100€).
Trying to keep up a service that <0.1% of the population uses costs a lot more.
Having grown up here I think a lot of people would freak out if you had to use computers for services. The town I grew up in doesn't even let you pay taxes online in 2021.
I saw some article suggesting that actual computer savviness is on the decline among people under 18 as well due to the growth of iPads and phones as the primary compute platform for the younger generations.
Strange to say that Miles' fusion never popularized, because Bitches Brew sold well and sparked imitators (Herbie Hancock's fusion era, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Jaco Pastorious) that also sold well and sold out conventional concert venues. As the Wikipedia article for Bitches Brew notes, the album “was viewed by some writers in the 1970s as what spurred jazz's renewed popularity with mainstream audiences that decade.”
I don’t know if you can call those guys imitators - Herbie, McLaughlin and Zawinul all played on Bitches Brew. It was a seminal “fusion” record for sure and the school of Miles without a doubt left a lasting impression on all of them, but all those groups sound pretty different to me.
I love hearing John McLaughlin tell Miles stories - he has so much respect and gratitude for him.
BB, In a Silent Way and Kind of Blue are probably my favourite Miles records, he really managed to reinvent the art form more times than many other people I can think of
Agreed, none of them are imitators. Proteges, yes.
Zawinul got his start with Cannonball Alderly, and one of his early compositions (Mercy Mercy Mercy) has big fusion vibes to it.
Hancock is just a Miles level genius. My piano teacher told me something like "I can play at Herbie's standard for a 5 minute stretch, but watching him keep at it for 90 minutes solid ..."
McLachlin is a hippie who cut his teeth on the late 60s modal/fusion scene.
In a Silent Way is my favourite jazz album ever. I think the history was they did Bitches Brew, then after that straightened that approach out a bit to make something more accessible.
Protégés - absolutely! I think they all saw it that way too. Miles was the teacher
Timeline on those albums - I think it happened the other way around actually - In A Silent Way was Miles’ first foray into electric jazz in 1969 - Bitches Brew came soon after in 1970 and was pushing the boundaries further. Both great albums, every single player on those albums is great. Miles sure could pick the best for his bands and make it gel together.
Herbie is without a doubt one of the giants. Listened to the Headhunters era albums probably more than any other records in my life. Killer. Love his earlier jazz stuff too, and the acoustic albums he put out later (Joni covers etc)
That does make sense to an extent. The average listener today is more likely to think of cheesy 80s synthy jazz fusion when they hear of the term, rather than something like Bitches Brew.
They all sound like imitators(not really) because most of them played on the Bitches Brew record. At least Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin. :)
"Imitators" might not be the best word, but judging from these musicians’ recordings as leader or sideman to others up to about 1970, which are generally in a much more traditional postbop vein, they might not have made the leap to fusion had it not been for Miles’ late 1960s albums already opening up a new genre gradually and then IASW and Bitches Brew throwing the doors wide open.
Miles became an ornery old man in the 1980s. Most of his angry statements (sure, some are about race, others are about all kinds of things he didn’t like for whatever reason) that became grist for quoting came generally when the quality of his work itself had already begun to decline significantly, in the view of most critics and jazz historians. For me, this doesn't “taint his legacy” as much as give me one more reason for ignoring his last decade, while still enjoying greatly the recordings generally regarded as classics.
In the 1990s, while first lady, Clinton served on a task force for public healthcare [0], and she wrote a book entitled It Takes a Village arguing for this and other state intervention. Regardless of how left she is compared to parties in other countries, this immediately placed her on the left of the USA's partisan divide.
When running for president, her policies were at least significantly left of the Republican party's platform. She's firmly in the authoritarian end of that axis, but also a bit to the left.
Instead of going to Google, if you are looking for local businesses in a particular category and their opening hours or contact information, then one recommendation that would preserve privacy is using OSMAnd on your phone for looking all that info up without requiring any network connection. Of course, that assumes that your community is well mapped on OSM.
I have DDG as my default, except sometimes I switch it back to G for a few days.
I do something both odd and inefficient for local business search: I open the Apple Map app, and restaurants and other businesses show up, especially when I zoom in. I live in a small town, and seeing a map (with satellite imagery enabled, of course) and zooming in on different areas reminds me of where I might want to eat, etc. Fun.
What if 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, but in such a way that the remaining 10% have no political power and no industrial base, because that all remained with the majority? Hard for the non-uploaders to expand in that case.
That's quite contrived in my opinion. How can people uploaded into a simulation maintain that level of control in the physical world for any durable period?
They have to keep up all the computing infrastructure running the simulation, and deal with long-term threats like geological activity and asteroids. That requires having and maintaining considerable technology out in the real world, and if only a mere 10% refuse to enter the simulation, then that minority may not get to benefit from spacefaring technology, or have the capital or industrial base to develop their own.
In fact, since spacefaring presents a threat (kinetic bombardment) to any planetary-bound species, then that majority who choose to enter the simulation may want to expressly prevent the minority from leaving the planet.
This is obviously not impossible, but we are now in the realm of adding clauses to an already rather specific scenario, each clause adding another degree of improbability. (The odds of "an upload cult arises on a planet" is by definition greater than "an upload cult arises on a planet AND actively presents anybody else on the planet from ever leaving.)
I think the metaphor to look to isn't necessarily even human civilizations spreading around the globe; it's life spreading through the planet to colonize every niche out of which the slightest scrap of energy can be extracted.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the non-uploaders to, you know, just pull the plug? Or change the input to the digital existances in a way to simulate a reality "outside"?
No, because – as I mentioned above – the uploaders would still maintaining all kinds of technology to monitor and control the outside world in order to ward off any threats (natural disasters, sabotage from the non-uploaders) to the computing infrastructure on which the simulations are running. If the majority of society chooses to upload, then that suggests that such protective infrastructure is already so stable and advanced, that the non-uploaders would be powerless to simply "pull the plug".
It's an interesting question. How do people maintain control now? In general, it is not through physical control. We have institutions, we have "manufacturing consent".
We have those in a negative sense. Manufactured consent is mostly about directing motivation towards wars of control and acquisition and preventing other activities - including the peaceful development of sustainable energy, which is finally happening fifty years after it could have, and non-corporate non-military access to space on top of a non-corporate internet, neither of which are happening at all.
Manufacturing positive consent for a billion-year project is - obviously - a completely different kind of problem.
POTUS himself may be absent from Africa but not from physical reality, and the physically real resources under their command certainly aren’t absent from the various corners of the world.
I don't understand your argument. How much control do you think the White House exercises over chimpanzees? Your hypothetical chimpanzee is completely correct.
While NZ’s leadership choose not to name the shooter in their public statements, the name of the NZ shooter is well known. It is right there at the top of the Wikipedia article on the incident, and many non-NZ newspapers choose to name him.
Nowruz is celebrated by many Iranian-speaking peoples, even ones who had little historical connection to Zoroaster's reforms. It is best seen as a general ethnic Iranian holiday, not a specifically religious Zoroastrian one.
Zoroastrianism was founded by an individual: Zoroaster. Traditionally it has been viewed as the product of an individual (drawing on some elements of the prevailing religion) just like Christianity, Manichaeism or Buddhism, though details of the founder's biography are now lost to time.
"The war on drugs has been a failure and should end" seems like a similar can of worms. Should the state take the approach of decriminalizing drugs but still aiming to reduce their use by allowing addicts only recourse to medical treatment in special centers? Or should things take a libertarian path and allow citizens to put whatever they want into their own bodies whenever they want?