Patrick Flynn, a Catholic, sued his children’s Catholic school when they demanded his children get vaccinated to attend; Flynn objected on religious grounds, and sued. The diocese defended on religious grounds, claiming vaccines promote the common good and are theologically required. Neither the trial nor the appellate court wanted in on any of it (declaring it a theological matter rather than a legal one), leaving the ruling that private schools in Florida can deny religious vaccine exemptions (which public schools cannot).
Tag: society
Galaxy Colonization Highest Good
Right now, outside of Earth, the universe as we know it is full of vast empty spaces, fiery stars, and lifeless planets. It’s beautiful, but it’s as dead as a rock. I, for one, would not want to be a rock. Being a human is wonderful, but even being a monkey or a dog or a bird would be better than being a rock. There is more happiness and pleasure (and whatever else makes life worth living) in a single bird than there is in the whole known universe outside of Earth. That would no longer be the case if humanity colonizes outer space.
Unified tyranny would be difficult to maintain across the vast distances of outer space.
To get a sense of the possibilities, consider a Dyson swarm, which is a series of structures that a civilization could place around a star to collect its radiation. If humanity builds a Dyson swarm around the sun, we could get a billion times more energy than from Earth. That alone would enable a huge improvement, but then note that the Milky Way has a few 100B stars. A network of Dyson swarms could power a massive galactic civilization that utterly dwarfs anything we can achieve on Earth. However much good we may be able to do by making the world a better place is utterly dwarfed by making the universe a better place.
and a counterpoint
These facts make it look hopeless for a governing system to effectively coordinate law enforcement activities, judicial decisions, and so on, across cosmic distances. The universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion.
But there is another strategy for achieving peace: Future civilizations could use a policy of deterrence to prevent other civilizations from launching first strikes.
Cowen On Complacency
So, bottom line: compared to most times and places, the US has been especially complacent lately in many areas, for many specific reasons but for no identifiable general reason, except maybe in part for peace, wealth, and Tocquevillian satisfaction (whatever that is). But these changes will soon revert, because “cycles.”
Rampant illiteracy
the vast majority of people are illiterate. this doesn’t bode well for their future job prospects.
Researchers defined 4 levels of proficiency, based on the types of tasks users can complete successfully. For each level, here’s the percentage of the population (averaged across the OECD countries) who performed at that level, as well as the report’s definition of the ability of people within that level. Level 0: 14% of Adult Population. An example of task at this level is “Delete this email message” in an email app. Level 1: 29% of Adult Population. An example of level-1 task is “Find all emails from John Smith.”. Level 2: 26% of Adult Population. An example of level-2 task is “You want to find a sustainability-related document that was sent to you by John Smith in October last year.”. Level 3: 5% of Adult Population. An example of level-3 task is “You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.”. Can’t Use Computers: 26% of Adult Population
$11 Potato chip
Sweetish brewery St. Erik’s has created the world’s most expensive potato chips. The luxurious black box designed by St. Erik’s contains just 5 individual potato chips, each made by hand by a chef, using 5 special Nordic ingredients – Matsutake mushroom picked from pine forests in northern Sweden, truffle seaweed from the waters around the Faroe Islands, Crown Dill hand-picked on the Bjäre Peninsula, Leksand Onion grown on the outskirt of the small Swedish town of Leksand and India Pale Ale Wort, the same kind used to make St. Erik’s Pale Ale beer. The potatoes themselves, are also special. They apparently come “from the potato hillside in Ammarnäs, a steep, stony slope in a south-facing location where almond potatoes are cultivated in very limited numbers. The slope is difficult for modern agricultural machines to access, which means that all potatoes are planted and harvested by hand.”
Taos County
The mesa lacked almost every incentive for a permanent population. The one resource it had was cheap land tucked far away from neighbors, cops, building inspectors, and anyone else who might stop a person from doing whatever the hell he wanted on his very own scrap of dirt. Even among the recluses, word was eventually going to get out. Fugitives came to live in hiding. Veterans and retirees came to stretch a monthly check. The hippie communes that had taken root in Taos County in the ‘60s and ‘70s disbanded, and a few diehards decided that isolation on the mesa was the next best thing. Environmentalists came to build the experimental Earthship homes that would have been banned by county building codes. Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts came to grow marijuana. Many came to build a life that didn’t revolve around a steady job and a mortgage payment. Others came simply to retreat into themselves. Today, Taos County is one of the poorer counties in the country. Some do better, some do worse, but the gradation on the mesa, as in much of Taos County and New Mexico at large, is in terms of who has more of not very much. The only common culture, Elliot feels, is one of poverty.
it is amazing to find this level of anarchy in the continental us
Trace of the Weirding
it feels like decades worth of change happening within the space of weeks so it’s a weird kind of world happening around us right now you can’t really judge the state of it in the sense of providing an accurate snapshot but what you can do is narrate the perspective you have as you can make your way through the world. we’re gonna try to get a sense of the state of the weirding.
AirSpace
We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started…
The profusion of generic cafes and Eames chairs and reclaimed wood tables might be a superficial meme of millennial interior decorating that will fade with time. But the anesthetized aesthetic of International Airbnb Style is the symptom of a deeper condition, I think.
on the homogenization of space: sameness worldwide, reclaimed wood, craft beer etc.
What are young men doing?
The average low-skilled, unemployed man plays video games an average of 12h. 22% of unemployed young men did not work the previous year either. These individuals are living with parents or relatives, and happiness surveys actually indicate that they’re quite content compared to their peers
large fractions of society are already doing what they would if UBI were here
Online Fealty
The ISIS Caliphate is using online fealty as a way to recruit jihadis around the world. It’s a powerful recasting of an ancient concept that goes well beyond modern expressions of loyalty. The way ISIS has constructed its brand of online fealty makes it globally scalable. The only barriers to entry are: conduct an attack and publicly pledge fealty. The most common platforms for a public pledge? Social media, 911, etc.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 