The voltage on big SET amps is quite bracing, while they're very cool I'm quite happy to live vicariously through the kind of people who do those sorts of project on the internet too. I don't mind working on 'normal' valve amps but that kind of build is out of my league.
It's a neat little mark but I don't think it has much of a
chance being widespread because I think ?! has already won in real usage and doesn't have the fine detail problem. I think it has a better chance of becoming an official grammatical digraph than the merged mark.
On a typewriter, you could type one punctuation mark, backspace, and then type another.
Even once computers added the interrobang to Unicode (or older systems), you either need to type in a numeric code, use a secret bucky bit, or select it from a graphical UI, none of which is worth it for more than the odd weirdo with a whimsical streak.
> Ever since I mapped scroll lock to "compose" on my keyboard, I've had fun typing all sorts of characters :)
I've used <Caps-Lock> as <compose> key for ages now, and <Scroll-Lock> as push-to-talk microphone activation key, since I never use either of those keys for their actual purpose anyhow. Is nice being able to easily type emdash and umlauts and such (as well as several common emoji and a bunch of other useful stuff) on a US keyboard.
If they were capable of unselfish, bigger-picture behaviour they wouldn't be part of a ruling class. There is no such thing as benevolent power, every power will eventually be abused to the maximum practical extent it can be and every emergency will eventually become routine.
You cannot hope for a good absolutist king because good kings only exist in mythology. All you can do is design systems that structurally limit the power any one group or individual is allowed to amass over others in my view.
> every power will eventually be abused to the maximum practical extent
But what is the practical extent here? If you own unimaginable amount of wealth while most people are on lets say basic income, you can just afford anything, what do you get from abusing your power?
The same thing every cruel and capricious ruler has got from it, history is littered with example after example of the devil making work for unlimited wealth and power. That kind of wealth and power generally becomes self-justifying, humans have endless capacity for self-delusion and it is very easy for the powerful to convince themselves that their selfish actions no matter how inexcusable are actually generous and aligned with the public good. When it comes to outright oligarchy, wealth and power are simply aspects of the same underlying phenomenon.
At any rate, your common masses on basic income are still living under illiberal conditions even if their shackles have been thoroughly padded. Liberty isn't merely the freedom from interference as neoliberal types like to claim, since ancient times it has been understood that liberty is the freedom from domination. According to the classical formulation a renter in a liberal democracy is still not at liberty because their landlord may turf them out on a whim, the wage labourer is not at liberty since they may be laid off at the whim of a board who neither know nor care to know their name, anyone whose living circumstances depend on the continued whim of even a benevolent master is not a free individual. Under this framing, the people on basic income would be profoundly unfree since their entire lot in life depends entirely on the benevolence of the oligarchs.
There is a good reason that even the Romans understood this danger even as they failed to prevent it. Republics should not suffer private princes, it is a lesson we have been failing to learn for over two millennia.
I don't think elites are ever benevolent, but sometimes they do limit their abuses out of long-term self-interest.
A good example of that is the Roman Republic. The elites created a system that gave land out to retiring soldiers in parcels that were large enough to make them middle class farmers but not genuinely wealthy. That let them churn out absurdly large amounts of heavy infantry that no one else could match. That made them slightly less wealthy in the short term than if they had just taken all the land for their own estates, but it made them immensely wealthy and powerful in the long-term.
They were also very welcoming to outsiders compared to their contemporaries. Conquered territory was basically fully Roman within a few generations (though still keeping many local customs).
Contrast that to Sparta where the elites held onto every ounce of power with an iron fist, keeping most people in slavery, and made it virtually impossible for anyone born outside the elite to join it. They ended withering away to practically nothing, sometimes fielding armies with only a handful of full citizens commanding it.
The early 20th century US is another good example. Fear of communism led to many elites supporting the expansion of worker's rights and the institution of a social safety net (FDR and JFK were both from very wealthy families).
Unpopular perhaps, but correct in my opinion. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin in terms of civic duty I think, if I was being tried for a serious crime I would much rather my jurors were people interested in seeing justice done according to the evidence than people who wanted it over with as soon as possible justice be damned. I suspect everyone in a country with juries would want that.
For what it's worth, I probably could have wriggled out of jury service on medical grounds but made sure to do the opposite.
I agree but after watching voir dire filter out anyone semi-literate on more than one occasion, I don’t think it much matters. The juries are full of morons because that’s what both the prosecution and defense want the juries to be.
Be careful confusing "has no opinion" with "moron". The voir dire process tries to select for people who have no opinion: it's specifically designed to filter for neutrality, because if the trial hasn't even begun yet and you have an opinion, that's a problem.
There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.
Unless this was a case specifically related to the field your degree is in or there are a very limited number of people with college degrees in your area, I doubt that was the full story.
Having a degree is not an attribute that you can be dismissed "for cause" for, and the attorneys have a limited number of preremptory challenges available. At least in my area, where > 50% have college degrees, if they tried to strike everyone with a college degree they wouldn't have a jury pool left.
Ah I think there might be a trans-Atlantic difference here and we're talking past each-other a little. I'm in the UK where jury selection isn't really a thing, selection is at random off the electoral roll and the filtering is mostly based on who has a good enough excuse to not do it.
In the UK, lawyers do not get to pick and choose jurors; jurors are entirely random. The only way a juror can be 'excused' is if it turns out they are related to the defendent or something.
Not quite. In every jury selection I've been through, there were people obviously chosen or not chosen for specific attributes, none of which had anything to do with intelligence, level of education, age, etc. Jurors were not chosen at random...only the initial pool of jurors was selected in any "random" fashion. American attorneys try to look for specific characteristics in jurors, depending on the circumstances of the case.
To offer a counterpoint, when I did jury service the other jurors were one of the few parts of the justice system I left with more respect for. Everyone took their duty very seriously even those who were self-employed and thus directly losing out as a consequence of the jury system. If it were me in the dock, I would rather face twelve of my countrymen than officialdom alone whose shortcomings were thrown into relief by the conduct of the jury in my view.
Agree 100%. It was a minor criminal case, but I had a lot more respect for the law, the people sworn to uphold it, and the rights we have as citizens after participating as a juror.
I agree. I was on a jury in a murder trial this past summer. There were several complainers on the jury (one got relegated to alternate juror status), but when it came down to deliberations, everyone took part and did the job seriously.
Also scamming 101 for that matter, you want your mark to feel an immediate threat of overwhelmingly negative consequences so they'll buy whatever you're selling to prevent it. Silicon Valley directly makes tens of billions of USD literally serving scams to the public already, so I think it's fair to take most claims of doom with a pinch of salt.
Consider the second order effects, there's a reason Western systems emphasise equality before the law. Of course most real-world implementations fall far short, but the system makes equality before the law a goal for a very good reason.
Consider the alternative option, we weaken equality before the law when dealing with non-Western entities who are bound by legal systems we consider on strategic grounds to produce inferior justice. Not only would this by definition be a weakening of our standards of justice, it creates an enormous moral hazard. Common law systems like the UK and US rely strongly on precedent, imagine the kind of unjust precedents which might be set if we do not apply equality before the law strictly. On top of that, having weakened standards of justice to frustrate foreign opponents, what is going to stop the political apparatus from weakening standards of justice again to frustrate domestic groups it doesn't like?
Even if it leads to disadvantage on the global stage, in my opinion the risks associated with weakening equality before the law far outweigh the benefits. A legal system with strong integrity is an asset, and it shouldn't be spent cheaply on short-term geopolitical gain.
> Consider the alternative option, we weaken equality before the law when dealing with non-Western entities who are bound by legal systems we consider on strategic grounds to produce inferior justice.
Maybe the alternative is equality-before-the-law, but the judgement amount won by the Chinese company gets put in escrow until there's legal reciprocity, to create pressure for it.
Holding payments in escrow has the problem of making the administration of justice contingent on the behaviour of a foreign government, which brings us back to where we started with equality before the law. How can we be said to have a higher standard of justice if we explicitly carry out the same kind of instrumental justice we're accusing others of?
Personally I think building trustworthy systems for international arbitration is the method most likely to succeed, if the aim is to come to a common standard of justice for commercial matters then courts on either side of the equation will always be considered suspect by the other side. Both credible international institutions and neutral third countries are a good way of doing this. Appeals to the virtues of different systems aren't going to work here, instead we have to create material incentives that favour a high standard of justice. A reduction in these kind of legal difficulties would improve trust and efficiency.
Obviously this approach has its limits but that's when things like diplomatic pressure, economic protectionism, and in the worst cases economic sanctions come into play. This is all the realm of the executive and legislature though, not the judiciary. The principle is not mere idealism, if we let day-to-day international relations contaminate the judicial process we are committing exactly the same sin that we're accusing China of. By keeping the instrumental aspects of foreign policy isolated in the executive and legislature, this problem is avoided in the interests of justice. It also helps avoid the perception of hypocrisy which is always a diplomatic advantage.
Yeah I've noticed that millennials are often maximalists, years and years of ghastly 'landlord white' paint jobs contributed to that as well I think.
I'm currently renting but looking to buy in my area, I'm sure I'll find the chemical stripping of horrible white gloss paint and the painting over of 'minimal' white walls with a riot of colour outright cathartic. The house I'm renting would look so good if someone took the time to undo all the bodge jobs and cheap decoration choices I think. The lovely hardwood doors have proper brass hinges for example but it's all covered up with decades' worth of horrid white paint. Half the houses round here probably have gorgeous hardwood floors under crappy laminate or lino, and almost all have nice fireplaces I'd love to reinstate and use with a wood burner.
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