And Clinton (mostly Gore as VP) cut the federal civilian workforce by about 20%, while following the both the letter and spirit of the law, and not causing chaos.

I’m about 1/2 way through reading “How to be a stoic”, so far its a good introduction.

In a sense that book is more about selfhelp, and misses some parts of Stoicism.

An interesting book which is more complete but still readable is Stoic Notes written by Rymke Wiersma, translated in English here: https://modernstoicism.com/a-free-book-stoic-notes-by-rymke-...

So far it reads as a light introduction and sales pitch, which is fine.

I haven't read that, but I bet it's good. Massimo has been writing on the subject since I learned what Stoicism was.

If you're interested, feel free to sign up to Stoa Central. Really, I would love to have some intelligent people to have discussions with.

Or policy. We have an embarrassing chap in these comments advocating for the equivalent of Jim Crow voting laws.

Who, amusingly, dodged his military service.

What about people with a medial disability?

Are we talking one spurs? Or dementia?

Either way, they sound like they have leadership potential.

Should still count if you can be 'drafted' into an 'office job' right?

The book does address that, in that the federal service is universally available (and even the blind, deaf, or crippled would spend their time performing some job, even if it eas "counting the hairs on a caterpillar by feel".

Weird, there are none when you use the appletv device

I use an Apple TV.

Maybe it’s just me. I’ve been an Apple One subscriber for a long time now. The Peacock commercial I’m talking about plays right when I open the app, almost full screen and quite loud. It seems to be some sort of add-on offer for Apple One subscribers.

When you open which app? The appletv app on the device?

I’m not sure what you’re asking. I clearly stated that the Apple TV app has ads when I open it from my Apple TV device.

the promos for other shows are commercials

What’s your point, exactly? They are still commercials.

To me there's a very distinct difference between unobtrusive same-service tasteful trailers and entirely unrelated third party ads.

I genuinely discovered great series and films that I enjoyed a lot but I would not have watched otherwise (e.g Shrinking).

This is true for cinema as well.

While I agree that third party advertising is not the same as playing trailers from other same platform shows, once you are in the app, these highly promoted shows are really hard to miss, regardless of how many trailers are placed at the beginning of another show.

For Shrinking, for instance, they placed an almost full screen, auto play trailer in the main carousel. It is also first in the top ten shows, and it appears in a number of other lists.

Regardless of all this, they do play unrelated promotions for their add ons like some sports stuff or the Peacock deal.

I think a time-lock feature to enable “I know what I’m doing mode” for a year, after a 48h delay would be ok.

Or something like that

I like Chrome OS's approach where you essentially choose your security level at initial setup, and need to wipe your machine if you wish to change it.

But what if a scammer walks grandma through backing everything up, unlocking the machine, installing a rootkit, and then restoring from backup? /s

(Joke is on you. You thought you'd be given access to app data to back it up? That's against the security model.)

No, that would still suck.

More of less peaceful than Batista? To whom? And for whose benefit?

If you actually want a response, you probably should form questions as full sentences.

Peak efficiency is seasonal. Much of North America is perfectly suited for solar year round, at reduced efficiency.

Is that your summary of the causes, goals and impacts of the Cuban revolution?

Causes and goals, no. Impacts, yes. Regardless of intent, socialism inevitably destroys everything it touches.

Or, a prolonged embargo, threats of invasion, actual attempts at invasion, diplomatic pressure to isolate, etc all by the most powerful empire in history on your doorstep destroyed everything.

It’s pretty hard to sort out after the fact.

It is not hard, because you can look at other examples besides Cuba.

Once upon a time, there was COMECON, a huge bloc of socialist countries trading with one another, whose intent was precisely to limit Western pressures. It included some fairly developed countries like Czechoslovakia and GDR. 500 million people in total, similar to the US and Western Europe together back then. A huge market in total, from Leipzig to Vladivostok to Saigon (after it fell).

(BTW Cuba was a member of COMECON and it was a very non-productive member, being heavily subsidised by the Soviet Union all the time. I still remember the Cuban oranges sold in Czechoslovak shops, which were so full of stones/seeds that they were barely edible. No one would voluntarily buy them unless there was no alternative available, but there usually wasn't one. A good metafor for what was going on.)

They still ran their economies into the ground because Marxist-Leninist economy doesn't work in practice. Marxism as a theory is catnip for intellectuals, but neither Marx nor Lenin ever tried to run a corner shop, much less an actual factory. The resulting misalignment of interests throws off almost everybody and a country practicing Marxist-Leninist approaches to economy will end up with just two really functional institutions: the secret police, to keep the comrades in power, and the (very non-Marxist) black market, which is tolerated because otherwise the population would starve. If it is not tolerated, the population will starve, but only a few countries like North Korea were crazy enough to go down that road.

The same happened all over again pretty much everywhere where it has been tried. China only started to economically grow after ditching Marxist economy for market reforms in 1979. India was never totalitarian, but toyed with Marxist approaches until 1991, when the "License Raj" was reformed; since then, it has been following Chinese economic growth along a very similar line.

Heck, even very early idealistic Israel ran into somewhat similar problems, although all the kibbutzniks were there voluntarily and eschewed use of state violence to build their utopias.

Communism doesn't work because its originator (Marx) used Hegel's dialectical method, which was only ever meant to be used in conjunction with an idealist (=reality is derived from the mind) philosophy, and misappropriated it into dialectical materialism. The dialectical method is acceptable when the contradictions are between concepts during the process of gaining knowledge which if completed results in "the truth being the whole".

In materialist philosophy, the real world exists entirely outside the mind and the mind only interprets it. Having dialectical materialism would imply that material reality has a final destination (=communism) that it is striving to achieve and that rather than concepts such as life and death contradicting each other, it's people that are contradicting each other (capitalists vs proletariat). Because forward progress is guaranteed, there is no need to have knowledge/discussions about how to arrive at the final destination. The best way to accelerate the process is to simply destroy the existing order no matter what it is. Reformists (people who demand incremental improvements) are slowing down progress toward utopia while supporting the status quo and should be held in contempt.

What this ultimately means is that Marxist socialism has never been about building a good society for people to live in, but to dismantle the status quo, no matter what it is. This makes Marxist socialism an extremely attractive ideology for ruthless, violent or narcissistic individuals, while simultaneously luring in unsuspecting people who just want a better life and have reasonable grievances with the status quo. These subtractive ideologies fail because they're biting the hand that feeds them.

There is this socialist streamer (Vaush) that summarized all of this in a single sentence. "I don't care about principles, I only care about winning."

Is it? It's more like "you can't succeed with any political system if your powerful bullies dislike it". What do you think about Vietnam? Everything destroyed as well?

I don't think anything about Vietnam, I was just making a joke.

I think of him as known for his thoughts on the “color” brown.