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cryptophreak

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That’s one of the great things about the approach demonstrated in the post. The developers of Handbrake don’t need to invest any time or energy in a minimalist interface. They can continue to maintain their feature-rich software exactly as it is. Meanwhile, there is also a simple, easy front end available for people who need or want it.

While the article frames this phenomenon as self-evidently negative, I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a driver of island tameness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_tameness) in humans. To quote Theodore Roosevelt:

"The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful."

The number one cause of death in that same age group was (and remains) accidents, and yet driving has not been curtailed. Young families could not attend school, go to work, or gather with loved ones because of the #4 killer, but the #1 killer inspired no such restrictions.

I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.

The typical rebuttal to this kind of article, seen in some of the comments here, is that the author is necessarily wrong because X happens to Y people per year. Does he want students to die? In other words, "Some number of kids have probably died playing with a stick, so we absolutely must ban or regulate sticks, unless you want kids to die. Are sticks really worth the lives of children?"

The first problem with this argument is the use of thought-stopping language. It seeks to neutralize all reasonableness and good judgement by appealing to the badness of outlier events. Opponents of totalitarianism are painted to be bad people because without totalitarianism uncontrolled things might happen, and that's just irresponsible.

The second problem is that life is inherently risky, so the quest to eliminate risk thus necessarily trends toward eliminating all of life. 100% of people die no matter what choices they make. What should we do about that? Should we divide up the proximal causes and ban them all until no human activity is permissable? Or should we accept that yes, X people per year will die doing Y, maybe the number will even go up over time, and we're okay with that?

Windows 10 Review 11 years ago

I just don’t like it on principle. Why would I voluntarily offer potential control of my machine to somebody else? My software is mine.

The drug war should already have taught us that it's counterproductive to view offenders as generic nuisances rather than people to be negotiated with.

The ivory trade, like the drug trade, is entrenched. There are a lot of people involved. There’s a large, complex, long-standing, and covert structure to deal with. As law enforcement has so clearly demonstrated, you can’t solve behavioral problems at scale with contempt and violence.

The really thorny problems in the world won’t be beaten into submission. To negotiate our way out of this problem, it’s necessary to see the offenders as real, valuable human beings.

From the standpoint of understanding human behavior at scale, the alternatives you offered are unworkable.

People are going to drink, they are going to do it in social environments beyond their homes, and they are going to return to their homes. A realistic solution involves recognizing these centuries-old truths and minimizing the inherent risk. Water flows downhill, and hitting it with a stick won’t change that.

It’s unfortunate that SMS isn’t supported—that’s practically the only reason I still have a phone, and the entire reason I’d want this service is to block all calls, excepting the ones I’ve specifically authorized.