I assume they will take the original and most likely unchanged TTD binaries and package them together with DOSBox and that's it. It's something that one dev could do in a weekend.
Another example: Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce. Women in the workforce? Only when the Industrial Revolution happened and the economy could support the roles. Industrial Revolution? Only happened when farming and trading got good enough that 90% of the population didn’t need to be farmers first. Very few moral enlightenments have ever actually happened absent economic preconditions, or would not be reversed if the conditions degraded.
> Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce.
That is not how it was. First, women were actually working and producing the whole time - but with much more limited options. It is not like they would twiddle thumbs bored prior industrial revolution.
And second, the politically succesfull feminism happened mostly with women who were middle class, not allowed to work and wanted more ambitious jobs.
Natural rights do not exist. There is nothing natural about freedom. Every right we have we fought tirelessly for. If we forget the struggle we went through to obtain freedom we can easily abandon the cause and lose that freedom.
While I mostly agree, freedom as a universal right does exist; not everyone can exercise it, but that doesn't make it less of a right.
And it is 'natural' in the sense that it is valued ~~ universally. I can't establish objectively that it is valued everywhere, of course; I can establish that people en masse have valued it and fought for it all over the world, from Europe to South Asia to SE Asia to East Asia; in Africa, to all of the Americas.
Well the issue here is that value is a spectrum. Having rights involves trade offs, take a look at singapore. I do not think it is in any way self evident that all people value each of their rights the way that you do. In el salvador the people gladly gave up their rights to obtain order, and now they have one of the most popular governments in the world even though they do not have very much freedom at all. For you to carte blanche say the el salvandorans are wrong to be happy with that trade off is naive and incredibly paternalistic. The same is true of the situation in Haiti.
These are the same old argument that the dictators have made for generations. 'People here don't value freedom'; 'it's just your opinion'. They are called universal rights for a reason, and finding one popular dictator (in a world of fascist propaganda) while democracy and freedom have swept the world is not significant.
And if you say, who are you or am I to tell them what they value? Who are the dictators? If we can't morally, then you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.
> you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.
Certainly I think all people should have say over how they are governed. Whether they use that say to give themselves freedom is another question.
> 'People here don't value freedom'
No one is saying this. The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).
I havent spent much time looking into the popular opinion about that trade off in Haiti, but to claim that they should never make it as you claim takes away their self determination. If your claim was that Haitans are by and large unhappy with the drone program that would be a different story, but to just say handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive
> The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).
You're assuming what they value more. Also, without freedom there is little safety. Without freedom of speech, etc., you can't have a free election where people can have self-determination.
And without universal rights, if some voters can take rights from other voters, nobody is safe or has self-determination.
> handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive
You are naive to the age-old excuses of state murder and oppression. It's not only criminals (how do you even know who is a criminal?) and it's not going to stop. Do you think the mercenaries and others running the drones care? Do you think they won't murder people for their own benefit or through sheer recklessness and contempt for human life? There's a reason we have limited government and courts. That's why Haiti is in this current state - prior murderers who did the same. Murder is how they seized power and murder is how they kept it.
You'll notice that stable governments are not founded on extrajudicial state murder. That's not what Washington, Jefferson, etc. did.
In warfare, combatants are killed without trial but within the laws of warfare. Even there, extralegal killing is murder.
Yes, that's all the more reason they need a real government that protects people's rights.
The anti-freedom crowd always finds an excuse to disregard others' rights, liberty, and welfare, to impose what they want to do on others. They do it in the US too.
Plenty of places like Haiti just put civilians in the battleground between two equal and equally bad sides, the military and the insurgents. Both sides give the same excuse why they maim and murder civilians, which doesn't begin to address the damage to property and welfare.
In Iraq, for example, the US finally stabilized things when they adopted an effective and acceptable anti-insurgent strategy (led by David Petraeus): Protect the population.
That is naive. 'they need a real government that protects people's rights' and this government will magically materialize out of thin air and institute an island paradise, right? You can't even meaningfully discuss a real 'military' in Haiti, it is a failed state with minimal control of even their capital city.
This is a very common view among people who have grown up in the west. Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."
It's strange because the dominant religion in the west has as a fundamental tenet that people are inherently bad. But I digress...
Unless one is some form of deist who believes there is a top-tier authority who is active in bending the fate of the world, there is no reason to believe rights are natural or exist in any way absent the will of the powerful. It's a sad conclusion but the only one I can come up with after 50 trips around the sun.
This is an extraordinarily realistic take, I imagine you've traveled well to reach to that conclusion. The West is simply unwilling to concede that nothing is given in nature, as they have never truly dealt with the conniving spirit in the hearts of most men.
Yet universal rights have taken over the world, and are embraced by all the most free, most wealthy, most safe countries; it is the foundation of their governments. They are the most succesful governments in history with no others even close to competing, and have done that for many generations.
And now that universal rights have been weakened, the freedom, prosperity, and safety of those countries is weakening.
> Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."
That is a strawperson. Certainly nobody says 'spontaneously', and democratic goverments are constructed carefully to prevent abuses of power.
Naivete is swallowing the bait of fascists, hook, line and sinker: That freedom is somehow impossible, that people are only evil (instead of a mix of good and bad, either of which we can embrace and strengthen), and we must have a strongman. How convenient for the wannabe dictator.
America has always been blessed with great geography, natural resources, an educated populace, and an inventive, optimistic spirit. That is to say, Americans have never suffered and as such, cannot comprehend suffering. Thus Americans are blind and naive to injustices they have never faced.
After my mom kicked me out I went to live with my grandparents. They bought me a c-128d and a 1200 baud modem. Little did they know I had no concept of hourly connection fees or phone billing. It was amazing until they got the first $200 bill from Q-Link and $400 from the phone company. My grandpa was so pissed he kicked me out and fortunately my dad took me in. It was about 7 years before he talked to me again, and it was only a terse, stiff conversation on the phone when he called to talk to my mom. He died not long after. He grew up poor and couldn't get over it. I still appreciate them taking me in. I wouldn't be where I'm at today without them buying me that computer system.
I have such strong nostalgia for that era, but man, every time I try to go back and experience a BBS like this is just feels so empty. There really isn't a way to experience the feelings back then. I admire them for keeping it alive, but the magic was long ago dispelled by ubiquitous internet connectivity.
I can go play a retro videogame and be taken back, but I've never felt that way with a BBS. Maybe it's just the intensity of what the BBS world was back then. It was a way into another world.. an exclusive world.. the first taste of digital life, long before it was taken over by the masses. An intimate community, but also a gateway to esoteric and faraway lands.
I was 12 when I got my first modem in '87. Suddenly I was no longer trapped in my town but connected to something secret yet global. Sure, long-distance charges kept things local for the most part, but it wasn't long before I found a way around that. Stolen calling cards, open PBXes, then Tymnet/Telenet and then in '90 an internet gateway of a local university. Wardialing, finding strange systems in the night... poking around until something gave way. Arrested. Reset. Probation. No computers. It all came to a halt. Then one day at Boeing Surplus I found an old green screen terminal and a 300 baud acoustic modem. Back online.. but the world began to change. MBBS, multi-line systems, and the world began to open. The world wide web began to take shape, Yahoo awoke, and the old steamship rolled into port for the last time.
I feel this. Almost exactly the same experience. 300bps in early days. At some point got a 1200bps. Then 2400, then 14.4 and 28.8 came fast. WWIV variants. CDC. 2600. Phrack. 612-341-2459 for local Telenet dialup at the time, my fingers still know the number unconsciously. War dialing! 5ESS. SS7. Bluebeep. 0700 bridges. Even in the early days of the internet, EFnet had BBS flavor to some extent. Certainly the warez. haha. A lot of the same people. What a time. I remember the first time I was going through Computer Shopper and found the BBS list. First one I ever called was Unlawful Entry... welp. If fate exists, it was busy that day.
As someone else mentioned, the community is gone. But, I think there's also the feeling of victory from when you actually connected. You may have needed to autodial for hours to get onto the BBS. There was a huge amount of anticipation that led up to getting connected. Once you were on, it felt more special that it does today with the instant connection.
That is exactly what I felt looking at Darkrealms' site again.
I grew up on BBSes and ran one in the late 90's. It's not the same, there's no going back. Downloading random txt files with wacko conspiracy theories, fighting other online users in door games, dialing long distance for a chance to find cool warez, it's all hollow now. There's no community left. Any info you want can be found in seconds.
The Osprey killed a lot of Marines over the past decades. It took a while to work out the issues. Hopefully we will remember what the Osprey taught us.
Some countries are more prepared than others. Vietnam, who now handles a lot of mfg moved from China, has reserves measured in days. Yes, some countries have a couple months. I don't know the stats for nat gas though, and that could be better or worse.
Petrochemicals are a big part of the world economy. Energy is needed to get workers to work, factories to run, and ships to move.
This could slow goods production on par with covid. Forward looking financial markets which, by and large, failed to predict this will likely overreact as well. If the private credit bubble bursts coincident with market panic we could see a major financial crisis (maybe not GFC, but big).
It's a big price just to cover up the Epstein Files...
Nah. So far we haven't hit Iran's oil export infrastructure. If China makes a serious move we blow it up. We can also close the straight ourselves and claim it's for protection.
I ain't reading all that, but if you're referring to the strike on the oil storage facility in Tehran, AFAICT that's not for export. It's local consumption. We haven't, to my knowledge, hit oil exports yet.
I don't think oil works like that. Infra takes a long time to reroute, especially in war time. Exports are nearly all of Iran's economy. They can't turn it off or they starve.
AI is killing the notion that SW companies are infinite money printing machines. The idea is that someday soon(in the next 5-10 years as markets are forward looking), someone will vibe-code a replacement for Photoshop/TurboTax/Office and if nothing else that will kill the profit margins. This changes the entire economics of SW and affects current hiring and spending.
Quite the opposite. I just spent the past month "vibe coding" a pretty serious program in C. The tldr is yea I can build faster but I'm still sitting there testing, debugging, and focusing on specific features as I go and that's still a human limitation. The AI productivity is pivoted directly into higher complexity of features. It's not a magic wand that immediately builds a program that works perfectly out of the box. The zeitgeist just hasn't caught up to the reality of that.
And that's cool but your experience is not what the market is trading. The vibe is that vibe-coding will come together in the next few years and SW margins will be hit. That doesn't mean it's the reality, just that it is what the market is thinking.
Oregon ticks most of those boxes except the difference is that Oregon has very few jobs. People flock to WA because of jobs created by long-standing business friendly policies.
That doesn't explain everything, obviously, but I think you need to take it into consideration. For decades I've heard this in some form from people: "Oregon is amazing, but I had to leave when I couldn't get a job." Meanwhile the Sea-Tac region has had amazing growth, packed wall-to-wall with a range of companies.
I agree, difference between explosive growth and “consistent draw” is large employers setting up in the region.
Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.
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