"Oh boy, look at that all that melting ice cream.. I hope he sits on our anthill!"

That's how I learned that forest ants, at least the local ones, are incredibly docile. I never got bothered by them.

Edit: I just realized that your question was specifically about losing a smartphone. I’m not sure if “half a day” is a universal estimate. I can easily imagine that many people would completely lose access to their digital lives because they only realize the implications after the fact. I think I’d need at least half a day just to figure out how to unlock the scooter again after losing my smartphone. I have absolutely no desire to deal with that.

It is taken out more, so you are more likely to lose it. I often see people with their phones out on a table in a cafe, or even on a flight while they are asleep.

I think it would be more effort to replace a phone than a wallet. You need to buy a new phone and restore it. With a wallet you might need to make a few phone calls but you can manage more easily until it arrives.

Domestic violence is an obvious line to set, but are you really going to cut a good friend off for not repaying a loan? I would argue that the former is a net good (protects people from abuse) while the latter is a net harm (causes people to abandon their friends when times are bad, without helping to get repaid). I would also argue that most lines fall into the latter category.

Setting lines to protect moral, philosophical, or political beliefs seems even worse, because it's preventing you from changing your mind about those things. Once you've set a line, you can't adapt to change as easily. Having criteria for changing your mind is a band-aid over the problem, because those criteria are set by you as you are today, and they're biased by your current beliefs.

I think this article is a pretty good complement to ask vs. guess culture https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/ask-vs-guess-culture

in my experience, people from ask-heavy cultures will only respond to clear lines. otherwise they will just keep pushing. if you have people in your life who are very good at recognizing soft boundaries, you don't need this skill with them, but it will be helpful for people who ignore soft boundaries.

> Lines Will Move Further Away If They Aren’t Defined

Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Sometimes I think some line is important, then I move closer to it, and realise the line is less important to me, and so I'll be less cautious of it.

Some might say "slippery slope!" or "boiling a frog!", but I think of it as me updating my values as I learn more.

Some people are prone to black-and-white thinking, and so I can see why they might be drawn to hard lines.

It is not about slipper slope, you are not falling, you are simply consistently making decisions based on what people around you approve. If you dont have lines, you dont have values. You are just doing what is easy or socially approved right now.

> Social approval from peers comes first, lines are moved, always because something that is approved by friends.

I hope so! It would be too much for someone to figure this out all by themselves.

Should lines have been set in 1500? 1800? 2026?

A lost art today, where narcisism is "everybody else is toxic" and boundaries for everything is the norm.

Also, in fact, you can have friends and boundaries. If you cant, you need therapy.

In my experience nobody asks me, their friend, for a (nontrivial) loan unless they've exhausted more conventional lines of credit. Bank loans, credit cards, getting their parents to bail them out.

The friends who I'd rely on to pay their debts don't need $500 from me to help cover their rent this month. And the friends who are already struggling with credit card debt ain't good credit risks, and don't need more debt added to the pile.

I'd sooner just gift them the $500 in the first place.

Not being repaid is possibly a reason not to lend him any more money. I don't see it as a reason to cut contact with him, though.

My motto, is that people have helped me a lot in life, with time, resources and sometimes money.

If I loan money, I explicitly do not expect to be repaid, and will generally say, pass it on.

Also it's often not the loaner side who cuts off contact. But if the person who receives the loan cannot repay it, and every time they talk to you, they feel guilty and think about it. They might just start avoiding you.

The moral dilemma might be more significant if the amount is large enough to worry you.

Suppose a close friend needs $50k for medical treatment, but it's $50k you had saved to pay for your child's university, and they promise to pay you back gradually so it's in time for your child to start university, but meanwhile they don't pay any back, and instead spend their income on a fancy car. I think it would be challenging to remain friends with that person.

No, it's not.

A boundary is something you're saying about your behavior. "If you use racist language at me, I will have to end this conversation."

And much, much worse than someone with "a minefield full of unnecessary boundaries" is someone who has boundaries they don't tell you about.

You should only set boundaries that are real boundaries for you, not just whims or arbitrary decisions. But if you do have boundaries—and everyone does; if you think you don't, then you just haven't had someone cross them (or haven't realized that's what happened when they did)—you must communicate them in contexts where there's a real chance of them being crossed.

To do otherwise is unfair to everyone else and to yourself.

I think this falls under de-escalation, and there's lots of approaches.

Communicating boundaries, or stating if-thens, can be an escalation in some situations.

Steering the conversation/situation away works in some situations.

Non-verbal communication can work, and be more tactful: it allows an accidentally-offensive person to recognise, pull back and show support. This smoothes out conversations, and is common enough that it's expected for many.

For groups of people that use non-verbal communication less, then perhaps explicitly stating things is the only option.

But don't be surprised if non-verbal communicators interpret it as combative!

"Wow, Foo got upset quickly at me, and in front of others. [Why didn't Foo make it clearer that they were getting uncomfortable [using non-verbal methods]]".

An ultimatum says “you must do X or else I will do Y”

A boundary says “you must refrain from X or else I will do Y”.

You make a distinction without a difference. In either case, without providing for compromise or alternative mutual understanding, it is likely confounding and demanding.

Additionally, an ultimatum comes with a deadline; a boundary is indefinite (until stated otherwise).

In a sexual relationship context, that distinction could be better illustrated by:

"Don't touch me like that again without asking first, or I will break up with you"

vs

"If you don't have sex with me by the end of the week, I'll break up with you".

An ultimatum is, to most people, inherently damaging to psychological safety. A boundary is not automatically better - it can be unreasonable, unhealthy, or incompatible with the other persons needs - but unlike an ultimatum, it's not _inherently_ harmful to the relationship.

I mean...I'm a pretty easygoing guy overall. My boundaries are things like, "If you come up and scream in my face, I'll tell you to sod off." "If you punch me, I'll probably shove you back." Reasonable boundaries for other people might be "if you grab my butt, I will report you to HR", or "if you ask me to work unpaid overtime, I will refuse (and report you to HR/the NLRB)".

It seems like you think "people setting boundaries" looks like telling your coworkers things like "never ever speak to me in anything but the most respectful tones" or "if you ask me about my personal life, even the tiniest bit, I will call the police". Except in extremely unusual circumstances, "boundaries" like that are actually people being abusive of their coworkers.

Did your good friend not repay his loan? Okay, what's the size of the loan, and how did they react when you reminded them? What's the circumstances surrounding the loan itself - did they borrow for the down payment of a mansion, or did they borrow to buy cheese?

Also, if you're treating your life as a game theory set piece then perhaps that's a place where you should start making changes. Just sayin'.

is it? the example given for things implied to disallow are playful pinching/punching.

Even the author's implied choice of line is suspect here.

If I start by not liking playful pinches and said so, you should stop doing them. That is the initial situation. But in this (made up) story, she moves then line and tolerates them, because he is not stopping and she does not see it as a red flag.

This next part is woo-woo, take it for what it’s worth.

When getting my massage license we had a whole day talking about how many people have chronic pain because they suppress negative emotion and it ends up on their body. Think “grin and bear it”. It turns out “bearing it” is a physical process in your body with negative consequences. You probably know someone like this who is very agreeable and also has very bad headaches, gut problems, strange pains/“fibromyalgia” symptoms. They’re always chasing a medical reason for their discomfort but maybe their discomfort is that they are holding in a lot of resentment instead of “holding their line” as the article puts it.

Stress is /always/ manifested physically in the body—what would it even mean to be stressed out but also totally physically relaxed? And as it turns out, letting other people stomp all over your intentions is very stressful.

Even the premise of deciding who's right and who's wrong is miserable. Most problems are like those daisy-chains of padlocks you see on gates in remote areas[0]: there are multiple factors that caused the problem, and removing any factor would remove the problem too.

[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/72793939@N00/51117212748

That they’d beat Iran and have some friendly dictator installed in short order.

Are you arguing that this is going how the US planned?

When was the last time the US had this much trouble getting its allies to follow it into war?

The administration would have been informed of the risks to the US, which are relatively minor in comparison since the US is a net exporter of crude, and ignored them. If the risks had been greater, they would not have ignored them, and would have at least had an actual plan to keep the Strait open. They might even have informed their close military allies using something other than Truth Social.

I am not arguing that they planned this, even though it should have been obvious that it would happen. I absolutely do believe they were warned it was a possibility and didn't care.

Datacenter investment is currently a noticable fraction of US GDP. That's as globalized as it gets, we aren't even remotely self sufficient on that front. What happens to our economy if that segment crumbles overnight?

I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.

You might not consider this productive, but they do, so what you think literally doesn't matter to them.

There is more to it than "being able to make an entire application", which a novice could also have pulled off in a weekend 10 years ago.

The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.

At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.

If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way.

Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.

The other problem with any map tile downloading is that it eats up their entire 3GB of transfer and their phone is dead before they even start. Catch-22.

My experience trying to get it to find a route to work just now involved finding my street name but not being able to enter my address, not being able to enter my workplace's exact address either, getting told to take an express train to a stop that I know it never stops at during peak hour, and searching in vain for a way to change the trip time. I bet it also can't handle delays, cancellations, or bus replacements.

Maybe it works better in your city? I notice you wrote "we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people", but you could use the same evidence to conclude Osmand isn't much of a solution for their problem.

(I will note that I use it for hiking and it's very good for that, as it is for cycling.)