Personally I went full circle on the issue. I did table layouts when I was a kid, then I learned the "right way" and fought great battles to make CSS behave. Then, after I did a bit of that stuff and saw others doing it, it dawned upon me that the whole "separating layout from content" is just a religious dogma, and like the best religious dogmas, those loudest about it are least likely to actually try and follow it. We've replaced clean tables with an ungodly mess of divs, which are placed in our HTML for the sole reason to provide CSS hooks - there's no semantic reason for them. This is not separating presentation from content, this is shitting presentation at content through a high-speed fan!
So nowadays, I look more favorably at tables again.
I never understood the point of this... If you want something to look like a table, why not just use a table? With html only content and design really matter...
User agents aren't necessarily graphical web browsers. Marking up a document fragment as a <table> when it isn't tabular data makes it harder for screen readers, terminal web browsers, and crawlers to do their job well.
My tone may have been blunt but I will stand firmly behind that America's race and gender relations, despite great progress in the last few decades, leaves much to be desired and in most parts of the country it is dangerous to be a part of a marginalized group.
You missed my point. I don't care what you happen to believe.
I'm pointing out that people probably objected to inserting a debatable & unpopular held view as a subclause in another argument. That forces people to either go along with accepting your point or getting into a pointless & unsettleable argument that's not even being discussed.
This guy is excellent. I recommend his first novel, "We the City," and you might also want to check out a literary form he renamed and whose revival he spearheaded, "small fates."
Well, that's not entirely fair. Sure, civilization has largely made mankind more peaceful, but Progress is still driven by violence. There was even a link on here recently about how the relationship between war and civilization.
But many people don't realize that this kind of idiosyncratic asshole-ishness is how a lot of successful rebels / revolutionaries work, cultural and political.
Lenin is a great example, and the most illustrative for me because I spent so much time studying him. The man was factionalistic to the point of absurdity. Always he was dreaming of a new epithet to throw: economism, leftism, opportunism, etc. But because of this he insulated a radical minority and made them disloyal to anything but the ideology he was using to direct their political action. And in the end it worked.
Steve Jobs did a similar thing, but I'm sure I don't have to explain that one here.
While I have an idea of what you mean, I'd reexamine that conclusion. It worked for a while. IMO, the Soviet system wasn't sustainable until Khrushchev - Beria and Stalin were constantly trying to figure out when the other was going to murder them.
I think the pathology in play for Lenin and Stalin was akin to eliminationism on a smaller scale - once someone became "othered", they were pretty much destined for one behind the ear.
I don't mean that communism worked, but that Lenin achieved what he wanted as far as actual revolution is concerned. What you said is true though, and I think it has to do with the problems inherent in trying to "plan a society."
I'm pretty critical of technology and modernity in general, and this Cult of Elon is a large part of the reason I dislike the man and his endeavors.
It has nothing to do with his intelligence or person. He's clearly intelligent, and I'm not quite sure he's a person (ha) but I don't know the dude.
It's just that he has revived so much technological optimism in a time when skepticism is pretty important, at least imo. He seems to bandy about these technical solutions that are dazzling, for sure --- and extremely interesting --- but just don't cut it, or come with a slew of potentially unintended consequences, or simply aren't putting the focus in the right place.
For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?
It's infuriating because when I say things like, "I'm not convinced that collapse or technical decline would be a bad thing," people can immediately see the criticisms, chief among them being "Won't a lot of people die?" Which is fair.
But there is little to no skepticism when Musk presents his idea, when there certainly should be. How many people do you think will make it on those spaceships, and who do you think those people will be? At least in a case of economic or technical decline, many people will have a fighting chance at it not being totally awful.
> For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?
To be fair, that's not a good characterization of why he's into Mars colonization. He's not advocating colonization so we can disregard life on Earth. He seems very much into preserving life on Earth. Mars colonization is a backup plan (or the initial stage of a backup plan) for the inevitable moment when Earth will have to be abandoned regardless of how well we behave.
Regarding “a lot of people dying” angle: the difference is in magnitude of “a lot of people”, and choice. However many people die on SpaceX spaceships, the number can never reach millions or even billions that would result from the collapse or technical decline. People also, in general, will choose to get on a spaceship and dwell on Mars, but they neither choose to be involved in dying from civilization collapsing, nor to have to fight for survival in such a situation — it would be completely forced upon them.
Thanks for clarifying his position. I didn't mean to suggest that he intended it to be anything other than a backup plan, but my wording might have been ambiguous because others, like Martin Rees, have suggested similar things and tend to regard them as one of the more likely outcomes of humanity's future, if the species is to survive.
> However many people die on SpaceX spaceships,
Maybe you misunderstood me. I mean that the people who don't go on SpaceX spaceships would die in a situation where that is critical to the survival of civilization.
Your choice thing doesn't convince me, but I do understand and think it is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.
I've also seen a fair amount of people actually cognizant of the dangers our technological society poses. It's not the majority, but there are far more people here than most discussion-centered places on the internet.
