This is a funny comic, but I dislike how it perpetuates a common misunderstanding of stoicism that it’s about suppressing or ignoring your feelings, when it’s actually about engaging with your feelings as deeply, mindfully, and intentionally as possible. It’s about trying to understand why you feel the way you do, and also trying to understand how your feelings can lead you to acting in a manner which contradicts your values. A stoic master wouldn’t ignore their anger, especially if their anger is the result of witnessing their own teachings being misrepresented and used to further injustice. They would just be careful not to let their anger lead them to acting rashly and doing something which will ultimately undermine the virtues they want to cultivate in themselves and in the world.

The idea that the velocity of a person walking forward on a train is simply the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking with respect to the train is called “Galilean relativity”.

Einstein realized that Galilean relativity has a big problem if you take for granted the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of reference frame, and people had a lot of reasons at the time to suspect this to be true.

In particular, he imagined something like watching a train passing by him, but on board the train is a special clock which works by shooting a pulse of light at a mirror directly overhead which reflects back down and hits a sensor. Every time the light pulse hits the sensor, the clock ticks up by one and another light pulse is sent out. People usually call this the “light clock thought experiment” if you want to learn more about it.

Anyway, Einstein realized if he was watching the light clock as the train passed by him while he’s standing on the station, the path the light beam traces out will take the form of a zigzag. Meanwhile, for a person standing on the train, it will just be going straight up and down. If you know anything about triangles, you will realize that the zigzag path is longer than the straight up and down path. So if everyone observes the speed of light to be the same exact thing, it must be the case that it will take the light a longer amount of time to traverse the zigzag path. And so the person standing on the platform will see that clock ticking slower than the person on the train will. This phenomenon is called “time dilation”.

From this point, you can apply some simple trigonometry to figure out just how much slower things would be appearing to move on the train. And it turns out that the velocity the person watching the train observes the person walking on the train to have is not the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking on the train. But rather, it’s something like that velocity, but divided by 1 + (train velocity)•(walking velocity)/c^2, where c is the speed of light (and this is called “Lorentzian relativity” if you want to read more about it).

It’s important to notice that since trains and walking come nowhere close to the speed of light, the value you’re adding to one is very small in these kinds of situations, and so what you’re left with is almost exactly the same thing you would get with Galilean relativity, which is why it still is useful and works. But when you want to consider the physics of objects that are moving much much faster, all of this is extremely important to take into account.

And lastly if you wanna read more about this stuff in general, this is all part of “the theory of special relativity” and there’s probably helpful YouTube videos covering every single thing that I’ve put in quotation marks.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.

First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.

Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.

I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.

I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.

I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.

Maybe somebody should make the argument that random businesses benefiting from prison labor is not only unethical for the prisoner, but also for the people that they owe restitution to.

so like I am not making any comment on anything but the legal system here. but it’s absolutely the case that you can win a lawsuit on purely circumstantial evidence if the defense is unable to produce a compelling alternative set of circumstances which can lead to the same outcome.

in civil matters, the burden of proof is actually usually just preponderance of evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. in other words to win a lawsuit, you only need to have more compelling evidence than the other person.

Mozilla could solicit donations for the development of Firefox while also still being able to rely on commercial funding sources if they restructured the Firefox project so that the core technologies underlying it (stuff like Gecko and SpiderMonkey) were actually developed by the Foundation instead of the Corporation, while the Corporation could package all of those pieces together into a complete software product with branding. The way things are now, though the entire browser is developed by the Mozilla Corporation and so its development can only be financially supported by Mozilla Corporation selling products or engaging in business deals.

It’s important to distinguish within a political philosophy the normative values that inform it and the actual strategy, if any, that it prescribes. Especially on the left, there is an extremely large amount of common ground with respect to normative values, and what distinguishes the different tendencies almost always boils down to little more than arguing about why the other person’s strategy will actually not work and why their strategy is what we need to be doing. But like something else I notice is very rarely do people actually engage with the context of situations and they also think in very absolute terms which makes them feel like by identifying with a particular tendency they are attached to and constrained by it. What’s even more interesting to me is this common ground doesn’t even end at the left and quite frankly even the average politically disengaged individual will agree with so many of the normative values expressed by leftists, and with a thoughtful rhetorical approach can usually be made to see all of these issues for what they are.

this is all to say that the idea of being any particular kind of “-ist” in the sense that it means you can’t be also at the same time critically engaging with or even simultaneously identifying with other kinds of “-isms” has for a very long time felt extremely incoherent to me and even worse is when people try to project these labels with certainty (typically at the exclusion of other possible labels, no less, other labels which are simply assumed to be impossible to synthesize together) onto others on the basis of random public statements they have made.

The left-right dichotomy is not about political philosophy, but attitudes towards the status quo and hierarchies.

College is often sold to the working class as some kind of vocational training that will prepare them for highly sought after knowledge based careers. But really think about it: before the mid 20th century, who was the typical college student? Was it a person who had to worry about the consequences of unemployment even if they couldn’t find work?

The next question to ask yourself is: why did these people go to college anyway if it wasn’t for career reasons? And is it something valuable that we are losing as administrators make college more about jobs?

A lot of nonprofit organizations will try to justify underpaying workers on the basis of social interest. However, it certainly is not some kind of requirement and many do offer compensation which is competitive with what the private sector offers. And furthermore, if more firms in the market were structured in a cooperative or nonprofit manner such that this became the expectation instead of the exception, these firms would not easily be able to get away with underpaying workers because they’re not actually doing something special anymore.

By the way, none of this is to say that this would magically solve all of our problems or anything like that. It’s only that there will be a lot fewer problems to worry about when most businesses are legally obligated to prioritize the interests of consumers and workers above arbitrary shareholders

Never forget that when a business owner tells you that they put consumers first, nothing is stopping them from converting their business into either a cooperative or a nonprofit organization dedicated to the public benefit. Even if it’s the case that at some given moment, the business really is putting consumers first, there is no benefit to the consumer for the business to continue operating as a privately owned for-profit institution. The only benefit a for-profit institution provides that a cooperative or nonprofit cannot, is the power for leadership to prioritize their own interests above all other stakeholders whenever it suits them.

The most amazing part is not even that long ago, everyone agreed this is how it worked, even the business owners. I remember recently watching the 1923 silent film “Safety Last!” starring Harold Lloyd. I was very struck by a particular scene in the film where the owner of the store Harold Lloyd works at says:

“I’d give $1000 for a new idea that would attract an enormous crowd to our store. Something is wrong with our exploitation! We simply are not getting the publicity that our position in the commercial world calls for.”

This character is not presented as some kind of villain or saying something wrong. He’s just talking about how everyone understands business to work, by exploitation, which has always simply meant taking advantage of some kind of opportunity, even when people like Marx talked about it.

it was definitely happening several hours ago at least. I asked for it to tell me what the full name of a baby would be if the musician who made the song neon named his child after the most famous king of the Torah. as soon as it wrote out the word “David” the session would just end with the error message “I’m unable to produce a response”

The public needs to understand that this is literally people trying to take away some thing that belongs to the public, without having to even pay you for it