Hasnain says:

Interesting read. This part stood out - and I disagree: I thought Americans were decidedly anti-intellectual?

"Without knowing it, Zuckerberg is the heir to a long political tradition. Over the last 200 years, the west has been unable to shake an abiding fantasy, a dream sequence in which we throw out the bum politicians and replace them with engineers – rule by slide rule. The French were the first to entertain this notion in the bloody, world-churning aftermath of their revolution. A coterie of the country’s most influential philosophers (notably, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte) were genuinely torn about the course of the country. They hated all the old ancient bastions of parasitic power – the feudal lords, the priests and the warriors – but they also feared the chaos of the mob. To split the difference, they proposed a form of technocracy – engineers and assorted technicians would rule with beneficent disinterestedness. Engineers would strip the old order of its power, while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order.

This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially Americans. The great sociologist Thorstein Veblen was obsessed with installing engineers in power and, in 1921, wrote a book making his case. His vision briefly became a reality. In the aftermath of the first world war, American elites were aghast at all the irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict – the xenophobia, the racism, the urge to lynch and riot. And when the realities of economic life had grown so complicated, how could politicians possibly manage them? Americans of all persuasions began yearning for the salvific ascendance of the most famous engineer of his time: Herbert Hoover. In 1920, Franklin D Roosevelt – who would, of course, go on to replace him in 1932 – organised a movement to draft Hoover for the presidency."

Hasnain says:

I wonder how it'll go down in the history books, seeing all the governments irrationally* "fight" drug "abuse" the wrong way.

" For instance, the last time the UN held a special session on drugs, in 1998, it set itself the goal of a "drug-free world" by 2008. The Hopkins-Lancet commissioners also fault UN drug regulators for failing to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse. "The idea that all drug use is dangerous and evil has led to enforcement-heavy policies and has made it difficult to see potentially dangerous drugs in the same light as potentially dangerous foods, tobacco and alcohol, for which the goal of social policy is to reduce potential harms," they write."

* I understand single actors might have a huge lobbying component to their choices..

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2017-09-19T02:05:40+0000

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future reading - microcontroller programming using Rust

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2017-09-17T17:46:43+0000

Hasnain says:

Sounds like stuff out of a spy novel

Hasnain says:

"“We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people.""

Hasnain says:

Whoa

Hasnain says:

So it turns out the desire to have "illegal" immigrants kicked out is more important than the desire to not have Big Brother spy on everyone.

"“We send a report every morning to ICE — all the names of everybody that comes in,” an unidentified front-desk clerk explained to the New Times. “Every morning at about 5 o’clock, we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE.”"

Hasnain says:

"That created another problem: SoFi did not have enough money to fund all the loans it was giving out. Mr. Cagney told employees that because of the funding shortfall, it could take as long as 30 days for some new customers to get the money they borrowed. But the employees who dealt with the customers were told by a supervisor to say that people would still get the money within 72 hours as promised."