Not having standing armies also creates structural problems (mostly getting invaded). There are only 21 countries without a standing army, and they're almost all micronations with <200k population (mostly tiny islands). Iceland is the only one of them with a GDP per capita worth mentioning, but it's also part of Nato, the largest military alliance in the world.
It's a permanent professional army, where are you getting this stuff? Switzerland has an air force and everything. They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.
> They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.
Less than 10% are full timers, the vast majority are conscripts and volunteers. Even officers generally aren't full timers[1].
All I'm saying is, there's a spectrum of 'Complete citizen militia, as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution' all the way over to 'Standing army as it exists in the US today', and Switzerland is obviously much closer to the former than the latter.
This is why we originally instituted mandatory military service here in Sweden. To ensure that the army isn't representative of some special class, e.g. the nobility or the burghers etc.
Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone.
I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone.
The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stated. The Medium has a smallish battery, maybe?
Give me what you can. Wifi. FRS. CB. LoRa. The ability to switch between those? The ability to broadcast across all of those in some spread-spectrum broadcast?
Make me use your special App that I have to install on my phone.
Make the device also act like a storage device. The Small has usb storage big enough to store the APK for the app for me to side-load.
The Large has enough usb storage for, I dunno, all of Wikipedia and medical texts, and open maps, and a few other things, and the Kiwix app to side-load.
Make the Medium and the Large also be able to be a hotspot, for other people nearby to be able to connect to, so they can download the app and browse Kiwix, and send messages through my phone? Or just let my phone be that hotspot, I guess?
And most importantly, give me messaging. Secure point-to-point, exchanging keys by touching our phones together, or using QR codes, or something.
Or broadcast messaging. With configurable repeating.
And then make the Base Station version of this, which has solar panels, and a battery, and it's just a repeater. You install and forget.
If you're only going to build one thing, build the Small version I described. Next, I guess, would be the Base Station. Next would be the Large.
Where is the Kickstarter? I'll back it right now. I'll buy 2 Large, 6 Small, and 4 Base Stations. Right now.
Meshtastic is the name. It works today. Many cities have them. They aren’t useful in antigovernment scenarios because they are trivial to jam and deny use of.
Pragmatically, cost and ease of access is especially important in suppressed countries or ones with unstable infrastructure. While the devices you're talking about has lots of conveniences, distribution and price dominate in lower income regions.
For a side project, sure. But in first world countries, the odds of infrastructure breakdown or suppression of Internet is incredibly rare. In Iran's case, suppression is a weapon so phone only makes a lot of sense.
Does it help get repeatable results if you say, "Use a random seed of 42 for this task"? Or if you somehow lower the temperature, so it's more deterministic?
At the moment, it looks like Claude Code does not support using ‘temperature’ or ‘seed’ flags. It would be awesome if they add that.
Using the request to use a seed within the prompt will mean that when Claude rights the code it could use that seed inside what it writes for randomize functions. But sadly it wouldn’t impact Claude’s own text generation’s determinism.
There is active interest on GitHub to support this. But the most recent issue with it I could see was closed in July as “not planned”
I can picture my family of four getting on our PJs and hopping in a sleeper car on Friday night. We tell the car if we need to stop for a restroom, or anything else...
And we wake up on Saturday morning, up to eight hours away from home (were we allowed to go 90 mph? Or more?) And then we spend all day Saturday, all day Sunday, enjoying some town. Sunday night, we put on our PJs and hop in the sleeper car. We wake up Monday morning back at home, the kids go to school, and the adults go to work.
I could get to Duluth, Charleston WV, Sioux Falls, Toronto, Pittsburgh.
Financial Independence, You're Not The Boss Of Me.
Once you're financially independent, at a level that you're comfortable with, you don't have to put up with crappy bosses.
If you're Sergey Brin, you kind of don't really have a boss, do you?
If you "retire" into working at a hardware store, or volunteering at the Humane Society, or just shifting into a lower-stress job...
Well, that's the dream, isn't it?
I was so happy when I realized that, unless there were dramatic shifts in the markets, I would always be able to find "decent" work for great wages. And maybe I could be patient and find "good" work for "pretty great" wages.
Once I had that level of comfort, I was way, way more brave at work. I thought, "Well, they could fire me for their own reasons, any day. So, I might as well do The Right Thing™. If they fire me for doing The Right Thing™, well, I didn't really want to work there anyway, did I?"
And then there were dramatic shifts in the markets, lol. But fortunately for me, I had built up a nest egg, and now I've shifted into a lower-stress job.
I honestly don't know what advice I'd give to younger folks. Move to Norway?
But I think "Fuck you money" implies, "I honestly don't have to worry about money, ever again."
Now, we all have different definitions for that, but the kind of thing I was talking about is definitely not "Fuck you money," to me.
I think if I had "Fuck you money," my best friends and close family would all have their medical debts paid off. I think my parents and in-laws would have their mortgages paid off.
It’s more than just money, it’s how you set up your life to be resilient to contingencies. For example finding a compatible life partner. For example finding happiness without lifestyle inflation and breaking free from the hedonic treadmill. Or perhaps having a good lifestyle business for some people. Or having extended family support nearby. I call these things unfuckwithability. Money is a big part of it, but may not be the biggest missing piece for many people.
Allegedly a Straussian meme is "self stabilizing" because it imposes some sort of cost to buying into the lower or higher meaning. So it's a multiple entendre that has ideological or epistemic implications. (I'm not convinced this is a thing, the examples were pretty contrived.)
Whereas in the example here, acting on that advice is costly (it means losing friends) but believing it is free. And there aren't different layers of meaning accessible to different parties. It's straightforwardly a play on words.
I've been trying to come up with "self stabilizing" examples since yesterday, but think I finally may have stumbled upon one:
"Prep hop" videos, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1N3WXZ_1LM , may get forwarded by members of different subcultures for two different reasons: the first because they appreciate the comic satirisation of others, and the second because they appreciate how the comics have sweated the details of their own subculture — "we are like that only".
- Cost to the low (those who live on what they have earned): if we thought it was real it would mean that wealth was not on a bell curve and there may be a world past the one that all the think bois who write self help posts sketch out.
- Cost to the high (those who live on what they have): no good would come if we said it was real to folks who don't know (TMTC) and it could be bad, if they did not like that we have what we do.
We all stroll down the road of life, but if folks do not care to look at lanes not like theirs, it might make strife to both say the lanes are there, and not to laugh.
If you have a standing army, that creates a whole rats nest of problems.
And ps, I've talked to people who think we shouldn't have a standing army, and I frankly think they're insane.
reply