> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
I don't say it's a cultural oddity, western culture had its fair share of self-destructive regimes which ideological underpinnings created great disasters, especially in the 20th century
I feel like I may be insulting your intelligence with how obvious this is, but the Israeli government has had turning Iran into a failed state as an open policy objective since the 1980s. Given that Israeli interests have achieved this end in basically every non-monarchy in the region, I think this is a credible threat. Israel has a highly aggressive and influential lobby in the United States, which has posed debilitating sanctions on Iran for many years now. I’m not saying the religious leadership in Iran are the good guys, but the siege mentality is hardly irrational.
I think that's an overly simplistic and false view of Israeli-Iranian relations since 1979.
Israel had tried to help Islamist Iran negotiate with the US through the Contra debacle, shared intelligence with Iran against Iraq (failed reactor bombing) and outright sold weapons to Iran to support them against Iraq.
There was a naive belief in Israel that the daily "Death to Israel" chants are just rhetoric like in the arab countries it used to deal with, and Iran can be a quiet ally like before 1979
At the same time Iran fought Israel through their mercenaries in Lebanon up to the point where all of Iran's resources were consumed by the failed attempt to encircle Israel, which has collapsed completely in the last two years
> exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation
Until like a couple years ago, autarky was generally not in the Western playbook. It’s a stupid idea that tends to be embraced by stupid people. The only ones who have done it sustainably are the Kims, as a nuclear monarchy over a totalitarian state.
They have not been in the same situation, and that is sufficient explanation. No cultural geists need to be posited.
The point of autarky isn't that you want to isolate yourself from the world, but that because you credibly could, you're in a much stronger negotiating position in all those mutually beneficial deals you would like to make.
It IS climate change, to a large part. And yes, I think you're right it's how climate change will show up for us as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
And the reason qanats weren't sufficient anymore, was that they pursued a policy of food independence, due to sanctions/a desire for political autonomy.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:
It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.
We tend to forget that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of large-scale engineering: intensification of agriculture, massive construction of dams, roads, mines etc., where nature and environmental footprint was at best an afterthought. In the US, in the Soviet Union, and also in (the Shah's) Iran.
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
> Buying them is an easy way to feel good in the moment and it's easy to tell yourself that you'll do the courses later.
What's more discouraging is that completing them may be little more than that as well. Sure, you put in the self-discipline and work to ace all the quizzes and maybe even turn in the practical final assignment, and you have a piece of paper to show for it, but did you really learn all that much? How much sticks with you in a couple of years?
I took Odersky's Scala course on coursera, which was fairly tough (relative to the ~10 other similar courses I've taken as an adult). Certainly felt good completing it. Didn't feel so good about dropping out of the sequel course a couple of weeks in as I realized I just couldn't complete the assignments in time without sacrificing too much of family and social life, but no matter. What do I remember of Scala today? Certainly not enough to program in it... Maybe some vague things about covariance and contravariance and how mutability makes it painful.
I also did a bunch of Andrew Ng's courses. The first covered a bunch of non-NN machine learning methods which are a lot less relevant than they were. I remember their names at least, but I certainly couldn't explain them in a code interview. Then I learned to write vectorized hand-calculated backwards passes in Matlab (well, gnu octave), and some early Tensorflow. Also well out of code interview accessible memory by now. Ng's courses were great at giving you a sense of accomplishment and removing all time-consuming frustration not related to the actual focus of the course... But learning these things a few years before most people didn't make me rich, and these days I'd have to ask a chatbot like everyone else. Skills you don't use atrophy, and I couldn't convince anyone to pay me to implement ML models.
So I guess what I'm getting at is, even at their best these courses may not give most graduates what we really hope for.
Many interest groups in the US are for hire. Meaning, if you don't like a piece of upcoming legislation, you can give them a donation and they'll find out a way the upcoming legislation hurts their demographic. These groups have overwhelmingly passive members, who don't run the organization in any meaningful way.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
> It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.
I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.
I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.
Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
If I wrote something for my own use and decided to open source it and then someone hypothetically decided to sue me because it wasn’t accessible, I would say f%%%. them too and take it down.
> If I wrote something for my own use and decided to open source it and then someone hypothetically decided to sue me because it wasn’t accessible, I would say f%%%. them too and take it down.
The difference is that they won't win in court. There's no law requiring you to make your open source work accessible - unless that open source work was part of a project for which you got federal grants.
Sorry, but it's clear that many commenters to this thread no almost nothing about what happened, and are merely engaging in outrage mania.
In the real world, though, when people ask for grant money, they justify how the money will be used. If you didn't put a line item for accessibility, and didn't budget for it, it's on you.
> How do you feel about entities taking your face off of your personal website and plastering it on billboards smiling happily next to their product?
That would be misrepresentation. Even Stallman isn't OK with that. You can take one of his opinion pieces and publish it as your own. Or you can attach his name to it.
However, if you're editing it and releasing it under his name, clearly you're simply lying, and nobody is OK with that. People have the right to be recognized as authors of things they did author (if they so desire) and they have a right to NOT be associated with things they didn't.
> At the end of the day it’s very gross when we are exploited without our knowledge or permission so rich groups can get richer.
The second part is the entirety of the problem. If I'm "exploited" in a way where I can't even notice it, and I'm not worse off for it, how is it even exploitation? But people amassing great power is a problem no matter if they do it with "legitimate" means or not.
If somebody is stealing from your bank account every week and you just don’t notice it, are you not being stolen from? Has nobody stolen your credit card and used it until the moment you notice the charges. I don’t really think we can go “if a tree fall in the forest and nobody is around to hear it…” about this.
Stallman has his opinions on software, I have my opinions on my visual work. I don’t get really how that applies here or why that settles this matter.
If someone steals from my bank account I certainly CAN notice it even if I don't immediately, and I'm certainly worse off.
That's such a bad straw man I wonder if you're really supporting the position you claim to be supporting. Maybe you're just trying to give it a bad name.
Your opinion isn't on visual work, but visual property. You don't demand to be paid for your work - your labor. Rather you traded that for the dream of being paid rent on a capital object, in perpetuity (or close enough). Artists lost to the power-mongers when we bit at that bait.
* I'm into genealogy. Naturally, most of my fellow genealogists are retired, often many years ago, though probably also above average in mental acuity and tech-savviness for their age. They LOVE generative AI.
* My nieces, and my cousin's kids of the same age, are deeply into visual art. Especially animation, and cutesy Pokemon-like stuff. They take it very seriously. They absolutely DON'T like AI art.
Sorry to get on one of my political hobby horses but...
We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a workplace.
And just like some people just lie for amazingly little reason, I'm increasingly convinced some people do this. Maybe for a sense of control, maybe because they think they'll get rewarded. For every person who holds a crazy belief in public, there's probably one who holds the same belief but doesn't feel the need to let others in on it. As the world gets more paranoid, it'll get worse, open fears are the top of the iceberg.
If Enzor-Demeo ends up tanking Mozilla, there are plenty of people who will be happy with that. It's not as if his career will be over, far from it. Ask Nick Clegg or Stephen Elop. We all need to wake up to the idea that maybe the people who are supposed to be on our side aren't actually guaranteed to be unless we have solid mechanisms in place to ensure it.
I see you're familiar with Stephen Elop. Also, remember that the people who hired Elop probably hired him with the intention of making a fortune off of that destruction.
It's not that he's some secret agent or some mentally ill person who wants to destroy the company while twirling his mustache, it's that he's a person carefully chosen by people who have made large fortunes from Firefox through indirect means. He would be chosen to destroy it in a way optimized for their gain, like Elop was chosen by the board to turn Nokia into a cheap, obvious Microsoft buy, Clegg was chosen to enable the Tory government, or Sturgeon to make sure that indyref2 never happened.
Google is under no antitrust threat at all anymore. Obama judges don't believe in antitrust. Google wants to get out of paying that 500M/yr, and shitting up Firefox is a great way to do it. They'd be more than happy to throw a couple dozen of those Ms to Enzor-DeMeo or whoever will help them get that done.
How much you willing to bet that he becomes Mozilla's highest paid CEO in history, ruins the product completely, then leaves and ends up an exec at Google or some 80% owned by Google offshoot founded by a Google alum?
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