One thing Substack has going for it is paywalls. These provide a mechanism for monetization less obnoxious than advertising. They also allow writers to have a public face and private face with free and paywalled content. This provides a mechanism for hiding controversial postings that might lead to problems for Substack. That and its lack of algorithms might give it some traction.
Where does property come from? I always gathered it was a government service. At some point, it comes down to "you and what army?" If you have the stronger army on your side, you get to decide what is property and who owns it.
Regarding Sperber's hodgepodge of headlines, back in the early 1970s, I worked for a company that sold a natural language database product that kept track of the dimensions, such as length or price, of every value. Buckminster Fuller was pretty impressed by it, but argued that it made no sense to combine physical (e.g. length) and metaphysical (e.g. price) values. Reading Sperber's list, I can't help thinking he is conflating too many categories and so obscuring any pattern. I read too many triumphalist 19th century articles with similar hodgepodges of facts about check clearing operations, population growth, telegraph stations, railroad passengers, steamship miles and so on. Perhaps I'll take a look and see if the book manages to make some sense of this rather than just trying to make an impression.
Buzsáki sounds like he has some fascinating insights. We are, for all our ignorance, starting to learn something about how the brain works. I've been reading Visual Differential Geometry and Forms, and one thing that is striking is how long it took for mathematicians to move from an extrinsic to an intrinsic point of view and, strangely, how much less intuitive the intrinsic view seems. It wasn't until rather late in the 19th century that intrinsic geometry started coming into its own and just in time for Einstein to use it as the basis of his General Relativity. I think Buzsáki is doing something similar with our understanding of the brain, so I'll stay tuned.
I think it is easy to both overestimate and underestimate Russia. One thing about Russia is that Russia rarely surprises. It may change the formalities of its government and the names of its cities, but it doesn't seem all that much different nowadays than it did under Peter the Great. Ages ago, I took a course from Evsey Domar on Soviet Economics, and, to be honest, the dynamics were basically the same under the tsars and, beyond the scope of the course for obvious reasons, modern Russia today.
Regarding "They're Getting What They Want", I've been struck by how many conservatives outright admit "I don't like abortion because I want to give churches, husbands, families, etc more leverage to force women to do what they want."
One thing Substack has going for it is paywalls. These provide a mechanism for monetization less obnoxious than advertising. They also allow writers to have a public face and private face with free and paywalled content. This provides a mechanism for hiding controversial postings that might lead to problems for Substack. That and its lack of algorithms might give it some traction.
Where does property come from? I always gathered it was a government service. At some point, it comes down to "you and what army?" If you have the stronger army on your side, you get to decide what is property and who owns it.
Regarding Sperber's hodgepodge of headlines, back in the early 1970s, I worked for a company that sold a natural language database product that kept track of the dimensions, such as length or price, of every value. Buckminster Fuller was pretty impressed by it, but argued that it made no sense to combine physical (e.g. length) and metaphysical (e.g. price) values. Reading Sperber's list, I can't help thinking he is conflating too many categories and so obscuring any pattern. I read too many triumphalist 19th century articles with similar hodgepodges of facts about check clearing operations, population growth, telegraph stations, railroad passengers, steamship miles and so on. Perhaps I'll take a look and see if the book manages to make some sense of this rather than just trying to make an impression.
Buzsáki sounds like he has some fascinating insights. We are, for all our ignorance, starting to learn something about how the brain works. I've been reading Visual Differential Geometry and Forms, and one thing that is striking is how long it took for mathematicians to move from an extrinsic to an intrinsic point of view and, strangely, how much less intuitive the intrinsic view seems. It wasn't until rather late in the 19th century that intrinsic geometry started coming into its own and just in time for Einstein to use it as the basis of his General Relativity. I think Buzsáki is doing something similar with our understanding of the brain, so I'll stay tuned.
I think it is easy to both overestimate and underestimate Russia. One thing about Russia is that Russia rarely surprises. It may change the formalities of its government and the names of its cities, but it doesn't seem all that much different nowadays than it did under Peter the Great. Ages ago, I took a course from Evsey Domar on Soviet Economics, and, to be honest, the dynamics were basically the same under the tsars and, beyond the scope of the course for obvious reasons, modern Russia today.
Regarding "They're Getting What They Want", I've been struck by how many conservatives outright admit "I don't like abortion because I want to give churches, husbands, families, etc more leverage to force women to do what they want."