SBF comes to mind.

SBF wasn't as successful though. His success wasn't even in the same stratosphere as Zuckerberg. His company was around for 3 years. Facebook has been around for over two decades. In terms of net worth, SBF was somewhere around 60th, I think? Zuckerberg was no. 2. Same thing with their respective companies.

Thirded, it fundamentally changed the way I understand government. Would also recommended The Road to Unfreedom for some context around current geopolitics.

Can you expand? What was your understanding before, and how did the book change it?

I'm not the person you asked, so I can only answer for myself. Previously, I had viewed Nazism as more of an aberration that overtook one society, and was the sole cause of the brutality of the Holocaust. Learning about the other forms of brutality that played out over the exact same geographic area, from a political direction that claims to be the arch-enemy of Nazism, points out that people's political representations are often quite distinct from the material effects they enact on people's lives. The Holodomor was not widely reported, and in fact covered up by the few Western journalists that witnessed it, and in the informational blackhole caused by Stalinism and the abduction, imprisonment, torture, and frequent death of anybody who stood out, much less spoke of the massive damage caused by Stalin, well, the full nature of what happened was not visible to the world until the fall of the USSR. The eyewitnesses to the starvation were often silent to their own natural death a decade after the fall of the USSR, due to the depth and depravity of the oppression of expression that happened in the USSR.

Basically the book points out the same lessons that Hannah Arendt and others have been pointing out for a long time, that such mass death of innocent people is quite possible even outside the strange ideologies of Nazis. The conditions for evil are quite endemic to the human condition, especially in those that abandon truth in pursuit of political strength.

Thanks for responding that makes a lot of sense. I think you're right about that, and if we view these movements as cults rather than political movements then it starts to make sense how different projects / ideologies can end up at the same conclusion of destruction.

20 grams of C4 or similar plastic explosive would be more than adequate to produce the effects seen. CL-20 wouldn't be a good choice for this deployment: it's not particularly stable for rough handling even with a good phlegmatizing blend, and tends to decompose at the temps one would expect a pager to be exposed to (hot car, etc).

That's a fair point my knowledge of explosive chemicals only stems from conventional missile-based warheads and propellants. It's very possible a different explosive was used.

C4 would be easily detectable by spectrometers, including at the airports, wouldn’t it?

Absolutely a contributing factor. A decade ago folks in the automotive community were speculating that vehicle bloat and a shift of the landscape to heavy truck/SUV representation would be an outcome and sure enough.

Last I checked my desktop doesn't slam into pedestrians/bicyclists trying to use what public infrastructure we have in the US. If unbounded vehicle bloat is systematically contributing to the deaths of citizens then yes, we have a collective responsibility to regulate it.

Finally some action from the NHTSA on this. As a driver of tiny Japanese shitboxes my entire life the last ten years of new vehicle development has been terrifying to watch from the driver's seat. Not only are these new (last 10 years) trucks and SUVs absurdly large and growing bigger, the sightlines from their driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible. Here's to hoping the car bloat arms race gets damped a bit with legislation stemming from the NHTSA's push.

Recently did a one-day rental on a late model American pickup truck for a cross-town move. I absolutely could not believe the ground clearance and (lack of) view out the front of that thing. (My frame of reference is a bicycle and, occasionally, a Honda fit from the aughts.) You literally need a sort of ladder, which comes standard, to get in. Driving it was what I, previously, imagined getting behind the wheel of a semi-truck to be. It amazes me that auto mfrs can just ramp the size of these things up without any regard to how it might affect others on the road or sidewalk.

My small car was totaled in a fast food parking lot be a ford f-250 whose driver claimed to literally not have seen me when he broadsided me. it was easy to believe as his hood was higher than my roof.

Side (off-topic): I really like how I finally found the missing word for the 2000-2009s: "aughts".

I prefer "Dawn of the millennium"

> driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible

This is the thing. The sightlines and pillars are so big it's literally difficult to see other cars on the road with you.

That alone should warrant some safety regulation.

If I pull up behind a modern pickup at a stoplight my car is completely occluded. If I pull up to the passenger's side of a modern pickup the driver has no idea: they cannot see down far enough from the driver's seat to know that there's another vehicle next to them. It's remarkable.

I knew things were off the rails when I parked my beater 2nd-gen Ranger next to a then-new F-250 and couldn't see the top of the Ranger's cab when looking through the F-250's windows.

> I don't really understand why first cities allow private vehicles in general.

Because people of all capabilities need to get to the businesses in the cities. If you're proposing prohibiting private transportation, you first need adequate public transportation, which is expensive and often lacking.

The alternative, where _nobody_ has easy access to the city's businesses, tends to result in the businesses moving out of the city to somewhere else, taking their tax payments with them, often places that are _even harder_ to get to for people who don't have cars... because businesses need customers. If you won't support them (by providing affordable and convenient means for the customers to reach the businesses), they won't wait to die, they will solve the problem themselves.

Only cities which have well-developed public transport networks, and have very popular city centres (to the point of congestion) are even thinking of banning cars from them. The rest of the cities need all the help they can get to fend off financial ruin from e-commerce.

Obviously emergency vehicles are needed and similar access for commercial and handicap vehicles makes sense.

Popular cities don't really need to compete to fill a bunch of commercial real estate. They have people who commute every day by public transport and residents who are competing for real estate with this property.

It's enough now with the cars, there are mall towns and cities happily lose 'business' to them because it is not worth wasting 30% of all land to attract a bunch of people who may never actually get out of their car in your city and then at most to a business that probably pays less in property tax than a correspondingly sized residence.

These businesses can't vote and if they aren't in town to complain the noise from them stops. There were also a lot of angry horse cart drivers once.

Because public transit is woefully inadequate to get people where they need to go in nearly every city in the US. Even if we were to magically immediately fund this to the levels needed, it would take 10-20 years to build out that infrastructure. (To be fair, need could be met with buses until subways and other light rail is built.)

But people in the US don't actually want that, unfortunately. They mostly like being able to drive around in cities (either their own city, or nearby cities where they want to visit). It's weird to say that, because most people would probably say they hate driving in city traffic. But when the alternative is driving to some sort of park-and-ride and switching to trains or buses, many US residents will prefer to drive.

Let's also not forget that even some of the most transit-heavy places in the world still allow private vehicles. In some (Tokyo especially comes to mind), it ends up usually being more expensive and take more time to drive than to take transit, but people still choose or need to do it for whatever reason.

Your phrasing of "why cities allow" is a common one, but remember that a city isn't its own entity with its own wants and desires. The laws reflect the wants and desires of the voters who live there.

What you've described is part of the experiment, which asks the question "can/will you focus for ten minutes on something that you did not choose and may not immediately tickle your neurons?". For most the answer is 'no'. The lack of choice is by design.

They based the exercise on one where choice was not eliminated:

> Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her students. She asks them to go to a museum, pick one work of art, and look at only that for three full hours.

Since what they have described as the "shape of attention" is more measuring how willing I am to endure a headache for no good reason, I would say it's a poorly designed experiment.

The goal for the journalists here is to show something about the "fried attention span" of the twitter generation I'm sure, whereas the goal for the original educator was to get people to deeply engage with art that already spoke to them somewhat. Attention can and should be directed, but in general not by others, so this just doesn't measure what it claims to.

And for what it's worth, I say this as someone who is more interested in art than the average person. I've not only looked at a piece of art for 10+ minutes before, but the last time was less than a week ago.

Edit to add: What really is the difference between something you don't like & didn't choose vs say an advertisement? Does leaving the room during ads imply anything good or bad about the attention span of the public?

I survived the ten minutes, but then when I clicked to read more it prompted me to subscribe. There's probably a little bit of a "get people to chase the sunk cost of their attention" thing happening here too.

In my case, it was broken and no art appeared. Only a black screen with the text overlayed and the "I quit" button. ...Makes me wonder about the validity of their data.

Maybe that was the art.

It's a voluntary experiment on a website. It's not that serious.

Certainly true, but boredom is also the foundation of creativity so there is some middle ground worth seeking out.

Perhaps also a good way to explore why so many kids are bored in school.

Notably absent from your comment is what you honestly think caused the disintegration of real-world community. I'd posit that it's an expected systemic outcome of unbounded and undirected capitalism.

I'd keep a house for the skiing at Pajarito too! For those reading along it's certainly worth the trip if you're in the area.

I have a vague recollection of coming across a physical 6x6 chessboard somewhere on lab property and found it a little odd, but never knew it had ties to MANIAC. Lots of history floating around in that place.

I promise people still make piles of money being really good at radio and really good at machining steel. The complexity of the deliverables has increased, yes, but the expertise and technical skill to do modern radio and machining is very much rewarded in the marketplace.