See, this is a clear example why hypercynicism (everything has always been maximally evil all the time already) is not at all helpful. You lose your ability to differentiate in your cynical zeal to cast everyone as maximally (undifferentiably) evil all the time.
Readit Newsarrrg commented on Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/saubeidl
arrrg commented on Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/saubeidl
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.
My belief is that there is no problem with the Chinese equipment, just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment. And Europe jumped on the bandwagon just because.
For decades trusting the US was no problem at all. The relationship was mutually beneficial. Cooperation and trust among nations is possible and Juche (completely self-reliance) is not a worthwhile goal at all. So, sure, cooperation is great and should always be a goal – it also secures peace (people who are economically intertwined are less likely to go to war with each other).
The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.
arrrg commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
> Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside
You are ignoring what I said and just reasserting your hegemonic view of scholarly institutions / scientific work. On the contrary, if you zoom out it becomes obvious that our academic research in these matters is ephemeral heat and noise that gets rolled into the dustbins of time.
Your central claim is that scholarly academic (mainstream) work ist disconnected from fine arts and as such outside of it, no fit to give meaningful answers.
That seems like a wild and weird take to me, contradiction everything I know about how the world works. But if that is your hypothesis then I don’t know how you can answer ist without actually engaging closely with those who you say are disconnected.
arrrg commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
Who is inside and who is outside depends on your (subjective) spatial interpretation of the situation.
It could just as well be said that a bunch of scholars disconnected from the culture, history, and technique of fine arts (except as objects of scholarly interest) are wildly speculating from the outside about the nature of the objects, and people interested in these things are starting to ask "Why are these silly things being said about the topic I'm interested in? Are the people behind this pranksters?"
Anyways, if there is a misunderstanding here, which I don't doubt is the case for at least some of the people involved, why can't the discourse be had in public about it? The question has been asked as you suggest...publicly. Polychromic revivalists are free to respond in public, and we can all benefit from hearing the more nuanced perspectives get expressed.
How do you think public discourse spaces are created? By approaching and talking to people when you write about them! That doesn’t just magically happen …
I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)
If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.
arrrg commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, these researchers have cultivated a public perception that the classical statues we admire looked totally ridiculous and were actually hideous. It is difficult to interpret it as unintentional, when the more absurd your reconstruction, the likelier you are to get press attention and get invited to special events at international galleries.
https://journals.openedition.org/techne/2656?lang=en
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109995973/we-know-greek-stat...
https://bigthink.com/high-culture/greek-statues-painted/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...
https://steemit.com/news/@beowulfoflegend/greek-statues-were...
To get closer to an answer to this you should still talk to the people doing the actual work?
I know that many scholars have an uncomfortable relationship to the PR work their research institutions are doing, but they themselves don’t strike me as unapproachable or closed to nuanced discussion. Seems weird to ignore that perspective and wildly speculate from the outside.
arrrg commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
arrrg commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau
> As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.
This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.
It takes a village to raise a kid.
You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves.
This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society.
What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
arrrg commented on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado nobelprize.org/prizes/pea... · Posted by u/pykello
Don't get me wrong. She has firmly opposed maduro and is a beacon of hope for many in Venezuela but she hasn't accomplished anything meaningful yet? She is just a career politician that just happens to be in the opposition of the venezuelan goverment when Maduro (a dictator) is in power. But she hasn't done anything extraordinary to merit the award.
The peace prize is often given to people still working on something, not having achieved something. In that way it is different from the science prizes.
I think that is a understandable approach (providing support), though it can lead to giving the prize to people who never achieve any of their goals. Whether that’s a worthy trade off I do not know.
arrrg commented on Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels grist.org/buildings/how-g... · Posted by u/bilsbie
Yes, but until recently, Germany produced more electricity than China did.
Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
arrrg commented on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year helsinkitimes.fi/finland/... · Posted by u/DaveZale
Yes. In the future there will be no cars and no deaths related to them. We just live in the 1800' of our time.
This is a nonsensical generalization.
This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.
If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.
That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.
Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.