Maybe, but former colonial ties strike me as a rather clumsy way to organize a world. One hopes foreign policy can evolve beyond where it was in the 1800s.

Patients dying of Tuberculosis in Sierra Leone will be thrilled they can now get peer-reviewed literature absolutely free. They'll have to walk three miles every day to read it, but hey, progress.

Restoring NOTAMs to a version 24-hours-old means deleting an entire day's worth of pilot reports and other time-critical information. That would not be very different from shutting down completely.

But for $100,000 extra there's a super secret 16th level.

In Mother Russia, censors defeat VPNs!

Seventeen percent! https://youtu.be/KdmoPhJFLhQ?t...

For a while I worked at the intersection of these worlds.

From 1989-1997 I was at Galacticomm, makers of The Major BBS. It was my job to develop the Internet Connectivity Option, a TCP/IP stack for our BBS. It took years and underwhelmed. I still wonder if / whether / how we might have done it differently: bought out a coopetitor in Montreal who was ahead of us, rewrote the stack from scratch instead of porting a package ported from BSD, or assembled a team instead of developing solo.

Lessons learned: more eyes are better. And more ears, more voices, more hands. I revere: open source, decentralization, pair programming, free speech, deeper understanding, uninterruptedness, rethinking, starting over.

It's also a very scary phrase to hear in sci-fi.

You forget, Voyager was launched in 1977. They're actually ASCII art.

Very cogent and articulate. And well couched: you are saying what "is," not necessarily what "ought" to be.

Thanks for linking to that illuminating article. I would say "madman" exaggerates. But give a bitter, tragic, traumatized genius a little too much power and certainly there's no exaggerating the bad possible outcomes.

Yes and yes. Except this was phrased as if the story were ended. I don't think it is. We still need to invent collective sanity.

Interesting the parallels. I was married to a Colombiana who is fluent in English but she never had the patience to help me learn Spanish. On the other hand, spending a few days with her relatives -- without her -- immersed in only Spanish is when I made huge progress. Brains are stubborn. Mine refused the pain of rewiring for a new language until it had no alternative. It was only when I had no chance at human contact in any language but Spanish that it started to sink in. Every pair is different but I'm glad I gave up early looking to my wife to teach me her language. Relying on people for what they're inclined and capable is a mystical art.

I have a pet wish that A.I. proceeds briskly on real-time translation. That would be world-changing. Now THAT would make the world smaller. It might also start world war four and five and six. (My pet notion in the U.S. is that we aren't more divided than ever. We're just finding out how divided we always were.) In the meantime, we all struggle and we all miss out.

The challenges of making a living on intellectual property is another pet peeve of mine, and one I have general aspirations to improve. Selfishly I just want to read or listen to more of your stories. I am averse to Patreon for extraneous reasons, but I recognize the need for great storytelling to be compensated. I wonder if a podcast or vlog could be useful media of expression, to hone message and develop audience. There's a strange phenomenon of different media drawing out different messages. Even moreso, different listeners draw out different messages. We sure are a conversating species.

I'm an avid reader of The Economist magazine, and feel it is among the best of worldly news sources. As deep and nuanced as their reporting on China is, I have long sensed much is missing. The stench of something-must-have-been-lost-in-translation is becoming familiar. Language barriers are the biggest, though ideological and cultural and moral-compass barriers are formidable too.

Thanks for writing back, this has been a most rewarding exchange.

What a fascinating read, I enjoyed everything you wrote very much. It is nuanced, authentic, and insightful.

Language barriers are underappreciated. I could not have gotten a fraction of what I did from your writing if you weren't a native English speaker.

My home planet got a teensy bit smaller today. I'd welcome more.

Furthermore this issue needs more Furthermore.