I finally, after a couple of years off, picked up work on a Standard Ebooks[1] edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. I made a new years’ promise to myself to get it as done as possible by the end of the year. If it doesn’t happen I’m not going to be too hard on myself though, given the 5K endnotes and 1.5M overall word count. But we’ll see!
I’d recommend GrandPerspective:[1] it’s really good at displaying this sort of thing, has been around for over two decades, and the developer has managed to keep it to <5MB which is perfect when you’re running very low on space.
I use GP, would recommend as well; it generates great color codes tree maps of your storage. Once you get used to navigating it that way, you won’t go back.
The US is a republic with some democratic institutions, but the economists index isn’t some platonic indicator that gets to define who’s a good government and who isn’t. Several of its higher ranking countries have outright banned extremely popular political parties in recent years.
And both have a similarly executive-centric form of government where the president and the majority party hold a disproportionate amount of power. Although the US is even worse than France on this regard as far as I know.
I think it makes sense that both are categorised as flawed.
If you want to talk about rhetoric look at the idea of a “democracy index” - a score suggesting a scientific approach for determining how good/free a nation is.
We can play the “whose saying it game”, or look at the arguments. Democracy is rule by the lowest - and it’s easily manipulated by the popular. Buying votes, focus on the carnal, and immediate is a clear sign of democracy in decline.
I was more wondering about these emperors, kings, barbarians, and those in their influence who were casting aspersions at Athens. Why are we giving these historically incorrect people the time of day?
Once again, looking at incentives can help you find hidden motivations. But at some point you have to look at the arguments at see if they make sense or not.
The US founders didn’t believe in democracy. More people do today, mostly out of a sense that it’s moral obligation. Very few actually will argue it leads to better government outcomes.
I degoogled back when they announced AMP email, and am in broad agreement with the author here. The only things I’ve found it hard to replace are YouTube, Arts & Culture, Google Books, and Books ngrams. Everything else has great alternatives to move to 100%, and Books is just a backup alongside archive.org and Hathi.
Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
I produce book for Standard Ebooks, and they need cover art.[1] Arts & Culture is a good source, but I also use Wikimedia Commons and some museum sites directly.
If you’re interested in watching some sumo, NHK put up English-commentated 30 minute ad-free round-up videos on YouTube for each day of each fifteen-day-long basho. They take each video down after a week or so, so you need to be watching at the time. The next basho is held in Ōsaka and starts March 8th (see https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/sumo/basho-schedule/).
When I visited Japan, I went to a Spring basho in Tokyo.
The sumo matches were much more entertaining than I had expected, as the strategies employed by the fighters were varied and the sumo rules ensure that a winner is decided in a relatively short time.
reply