One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.
This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.
Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.
It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.
There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.
A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.
There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.
Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
This reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early.
The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
On Saturdays, in the town of Surfside, I would frequently see many Orthodox Jewish people at the beaches and cheerfully going for walks and so on. A pleasant and wonderful atmosphere.
Reminds me of my friends in Gaza, where every day means no shops, no restaurants, no home, no medicine, no food, no water, no hope. The beaches are full of people just trying to exist.
The person you are talking to did not personally commit genocide in Gaza. Just as I, an American citizen, did not declare war on Iran.
In fact, I think the war in Iran is a stupid and immoral thing to do. It's possible that the person you are responding to feels the same about the Israeli government's genocidal actions in Gaza.
However, you did not bother to find out. When you judge someone before knowing them, it is called "prejudice". Pre-judging.
Did the comment you replied to actually accuse them of any of those things? I don't see them doing that. They juxtaposed the two situations, but they made no accusations nor casted any blame. There isn't even any prejudice I can see. Was the comment edited or something? I don't see how your comment makes sense as a reply to its parent.
> I don't see how your comment makes sense as a reply to its parent.
But you can see why the Gaza response made sense? It was completely irrelevant to this discussion. I’m not sure how you’re missing the heavy sub text here.
Friendly reminder that, for all that I despise Israeli politics, "existing in Tel-Aviv" isn't a crime or an aggression against Palestinians.
We can think ill of the Israeli state without jumping to "fuck you for living in Israel and having nice things" as soon as someone mentions their city name.
The UN classified it a genocide. Is the latest to call that a marketing ploy or Russian disinformation and say it's not OK or hip or fashionable to question our allies? Evil productized?
Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.
I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
I volunteered down there for a week when that happened. I think the only thing we used our phones for was a picture here and there. Otherwise, complete darkness. Despite the obvious of it being a disaster zone and homes destroyed everywhere, it was a positive experience.
When I first heard of Starlink and the possibility to have internet everywhere, I was a little sad inside. It is now impossible to escape in this world, even in the most remote mountains on earth. People always look at me sideways when I say this, but I truly think the power/internet needs shutoff for 6 months to a year every so often to give us a little bit of a reset.
I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.
I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.
So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
> One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal
After hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, most people had no electricity or internet for many weeks, some for many months. This kind of human (normal!) connection fluorished for all that time.
I forget where, but there was a restaurant who locked all phones in a box at your table and if you made it to the end without opening it the table got a free cookie.
Plenty of these experiences can be found without disconnecting the electricity for multiple countries. Personally, I find musical events of all sorts are amazing for this, and completely AI free should you chose the right events :)
This weekend Liquicity came to Barcelona (for the first time?) and being with other strangers, dancing all night long, to other humans playing us music and singing and sometimes fucking up, is just an experience out of this world, and these sort of events are all around us, almost every week or at least every month. If not in your country, probably in your neighboring country, just a bus/train ride away.
You just need to take the steps and get out of your house, the human connections are out there and ready to be grabbed by the ones who dare and persist :)
The problem with live concerts is that a substantial number of people are holding up their smartphones in front of them and experiencing it through the screen.
TOOL concerts (minus ones at music festivals) typically restrict phone usage for this exact reason.
Maynard lets everyone record the last song and 99% of people respect the request for no phones. It's not even disrespectful for the band, or yourself, its rude to the person behind you.
That might work at concerts, but it still sort of irks me. Museums, however, have become the worst for this. People stepping in front of me holding their phone in front of my face while I'm looking at the thing just so they can get a picture and wander off without ever really looking. If you want a picture of the art, go to the gift shop
I remember going to Coachella every year from 2005-2010 and it was a great experience. I went in 2017(?) once after that and it seemed like literally everyone had their phones up filming during the sets. It was a night and day difference. Even the EDM tents were people just filming which also had a chilling effect on how crazy people were getting.
Large electronic music events always been like that in my mind, attend the events with less than 1000 attendees and you'll find a completely different vibe. Also, Cochaella is American, maybe try something European next time, I've never been to any North American parties, but judging from what I could see in the past, and even today, they sure look a lot more commercialized than the same-sized events in Europe, and people seem to be interested in something else than dancing their ass off with strangers.
Same here. Just looking into going to Coachella or Burning Man seems like so much work. I'll take a summer festival in Spain, Germany or Netherlands instead.
In comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?
In my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end.
For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
With AI we're about to have a trust crisis (I'll explain in a sec), so if we extrapolate it very far, we could see a world where nobody trusts anything displayed on a device, which is essentially what you describe but in a world with electricity still running.
The trust issue: we already see hacker news members accusing each other of being LLMs, we already see legitimate images being immediately put in the AI category, and AI images and videos being shared as if the truth. We already see signs of infosec changing forever, with flaws found in SSL libraries that makes you wonder how trusty that little padlock next to the URL will become, we already see operating systems having to patch faster than they can.
With all that you get to wonder how much you can trust the pixels you see on your device, and how much we'll collectively trust them in the future. That leads you to trust your neighbours way more than your social media feed, which frankly, may have a positive impact on society over the long run, despite a very painful transition.
That's under the hypothesis that AI leads us to experience a trust crisis, which isn't a given.
Some projects are meant to scope creep. Like this one. If the project manager of the swiss army knife had defended it from scope creep it would have 1 knife.
IIRC the original scope was the 8 most common tasks that literal Swiss soldiers did. that was their scope.
sewing and maintianing clothes was one of them, for example, so thats why it has a punch. They'd need to be able to open cans, as that was the most common long term ration, and they'd need to be able to maintain their rifles which had screws, thus screwdrivers.
a version with a wine bottle opener was made for officers and became common
The comment you’re replying to already explains why they have a corkscrew… I’m used to people not reading the article they’re commenting on, but this is the first time I see someone not reading the comment they’re replying to.
This is what happens when you allow money to influence power without check.
What can be done to curtail it? Ban corporate donations to political parties and PACs. Limit personal contributions. Implement campaign spending limits so parties can't spend hundreds of millions on an election if they somehow manage to get that much money.
Other nations (e.g. Canada) do this. It's not perfect. Money is always looking for a way, and politicians are always looking for the kind of power that money buys. It's an eternal game of whack-a-mole, but it's a game worth playing.
American politicians aren't going to propose this. Americans need to demand it.
But it almost doesn't matter anymore - the bribing is being done so much in plain sight anymore, that these mechanisms are hardly needed anyway. It is a cultural rot that won't be fixed by "just make some rule," the people making the rules are the ones benefiting the most from the corruption.
If every employee at a corporation has the right to free speech and to make political donations, why should the corporation itself have need of such rights? Just because big money won in 2010 doesn't mean the ruling should go unchallenged for all time.
People, not capital, should have rights, because rights are there to protect people from power.
I'm not being supportive of it, I'm explaining how unlikely it is that this ruling will be overturned. It tends to be very rare, especially a scope of 1st amendment ruling. that's just how that court works, and if it does happen, is on decades time scales, not a matter of a year or two, which is sort of what is needed right now. I would say in this case it's essentially impossible, given that this same SC also ruled that it's acceptable for they themselves to get "gifts" from politically motivated persons, as long as the gift is received after the act done, and no explicit quid pro quo conversation happened. In other words, they literally legalized bribery. There is no universe this court or any future court overturns this, the levers of power have been seized, no one is coming to save anyone, "vote harder" isn't going to work. If that sounds fatalistic or hard to read, sorry, but people have been predicting this outcome for 20+ years and nothing has come close to being done about it, much the opposite.
This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?
A CBC political commentator recently said, "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way." Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election. America is this way and will likely get worse. Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.
> "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way."
Trivially true, of course.
> Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election.
Also true but far from trivial for the vast majority of the US population. The medias of all sorts fervently maintain the illusion that electing the other party is going to fix the damage done by the current one, ad infinitum.
Anyone who dares to challenge the above orthodoxy is quickly canceled/shouted-down/name-called/downvoted/etc into oblivion by bot farms with the latest AI at their disposal.
> Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.
I don't see a big difference in the situation of former friends and allies. More likely than not they'd be sold a veiled version of the same, in other words, they'd follow - under the usual vague slogans which mean different things for their authors and audience. To be precise, if there is a way out of this mess, America and her former friends will have to find it, and walk on it, together.
> America is this way and will likely get worse.
Only if we keep wasting time in fatalistic contemplation and fruitless hopes of finding hiding places individually.
> This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?
This is just one person's POV that I would say is more informed than the average american, by no means an expert -
I would say to answer your question very simply - most Americans, if you asked, would have no idea about the Supreme Court in general, let alone the nuances of those rulings I have linked up thread, let alone the implications of them. Americans are raised from a very early age, in school and reinforced by culture, that their institutions and rights are unflappable and almost even incapable of error or harm - while simultaneously teaching historical lessons that blatantly show this isn't true, like chattel slavery, women's sufferage, civil war, etc. This creates a sort of cognitive dissonance that I can't really explain but seems to make people incapable of seeing any harm done by their own systems.
That's one area. The other area is, in the current environment, major news sources are mostly coming from social media these days, that is gamed to hell, and the news sources themselves are bought and paid for by people with corrupt interests. So even getting a fair view of what's actually happening requires work, and a lot of critical thought because there's so much bs out there, that most people just won't bother.
The other thing is that if anyone does push the line a bit and tries to challenge things, if it becomes threatening to the mainstream narrative or people in power, gets squelched, sometimes brutally, by these same systems. A really good example of this is the widespread censorship (explicit censorship, and things like shadow bans/watch lists inducing fear to make people self censor) of the Gaza "conflict" - and this started in the Biden admin, it wasn't really one particular party at all. You can see the same silencing effect happen when any progressive upstart begins threatening the establishment party, they just get outspent. There was one incident in a California senator race, due to it's "top 2" system, where a democrat actually spent money on his likely republican opponent's campaign to push out the progressive, because he felt he would be easier to beat than his progressive challenger.
A system like that cannot possibly function fairly or in the interest of its own people. I do not see how the union is preserved, this is too unstable. I do not want to live through it.
People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them.
During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.
> Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you
Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year.
edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
> both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
That implies there is a good one. The lesser of two evils is still evil, and even how to measure lesser is extremely subjective.
> Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric
Harris campaigned on saying as little as possible. Several Democrats have called for Trump's assassination. Some (like Stacey Plaskett) quite directly, others (including Harris) have implied or joked about it. Someone worked the nutters into a sufficient frenzy to attempt it with Trump and to murder Charlie Kirk.
> Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are.
Around 3 million people die in the US per year, on the order of 6000 of those are in prisons, ICE was on the order of 30.
The media focuses on that because Trump campaigns on immigration, not because it's a significant proportion of the people the government kills. Significantly more people die when Democrats get paid off by the AMA to limit the number of medical residency slots, or impede housing construction even in states their party fully controls resulting in homelessness and poverty-inducing high rents.
> Show me dead protestors
Are you referring to the unarmed woman killed by the capitol police in 2021?
> stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable
Biden pardoned a lot of people in his own party.
The government failing to hold itself accountable is the default. Most of the time they don't even initiate proceedings against themselves when they're committing a crime, and hide behind qualified immunity etc. if someone wants to sue them.
> Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
The Inflation Reduction Act was a trillion dollars. The federal budget is multiple trillions every year and a double digit percentage of it is corruption every year, regardless of which party is in office.
In general it seems like you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage of the overall problem and ignore the systemic bipartisan corruption and government unaccountability that has been the status quo for generations.
Oh, so you can't find equivalents from Harris and Walz! That's what I thought. You aren't an enlightened centrist, you're a partisan hack posing as one.
> residency slots, NIMBY
Who put forward the last bill addressing the residency slot issue? Which party has the bigger YIMBY faction?
> Ashli Babbitt
She was storming the capitol! The officer who shot her was investigated and cleared because the courts agree: cops are allowed to shoot if you are trying to breach the inner defensive perimeter of the US capitol. Where are the investigations for Rene Good and Alex Pretti?
> state investigators were denied access to the shooting scene by the federal government
Oh. This isn't even "we've investigated ourselves," it's just "we kill you, you die." That's new in US politics.
> IRA was a trillion dollars
Spending that you do not like is not fraud. That's not what the word means. I'd love to call the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon) Iran fraud, but I can't, because that's not what the word means.
> you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage
The reason why you can't come up with equivalents for the Trump fraud is because they don't exist, so you have to pretend that congressional appropriations that you don't like are somehow equivalent. But they aren't. They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm, but Trump can just pocket billions and Republicans say "both sides." No, it's not both sides, it's not normal outside of shithole countries, and despite Trump's best efforts to turn the US into a shithole country we can still decide to enforce our laws and turn back the clock on that.
I can't help but feel you're leaving out some key details here...
was she perhaps trespassing after walking through broken barriers, past security guards that told people to leave, and through broken windows? was she also warned to stop multiple times while climbing through a broken window to circumvent a barricaded door at the time of being shot?
If those things happened to be true, it would seem that you're attempting to deceive us as readers to make a point in poor faith. Probably no need to do that, right?
The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.
I'm not trying to be combative, just honest. Here is Harris saying Iran is our greatest adversary (sorry for the Zionist source). Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also been very vocal about wanting to attack Iran. Clinton actually recently praised Trump!
Oh, Harris called Iran an adversary! Wow! I'm glad we didn't elect her or the party that negotiated the last deal with Iran! The party that tore up the Iran deal and kept joking about bombing them into the stone age and started 2 out of 2 of the last middle eastern forever wars is the much better bet.
What? They bombed Iran and started forever war 3 of 3? Who could have seen this coming?!
No, Harris failing to push back hard enough on Gaza is not in the same galaxy of culpability or catastrophe as Trump starting a war with Iran on Israel's behalf. And endorsing their actions in Gaza, lest we forget.
And let's not forget who is actually in office and started the war, and how it's currently going. We can wring our hands about what democrats might have done but we have active proof of what republicans are currently doing and it isn't pretty. There's a vast gulf between "hawkish" and "actively bombing." I'd be willing to give pretty much anyone else a shot at it right now.
I simply do not vote for Zionists of either party. They can keep swapping seats and lose every time. If you support Israel, you cannot have my vote. I'll just sit out the election if I have to (and did last time).
Oh, that's why you can't acknowledge the simple fact that Kamala was better on Gaza, because if you do you acknowledge your own culpability in making the genocide worse.
More people in Gaza were murdered under Biden/Harris than Trump. I’ll never understand neo-liberal extreme parasocial behavior. These people are not your friends, they are the scum of the earth. Treat them as such.
What Biden did in Gaza (and Trump continued) is way worse than what has happened in Iran. It's a vile crime against humanity to attack Iran and kill civilians but Gaza is a straight up US fueled genocide.
All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.
> edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
I don't think we should pat ourselves on the back too hard for milquetoast takes devoid of any specifics.
(also I think you misread the responses to your post)
> All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
"There are five actual Marxist-Leninists you need to be paying attention to in the US but we can't even name one relevant actual fascist, so the symmetry isn't there."
That was my initial reading, and it's because I've encountered numerous people who sincerely believe that. Using sarcasm in posts subject to Poe's Law is a good way to be ambiguous.
Lets start: you. Followed by Stephen Miller. Trump, per the assessment of his own former chief of staff. Josh Hawley. Leonard Leo. All the "Dark Enlightenment." Your initial reading is tendentious and of little value. Are you seriously going to challenge the notion that American politics has a spectrum from center right to fascists-would-blush ideological crackpots like the dark enlightenment?
Yeah JD Vance is a questionable politician who has not won that many election and those he did win he had massive sport behind him that was ideological.
Its not even remotely clear at all that JD Vance has anywhere near the 'skill' of Trump on unifying so many wildly different groups. And JD Vance is a bottom feeder who attached himself to Trump in the right moment and was put as Vice president because some of the Hardcore Trump people didn't want a non-100% Trump Vice President. He didn't win an election to be Vice president.
Thiel and friends can dream up anything, just like they dreamed of Orban winning in Hungary. But just because they were lucky in the last couple years, with a bunch of things, doesn't mean all their plans will work.
Vance's political instincts are highly questionable.
It appears he's reached the first seat in the line of succession without demonstrating any particular skills at all, so I take little comfort in the idea that this is maybe the end of his puppeted rise to power. With an 80 year old in office with nearly 3 years left of presidency, he may very well find himself in the highest office without the need of unifying anyone.
