> This is the exact kind of thinking that leads to this in the first place. The idea that a human relationship is, in the end, just about what YOU can get from it. That it's just simply a black box with an input and output, and if it can provide the right outputs for your needs, then it's sufficient. This materialistic thinking of other people is a fundamentally catastrophic worldview.
> A meaningful relationship necessarily requires some element of giving, not just getting. The meaning comes from the exchange between two people, the feedback loop of give and take that leads to trust.
This part seems all over the place. Firstly, why would an individual do something he/she has no expectation to benefit from or control in any way? Why would he/she cast away his/her agency for unpredictable outcomes and exposure to unnecessary and unconstrained risk?
Secondly, for exchange to occur there must a measure of inputs, outputs, and the assessment of their relative values. Any less effort or thought amounts to an unnecessary gamble. Both the giver and the intended beneficiary can only speak for their respective interests. They have no immediate knowledge of the other person's desires and few individuals ever make their expectations clear and simple to account for.
> Not everyone needs a romantic relationship, but to think a chatbot could ever fulfill even 1% of the very fundamental human need of close relationships is dangerous thinking. At best, a chatbot can be a therapist or a sex toy. A one-way provider of some service, but never a relationship. If that's what is needed, then fine, but anything else is a slippery slope to self destruction.
A relationship is an expectation. And like all expectations, it is a conception of the mind. People can be in a relationship with anything, even figments of their imaginations, so long as they believe it and no contrary evidence arises to disprove it.
> This part seems all over the place. Firstly, why would an individual do something he/she has no expectation to benefit from or control in any way? Why would he/she cast away his/her agency for unpredictable outcomes and exposure to unnecessary and unconstrained risk?
It happens all the time. People sacrifice anything, everything, for no gain, all the time. It's called love. When you give everything for your family, your loved ones, your beliefs. It's what makes us human rather than calculating machines.
You can easily argue that the warm, fuzzy dopamine push you call 'love', triggered by positive interactions, is basically a "profit". Not all generated value is expressed in dollars.
"But love can be spontaneous and unconditional!" Yes, bodies are strange things. Aneuryisms also can be spontaneous, but are not considered intrinsically altruistic functionality to benefit humanity as a whole by removing an unfit specimen from the gene pool.
"Unconditional love" is not a rational design.
It's an emergent neural malfunction: a reward loop that continues to fire even when the cost/benefit analysis no longer makes sense. In psychiatry, extreme versions are classified (codependency, traumatic bonding, obsessional love); the milder versions get romanticised - because the dopamine feels meaningful, not because the outcomes are consistently good.
Remember: one of the significant narratives our culture has about love - Romeo and Juliet - involves a double suicide due to heartbreak and 'unconditional love'. But we focus on the balcony, and conveniently forget about the crypt.
You call it "love" when dopamine rewards self-selected sacrifices. A casino calls it "winning" when someone happens to hit the right slot machine. Both experiences feel profound, both rely on chance, and pursuing both can ruin you. Playing Tetris is just as blinking, attention-grabbing and loud as a slot machine, but much safer, with similar dopamine outcomes as compared to playing slot machines.
So ... why would a rational actor invest significant resources to hunt for a maybe dopamine hit called love when they can have a guaranteed 'companionship-simulation' dopamine hit immediately?
How much did you pay for the house? How much rennovation did it need? Are you working remotely there? How did you acquire a house in an area that's less accommodating to English than Tokyo? Did you need/use a real estate agent?
> People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would.
From what I've witnessed, the most common complainants were authoritarian mothers who treat their own child(ren) as helpless irrespective of biological age, and teachers, usually with families of their own, who treat non-violent "quirks" beyond their comprehension as a sign of malfeasance. In both cases, lack of familiarity with children is not the issue. Instead, their previous "successes" with raising/teaching children cement a narrow and selective expectation for how children must or must be made to behave. The motivation in either case is a desire for control. The ideological/cultural angle is, at best, a sincerely held rationalization, but is more likely an instinctual employment of thought-terminating cliches/kafkatraps to justify getting their way or make dissenters look/feel unreasonable.
Lax zoning regulations, relatively cheap labor, low cost of materials, and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate. That is what separates Tokyo from New York City.
There's also (relatively) strong renter protections, including effectively frozen rent.
Yes, it's possible to increase rent, but only if the surrounding areas prices have increased, and even then the renter has to agree or it otherwise goes to court and the court tends to not side with landlords.
> and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate
Yes and no. Most housing in Tokyo is apartment complexes and/or condos, which do not depreciate very much (and in fact in the past few years have appreciated by ~30%). Standalone houses depreciate, but the land appreciates. That leads to new construction for those properties, which often then turn into apartment complexes.
Basically, it's a matter of mostly becoming more dense over time, while also restricting price increases of rents.
I don't think it's any of that. Or at least those sre all second order efdects.
It's a much more conformist, homogenized culture so there's less resistance in implementing policy on general.
Also, housing isn't an "asset" the way it is in the US. You simply don't place as much value on your house over there, so there's less resistance to renovating or outright demolishing houses every few decades. Americans would instead see money going down the drain.
The protocols were made open by necessity, not by design. The motive was to connect academic , government, and commercial institutions across the country, all of which operated on incompatible operating systems and data networks. However, the common man would not have benefited from this before 1993, as the government effectively operated as a semi-competent firewall against commercial content and the broader public. They even sued ISPs that permitted legitimate accounts from remotely accessing the net through PPP or SLIP protocols. Not even commercial news feeds were permitted until the late 80s.
The only Internet the common man interacted with is the one that began to flourish as the government relinquished control. The Internet since the mid-90s is and has been a purely commercial achievement.
There were some early ISPs, like The World (Boston), that had IP access around 1991 or so. I believe they were connected through UUNet. I don't know if they were routeable on the NSFNet? "Commercial" traffic was supposedly prohibited.
Are there any new developments on the technical side of microscopy such as new materials or techniques? What journals or trade papers are reliable in researching this information?
How does one become a microscopist as a profession? It seems like a specialized field with a narrow entry point and a lot of hoops.
On the technical side, yes. The biggest new developments I can quickly think of are:
1) Cold field emission guns. The big challenge of an electron source is producing a coherent beam - that is a beam that comes off the tip one electron at a time, at the same location, the same angle, and with the same energy. The cooler the tip runs, the more coherent it tends to be. This has made a big difference and is just now widely commercially available.
2) Narrow pole-piece gap. The sample on most TEMs sits sandwiched between two objective lenses that operate in tandem - these are typically called twin objectives. The upper one ensures the beam is parallel, which primarily results in uniform defocus (or focus if one so desires) across the image. The lower one is responsible for image formation and initial magnification (actually, all of your resolution essentially). The gap between them is responsible for your primary aberrations: spherical and chromatic. Reducing this gap reduces the total aberrations in the image.
I will side bar that the physics of a microscope are not really holding it back from what I'm doing - generating structures of biomolecules. Really, I'm more limited by the camera technology than anything, because the cameras simply aren't performant enough to dose the images to the level I'd like, to collect as many images as possible in as short a time as possible. Fundamentally, I tend to be limited by number of observations.
For the really cutting edge stuff...check out ptychography:
>How does one become a microscopist as a profession? It seems like a specialized field with a narrow entry point and a lot of hoops.
There are basically two routes for TEM - material science, or biochemistry. The way to become a microscopist for me was to show up at a University that had a grant for a microscope, but no one to operate it. :)
In general, universities operate TEM cores, frequently called bioimaging or something. (Structural biology if it's newer although that's just one application among many). Frequently there are positions for all education levels - bachelor's through PhD, depending on what one wants to do. Training is a mix of hands on (interfacing with complicated systems) and theoretical (physics and image formation). Typically the operators aren't the most theoretical, but have a lot of very niche practical knowledge you only get from being around broken microscopes.
How does a corporation fight back when previous administrations have neutered its ability to do so? The Patriot Act (Bush), mass spying on Americans via gag orders (Bush/Obama), proactive anti-trust litigation as a government cudgel (Biden/Trump), jawboning (all of them). Trump's second term is certainly the most brazen and nakedly transparent attempt at control, but the groundwork had been laid decades earlier.
The erosion you speak of happened long before anyone paid attention and the solution people and politicians sought was a further weakening of companies grip on their own assets (more taxes, more regulations, more interference in the market). As an earlier commenter pointed out, the popular political solution to thugs in government has been voting for more thugs in government. In such a circumstance, what does a company owe to those didn't have its interests in mind when it mattered? Even if it can, why should Apple risk becoming a political target against the current administration for the sake of a fickle electorate?
> A meaningful relationship necessarily requires some element of giving, not just getting. The meaning comes from the exchange between two people, the feedback loop of give and take that leads to trust.
This part seems all over the place. Firstly, why would an individual do something he/she has no expectation to benefit from or control in any way? Why would he/she cast away his/her agency for unpredictable outcomes and exposure to unnecessary and unconstrained risk?
Secondly, for exchange to occur there must a measure of inputs, outputs, and the assessment of their relative values. Any less effort or thought amounts to an unnecessary gamble. Both the giver and the intended beneficiary can only speak for their respective interests. They have no immediate knowledge of the other person's desires and few individuals ever make their expectations clear and simple to account for.
> Not everyone needs a romantic relationship, but to think a chatbot could ever fulfill even 1% of the very fundamental human need of close relationships is dangerous thinking. At best, a chatbot can be a therapist or a sex toy. A one-way provider of some service, but never a relationship. If that's what is needed, then fine, but anything else is a slippery slope to self destruction.
A relationship is an expectation. And like all expectations, it is a conception of the mind. People can be in a relationship with anything, even figments of their imaginations, so long as they believe it and no contrary evidence arises to disprove it.