Mohebi made the sign after scoring a goal against New Zealand's World Cup team.
Seventy-nine years ago this month, at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan for the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it quickly became known, committed more than $13 billion for Europe’s postwar recovery—approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars. Donald Trump’s deal with Iran, which he signed yesterday in Versailles, commits the United States and its regional partners to ensuring that Iran receives “at least $300 billion” for its “rehabilitation and economic development.”
This is, in effect, a Marshall Plan for the Iranian regime, albeit not one funded with American taxpayer dollars. But whereas the original was designed to consolidate an American victory, this one is designed to manage the consequences of a defeat that pushes the United States closer to disengaging from the Middle East.
The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran is remarkably vague. Point one commits the United States and Iran to regional peace and stability. Vice President Vance told CNN that this means Iran will stop funding proxy forces and destabilizing the region; Tehran might well interpret that differently. The text does reiterate Iran’s commitment not to build a nuclear weapon, and it says that Iran agrees to “downblend” its highly enriched uranium on-site (which basically means diluting it). But the memorandum includes no other details regarding limits on enrichment. It says that Iran will not charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the next 60 days, but after that, nothing is specified.
When asked about the $300 billion, Vance claimed that the Gulf countries would supply it all. But the deal makes no such provision. It tasks the United States and its regional partners to develop the plan. Perhaps this is why a senior administration official told CNN that “people should not read too much into the language.” The official went on to describe the memorandum as a political document, saying, of the Iranians, “We came up with language that allows them to say what they need for their domestic politics.” But Iran will almost certainly demand that the United States stick to the letter of the agreement.
[Graeme Wood: Iran has humiliated Trump]
What we do know is that the relief for Iran is to come in stages. An immediate waiver of sanctions will allow it to export oil. This is a return to the arrangement under the Obama-era nuclear deal and is estimated to be worth up to $60 billion a year. Once the memorandum is implemented but before a final deal, Iran’s frozen assets will be released for it to spend as it seems fit. This reportedly consists of $24 billion held in banks in Qatar, Oman, and Iraq, although Tehran believes that its total inaccessible assets worldwide may exceed $100 billion. Only if a final agreement follows on this provisional one will Iran be provided with $300 billion and the lifting of all sanctions, including those linked to terrorism, its ballistic-missile program, and human-rights abuses. But Iran will already have received quite a lot up front.
The prospect of a final deal is remote, given the gap between the two sides. History is replete with wars that end in interim agreements, deferring difficult issues to future negotiations, only for the interim arrangement to become permanent. That is very likely to happen here.
When it does, Trump will face a choice. He can applaud the downblending of uranium and accept the new status quo. Or he can end the waivers and reimpose sanctions on oil. If he chooses the second course, Iran will, at a minimum, begin to charge a toll for transit through the strait, using the leverage it gained in the war. Things could spiral from there, but Trump has been clear that he wants out of the war and fears the economic consequences of a closed strait. That won’t change as the midterms approach. The Iranians surely know this, which makes it even less likely that they will compromise further.
The deal is a bad one. But Washington has no good choices at this point. Judged by the administration’s own objectives, the outcome is difficult to describe as anything other than a defeat. The United States entered the conflict seeking to eliminate Iran’s leverage, constrain its regional influence, and force it to accept strict limits on its nuclear program. Instead, Iran emerged with sanctions relief, a pathway to generous reconstruction financing, continuing ambiguity over key nuclear issues, and new leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.
The reason for this defeat was not a reluctance to use force. Many hawks advocated introducing ground troops, but doing so would have made matters much worse. The United States almost certainly would have wound up fighting the sort of casualty-heavy counterinsurgency campaign that has led it to costly defeats elsewhere. If the U.S. had attacked Iran’s civilian infrastructure, Iran would have retaliated against infrastructure in the Gulf, widening the war and exponentially worsening the global economic shock waves.
This was a war that should never have been fought. It was also fought foolishly. Beginning the campaign with a decapitation strike on the Iranian leadership made the conflict existential for the Iranian regime, which then had no reason to hold anything back. By contrast, the 12-day war last summer had the limited objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear program; knowing this, Tehran tempered its response to avoid a protracted all-out war with the United States. It did not do then what it did this winter: attack the Gulf states and close the Strait of Hormuz. Trump made no preparation to deal with these responses, even though they were widely predicted.
[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]
The memorandum of understanding may not even encapsulate the most important of Iran’s gains from this American blunder: The war could well mark the end of America’s will to play a security role in the Middle East. Domestic support for the U.S. alliance with Israel is in free fall. U.S. bases in the Middle East have been badly damaged, their vulnerability as targets exposed. Trump and his successors will be reluctant to use force against Iran in the future, knowing, as is now clear, that doing so will likely trigger the closure of the strait and an economic crisis. And Americans could be forgiven for feeling that they have tried every kind of policy in the Middle East over the past quarter century—war, diplomacy, working with civil society, building up regional partnerships, pushing various players to sign accords with one another—and watched them all fail.
No one should be under any illusion that an American withdrawal from the Middle East will make the region more peaceful or stable. The Israel-Iran rivalry would likely intensify, resulting in regular closures of the strait and possibly more wars. New rivalries, including one between Israel and Turkey, would no doubt fester and grow. The situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would almost certainly worsen and become more hopeless. Russia and China would increase their influence and strategic presence.
But right now, those who favor American engagement in the Middle East have very little to work with. Israel is perceived as trigger-happy and indifferent to U.S. interests, and many Americans have come to see the region as a strategic black hole.
That might change if a new Israeli government comes to power, especially one led by a mainstream critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policy, such as retired General Gadi Eisenkot, who has been rising in recent polls. Then the United States could possibly be persuaded to reengage: to help build energy infrastructure that circumvents the Strait of Hormuz and to return to the project of normalizing Israeli-Saudi ties, for which progress for Palestinians is a precondition.
But the window for such a shift is very narrow. For two decades, Washington has debated how to engage with this volatile region. Now many Americans question whether they should engage at all. If that sentiment hardens, Trump’s agreement with Iran may be remembered as the moment the United States began its withdrawal from the Middle East.
On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone.
The government’s actions won’t help. The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now.
Fable is the constrained version of Mythos, the AI model Anthropic announced in April. Anthropic only released it to a few selected organizations, because the company claimed it was so good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer code that releasing it more generally would be dangerous.
It was an obviously self-serving announcement, and because few were able to verify Anthropic’s claims they were met with some skepticism. Those with access used Mythos to find and patch many vulnerabilities in their own software. But one UK group found the latest, already public, OpenAI model to be just as powerful.
Fable is just another incremental improvement in the years-long climb of AI capabilities. But just as important as the AI model is the “harness.” This is typically not AI. It’s ordinary computer code that interfaces with the user. It stitches together AI models, decides how and for what purposes they can be used, and gives them useful tools such as web search and the ability to run their own computer code.
When Mythos first entered limited release, there was widespread debate whether its power came from the model or the harness. With Mythos demonstrating that it was possible, the open-source community scrambled to build harnesses that could steer other AI models towards similar capabilities. Harness improvements don’t need massive data or data centers.
They largely succeeded. For example, a Prague company was able to replicate Anthropic’s few verifiable cybersecurity capabilities with a much smaller and cheaper model—and a more sophisticated harness. Last week, a group showed that multiple cheaper models harnessed in concert matches Fable’s performance.
The broader community had only a few days with Fable, but that time we learned some about its capabilities. Its difference is less the new model’s raw analytical and problem solving capabilities, and more that the model doesn’t need that sophisticated harness.
Fable requires much less expertise and detailed prompting from the human user. You can give it a difficult goal and it will figure out novel and unexpected ways to satisfy it, finding loopholes in whatever constraints you or the system have imposed on it.
“Relentlessly proactive” is how AI researcher Simon Willison described it. Another descriptor might be “creative.” Experienced AI developers have had that combination of creativity and proactivity since last year, but Fable puts it within easy reach of everyone.
In the hands of someone with a legitimate problem that needs solving, that can be an incredibly useful capability. But in the hands of someone who wants to do harm, it can be equally dangerous. AIs don’t have a moral compass in the same way that people do. They are agents of the wants and desires of the people who prompt them.
That points to the real problem with relentlessly proactive AI. In language, wants and desires are always underspecified. If I ask you to get me some coffee, you would probably pour me a cup from the coffeepot, or buy one from a nearby coffee shop.
You couldn’t buy me a pound of raw beans, or a coffee plantation. You wouldn’t order a cup of coffee for delivery next month. You wouldn’t find a nearby person, rip a cup of coffee out of their hands, and bring it to me. I wouldn’t have to specify any of the million limitations to my request; you would just know.
Human stories are filled with warnings about underspecified desires. King Midas wished that everything he touch turn to gold, forgetting to add “but not my food, drink, and daughter.” And genies are notorious for granting your wish in a way you wish they hadn’t.
The deeper point is that it’s impossible to list all limitations and restrictions, and like a malicious genie, a creative AI will find the ones you forgot. Block a database you don’t want it to have access to, and it might figure out how to bypass your control. Ask it to book a flight, and it might hack the airline because the website says the flight is sold out. Ask it to save money on your cellphone plan, and it might cancel it altogether—or get someone else to pay for it. As far as we know now AI has not done any of this yet, but you get the idea.
Malicious intent is not required. To an AI model, constraints are just things to get around and not general truisms about the world. They are creative problem solvers and natural rule breakers. They “hack” in the sense that they find and exploit loopholes.
Human systems rely on so many norms that we scarcely recognize the existence of until they are broken. AIs naturally think outside the box, because they don’t have any real conception of what the box is or why it’s there in the first place.
There is no foolproof way to prevent people from using AI models to complete harmful tasks. There is no way to prevent the models from incidentally causing harm while completing benign tasks. AI models are no longer isolated from the real world. They browse the internet and answer emails.
They trade stocks and make purchases. They control physical systems. They are, in effect, robots that affect life and property. We have no technical mechanisms to verify the integrity of an AI system. This level of capability and creativity in the hands of us untrustworthy humans will have both great and terrible results.
The problem is not unique to Anthropic. Mythos/Fable might currently be the most capable rules hacker, but more sophisticated harnesses give other models similar capabilities. And we should assume that the other frontier models are no more than a few months behind, and that open-source models are less than a year behind. At best, any ban only serves to delay the problem for a short while.
That delay might be useful if we—as a society, as a planet—would use that time to come together and figure out what to do. This isn’t a US/China arms race problem; this a species-level problem that requires coordinated action at that scale. Unfortunately, we have no mechanism to do that. I first wrote about this problem five years ago, but it was all too futuristic.
Today, when its right in front of us, there is no world government that can impose constraints on the for-profit corporations currently controlling AI models and research. The US has no appetite to effectively and even-handedly regulate those corporations, even as they do catastrophic damage to the environment, democracy, and—in this case—society in general.
This all makes an AI public option all the more necessary, and urgent. Today’s AIs can be fast, smart and secure, but only two of the three are possible for any given system. These safety tradeoffs are tightly held secrets of companies racing to beat one another, and they tell us we have to trust them. Instead, the choices and their consequences need to be brought out into the sunlight.
We should be funding open-source harnesses that balance capability and safety—that achieve useful goals without so much power—and open-source AI models whose provenance and biases are public and well understood. We have opened the AI Pandora’s box. Now we have to make the best of it.
This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.
Firecracker Lane: New York’s explosive shopping district
Jun. 19th, 2026 10:38 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
boweryboyshistory_feedLooking for a healthy assortment of fireworks to ignite for the Fourth of July holiday? In New York, from the late 19th century until the 1930s, one needed to look no further than one of the city’s most heavily trafficked areas near City Hall. Firecracker Lane was a short row of fireworks dealerships that sat… Read More
The post Firecracker Lane: New York’s explosive shopping district appeared first on The Bowery Boys: New York City History.
George Washington’s copy of the Declaration of Independence
Jun. 19th, 2026 10:36 amboweryboyshistory_feedGeorge Washington’s copy of the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most well-known of the almost 200 copies first made of the document. As a facsimile, it’s certainly not the the most valuable document held by the Library of Congress — after all, they have Thomas Jefferson’s actual rough draft of the Declaration, along with tens of thousands of his other… Read More
The post George Washington’s copy of the Declaration of Independence appeared first on The Bowery Boys: New York City History.
New York City will be at the center of celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States, thanks to the largest-ever flotilla of tall ships to sail into New York Harbor — a reminder of the city’s storied maritime history. It will be like ghosts of the past returning from a long voyage. But… Read More
The post Party Like It’s 1976! New York City Celebrates America’s Birthday — Then and Now appeared first on The Bowery Boys: New York City History.
This one is very near and dear to my heart, and it is Wizards & Spaceships' "Indigenous Survivance For the Zombie Apocalypse ft. Daphne Singingtree." Daphne is a Lakota midwife, author, activist, and prepper, and she has both a fascinating life story and a perspective on surviving through climate collapse and collective action that I think everyone should hear.
Discussions of prepping usually stress me out. I don't have a go bag. I don't have a lot of useful skills. I do know my neighbours very well and can cook in a pinch I guess, but my plan to survive the collapse of civilization is not to survive it. I find Daphne's framing to be super helpful in both practical and narrative situations.
Also she was at Standing Rock so that part of the discussion is also amazing.
Anyway, check it out.
Discussions of prepping usually stress me out. I don't have a go bag. I don't have a lot of useful skills. I do know my neighbours very well and can cook in a pinch I guess, but my plan to survive the collapse of civilization is not to survive it. I find Daphne's framing to be super helpful in both practical and narrative situations.
Also she was at Standing Rock so that part of the discussion is also amazing.
Anyway, check it out.
Now I've had time to mostly do the laundry, I should also take time to recall what we did in the second half of the holiday, when the weather got a little better. (It also took me this time to get round to reducing the size of the holiday photos so they don't take up too much of my storage.)
As some glimpses of clear sky and warm sun emerged, we went to a National Trust nature reserve whose name escapes me, where there were two breeding pairs of ospreys and Son could tick ospreys off on his birding journal.
To make us feel like home it was a very boggy area and there were walkways bordered with metal curbs. They must have been warm, because Daughter and I found this handsome chap sunning himself on the rim.
They're just called 'common lizards' but I've never seen one before in my life, so they can't be that common. I didn't even think we had lizards in the UK.
(To be fair we only have three species of lizard in the UK and one of them - the slow worm - has no legs and kind of counts with the snakes.) A neat thing about common lizards is that they bear live young rather than laying eggs.
So that was very satisfactory. The next day we went to Kendal Pride and took part in half the procession. It turned out to be quite long, and I find walking hard, though the physiotherapy has been working. Still, I bugged out half way through and went to a cafe to wait for DH to finish. (He was taking photos of everything.)
The children stayed with me (they're very kind), and when DH got back we had lunch at the cafe, then I completed the course and found the event, where there were stalls and a stage with various performers. An excellent turnout.
The next day we went to Beatrix Potter's house, which was very comfortable and filled with antique furniture which she bargain hunted herself. It was plenty large enough for one person, or even a couple, but nothing like the enormous, prideful, historic stately homes we'd been touring, and I liked her much better after seeing it.
They did tell us that there was an infestation, but clarified that it was an infestation of ten felt mice scattered around the house for people to spot. We found all ten, including the one who was in a hole in the floor. One was singing in the piano, and two were in the dollshouse arguing about the bed.
Obligatory photo of Son in the window seat at Beatrix Potter's house taking a photo of the very nice hearth set-up. Surrounding her fire she had a bread oven and a compartment that heated water, with a tap attached. We were impressed.
The garden was lovely too, and contained several spots that appear exactly the same in the books.
For lunch that day we went to a pub near the cottage. The most unimproved pub I've experienced ever since they started to get family-friendly. Bare boards, bare tables, a bar and not much more. They were not having with this 'gastro-pub' lark! But they did do an enormous bowl of tomato soup and bowls of chips so large we shared one between three.
And that was it! On the way home we diverted to see one of the largest prehistoric stone circles in Cumbria.
It had sadly been vandalized in the 18th Century (blown up with gunpowder!) so some of the stones were cracked and all of them were lying down on their sides. But it was so peaceful there - peace that pressed into you like a great weighted blanket. The sun shone and the quiet and calm was astonishing.
And then we came home :)
Did someone make a wish for more Archive of Our Own (AO3) users at 11:11? Because that wish has come true and we are proud to share that just four months after we celebrated 10 million registered users, AO3 now has 11 million registered users! This means an average of around 250,000 people have made an AO3 account every month since then.
In honor of getting what we wished for, we’re spotlighting the Gift feature on AO3! Gifts are works that are dedicated by the creators. For example, a work may have been written for a friend’s birthday, created for a Gift Exchange, or simply something you made while thinking of someone else. Is there anyone you’ve created fanworks for that you’d like to spotlight? You can gift something to someone even if they don’t have an AO3 account!
If you’d like to gift a work to someone else, refer to How do I gift a work to someone? or refer to our general Gifts FAQ for more information.
Thank you for being a part of this milestone with us and we look forward to celebrating many more achievements with you in the future (18 million works is right around the corner)!
Unpacking RFK Jr.'s ties to group promoting unproven stem cell treatments for autism
Jun. 19th, 2026 10:00 amsnopes_feedThe U.S. health secretary was a speaker at the Autism Health Summit, sponsored by a leading advocate for "regenerative medicines."
“Beats me how they did it … I got the whole thing at a garage sale for five bucks—and that included the stand.”
It was over. But before the police could arrive, the rioting employees had already turned on one another, using the closest weapons at hand.
Solo Leveling: Fanfic: (see you in the depths of) real life
Jun. 19th, 2026 04:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluedreaming posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fan_flashworksFandom: Solo Leveling
Rating: T
Length: 300 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: The title is from THE FINAL FUTURE by Kim Yideum, translator uncredited.
Summary: Cha Haein considers Yoo Jinho.
( Read more... )
Rating: T
Length: 300 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: The title is from THE FINAL FUTURE by Kim Yideum, translator uncredited.
Summary: Cha Haein considers Yoo Jinho.
( Read more... )
Comic strip for 2026-06-19
Phoebe and Her Unicorn
1. Dear Sahaj: To make a long story short, my fiancé and I are getting married next month. His sister told him she was planning to hold an event for her baby while she’s in town for our wedding (Jewish baby naming ceremony, kind of like a baptism).
My fiancé told her we’d really prefer she hold it any other weekend. Her baby will be over 1 year old and I don’t trust her to throw the event in a way that’s sensitive to our wedding — she often forgets (or refuses) to consider us and dismisses our concerns. Last year, when my fiancé told her I was sad to be de facto excluded from a family weekend she planned, she told me “it’s not fair to put your disappointment on others.”
Well, she was shocked and hurt by our scheduling request. Sister + her husband tried to guilt trip fiancé solo while he was on a work trip in her city. “You’re taking your anger out on my baby!”, and “it’s just 10 minutes, no big deal.” Then the four of us talked, and they said they wanted to repair this. I acknowledged the hurt feelings but declined to hear more, and I shared what I needed.
Now she’s all “I guess everything I do is wrong!”, “I’ve never experienced hatred like this,” and “I can’t trust [fiancé] anymore!” because we set a boundary, communicated openly with each other about things that involve our wedding and relationship and shared how we feel (like she asked!)
Now, we’re trying to be polite and conserve energy before the wedding, but fiancé’s parents and other sister have been pressuring us to reach out or have another big talk. Fiancé’s family says they’re “close” but it feels suffocating.
Help! I just want to have a healthy, happy marriage and a fun, meaningful wedding weekend. How can we protect these things? My fiancé has gotten a lot better with boundaries, but still ends up super guilty and stressed about how his family reacts to us saying no to them.
— Bride To Be Hoping For Peace
( Read more... )
****
2. Dear Prudence,
My sister “Nina” got married in early April, and she’s still angry over something my boyfriend did during the wedding reception. No, he didn’t get wasted, knock over the wedding cake, or make an unwanted pass at anyone. His crime? He proposed to me on the dance floor. After I accepted, people stopped dancing to briefly congratulate us, and then we all went back to having fun. Nina, however, says I completely “upstaged” her and accused me of trying to ruin her wedding by taking the attention away from her!
Now my sister is demanding that I apologize and says she won’t speak to me until I do. She’s even dragged our mom into the act, and now my mom is on my case about it, too. I honestly had no idea my boyfriend was planning to propose to me at her wedding; it was just a pleasant surprise. My boyfriend says I have nothing to apologize for, and my mom and sister are completely out of line. I agree with him, but a part of me wonders if I should just give Nina a fake apology to restore peace in the family. Good idea, or should I stand my ground?
—Proposal Petulence
( Read more... )
My fiancé told her we’d really prefer she hold it any other weekend. Her baby will be over 1 year old and I don’t trust her to throw the event in a way that’s sensitive to our wedding — she often forgets (or refuses) to consider us and dismisses our concerns. Last year, when my fiancé told her I was sad to be de facto excluded from a family weekend she planned, she told me “it’s not fair to put your disappointment on others.”
Well, she was shocked and hurt by our scheduling request. Sister + her husband tried to guilt trip fiancé solo while he was on a work trip in her city. “You’re taking your anger out on my baby!”, and “it’s just 10 minutes, no big deal.” Then the four of us talked, and they said they wanted to repair this. I acknowledged the hurt feelings but declined to hear more, and I shared what I needed.
Now she’s all “I guess everything I do is wrong!”, “I’ve never experienced hatred like this,” and “I can’t trust [fiancé] anymore!” because we set a boundary, communicated openly with each other about things that involve our wedding and relationship and shared how we feel (like she asked!)
Now, we’re trying to be polite and conserve energy before the wedding, but fiancé’s parents and other sister have been pressuring us to reach out or have another big talk. Fiancé’s family says they’re “close” but it feels suffocating.
Help! I just want to have a healthy, happy marriage and a fun, meaningful wedding weekend. How can we protect these things? My fiancé has gotten a lot better with boundaries, but still ends up super guilty and stressed about how his family reacts to us saying no to them.
— Bride To Be Hoping For Peace
( Read more... )
2. Dear Prudence,
My sister “Nina” got married in early April, and she’s still angry over something my boyfriend did during the wedding reception. No, he didn’t get wasted, knock over the wedding cake, or make an unwanted pass at anyone. His crime? He proposed to me on the dance floor. After I accepted, people stopped dancing to briefly congratulate us, and then we all went back to having fun. Nina, however, says I completely “upstaged” her and accused me of trying to ruin her wedding by taking the attention away from her!
Now my sister is demanding that I apologize and says she won’t speak to me until I do. She’s even dragged our mom into the act, and now my mom is on my case about it, too. I honestly had no idea my boyfriend was planning to propose to me at her wedding; it was just a pleasant surprise. My boyfriend says I have nothing to apologize for, and my mom and sister are completely out of line. I agree with him, but a part of me wonders if I should just give Nina a fake apology to restore peace in the family. Good idea, or should I stand my ground?
—Proposal Petulence
( Read more... )
1. DEAR ABBY: For years, my only daughter and I got along pretty well. Then she stopped visiting or speaking to us, meaning we didn't see our grandchildren or my son-in-law. That went on for six to eight years. Suddenly, she has responded on Facebook but refuses to tell me what the problem was.
When you don't communicate with somebody for this long, it's difficult because so much has happened in the interim that conversations are now as if I'm speaking to a stranger. I deeply resent this, though I pretend I'm fine because if I don't, all communication will cease again.
As I near the end of my life, I don't want her to know or come to my "deathbed" (whenever that might be) because the only thing I'm going to want to know is "why," and she will never tell me. It interfered with my relationship with my three granddaughters, so I don't want to see her.
I truly feel if she didn't want any part of me all these years, she shouldn't bother paying lip service now. When that time comes, I only want to be around people who truly loved and cared about me. I can't get my son and my best friend to understand that when the time comes, I just want peace. How can I? -- WEARY IN WASHINGTON
( Read more... )
*****
2. DEAR ABBY: After the last presidential election, my daughter, "Cindy," whom I love with all my heart, turned against me.
Cindy started rebelling when she was a teenager. Our relationship was rocky for some time, but I never stopped loving her. Once she matured, our relationship became much better, so I was shocked when she turned on me in such a vicious way.
She began making up stories about how I had abused her as a child -- absolute lies. She also began sending me nasty text messages, calling me names because of my political beliefs and telling me she no longer wants a relationship with me. I don't care what her political beliefs are. I would never be so cruel to her.
It has been a year and a half since we have had any contact. I have tried writing her letters, which I assume she is throwing in the garbage without reading. I can't call her because she blocked my number, and she has also blocked me on all social media. I need advice about how to move forward. -- GOOD MOM IN THE SOUTH
( Read more... )
When you don't communicate with somebody for this long, it's difficult because so much has happened in the interim that conversations are now as if I'm speaking to a stranger. I deeply resent this, though I pretend I'm fine because if I don't, all communication will cease again.
As I near the end of my life, I don't want her to know or come to my "deathbed" (whenever that might be) because the only thing I'm going to want to know is "why," and she will never tell me. It interfered with my relationship with my three granddaughters, so I don't want to see her.
I truly feel if she didn't want any part of me all these years, she shouldn't bother paying lip service now. When that time comes, I only want to be around people who truly loved and cared about me. I can't get my son and my best friend to understand that when the time comes, I just want peace. How can I? -- WEARY IN WASHINGTON
( Read more... )
2. DEAR ABBY: After the last presidential election, my daughter, "Cindy," whom I love with all my heart, turned against me.
Cindy started rebelling when she was a teenager. Our relationship was rocky for some time, but I never stopped loving her. Once she matured, our relationship became much better, so I was shocked when she turned on me in such a vicious way.
She began making up stories about how I had abused her as a child -- absolute lies. She also began sending me nasty text messages, calling me names because of my political beliefs and telling me she no longer wants a relationship with me. I don't care what her political beliefs are. I would never be so cruel to her.
It has been a year and a half since we have had any contact. I have tried writing her letters, which I assume she is throwing in the garbage without reading. I can't call her because she blocked my number, and she has also blocked me on all social media. I need advice about how to move forward. -- GOOD MOM IN THE SOUTH
( Read more... )
There's a particular type of alternate history whose premise is: what if [fill in the blank past society] industrialized? (Rome is a particular magnet for this.)
The challenge of such speculation is that we have precisely one data point for what de novo industrialization looks like. Many parts of the world have industrialized, but they've done it by adopting the concepts and technologies developed elsewhere. As a result, our explanations for how it happens run the risk of being just-so stories, with no way to test them and see if they're correct. Those being the only explanations we have, though, we pretty much have to go with them whenever we attempt to depict either an alternate historical industrialization, or this process happening in a secondary world.
But before we ask what it takes to industrialize, we should first look at what industrialization is.
I'm going to give a simple answer to this. An industrial society is one that's figured out mechanized methods of production, rather than everything having to be done by hand. In order make that mechanization work, we had to harness new sources of energy -- specifically, fossil fuels -- and then reorganize labor around creating and operating the machines. As a consequence of such changes, a society of this type develops more specialized division of labor, and also tends to support higher, denser populations.
So: how do you get there from an agrarian society where muscles provide most of the power?
Obviously this is in large part a technological question. A Bronze Age society can't industrialize for the simple reason that their metallurgy can't support the kinds of technology necessary for powerful steam engines; hunter-gatherers, even less so. Even an iron-working society can't necessarily manage it, because a boiler capable of surviving useful levels of pressure isn't something any old blacksmith can bang together. But technology is only one side of the equation, and if all you're looking at is the metallurgy, it's easy to think that surely any place with good blacksmiths could figure it out -- that it's pure chance no other time period industrialized. In reality, you also have to ask yourself, what are we making these machines for?
Yes, aeolipiles -- primitive steam turbines -- existed nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution got rolling. But they were essentially toys, producing very little power and using up tons of fuel to do it. They had no practical function. It took a completely different design to arrive at a steam engine that could do anything useful . . . and the odds that anybody was going to put in the work for that design were low, because what purpose would it serve?
When your vision of the Industrial Revolution is that change at its height, with massive engines driving locomotives or machines that fill whole rooms, you miss how inefficient, ineffective, and unreliable early steam engines were. Even if some Greek inventor tinkered around with the aeolipile or asked "I wonder if there's a better approach?", he would wind up spending tons of money and effort on making a device that still wasn't worth it. The argument I've seen -- the best just-so story we have for the Industrial Revolution -- is that it started where it did and when it did because eighteenth-century Britain found itself in a situation where even a kind of crappy steam engine was better than no engine at all: coal was needed for heating purposes, their coal mines had gotten deep enough that they were flooding with water, and oh look, the fuel you need for the engine is right there where you'll be using it. No need to pay for transporting it anywhere. The economics worked out to make that a problem worth solving with a new technological development.
Coal has been used for a long time in cooking and heating, but we've tended to go for the easy surface deposits first, and to switch away from it when those become less accessible. The roots of Britain's industrialization probably lie in deforestation and the more intensive mining of coal in the century or two leading up to the development of actual steam engines -- a set of circumstances that didn't prevail in, say, Rome. They handled their mechanical problems with slave labor and had much less need for coal, living where they did; as near as I can tell, peninsular Italy had very little coal anyway (compared to Britain). So trying to invent a steam engine there would be a solution in search of a problem to solve: not a situation that favors the kind of technological development that has to pass through multiple not-very-effective stages before it gets to the good stuff.
And the good stuff, as you all probably learned in school, is steam engines that are smooth and efficient enough to be useful in textile production. Once you have those, it's worth the cost to build them in places other than on top of coal mines and transport coal to them. Other uses, too, but after the water-pumping prologue, textile industrialization really is Act I of the Industrial Revolution, because it's an easy place for a better (but still not amazing) engine to make a difference. So here, again, the just-so story says Britain was the right place at the right time: they had huge industries in both wool and (thanks to colonialism) cotton, meaning that productivity gains in something as basic as the spinning of thread could produce absolutely explosive growth. Everything after that -- trains and steamships and cool steampunk gadgets -- is flying on the momentum created by coal mining and thread.
Of course, all of this is the mundane path to industrialization. In a speculative world, it's entirely possible to change the starting conditions and create a different trajectory; so long as it still follows the general pattern of "non-muscle energy source allows for new, mechanized, mass production," it will feel industrial. If that energy source is the discovery of a vein of some mineral which, when a small quantity is placed into a device, becomes an abundant form of power, maybe nobody has to slowly iterate through crappy devices to reach a point where it makes economic sense to transport the stuff elsewhere. Or it's a method of channeling magical power from the sky, recently discovered by an innovative sorcerer, which turns out to be useful for some productive task. (Quite possibly it's still textiles: as noted in the previous essay, those are, alongside food, one of the basic survival requirements that have historically demanded the most time and labor.)
I'll admit to ambivalent feelings about that latter example, because of what kind of magic I like in my stories. An industrialized form of magic is one that, by definition, can be depersonalized. At that point, no matter what words you attach to it, I no longer find it very magical: it's just technology by a different name. I can still enjoy stories in such a setting; I'll just enjoy them for reasons other than the magic. And I freely admit this is a personal opinion, not one shared by every reader. For worldbuilding purposes, it's entirely fine to create a speculative twist on the process of industrialization -- and then it helps to understand what does and does not make sense!
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/SbcH2d)
The challenge of such speculation is that we have precisely one data point for what de novo industrialization looks like. Many parts of the world have industrialized, but they've done it by adopting the concepts and technologies developed elsewhere. As a result, our explanations for how it happens run the risk of being just-so stories, with no way to test them and see if they're correct. Those being the only explanations we have, though, we pretty much have to go with them whenever we attempt to depict either an alternate historical industrialization, or this process happening in a secondary world.
But before we ask what it takes to industrialize, we should first look at what industrialization is.
I'm going to give a simple answer to this. An industrial society is one that's figured out mechanized methods of production, rather than everything having to be done by hand. In order make that mechanization work, we had to harness new sources of energy -- specifically, fossil fuels -- and then reorganize labor around creating and operating the machines. As a consequence of such changes, a society of this type develops more specialized division of labor, and also tends to support higher, denser populations.
So: how do you get there from an agrarian society where muscles provide most of the power?
Obviously this is in large part a technological question. A Bronze Age society can't industrialize for the simple reason that their metallurgy can't support the kinds of technology necessary for powerful steam engines; hunter-gatherers, even less so. Even an iron-working society can't necessarily manage it, because a boiler capable of surviving useful levels of pressure isn't something any old blacksmith can bang together. But technology is only one side of the equation, and if all you're looking at is the metallurgy, it's easy to think that surely any place with good blacksmiths could figure it out -- that it's pure chance no other time period industrialized. In reality, you also have to ask yourself, what are we making these machines for?
Yes, aeolipiles -- primitive steam turbines -- existed nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution got rolling. But they were essentially toys, producing very little power and using up tons of fuel to do it. They had no practical function. It took a completely different design to arrive at a steam engine that could do anything useful . . . and the odds that anybody was going to put in the work for that design were low, because what purpose would it serve?
When your vision of the Industrial Revolution is that change at its height, with massive engines driving locomotives or machines that fill whole rooms, you miss how inefficient, ineffective, and unreliable early steam engines were. Even if some Greek inventor tinkered around with the aeolipile or asked "I wonder if there's a better approach?", he would wind up spending tons of money and effort on making a device that still wasn't worth it. The argument I've seen -- the best just-so story we have for the Industrial Revolution -- is that it started where it did and when it did because eighteenth-century Britain found itself in a situation where even a kind of crappy steam engine was better than no engine at all: coal was needed for heating purposes, their coal mines had gotten deep enough that they were flooding with water, and oh look, the fuel you need for the engine is right there where you'll be using it. No need to pay for transporting it anywhere. The economics worked out to make that a problem worth solving with a new technological development.
Coal has been used for a long time in cooking and heating, but we've tended to go for the easy surface deposits first, and to switch away from it when those become less accessible. The roots of Britain's industrialization probably lie in deforestation and the more intensive mining of coal in the century or two leading up to the development of actual steam engines -- a set of circumstances that didn't prevail in, say, Rome. They handled their mechanical problems with slave labor and had much less need for coal, living where they did; as near as I can tell, peninsular Italy had very little coal anyway (compared to Britain). So trying to invent a steam engine there would be a solution in search of a problem to solve: not a situation that favors the kind of technological development that has to pass through multiple not-very-effective stages before it gets to the good stuff.
And the good stuff, as you all probably learned in school, is steam engines that are smooth and efficient enough to be useful in textile production. Once you have those, it's worth the cost to build them in places other than on top of coal mines and transport coal to them. Other uses, too, but after the water-pumping prologue, textile industrialization really is Act I of the Industrial Revolution, because it's an easy place for a better (but still not amazing) engine to make a difference. So here, again, the just-so story says Britain was the right place at the right time: they had huge industries in both wool and (thanks to colonialism) cotton, meaning that productivity gains in something as basic as the spinning of thread could produce absolutely explosive growth. Everything after that -- trains and steamships and cool steampunk gadgets -- is flying on the momentum created by coal mining and thread.
Of course, all of this is the mundane path to industrialization. In a speculative world, it's entirely possible to change the starting conditions and create a different trajectory; so long as it still follows the general pattern of "non-muscle energy source allows for new, mechanized, mass production," it will feel industrial. If that energy source is the discovery of a vein of some mineral which, when a small quantity is placed into a device, becomes an abundant form of power, maybe nobody has to slowly iterate through crappy devices to reach a point where it makes economic sense to transport the stuff elsewhere. Or it's a method of channeling magical power from the sky, recently discovered by an innovative sorcerer, which turns out to be useful for some productive task. (Quite possibly it's still textiles: as noted in the previous essay, those are, alongside food, one of the basic survival requirements that have historically demanded the most time and labor.)
I'll admit to ambivalent feelings about that latter example, because of what kind of magic I like in my stories. An industrialized form of magic is one that, by definition, can be depersonalized. At that point, no matter what words you attach to it, I no longer find it very magical: it's just technology by a different name. I can still enjoy stories in such a setting; I'll just enjoy them for reasons other than the magic. And I freely admit this is a personal opinion, not one shared by every reader. For worldbuilding purposes, it's entirely fine to create a speculative twist on the process of industrialization -- and then it helps to understand what does and does not make sense!
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/SbcH2d)