Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World"
Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.
People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens also community self defense.
I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
>I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything
Most of America would be substantially less fucked than the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or barter" is their default mode of operation you see via HN.
I think this is relevant because the colloquialism of it meaning "developed" versus "undeveloped" doesn't work when you try to build on top of it
it's impossible to build on what Third World means or add lore like Fourth World when the definition is on a shaky and now non-existent foundation, while much of the unaffiliated world is highly developed now.
Someone already assigned "Fourth World" to stateless nations, so it's probably fifth world by now.
The developed world does have decaying infrastructure but moving it between the private and state sector has caused problems. As has lockdown and other international policies. Our local government's main interest seems to be in shutting streets off and designing bad cycle infrastructure that is little use to cyclists (I am one by the way). It is letting our streets fall to pieces and spending lots of money erecting physical blocks.
What does that even mean? We're talking about an organization that serves billions of riders per year. Their passenger numbers increased 20-30% since 2020 so even if their delays are bad clearly it's not bad enough that most people seek alternatives.
If I'm using your transit service and you take me on a several hour detour without my consent passing a dozen or more possible stops because "you're not cleared for that", you aren't serving your mandate and I'm never using your service again.
I might even pull the emergency brake before it gets that far and cause you more problems, even.
Every time a read a story like this, I feel an atavistic desire to self-host eveything. But I've had my Google account for 20 years now; the die is cast.
If you never start you'll never be free. It's also not all or nothing. You can keep things with Google, self-host new stuff and gradually move over things that make sense to mover over.
At least use a service with actual customer support like Fastmail, and backup your email with an email client that downloads copies of your email to your computer.
I mean Proton seems like a good (although extremely expensive) option, but these small companies could go out of business on a dime which is a problem when the effort to switch is a titanic undertaking.
creating backups is crucial. this includes all the contacts, texts of saved emails, photos and so on. Many of these ppl who get locked out fail to create local backups and rely on apple's cloud storage. big mistake.
Even just simulating "what if I lost this account" and seeing what you can't access (have your wife change your password and not tell you for a month or so, say) - tells you what you'll be missing.
I have a strong desire not to self host the “live” copy of anything. If my server goes down, I don’t want to have to drop everything and fix it (e.x. if I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to take a laptop incase I need to fix any server troubles - I go on vacation not to be on call!).
That said, keeping a backup of everything, decoupled from any account I don’t control, gives me huge peace of mind.
I'm slowly decoupling things and hosting parts of my infrastructure myself. Let it be on a cloud server or a home machine.
Doing everything and/or all-at-once is not practical, but having backups for most critical infrastructure helps a lot, and when it's rolling, it rolls without effort.
One can go step by step and call it's done when it becomes too much to bear or satisfactorily decoupled.
Just realize this: the longer you play this game, the higher your odds of getting banned. Once it hit me, I quickly decoupled from Google. It's like playing satoshi roulette for 0.5% gains. You keep winning until you get fully wiped.
> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
Not really. At that point TV was competing with cinema for attention, and each needed to provide something different. Now the mediums have merged as well.
That's the difference between the VC and PE models. VC, at least in theory, allocated capital to new ideas. PE squeezes "efficiency" out of what exists.
One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.
I have no skin in the game, but I will do that for you, if you bring back the children from the death. Can you do that? Let's start from the Nakba. Maybe even from last year.
No one is asking people to go back to Europe. All you have to do is Stop the Genocide, Repair. Reconcile. And stop the apartheid. But you know what, you have decided that Israel is untenable without war. Israel is of no use to the neo Imperialists, unless it keeps the region unstable.
Well majority of the white population in South Africa don’t have a home country to return to either. Afrikaans people moving to Australia, Britain or the US is not much different than forcing the Jewish people in Israel to go to those countries.
Besides that Apartheid South Africa is remarkably similar to Israel (of course the race part is entirely replaced by religion/culture making assimilation into the Israeli society actually somewhat feasible).
Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.
This is what this story reminds me of.