1) A thread on social, economic, and technological change:

2) As modern westerners, we grossly underestimate the profound and sometimes brutal sociological and psychological effects of continual, relentless, and massive social, economic, and technological change. We are too close to it. It's all we know. We are fish who can't feel wet.
3) The technological changes enable and facilitate massive social and economic changes, which, in turn, create demand for yet more technological changes to help people adjust to the social and economic changes. Rinse and repeat (in a smart washing machine).
4) There is nothing novel about this observation. Far smarter people have written and spoken eloquently about this dynamic over the past several centuries.
5) But we are not forgiving enough (of others and of ourselves) and we are not understanding enough about the significant harm that this continual and relentless cycle of change and disruption does to our mental and spiritual health. We think all of this is normal.
6) As products of our civilization, we typically think that it is we, the human beings, who must be conditioned to adjust to our society. We seldom consider that it might be our civilization that is more than a few tweaks away from normal or healthy.
7) Consider the phrase "well-adjusted". It automatically assumes that the normal and mentally healthy individual is the one who is able to adapt to the prevailing social and economic conditions, even in cases where those conditions, viewed holistically, are quite abnormal.
8) The pace of social and economic change that the average person is expected to endure today is unprecedented in human history - the way we live, where we live, the new skills that must constantly be learned, even the words that we are expected to use for things.
9) Things I'm not saying in this thread:

-Change is bad
-People in the past had it easier than we do
-Choice is bad
-Learning new skills is bad
-Change never happened before now
10) For most of human history, until very recently, the social and economic roles that the average person was expected to play were well-defined and virtually unchanging.
11) I'm not arguing that this was always good. Many of those social and economic roles were oppressive, unjust, and exploitative. And you could never change them. That world was very hard on the vast majority of people.
12) But, for good and for bad, there was an underlying and predictable stability there. You were a shepherd, because your dad was a shepherd, and as a humble shepherd, with the skills of a shepherd, you would live and die.
13) Yes, the Vikings could come in the middle of the night and slit your throat. Yes, you could die of the bubonic plague. Yes, if you got sick or became disabled, you were pretty much screwed. Again, I'm not arguing life was easier then, or that pain and misery didn't exist.
14) What I am arguing is that the predictability and stability of day-to-day social and economic roles and nearly immutable cultural expectations provided at least some degree of psychological comfort, some sense of belonging, and removed some pressure to always reinvent oneself.
15) No, I wouldn't rather live back then. Yes, in many ways things are far better now.

And, yes, we live in a society where people are under tremendous social and psychological pressure and it manifests itself in all sorts of seen and unseen pathologies which cause much misery.
16) The fact that many things are better now does not absolve us of the responsibility to question our current paradigm of head-spinning continual social and economic change, and to ask hard questions about whether what we are expecting of people is realistic, or even humane.
17) No, I don't have answers. If you expected any to such difficult questions, from someone who isn't all that smart, for free, in 280 characters or less, I am sorry to disappoint you. [end]

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SolarWinds follow up. Very good tweet explaining what happened.


Basically what this means is that SolarWinds itself was exploited. Someone posted an infected update as legitimate (digitally signed), leading customers to download a bad update.

“Multiple trojanized updates were digitally signed from March - May 2020 and posted to the SolarWinds updates website” https://t.co/8e3bMFWXYu


FireEye then explains that infected organizations were approached and exploited. This is a separate Step 2.

At this point, information is already going to “malicious domains” without extra intervention, after the malware does nothing for “up to two weeks”

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The first ever world map was sketched thousands of years ago by Indian saint
“Ramanujacharya” who simply translated the following verse from Mahabharat and gave the world its real face

In Mahabharat,it is described how 'Maharishi Ved Vyasa' gave away his divine vision to Sanjay


Dhritarashtra's charioteer so that he could describe him the events of the upcoming war.

But, even before questions of war could begin, Dhritarashtra asked him to describe how the world looks like from space.

This is how he described the face of the world:

सुदर्शनं प्रवक्ष्यामि द्वीपं तु कुरुनन्दन। परिमण्डलो महाराज द्वीपोऽसौ चक्रसंस्थितः॥
यथा हि पुरुषः पश्येदादर्शे मुखमात्मनः। एवं सुदर्शनद्वीपो दृश्यते चन्द्रमण्डले॥ द्विरंशे पिप्पलस्तत्र द्विरंशे च शशो महान्।

—वेद व्यास, भीष्म पर्व, महाभारत


Meaning:-

हे कुरुनन्दन ! सुदर्शन नामक यह द्वीप चक्र की भाँति गोलाकार स्थित है, जैसे पुरुष दर्पण में अपना मुख देखता है, उसी प्रकार यह द्वीप चन्द्रमण्डल में दिखायी देता है। इसके दो अंशो मे पीपल और दो अंशो मे विशाल शश (खरगोश) दिखायी देता है।


Meaning: "Just like a man sees his face in the mirror, so does the Earth appears in the Universe. In the first part you see leaves of the Peepal Tree, and in the next part you see a Rabbit."

Based on this shloka, Saint Ramanujacharya sketched out the map, but the world laughed
Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.