They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
It has to be free in case of OFAC sanctions otherwise if you are generating revenue from commercial activity in sanctioned regions, you get huge fines.
Yes, synchthing is godsend + also there are several music streaming docker based servers you can pair with an app on your phone and stream only the things you like (or download them) without moving the whole collection on the device.
For serious lectures (not story telling like history or other humanities) you can't be doing anything on the side if you want to understand. Try listening to a math lecture, or chemistry lecture while doing dishes :)
I found the same to be true with audiobooks, nothing serious can't be "just listened to". I've tried to "listen" to a good biology non-fiction on how live evolved from the primordial soup. Shit, in the first chapters there were covalency chemistry and other stuff that I needed to sit down and write to understand.
> not story telling like history or other humanities
Those are not serious humanities lectures. The serious ones are not storytelling, but serious examination of the evidence or of its analysis. There are far more factors, complexity, and uncertainty in an historical event or process than in a petri dish, and the event can't even be reproduced. It's impossible to use the same kind of scientific method and obtain the same kind of certainty, and requires far more critical thinking, judgment, and analysis.
What caused Andrew Jackson to be elected? There's a relatively simple story told, but the reality is enormously complex and uncertain.
Referring to "math" as serious just makes me want to discount your opinion entirely. Lectures (or indeed any linear encoding) are a bad medium for discussing formal languages. This has nothing to do with how much you care about a topic or whatever "serious" is supposed to imply here.
Regardless, listening to something intently and doing mechanical actions are not exclusive.
Well try to listen to a group theory lecture (for example on cohomology of groups) while doing chores :) But the lecture was indeed useful if you stop and rewind and see how the lecturer was explaining (there were some interesting graphs).
Your brain can't hold the context long enough to go to the required level of abstraction, while you're multitasking (may be walking or something deeply automated doesn't count.
I would say the main reason it's hard to follow abstract maths lectures by listening is not the difficulty of the concepts per se, but simply because it's so visual: it relies on notation and diagrams
But mathematicians can talk to each other about arbitrarily abstract concepts, as long as they have enough shared background, and they don't (always) need a blackboard to do it.
Conversely, you can have conceptually very simple things that are basically impossible to follow just by listening, like multiplying two nine-digit numbers or following one of Euclid's proofs in plane geometry. The difficulty isn't about abstraction, but how many things you have to hold in working memory
Original LibGen was still the best browsing experience and it's been down for months. If we lose this resource it would be truly a setback and grave loss.
Got it after a bad car accident, some brain damage. Interestingly it also made me race blind as well - I'm probably one of the few people in the world who can say that! I do identify loved ones from the sound of their voice, though, or if not speaking, I can sometimes tell from how they walk and move. Same thing races, it's not hard to tell if someone's voice sounds black or if they walk like a white guy
The modern societies run via those devices and the enforcement will move to the mostly free Internet that was "a long time ago, when it didn't matter as much".
Social networks aren't that social anymore. Around 65% of the facebook content is not shared/generated by your friends in your social graph. So they're all just a Tik-Tok clones basically. Short dopamine addiction info-snacks with more and more AI generated slop. (and some of the slop is interesting like Cold War military tech stories from books read and visualized by AI).
The network effects doesn't matter that much for the Tiktok's of the world.
A lot of people forget that going hungry is the default state of not doing a thing. The super rich and socially progressive societies redistribute the taxes they levy on the productive people to help the people who can not (elderly, ill) or won't (lazy bastards) work.
It might be a better deal for the society as a whole, to offset the cirme that would ensue if there isn't any social net.
A lion in the plains of Africa is not entitled to a dinner, the farmer in not entitled to a crop yield. It is super rare that people can't do anything to better themselves and get more for their own skills or execution. Any buisness owner will gladly share a percentage of profit you generate for them if you can show them you're indeed generating such profit.
If you're in DPRK or Cuba then you'd need to check your free-market priviledge of having a market for your skills.
It's not the social safety, but the bad enforcement of the law. When bad acts are not punished, this is the problem that occurs.
Some social systems like in Israel if you're ablebodied you are given a public service job, like cleaning the park and etc... so you aren't entitled to a check for doing nothing.
South Africa hasn't any meaningful social net and the wealthy people live in special "high security" enclaves with additional guards and fenced perimeters. If you have a lot of hungry people on the street they will be forced to survive somehow and you'd get more crime.
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
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