It is not a question of what, but a question of why.
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done
If the closest you can get to understanding populists is “some humans are just evil and selfish”, a large part of humanity will remain mysterious and unreachable to you.
I think everyone understands tribalism to some extent. You would probably expend more effort to protect your child than you would a stranger. Populism just turns up the knob on this instinct.
Calling people who hold beliefs you find wrong "evil" is, IMO, counter-productive and will lead not only to conflict but to worse outcomes for yourself (even if your side "wins"). The root of cultural differences (both within and between societies and sub-cultures) are differing beliefs of what is right and wrong; what is morally good and morally bad.
What you view as hateful, others will view as loving. And what you view as loving, others can view as hateful. Painting the opposition in simplistic terms like "evil" and refusing to even try to see why they feel they way they feel solves nothing and empowers extremists. And when groups led by such people "win", the majority still lose.
IMO, any side of any belief, be it individualism vs collectivism, atheism vs religion, sexual openness vs sexual restraint, free speech vs censorship, capitalism vs socialism, etc, etc. can easily morph into something harmful. You may have discovered "evil", but after many decades, I've come to see that most people's hearts are in the right place. But there are always a significant fraction on any side of any issue that, for whatever reason, cannot regulate their emotions and seem to need to strive for the extremes.
Compromise can happen if you reject extremists. Solutions can be found if you understand that the extremists on your own side are as much the opposition as the other side of an issue. Purity of belief always seems attractive on the surface. But moderation is not a cop out, it's pragmatism. Moderation is the practical philosophy through which solutions can be found. Fundamentalism, extremism, dogmatism, are approaches that lead to worse outcomes. Moderation leads to better outcomes. History has shown this again and again.
> I think when people, particularly in America, think "protest", they think of people walking around with placards and other such relatively low effort involvement.
Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests
Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.
The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully
I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics
Recently more with Palestine
> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.
I think you're wrong here
Do it for one day nobody cares
Do it for a week, people notice
Do it for a month, you've got regime change
Far below. Occupy Wall Street was perhaps thousands of people. 3.5% of the US would be over 12 million people. 3.5% of New York City would be 350,000 people. In the street outside Wall Street. Yeah, that would have occupied Wall Street, to the point that workers would have had trouble getting in the door. Occupy Wall Street was nothing like that.
The USA has an astonishly effective machine at stomping out protests for anything more than holding up a sign. BLM in Minneapolis was allowed to go on because the politician agreed with it. (Tim Walz's wife famously noted how much she enjoyed the smell of the burning tires.) []
When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.
My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.
This sequence of events (even though expected!) reminds me a lot of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail speech:
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
One of the qualifications is "Evidence that the beneficiary has either commanded a high salary or will command a high salary or other remuneration for services as evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence"
How does a startup founder go about proving this? They don't have quite the "high salary" and get paid in equity. What have you seen here? How do founders quialify for this part?
The clue is "other remuneration". USCIS will accept stock based compensation for founders under comparable evidence if you have raised money, i.e. your equity has a fair market value set by a professional investor in an arms-length transaction. Your total compensation will still need to objectively high compared to peers in your geographical area (supported by data).
Hiring a full-stack AI engineer (front-end focused), with about 2+ years experience |
Applied AI research company building production products like Atlantis (deep research agent) and Luna (enterprise chatbot). Transform research into React/Next.js frontends that make complex AI intuitive. Need React/Next.js + Python + elite prompt/context engineering skills. Work on hard problems, ship products, represent Nepal globally!
Starting from NPR 35,000/month. Located in Nepal with reliable internet required.
email resume/why to innovate [at] devdashlabs [dot] com
My biggest frustration right now is just how much verbose the output is. Like a freshman aiming to hit that word count without substance, the model just spits out GenAI fluff.
this is our 3rd pivot :) we've launched other products before such as Ledger API processing over $100m in txn volume a month and a PCI vault for fintechs with 1m+ users. However we took a hard decision to pivot again as we didn't feel like we'd achieve the impact we wanted in those markets.
Wow! Incredibly fascinated to see 1957 tech make such fascinating animations! It’s so time consuming. Imagine the patience to take those pictures frame by frame
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done