We are complicit (if not responsible). Accepted practice isn’t an excuse for indifference but criticising your own country isn’t a free pass to criticise the culture of others without challenging our culpability. If we sincerely want to help the citizens of these countries that we believe to be oppressed, we have options that we choose not to take. We could offer cultural asylum, give people a route to access our cultural ideals through immigration. We don’t, though, because we only believe in human rights when it’s convenient.
You, as an individual, may do your best to contribute to the betterment of the world, but when talking about society vs. society, you’re glossing over far too many of our ills while ignoring the positives of the others.
Freedom of religion, individualism, capitalism, they aren’t “good” or “right” they’re just… different. The western individualism (seen most prominently in the U.S.) is not the majority culture, to many, even those who are just as “free” as any American, western cultural ideals are a step backward.
The way you perceive Islam is not the way it’s perceived by Muslims in Muslim majority countries, it is not an oppression put upon them by religious zealots, it’s a community that they participate in with a deep sense of pride and duty. For every Muslim in a Muslim-majority country who wants to break from their religion, there’s an unsuccessful American struggling to survive, desperate to break free from the lonely American pursuit of individual success.
You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.
Was slavery-era America worse on the dimension of human rights or just different?
Why does cultural relativism excuse horrors of actual modern people with access to and awareness of all modern thinking, modern technology, and modern examples of societies who achieved moral progress, but we’re perfectly comfortable saying slave owners of the past are responsible for their crimes despite being raised by slave owners in a society of slave owners embedded in a world of slave owners with a history absolutely chalk full of slave owners?
I agree with your point, but I think it's not fair to blame cultural relativism. Relativism means not prescribing a single morality applicable in all contexts. That's something on which reasonable people will differ. If you do accept it though, you're not obliged to permit everything.
For example I think that there were relatively moral people who lived in e.g. the US and Saudi Arabia ~300 years ago and accepted slavery unquestioningly. It would have been better if they had questioned and rejected it, but I don't think they are evil for not doing so. In the modern US I think that only someone tremendously immoral would accept and participate in enslaving others.
This belief makes me a moral relativist (at least by some reasonable definitions). All the same I think I'm much closer aligned with your feelings on the morality of modern Middle Eastern society than GP.
All that to say, being a moral relativist allows you to have weird dissonant views, but it doesn't require it.
Slavery, throughout history, was generally not seen as desirable. Rather, it was either seen as a necessary evil, upon which a "logical rationale" (read: cognitive dissonance) was built up to justify it, or as a form of punishment. Aristotle actually predicted its end about 2000 years before it happened [1]:
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For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, "of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods."
If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
- Aristotle ~350BC
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He also made regular indirect mention of abolitionists and abolitionist causes, which have obviously existed for millennia. It's not just some coincidence that the Industrial Revolution happens and within about a century most of every country (that had benefited from said industrialization) had outlawed slavery. It's not that we became more moral, but rather it became comfortable enough to dispose with slavery. So we did, and then attributed that to "modern thinking."
That is an immense leap from "if we could have machines do it, we wouldn't have slaves do it" to seeing slavery as undesirable. Aristotle was a staunch believer in "natural slaves" who didn't have the faculty of rational deliberation and therefore were (and should be) guided by those who do have that faculty.
This line of thought can be traced all the way through to the modern day, and obviously well up to abolition.
There's really not much evidence at all that slaveholders saw their activities the way you describe ("necessary evil"). There's no evidence that we first had a necessity for slavery and then obviated it through automation. In fact, automation in the Americas increased demand on the labor of enslaved people.
If there was any external triggering event of abolition, it'd have been Darwin's On The Origin of Species and contemporaneous breakthroughs in science that destroyed the philosophical foundations that slavery was built upon (natural god-given supremacy, as Aristotle believed).
The abolitionist movement was an intellectual and moral one, through and through. You can just read the writings of abolitionists to hear what convinced them into their positions.
Wiki has a reasonable listing of the countless times slavery was abolished throughout history. [1] That list should be considered extremely incomplete, as it happened with quite the regularity, all around the globe. And so even calling something "the" abolitionist movement is a misnomer. Abolitionist movements, political leaders, and abolitionary successes have existed for thousands of years, and likely for as long as slavery itself has existed.
But it never remained abolished because of a simple logical problem you run into. The reality of the world - past, present, and future - is that stronger powers dominate weaker powers -- the same reality upon which Aristotle based his cognitive dissonance. And so so long as slavery provided a significant material benefit, powers that embraced slavery would dominate those that did not. And that dominance would inevitably lead to the institution (or reinstitution) of slavery in the weaker powers. The British Empire and its spread of slavery around the globe is but one of many examples.
So you saw this regular flip flopping. One ideologically minded leader would end slavery, only for it to come back later. What changed with the industrial revolution is that the latest end of slavery no longer had any particularly negative consequences, instead we saw the exact opposite. Countries that abolished slavery, which was primarily a rural/plantation based phenomena, actually started to grow exceptionally rapidly on the back of the emerging systems of industrial wage labor, while rural and plantation style production became less and less economically relevant. Slavery had become obsolete.
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There's some interesting parallels with slavery and modern day conscriptions. A country locks up its borders, prevents people from leaving, starts forcibly conscripting them into the military, gives them a gun, and sends them off to die. This is utterly barbaric, and most people would agree with such. Yet it remains a thing, and will remain a thing for the foreseeable future, for the exact same reason that slavery was perpetuated.
Countries that turn to conscription will be more powerful than those that don't. When this reality becomes no longer true (perhaps due to war becoming more mechanical in nature) we'll certainly finally abolish this barbaric behavior, and then claim it's due to some 'greater moral understanding', as if people alive today can't see with their own two eyes what an unnatural and abhorrent behavior this is. Of course we can! But trying to permanently stop something that's a significant means to power is like trying to stop a train by walking in front of it.
Sure, I don’t believe cultural relativism is itself in all cases wrong. I think it’s obviously wrong when used to excuse obviously immoral things done in a context where they are in fact obviously immoral (such as much of the Middle East in the modern day).
>modern examples of societies who achieved moral progress
But we haven't achieved moral progress.
G7/G20 countries have essentially merely physically outsourced slavery out of sight to second world factories and third world hell holes.
Through the magic of fiat money and currency exchange rates, we have deluded ourselves for half a century that we are in fact not colonizers and oppressors anymore.
Just one example are the Coltane mining wars in Congo: 1998-2008 5.2 million killed or dead from hunger (and it'd probably be higher if people hadn't more or less stopped counting after 2006). You probably didn't even know it happened,and yet millions today work at slaves to continue producing minerals for our digital comfort.
Those countries can outlaw those conditions whenever they want. When they do, they’ll have achieved some additional moral progress. I’m pretty sure you’d be crying foul if the US decided to go and enforce its laws over there.
Do you berate your parents and grandparents each day for their participation in a society that had segregation? Do you walk over hot coals every morning to repent for the benefits you reap by virtue of being born into a society built on the backs of the segregated? Do you deride and express disgust at your peers as they relish in the taste of the pain and suffering of the billions of conscious, feeling animals we genocide every year? Do you opt-out of the industries and services today that take advantage of the suffering of less fortunate individuals forced to service you in order to survive?
Slavery was bad. Slavery is bad. Slavery is not excused. However, frothing at the mouth with rage when speaking about the actions of another society because they don’t share the same moral values as you without thinking a step further is hollow, it is empty, it is meaningless.
Why is “modern thinking” (whatever that means) good? Why is maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole good? I am like you, I believe in that, but if you interact with people from different cultures, you will discover that is not a belief held by everyone. For many people, individual freedom at the expense of the whole is not good and they have observed that from these “modern” societies. Look at how deeply unhappy the U.S is, the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of people. Is limiting access to healthcare an example of “modern thinking”?
Where is anyone proposing berating anyone? You can say that a segregated society was less good than a non-segregated one without saying that everyone who lives or lived in a segregated society is worthy of berating/disgust/derision etc. I don't blame individual Iranians for living in a culture that is worse on many important dimensions than western liberal cultures, but that doesn't prevent me from making a fair judgment that (at least on those dimensions) it is actually worse.
Modern thinking: things like pluralism and liberalism. These are actual ideas that emerged in the late 1800s and which are responsible for immense human thriving, immense liberation from suffering all over the world. Upstream of all political and social reform is an intellectual reform, i.e. new "thinking." I am not referring to "maximum individual freedom," and in fact this idea is fundamentally in tension with pluralism and liberalism. Maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole is a bad idea because it yields bad outcomes, just like various forms of theocracy are bad ideas because they yield bad outcomes.
The ideas that yield expanded suffrage, expanded legal protections, expanded access to prosperity are good ideas because they produce good outcomes. Yes sure, the US/the west broadly isn't perfect, etc, but note that we can discuss all the ways in which it's broken so we can get to work fixing it. That's a good outcome and it's a critical part of the path to more good outcomes on more important dimensions.
You're not arguing that other forms get to better outcomes or whatever, you're just arguing that there's no such thing as good or bad outcomes and therefore no such thing as good or bad ideas.
Try going to Qatar or Iran and asking someone for their opinion on their heads of state. I think you'll find their reaction far more chilling than the fact that our health insurance system is broken.
Good outcomes by what measure? Happiness? Freedom? Community? GDP?
I will argue that by many standards, what we view as barbaric has better outcomes. Have you met a Singaporean? I disagree with their criminal justice system (as I do the U.S. but I rank Singapore’s as “worse”) and yet it has better outcomes for the majority of its citizens by most measures. Are they the measures you and I care about? Probably not, because to you and I, hanging someone for using heroin is not a fair price to be paid for a lower crime rate and higher GDP, but that’s a moral judgement, not some objective “modern” absolute. If you don’t value human life above all else (which many cultures don’t) then killing a few drug addicts a year to make life for millions of others better, that’s inconsequential — and excellent “modern” thinking about doing the most good!
If you can’t imagine why the bad of anti-lgbt sentiment is far outweighed by the good of community-spirit from an anti-lgbt religion then you’re not considering “outcomes”.
You are aware that the existence of grey areas does not negate the existence of different ends of the spectrum, right? I’m not arguing the world is simple and entire countries/civilizations can be placed on one end or the other.
I am saying that there are countless dimensions that matter, and there are better and worse locations along those dimensions.
On the dimension of drug addiction rates, Singapore is doing better than the US. On the dimension of personal liberties, Singapore is doing worse than the US.
This observation is not a counter argument to my position, it’s a disproof of yours.
Saying we cannot make value judgments about these things implies we cannot justifiably take action that would nudge us into a different location along any of these different dimensions. How could you possibly decide to change things if there’s no such thing as a better, more preferable possible future state?
Here’s a gut check: are you comfortable with your moral system landing you solidly in the “let’s allow slavery” camp in the 1800s? After all, the disagreement between slave holders and abolitionists was one of culture and opinions, and as we know now there’s no such thing as a better or worse position to hold on such matters. Does that moral system seem like a good one to you?
If your conclusion from my comments is that I would have been indifferent towards slavery then I have either mistakenly passed my comments through an opinion-inverter or you're reading my comments in bad faith. I am very progressive, I hold fringe views that I don't think will be mainstream for a couple more decades.
I hope I wouldn't need to say it, but for the record: I oppose slavery. I oppose gender based discrimination. I oppose sexuality based discrimination. I oppose racism. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose drug criminalisation. I oppose the American prison system. I oppose the smug western superiority complex about our behaviour being "modern" or the "best" or "ahead" of the rest of the world. I oppose referring to Saudi Arabia as "not modern" (or backwards or whatever term is in right now) which I believe is patronising and a view reserved for those without the willingness to be introspective.
For the oppressed gay man in Saudi Arabia, there's a gay man homeless on the streets of the United States, dying from neglect, after being kicked out of their home as a teenager by their Christian fundamentalist parents, thrown to the mercy of a society that couldn't care less about them. Let's put them on a spectrum, how many points is "dying homeless on the streets of America because of being gay" compared to "can't be openly gay in Saudi Arabia"? How many points for "robbed on the streets of San Francisco for the 8th time" when compared to "can leave valuables out in public without concern because there's so little crime in Singapore"?
If your vision for a better world starts with disparaging Saudi Arabia, I fear you are deeply uninspired and will not have the impact on the world that you could have if you instead focused on yourself and your culture. I also hope someday you appreciate the irony of you having worked for Palantir of all companies while talking about moral superiority of the west. I wonder where Peter Thiel would land on our Spectrum Of Moral Superiority. Actually, I don't want to know, let me live another day without reading a defence of that ghoul.
No, I didn't say that you are indifferent to nor pro-slavery.
I said that you'd land on the conclusion of allowing it, presumably despite your own personal preferences. Many people who opposed abolition also personally opposed slavery, but used arguments identical to yours to oppose action against slavery. The lack of action would've, obviously, allowed slavery to persist indefinitely.
Can you explain how (or if) your moral system would prevent you from landing on that conclusion? It's a simple question that doesn't depend on theatrics to ask nor answer.
My position is quite simple: I do not believe it's possible to compare the righteousness of cultures, certainly not in a way as reductive as you've proposed, in a way that conveniently makes our culture (America) gooder and the others (Saudi Arabia) badder. Please re-read my original comment, I specifically proposed offering cultural asylum as a way to offer western moral values to others who want to live according to them. I am in favour of cultural evolution, I am in favour of taking action against our moral ills, I believe that in your hypothetical that I would have a moral duty to oppose and take action against slavery within my own culture.
My question to you is, do you believe the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States? According to many measures of "goodness" like the Human Development Index (and the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index) the United Arab Emirates is a more "good" place than the United States and therefore, in your view of comparable righteousness, the United Arab Emirates is a more righteous place? Yet, the United Arab Emirates is, to many westerners (including myself and I am sure you) a place of many moral ills (including one of the most heinous: slavery). Do you believe that on your multi-dimensional most-good morality spectrum the United Arab Emirates out ranks the United States?
I'll answer that for you: no, you don't. And deep beneath this facade of objective morality, you know that morality is so deeply ingrained in your cultural upbringing that you cannot sincerely state that the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States, and that regardless of what any measure, whether it's one dimension or many dimensional, whether it's black and white or a spectrum, regardless of what that measure says, nothing is above your sense of what is right and what is wrong.
Got it, so post-abolition United States is not “more righteous,” even on the dimension of human rights, than pre-abolition United States. It is, as you say, “impossible” to compare them. You don’t actually explain how you get from this position to the assertion you would be proactive against slavery, but I think the utter nonsense of the first claim reveals sufficient moral confusion by itself. You’re just trapped between “can’t criticize modern slavers” and “can’t say I accept slavers of the past,” which obviously is totally incoherent.
Not clear what point you’re arguing against by saying “HDI says UAE is good yet you don’t agree with it!” Why on earth would I defer full moral judgment to HDI?
I never claimed my moral system is objective, so I’m also not sure what facade you’re referring to.
I openly criticise Dubai for their slavery, I refuse to visit Dubai for that reason alone. However, I refuse to say that Dubai is objectively less moral than the United States because morality is relative to the culture that defines it, in the same way I refuse to say that sushi is objectively better than pizza (despite sushi obviously being superior to pizza).
You may assert it but morality is not defined by or measured in outcomes, morality is a cultural product. If your moral system is not objective, if your moral system is a culturally-influenced personal belief in what is right and wrong, it is totally incoherent to say that Saudi Arabia has not made moral progress or that they have not used "modern thinking" because by their moral standards they have, and by their moral standards you (and I) are the immoral.
If you'd like to compare the United States to Saudi Arabia on human rights, press freedom, education, crime, freedom of religion, gender discrimination, do that. They have outcomes that we can measure, and don't worry, they're influenced by morality, so you can still pass judgement.
Who said anything about America? There are aspects of society in the Middle East that are different and bad. You don't have to be a moral absolutist to prefer that people not be stoned for adultery. And you can't assume that Muslims on average have a "deep sense of pride and duty" about the way their society is run. Sure some do, but they're not aliens with some higher form of existence, they're humans just like you and usually just worry about their day-to-day and believe a lot of things because that's what everyone around them seems to believe, just like Americans who like Protestantism and capitalism.
Sorry but this reeks of someone who hasn't actually mingled with other cultures and instead have taken academic philosophy as a substitute to make up for it.
Because you whenever it was intentional or not make yourself sound very racist by effectively saying "x person from y society actually like the barbarism said society has".
Comparisons of others in this case societies is crucial to make your own society better, failing to do makes us just reinforce bad ideas and what were then once local issues or small scale become systematic.
When it then is the case that your society is "better" then another society, then you can propose change or at least show why it's better in the "marketplace of ideas", the mistake of the past was that we saw our societies as inherently superior and as such bruteforcing said our way of life was seen as morally good and not tyranny.
The point I’m making is that what’s barbaric to you and I is not barbaric in another society and vice-versa. The American culture of kicking your children out of home the day they turn 18 is more barbaric to some than the death penalty, as is a child choosing not to contribute to their family.
Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!
I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.
Once you accept that individual freedom is a western ideal, and not fundamental to the human condition, it becomes much easier to understand that other cultures are fundamentally different.
The issue is that you're effectively using moral relativism to justify injustice or "their way of life" which is just a very shaky foundation to rely on.
Since again then the logic of "savages will be savages because they crave it" applies.
>The American culture of kicking your children out of home the day they turn 18 is more barbaric to some than the death penalty
For proclaiming to being cultured you make an example that isn't even a cultural norm in the USA but at best a trend within American household entirely predicated on whenever or not the economic situation is suitable for such norms to even exist.
Not only that but if you actually talk with said Americans during that time I would take a gander and say that the majority of them didn't feel bothered not because "their way of life" but because it isn't inherently barbaric if it's done with good intention (independence and spreading your wings).
>Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!
This is so overly reductive, first of all there are plenty of people in Singapore that do not share this idea that you are presenting that Singapore is a "comparable utopia" nor can you or they be taken serious by conflating barbarism with "crime" and "government failing to protect their citizens" (whatever this means).
And I love the whataboutism at the end.
>I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.
And you show this enlightenment by making such crude and clumsy argumentation spoken to the point that anyone can mistake you for making some very racist statements?
And these society that "focus on family instead of the individual" has severe issues within their societies when it comes to economic, cultural, social and political concerns that is undermining what they hold dear.
But if you want to essentially cope by proclaiming "these areas aren't important, just their quaint way of life is!" then you're only adding fuel to the fire for the people's suffering.
Even then if I were to take your argument at face value, the issue with your argument is that liberalism which is the cornerstone of individualism is not inherently against focusing on the family, instead they are concern with ensure that the individual can be free to pursue their aspirations and be free from unequal treatment in the face of society, the law and the nation... In other words you can be as "sacrificing yourself for the family" as you want.
Individual freedom comes out of the necessity of it existing not from idealistic daydreaming, thousands had to sacrifice their lives to give their future (family) the individual freedoms the people can all enjoy equally.
> You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.
You can achieve both. The only mistake you made was to half-bake the proxy (doing it for IPv6 only): proxy every http(s) request to tailscale.com. Vercel’s platform is valuable for a whole host of reasons, the networking side isn’t that important, your developers will greatly value the use of Vercel even if every request is being proxied through a web server hosting tailscale.com which responds to a request for /install.sh instead of passing it through to the marketing site.
(In Google Cloud you could do it entirely with load balancing rules, no need to even run a web server)
Sending a message can be a big hurdle when you’re new to a job. A junior person likely has a very deified view of senior team members and believes that their time is sacrosanct. Encouraging junior people to “just ping me” is like telling an arachnophobe “it’s just a spider”.
If you work with someone in an office, natural opportunities arise to grab some time, whether it’s when they’re bumbling around the office, grabbing something to eat or walking from a meeting.
A remote company can create an environment to address these problems, with structured time for conversations but it is very difficult to get right.
I am a fan of both remote work and in office work. Remote work is cheap and has little margin for error; in office is expensive as it is paying for guard rails that make it (relatively) difficult to get wrong.
I don't find it difficult--I regularly book time to do pair programming over Tuple with everyone who's up for it on the team. That's in addition to taking opportunities to chat on Slack about anything they're working on, e.g. PR reviews.
What I've seen work is for the team to have a private channel, and whoever isn't in the middle of something can answer, and the whole team will see that answer sooner or later.
You’re early and this is effectively a demo but just in case this is a blind spot: “token” is an in-the-weeds LLMism that means nothing in the context of transcription. Your costs may be measured in tokens but that’s not relevant to customers. Just “A free trial” with no quantifier would be better than 1k tokens.
This is a great point and a topic I’ve been thinking about myself. As more LLM services pop up that are subject to token/consumption pricing, what is the right pricing model for consumer based consumption products like this?
Price based on value. Pricing is hard, something as simple as per-token is alluring because it doesn’t require any thought but it’s leaving a lot of money on the table. There’s nothing unique about LLMs when it comes to pricing, all common pricing wisdom applies.
That seems challenging to do with a writing/note taking app like this. First, what would the pricing tiers be based on? Word count? That would just be another way of saying token. Number of documents created? That puts you at risk of long unprofitable documents. Google Sheets doesn’t really have this problem because the incremental cost of storage is relatively cheap. Tokens on the other hand are not cheap.
How do you price based on value without a corollary to tokens? If you charged $40 for this service then maybe you don’t provide enough value for the casual user who does the occasional school report. On the other hand you may be unprofitable for the doctor that decides to dictate all of her interactions every day or the author who dictates an entire book.
> First, what would the pricing tiers be based on? Word count? That would just be another way of saying token.
A customer sees "word count", they understand what's going on perfectly, right away. Tokens? More than half of them will think "what, like, game tokens? do I have to buy them in advance?"
Generously, 10% of potential customers are going to have even an approximate idea of what a token means in this context, maybe 1% could tell you that words and tokens aren't quite the same thing.
We notice these type of accidents because they’re so rare. 5k+ people die each year because of large trucks on the road, by comparison, boats and bridges are very safe — that’s why it’s allowed.
Probably, but this service has been around for over a decade so it has at least proven that it has some longevity — plus the creator is an HN user and this concern comes up every time the service is discussed, so maybe it’ll outlive us all because of the universe’s desire to prove a bunch of cynical nerds wrong.
I'm torn: the pricing is very good for a service that is meant - in spirit - to last a lifetime. but it also seems unrealisticaly cheap. a subscription seems more sustainable.
We jumped the shark long ago, we (technologists) have been contributing to this for decades: we’ve benefited handsomely from the consequences with our big salaries and hero worship. I don’t disagree with your broad point but you’ve had your head buried in the sand for a long, long time if you think society is “about to” be destroyed.
If you have a prioritised backlog and you’re working in priority order then there’s not much value in sprints — is there? Sprints provide value when you can’t just churn through tickets one after the other in priority order. Sprint planning is time consuming because sprints are useful when you need to plan.
You could use Linear’s cycles and milestones but you probably don’t need any of that structure if you’re just working ticket by ticket.
I've not looked at Linear - but when I was freelancing I used Pivotal (free account) to just put all my clients' requests into one long queue (I had about 8 clients at any one time).
I put in a very random guess as to the points value of each request - nothing more than "trivial, easy, difficult, bastard-bloody-hell-shit-buckets-difficult".
I had Tracker set to work in "weekly sprints" - but they're not really sprints at all - it's just a unit of measure. Internally it averages the number of points completed over the last three weeks, uses that for an average velocity, then moves the date markers on the "backlog" list to match.
Then, when a client asked when something will be done, I could pretty accurately say "unless something urgent crops up, it will be '18th-24th March'" (where "something urgent crops up" means I insert a story at the top of the queue instead of at the end).
PT automatically adjusts the number of stories that make it into a sprint. They don't really have a concept of sprint actually... it is just average velocity over time and the number of stories that can fit into that average.
If a PM wants to see how adding in just one more feature impacts the schedule, they can just drag the pointed story into the queue and see what gets pushed out to the next week.
If a developer goes on vacation, it is easy to see how that impacts the schedule cause you can subtract their average velocity.
Most people don't understand this killer feature of PT unless they've actually spent a bunch of time using it. It really enables you to do accurate project estimates, if you do it right.
You, as an individual, may do your best to contribute to the betterment of the world, but when talking about society vs. society, you’re glossing over far too many of our ills while ignoring the positives of the others.
Freedom of religion, individualism, capitalism, they aren’t “good” or “right” they’re just… different. The western individualism (seen most prominently in the U.S.) is not the majority culture, to many, even those who are just as “free” as any American, western cultural ideals are a step backward.
The way you perceive Islam is not the way it’s perceived by Muslims in Muslim majority countries, it is not an oppression put upon them by religious zealots, it’s a community that they participate in with a deep sense of pride and duty. For every Muslim in a Muslim-majority country who wants to break from their religion, there’s an unsuccessful American struggling to survive, desperate to break free from the lonely American pursuit of individual success.
You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.