472 - Nude shaming, WW2 vets vs WW1 vets IRL, and why space lasers don't work
In this week’s Brazil news, I got crowd-shamed for skinny-dipping outside our Airbnb.
Our Airbnb is on a canal, with some foot traffic and boats going by. My partner and I were hot tubbing in our backyard nude and decided to walk the ten feet to the water to submerge in the cold water. No big deal, right?
Wrong. Scant moments after my partner and I exit the property several people on both sides of the river start shouting and pointing and shaking their fingers, even miming ‘call the police’ motions.
Kind of odd they wanted us to go back when that meant exposing our bodies more than being submerged in the canal, but hey, the intent was clear.
I wonder why it was such a big deal in a country where locals on the beaches are wearing mere inches of fabric more than what we were? Maybe the Catholic majority and fact that this was in a small town…
I asked my kitesurf teacher and he said ‘the fishermen are just old fashioned’. Huh.
Tech
You’ve seen consumer report aggregator sites - now meet the aggregator of aggregators - Vetted AI aggregates the reviews of consumer goods across the Internet.
Just how many levels of meta aggregation are useful, I wonder? At some point surely the marginal value zeroes out - this one seems useful because its across all verticals.
History
I’m still slowly reading through A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which is exposing all sorts of eye-opening facts about the country I call home.
Take the Bonus Army of 1932, where WW1 veterans camped out on the White House lawn during the Great Depression, demanding immediate payback of war bonds that were planned to be paid back decades later.
One Douglas MacArthur of future WW2 fame broke them up under Hoover’s direction using tanks and tear gas, which added to Hoover’s unpopularity and resulted him losing the vote.
Compare that to how Roosevelt handled a second expedition of the same group in 1933, where most of them were offered jobs within the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps.
Or the WW1 anti-war song pairing I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier against pro-war classics like Johnny Get Your Gun.
Fun
Videogame Youtuber Jacob Geller goes deep on a geeky scifi meme - orbital space lasers, like the Death Star from Star Wars.
What seems a ridiculous video essay topic actually waxes poetic, as he explores how even within fiction, ‘a weapon to end all weapons’ ends up escalating warfare.
Reagan’s IRL 80s SDI initiative to laser down ICBMs as mentioned in the video exemplifies this, as it undercuts the stability of mutually assured destruction.
Fun fact- the Gatling Gun’s inventor used the same logic when he made it, thinking it would obviate the need for guns. Look where that got us.