Which is why we need open source tools that are vetted by the community. No one can actually track everything that is run on their browser, so the best we can do is to outsource it to people we trust.

Hmm, the question there would be: how do you decide which things are related to "technological growth"? Are humans manually tagging different data series as related to those things?

I'm not just talking about people being mean, though. I can be cordial with just about anyone. It's a matter of having enough commonalities to forge real friendships.

I've considered living in a small town, but... I worry about my ability to make friends with people there. I'm a really weird person, and only seem to be able to find people who are weird in the same ways if I have a really huge population of people to select from. (Or if the town is selected for people who are like me, I guess.) I have this association with small towns of like... gossip and exclusion if you don't conform to what everyone else is like there.

Do you think you're more normal than me, or is it not as bad as I think?

Oh my god this though

Bay Area:

“We should get lunch.”

English:

“I’ve identified your value relative to me and wish to start the process of exploiting your talents.”

The hardest part of this would be getting the data. What number would you say most represents "technological growth"? Has anyone been tracking that number for the past few centuries?

Somewhat related, a friend of mine made this graph. He scraped Wikipedia to find what nations were each other's "predecessors" and "successors," and formed a directed graph showing the breaking up and reformation of nations throughout history. Made possible by the human curation provided by Wikipedia.

Probably some of this type of data exists on the Internet if you take the time to trawl for it.

This is really interesting to read and reflect on. Honestly, I'm not sure these values are particular to Pixar, so much as they are an "America in general" thing.

Also, this was striking:

Although he causes all this, and at no small cost to his daughter’s mental health, Riley’s dad is not depicted as a villain. He loves his family, they love him, and together they work through the deprivations caused by the move. The narrative does nothing to condemn this state of affairs; indeed, it is Riley’s burden to accept them.

I don't think the fact that the move is treated as Riley's burden is all about capitalism per se; it's about the fact that adults in our culture don't generally take children's interests into account, or consider their problems important. It's always "they'll get over it," even when something is making a child very unhappy.

How can you be sure that you are getting the best results and not a biased list based on manual interventions and tweaks?

You can be sure that you are getting a biased list based on manual interventions and tweaks. Fundamentally, this is how every aboveboard search engine has to operate, unless they're willing to literally fight sovereign governments. US government demands censorship? Google has to comply. They don't have a choice.

OTOH, some tech companies (including Google) have shown a somewhat disturbing trend toward being... shall we say... more cooperative than they have to be with government surveillance and censorship.