For all its singularity, Belgium tells a quintessentially European story. Against a backdrop of ailing public services, precarious labor markets, waning traditional parties and intractable regional divisions, a far right is readying itself for power. In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.

TensionThe ability to see like a data structure afforded us the technology we have today. But it was built for and within a set of societal systems—and stories—that can’t cope with nebulosity. Worse still is the transitional era we’ve entered, in which overwhelming complexity leads more and more people to believe in nothing. That way lies madness. Seeing is a choice, and we need to reclaim that choice. However, we need to see things and do things differently, and build sociotechnical systems that embody this difference.This is best seen through a small example. In our jobs, many of us deal with interpersonal dynamics that sometimes overwhelm the rules. The rules are still there—those that the company operates by and laws that it follows—meaning there are limits to how those interpersonal dynamics can play out. But those rules are rigid and bureaucratic, and most of the time they are irrelevant to what you’re dealing with. People learn to work with and around the rules rather than follow them to the letter. Some of these might be deliberate hacks, ones that are known, and passed down, by an organization’s workers. A work-to-rule strike, or quiet quitting for that matter, is effective at slowing a company to a halt because work is never as routine as schedules, processes, leadership principles, or any other codified rules might allow management to believe.The tension we face is that on an everyday basis, we want things to be simple and certain. But that means ignoring the messiness of reality. And when we delegate that simplicity and certainty to systems—either to institutions or increasingly to software—they feel impersonal and oppressive. People used to say that they felt like large institutions were treating them like a number. For decades, we have literally been numbers in government and corporate data structures. BreakdownAs historian Jill Lepore wrote, we used to be in a world of mystery. Then we began to understand those mysteries and use science to turn them into facts. And then we quantified and operationalized those facts through numbers. We’re currently in a world of data—overwhelming, human-incomprehensible amounts of data—that we use to make predictions even though that data isn’t enough to fully grapple with the complexity of reality.How do we move past this era of breakdown? It’s not by eschewing technology. We need our complex socio-technical systems. We need mental models to make sense of the complexities of our world. But we also need to understand and accept their inherent imperfections. We need to make sure we’re avoiding static and biased patterns—of the sort that a state functionary or a rigid algorithm might produce—while leaving room for the messiness inherent in human interactions. Chapman calls this balance “fluidity,” where society (and really, the tech we use every day) gives us the disparate things we need to be happy while also enabling the complex global society we have today.

Now, nebulosity, complexity, and the breakdown of these systems is all around for everyone to see.

But that’s not the case for a computer, or a robot, or even a corporate food service, which can’t navigate the intricacies and uncertainties of the real world with the flexibility we expect of a person. And at an even larger scale, our societal systems, whether we’re talking about laws and governments or just the ways our employers expect us to get our jobs done, don’t have that flexibility built into them. We’ve seen repeatedly how breaking corporate or government operations into thousands of disparate, rigid contracts ends in failure.

when we work on cancer what you see is that when when 00:30:18 individual cells electrically disconnect from the rest of the body they their cognitive light cone shrinks they're back to their amoeba tiny little e gos and as far as they're concerned the rest of the body is just environment to them

Defections from large-scale anatomical goals, such as those that occur due to an inappropriate reduction of gap junctional connectivity [74], present as cancer, cause reversions of cell behavior to ancient unicellular concerns which lead to metastasis and over-proliferation as the cells treat the rest of the body as external environment.

Now you have three options:Directly send scheduled or recurring emails using Courier: Call the sendEnhancedNotification() function from the Courier PHP SDK, and use a third party task scheduling library called Crunz to deal with the scheduling side of things. This works using cron syntax, so the same principle can be used for scheduled or recurring emails.Use Courier’s automations to add send logic to your scheduled emails: An automation in Courier is a way of chaining together different steps such as the sending of emails (or other notification-related logic) so that the steps happen in a particular order. An automation can be run by calling the invokeAutomation()function, and as with option 1, you can use Crunz to deal with the scheduling.Using Courier’s no-code automations designer: This is a no-code GUI tool in the Courier UI that uses a drag-and-drop canvas to build up your notification logic. It contains some more advanced logic than option 2 (such as the ability to create email digests or batching).

The study, published in Nature Food, presents EDGAR-FOOD – the first database to break down emissions from each stage of the food chain for every year from 1990 to 2015. The database also unpacks emissions by sector, greenhouse gas and country.