There's a crosswalk I pass on my way to work that always makes me think of this. An elementary school is located there, and every weekday morning there is a crossing guard (someone with lights and a hand sign who stops traffic to help kids cross) posted there. To be sure, I expect this person is indeed necessary, as traffic in that area is heavy and fast. But it strikes me as a dysfunctional that we need people dedicated just to allowing children to safely cross the street.
Lots of military shooters will kill you with one or two bullets. I've thought that what would really make a shooter "realistic" would be if players who get shot are maimed (rather than being able to run and jump just as well at 1% health as 100%). But who knows whether that would actually be fun.
The 80/20 problem may be real, but the way you describe it strikes me as circular. (Women are discriminating which induces men to be undiscriminating, which induces women to be discriminating.)
Yes, I think this is what people defending Elon and other would-be disruptors neglect. The criticism isn't just that certain attempts at innovation are stupid or likely to fail, but that they betray the privilege or insular perspective of the innovator.
In the video, Rober mentions that he previously brought his security camera footage to police (the camera monitoring his house, not the camera in the prank box), but that they said it wasn't worth their time to pursue such cases.
I don't know if the usual caveats about sample size should be salient when we're investigating something like self-awareness. If I found a fish who could talk, I wouldn't demur, " ... but it's a small sample."
I tend to view "science" as quintessentially a "success term." We call a discipline a science if we have a high degree of confidence in its results. In this sense, math is a science, and whether psychology or economics are scientific has less to do with their subject matter than whether we think they produce real knowledge.
I like this notion of science because it helps to account for the broader sense of "science" you see in earlier periods of history, before it became more narrowly associated with experimental science. More importantly, I think it gets at what actually interests us in the designation of "science."
I'm the same way, but it has struck me that this is a kind of inverse brand fixation. If I were indifferent to brands, I wouldn't mind that my clothes happen to advertise them, but I do. I think on some level I view highly visible brands as crass, which is to say that a lack of branding is itself a class or status signifier.
The culture wars have enveloped everything nowadays, from #MeToo to GamerGate to Trump. I wonder if gripes between boomers and millennial are just another facet of that upward trend in polarization.
Peter Thiel has made similar remarks. He said that IT has been only area to see major progress in recent decades, in contrast to e.g. transportation, because it is relatively unregulated. (Hence Twitter rather than flying cars.) Of course, Thiel also holds the view that monopolies are often a good thing.
>Anti-vaxxers tend to be described as middle/upper-class liberals.
I've heard this, but it doesn't square with my own impressions, and a cursory Google search suggests that anti-vaxxers are not, in fact, predominantly liberal.
Presumably a good test case should involve a scientific consensus that the average person could reasonably be expected to be familiar with. What you're suggesting does not seem to fit (to be honest, I'm not even sure offhand what a "long gun" is).
>Not participating in the bid would have been suicide for the politicians of any major city
I find that pretty implausible. Foxconn didn't save Scott Walker (and I don't think that's because his would-be supporters later realized that it wasn't such a sweet deal, either).
To me "breeding" means intentionally selecting for desired traits. That's not what's happening here. In a sense, it's the opposite--presumably, elephants without tusks is exactly what poachers don't want.
The article does mention, "They hemorrhaged high-paying jobs after technology and globalization hit manufacturing and mining." Many jobs staffed predominantly by men (as opposed to jobs like nursing, say, staffed predominantly by women) never recovered after the recession.
I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that intense focus on college admissions is bad for kids. But it's a little baffling to me to see the harm of this approach described as limiting of their "entrepreneurial spirit." Maybe I'm the weird one here, but I have never understood the notion that the quintessential object of human ambition or thriving is starting a business.
Justifying a presumptive skepticism of reporting on Tesla with such a nebulous pronouncement as "but reporters often lie ..." is pretty much the opposite of "sophisticated."
So the complaint is just that Blizzard should have framed their announcement differently? The project is fine, but just don't present it at Blizzcon? That seems so feeble to me, and the sort of criticism you get when fans can't reconcile their displeasure with the understanding that Blizzard is rational to pursue the mobile gaming market this way. As for "You guys not have phones?", that was obviously a bad look, but seeing as it was an off-the-cuff remark in an awkward exchange, I'm not inclined to hold it against the speaker.
I don't see a meaningful difference between personal and political spending here. If I can pay a politician to enact a policy I want, perhaps to the detriment of his constituency or society at large, what do I care if he goes on to spend that money on sports cars or his campaign to retain office? As far as I'm concerned it's quid pro quo either way.
It's not clear to me what you find damning about the Cosby case. Are you suggesting that he should have been acquitted or found innocent, but was not due to overwhelming public opinion? The quite general remarks by Ginsberg that you cite here don't illuminate much.
That would be bad enough, but I expect the salience of Khashoggi's murder has more to do with identity than numbers. It's not as if a singular dead Yemeni child would have dismayed anyone in the West. What made Khashoggi stand out was that he was a WaPo journalist.
I'm kind of baffled by the number of people here defending this. I can only imagine that Americans have an emotional investment in their military that inclines them to overlook waste that they would never tolerate in any other area.