douche

The way that the Bible reads today, in English, after countless revisions and reformulations, translations and copyings, is so far removed from the original Greek or Aramaic that it's almost inconceivable that the words on the page are even close to what was written two thousand years ago.

The formality of the Bible in English can be in large part attributed to the King James version, and other versions of that time period, where you've got the turmoil of the reformation, with the English King as the head of the Anglican church in opposition to Rome, as well as a relatively tumultuous internal political climate, and so a lot of passages were tweaked around to reinforce royal authority.

If you removed all barriers on agricultural products being sold to developing countries, their local agriculture would be pancaked by cheap wheat, corn, and rice grown in more agriculturally productive regions.

This would likely be largely dependent on your birthdate. At various eras, the structure of NBA contracts and the collective bargaining agreement would have a large impact on your expected earnings. There's a window of time in which virtually anyone seven feet or over who could walk and chew bubblegum at the same time could have a very high chance of earning serious money as an NBA center, even with minimal skills[1]. If you came of age in the salad days of ridiculous rookie contracts, after the NBA had exploded in popularity and TV and advertising money ballooned salaries, and the newer, cheaper, rookie contract scales had yet to come into effect, this very well could be valid tradeoff.

[1] http://www.truthaboutit.net/2012/05/true-or-false-half-of-al...

The players and coaches almost certainly have more to gain by becoming the first team to fulfill Moses Malone's promise of "Fo, Fo, Fo" and becoming the first ever team to sweep the entire playoffs, in endorsement deals, future contracts, and reduced wear-and-tear on their bodies. I believe at one point, NBA players did earn additional per-game salary for the post-season, but the league has now switched to a system where the teams are awarded fixed performance bonuses based on various milestones[1] (which, before they are sliced up amongst the various players, are on the order of a bench-riding veteran's salary), so there is no incentive for them to drag it out.

For the teams, the league, and perhaps most importantly, the broadcast networks, extending series is a big potential for additional revenue. One estimate I've seen claims that ABC missed out on as much as $45 million because the 2015 Finals didn't go to seven games[2]. If David Stern, who was notorious for appearing to put his thumb on the scales, were still commissioner of the league, I'd be watching the officiating of the next two games very closely.

[1] http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/06/02/nba-playoff-b...

[2] http://time.com/money/4373400/nba-finals-rigged-money-abc-ad...

The Geneva Convention is only useful so long as the people with the big guns choose to uphold it. In many respects, it is a relic of early-modern limited war doctrines and archaic aristocratic sensibilities.

A modern 17" Macbook Pro might be the one thing that would convince me to go over to the dark side. My girlfriend has a 5-6 year old one, and the build quality can't be beat - unfortunately it's reaching the point where it is barely usable, because it doesn't have the performance specs to keep up nowadays.

I don't like these tiny little laptops everybody is building these days. I want a full keyboard and enough screen real-estate to actually do something without needing reading glasses.

My favorite pet peeve is JS links, that aren't actually <a> links, but spans or divs with click handlers, so there's no way to right-click->open in new tab or ctrl-click->open in new tab. It's like intentionally doing something that is harder, and works shittier; I don't get it.

I can wish for something better. It's frustrating when I look at what desktop applications looked like and ran like ten or fifteen years ago, and how little has appreciably changed now, beside ballooning resource requirements.

They haven't done anything interesting in 18 or 24 months. They spurned their die-hard audience with the last MacBook pro. Without their massive pile of cash, I'd be worried that my mutual funds are so deep into Apple.

The Mongols captured all of modern China, but couldn't master all of the indian subcontinent. Until the EIC, nobody else came closer.

Trying to force a teenaged boy to read books intended to be from the perspective of a pre-teen girl, written by a middle-aged woman, was predictably a disaster. Too many layers of indirection there.

Stephen King on the other hand... besides a few awkward questions with the father about what a screwdriver was, or what the Combat Zone in Boston was... was incredibly readable.

Good lord, suffer yourself to Belle Prater's Boy or Out of the Dust, and come back to me. Granted, that's just late 90s Newbury's, maybe they sucked less going forward.

If I wasn't already reading Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and Tolkien by that point, that kind of horseshit might have turned me off reading altogether at around 11-12.

I've cooked brook trout by cleaning them, putting them in a plastic bag, and accidentally leaving that ziplock bag in the sun for a couple hours on an August afternoon.

No shit. If you've ever gone deep sea fishing on the New England coast, and taken home some cod or pollock or haddock or hake filets, then when you skin them, you've doubtless noticed some litle round reddish worms under the flesh. You just pick them out with your filet knife when you clean the filet up.

I wonder how broken our astrophysical models will prove to be once we are more and more effectively able to peer outside our home system. There is a universe of examples out there, and I would find it slightly depressing if all of that complexity could be described by the theories of a swiss patent clerk.

I was probably ruined by reading a few hundred good science fiction novels before hitting that in a freshman lit class.

It's basically Newbury-level dreck. It reminded me far too much of The Giver - wildly implausible dystopian societies bent on the authors childish ideological sympathies.

If the Handmaid's Tale is anything to go on, I don't want to see any more Atwood. It takes a lot for me to toss a book in the trash, but there was one...

Maybe if they can't invest in proper native apps, they shouldn't exist. Electron is a scourge - clock speeds are not getting any faster, and tying a user application to a single-threaded execution model would have been recognized as suicidal a decade ago.

If only we could scrap the whole ecmascript thing and force everyone to implement a language that wasn't fundamentally broken for anything more complicated than slapping event handlers on buttons.

That's largely a self-imposed problem. People don't save even when they have the ability, they just buy more shit

The lead-violence correlation is very, very interesting. What always makes me wonder is how much historical effect environmental factors like this must have had. Lead used to be ubiquitous, between paint, pipes, roofing, glass, solder - the Romans even cooked in lead vessels at times.

There's probably no way of ever teasing out all the different factors, but when you read accounts of what daily life was like in, say 18th century London, and a.) violence was quite common-place, and b.) virtually everyone kept themselves inebriated enough to fail a breathalyzer at all times. Probably b.) contributed a good deal to a.), but if everybody is also suffering from low-level chronic lead poisoning...

It's probably easier today to buy a bunch of components and snap them together to build a desktop tower than it is to put together an erector set. If I recall, the trickiest part of the whole process was putting the right amount of thermal paste on the CPU before attaching the cooler.

Software, unfortunately seems to be going hard in the other direction. Half the time I can't even get copy/paste to work between apps on my smartphone. Just think of all the trillions of dollars that have been spent over the years trying to glue together different enterprise systems into Dr Moreauvian monstrosities.

Generally, in the US, we have the same. The catch is, that if you are leasing or have a car loan on your vehicle, you are usually required by the financing company to carry comprehensive coverage - so that if you total the vehicle while the loan is active, you don't get caught with having to buy another vehicle, and still pay the loan for the wrecked vehicle off.

Thus, while you can carry just liability insurance on your vehicle in most states, it isn't all that common, aside from older, paid-off vehicles, or used clunkers that are cheap enough for people to buy outright without financing.

I miss steel bodywork. This kind of "collision" in a 1980s vehicle would require a little hammering to pop out the resulting dent, and a little touch-up paint. Modern cars, it seems like you breathe on them, and they shatter and you're replacing entire quarter-panels or front-end assemblies.

Somebody backed into the front corner of my pickup truck at about 2 mph. Put a little crack into the plastic bumper, that continues into the front quarter panel. I'm glad I don't care about my vehicles looking 100% perfect, as I've no doubt that it'd be in the shop for a week, torn completely apart, and would cost a couple grand. It's ridiculous.

Those ancient Greeks, spoiling the native landscape with their olive groves, and vineyards, and sheep gazing on the hillsides \s

The Silmarillion might be Tolkien's best work.

I wouldn't mind if the N.Y. Times crawled up itself and disappeared. The main loss would be the crossword puzzle.

DirectX fostered multiple generations of gaming on PCs. I dunno what you're talking about with referencing it in a web development context, but it was, and still is, miles ahead of dicking around with broken OpenGL.

If you are used to python, and think that VS Code is very nice, you'll be blown away by the tools and functionality that proper VS offers.

Windows is, and has always been, king. There's some halk-baked shit that doesn't behave nicely on Windows, but that's largely self-inflicted.