Funding conservative causes as a wealthy private individual does not make you a threat to democracy., American liberal progressives seem to repeat that notion and get hysterical about this any time it happens, while forgetting the sheer number of extremely rich billionaire progressive supporters of numerous causes they do favor. Are these people then not also threats to democracy? Or does this definition only begin to apply once a billionaire supports a thing you don't approve of?
The author of this delightful post is very wrong or at least from a very unusual bubble in thinking that Bombadil is disliked by most readers of the Hobbit, but other than that, the narrative of secret evil he constructs is wonderfully compelling, enough to create a whole fascinating story line of its own. I loved it.
You're grossly understating just how brutal it would be. While you're right about how concave mirror surfaces truly create lethal concentrations of energy, this vast reflective surface would still unbearably heat the land next to it at certain times of day. 200% of Arabian Peninsula levels of solar heat as only "uncomfortable"? You've got to be kidding.
Has nobody considered the possibility of such vast, shiny external reflector walls absolutely, very literally roasting the surrounding landscape when struck by the already ferocious Arabian sun? How would a person even survive openly coming close to this fascinating monstrosity from either side at certain times of the day? I remember a story about sunlight reflections bouncing from the "Walkie Talkie" Building in London to then scorch some poor fellow's car in the streets below at certain times of day in the summer. NEOM strikes me as a would-be case of this on a truly infernal scale.
Of course, all those average people who need to be protected from themselves and their own stupidity by, I suppose enlightened betters such as yourself? Sure, there are plenty of foolish people out there making bad choices, but a fair number of them also exist among the supposedly higher earning, supposedly smarter classes too. Should a widespread program of treating adults like children in all possible be adopted worldwide?
Or should we perhaps recognize that sometimes bad things do inevitably happen and that you can't legislate them away by banning whole categories of activity that sometimes lead to bad outcomes. Many of the people shitting on crypto on this very site, people who often make claims like yours about a public that they seem to look upon as little more than a moronic mass, work at high compensation for some of the world's most manipulative tech mega companies and have for years, but oh hey, lets preach about protecting the masses from themselves.
Hypocrisy rarely makes itself absent.
The Eastern Forest has fragmented a lot since it first started being settled, but don't exaggerate for dramatic effect. Vast tracts of it remain or have regrown and many of the eastern US states are thickly, heavily forested in ways that would make, say for example a European gaze in wonder at actually seeing them. Even many urban Americans simply have no idea just how many and huge the remaining or regrown eastern forest sections of the U.S are. They don't see them and their limited sight of woodland largely consists of scattered fragments around their cities, where obviously, the least forest would be visible. Also worth noting, they continue to grow back each year. You can largely thank industrialized, centralizad agriculture and urbanization for that.
There were no exceptionally unusual Russian mobile forces massed along the Soviet/Reich-occupied border during 1941. In fact, Stalin pulled a number of forces back from the very border itself while a transition was being made between the partly abandoned Stalin Line and the (further west) newly developed but still unfinished Molotov Line of border defenses. Almost everything Stalin did in mid 1941 before June 22 reeked of two things: A heavy application of desperate appeasement towards Hitler and secondly, a lackluster defense preparation that was a pragmatic minimum whose absence would be too much to justify even by appeasement standards.
It's amazing how much Viktor Suvorov's completely discredited book and its arguments still carry weight with many people today. There was NO serious Soviet invasion plan of what Germany controlled in 1941, only hypothetical scenario planning and poorly designed plans for near future offensive power. The one thing the USSR was doing right however, as part of a more general strategy was gearing up a massive rearmament and war production program. This had been in progress since even before 1939 but only really picked up steam in the early 1940s.
Rare view? Maybe not, but neither was it widely assumed or a sure thing in the eyes of many contemporaries. Even inside Germany, inside Hitler's own government, quite a few well-placed people thought that the alliance with Stalin might be made to last quite a while as a pragmatic, mutually useful thing. There was even good logic for the notion: Stalin's own government almost certainly had no intention of actually attacking and trying to invade the Reich. What Stalin wanted most from the pact was enough time to fortify soviet defenses against a possible eventual German attack while grabbing up as much territory under the pact's leeway points as he could. Hitler's fear was in letting that go on for too long, to the point that the USSR would be much more difficult to invade.
Agreed for the most part. In my case, I use an app on my phone to read books from a filed collection of dozens that I really want to finish at some point. Sure, it might not be great for my eyes, but if my phone is with me most of the time in random places and situations where waiting suddenly comes around here and there, I can plough through lots of literature.
Of course, to a passing observer, it wouldn't look like that. Because most people associate phones with social media scrolling, they automatically assume that's what you're doing with one. My phone thus has one major thing in its favor at least: it's let me read more full blown novels, literature and non fiction tomes than I ever did before having one, and I read a lot even then. Phones aren't an activity by themselves, what thing you use them for is the activity and its nature makes a difference.
>Probably, in Hitler's own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia's turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it.
Unsurprisingly, Orwell here was wonderfully prescient, even as many contemporaries failed to see that this exact plan was the case.
The advice and practical suggestions of this post are great, but for those who claim to have a hard time leaving google behind regardless (without a major business or work obligation that makes it difficult), the drama is overblown. It's not only possible, it's also relatively easy. I use google for exactly four things: Two gmail addresses for random crap emails and obligatory sign-ups if I want some document (serious email goes to a protonmail address); a phone with Android built into it (invasive but meh, I keep my smartphone engagement to enough of a minimum that it isn't a huge invasion of privacy); Google maps for random addresses and youtube for music I seek (and later download anyway), which in any case can be used without signing in.
That's it. The rest is easily superfluous for most personal uses and I suspect that claiming otherwise is pure self absorbed convenience-hunting.
Whats up with Manhattans South Precinct (the roughly square section south of Central Park? For just about all of the categories of crime on this map, it consistently ranks as the worst area in the whole city across all five boroughs. Seems weird for this to be happening in a core section of Manhattan itself.
There's certainly a certain relation between them. What's more, as genetic screening of early-term pregnancies becomes more common, the inevitable abortions that result due to real or perceived defects or other random personal reasons are things that many eugenicists of the past would have probably been keenly interested in, and even applauded in certain ways.
Seems a bit odd to me. Many older film cameras from the 80s and 70s (or earlier) can still take perfectly decent photos even without a battery. As long as you can guesstimate things correctly and manually control for other settings such as aperture, it becomes easy to do. I've used my old Asahi Pentax for decades sans battery or exposure meter.
Guns are very loud close up, but even a moderate distance and especially in an urban setting where sounds bounce all over the place and get partly diverted, they rapidly seem a lot less noisy. I live in a place that just a few years ago had regular gun battles just blocks away from my home and while you learned to rapidly identify the specific sound from things like firecrackers, it wasn't especially loud unless you heard it from very close by.
Living in a country where gunfire is very common, the opposite starts to happen: even when you hear what you rapidly realize isn't gunfire but only somewhat similar (firecrackers, cars backfiring, etc), your first reaction is to assume gunshots or automatic rifle fire before assessing what you heard more carefully.
Your metaphor is totally off. For one thing, even the biggest CMEs aren't powerful enough to literally cook us. Partly because of solar size, distance and composition, and partly because our Earth has its own protections via the atmosphere, our robust electromagnetic field and a few atmospheric factors. Secondly, random bullets fired off in random directions remain as small dense objects. That metaphor works better for asteroids randomly bounding around the solar system. CMEs on the other hand expand and spread to pretty huge sizes as they fly outward into the Solar System. This makes them much more likely to arrive.
Can't think of a better thread than this one for mentioning this great and worth-seeing movie that ties right in (fictitiously): "The Robot and Frank" (2012).
So, because you yourself get no joy from alcohol, it frustrates you and makes you "uneasy" to see any situation where others do? Consequently, anything that forces them to consume much less is a good thing? Why? Why should others' personal pleasure bother you in the first place? I comment because this is a sadly selfish attitude that's far too common among many people about many things.
What a foolishly absolutist bunch of woke nonsense. These kinds of words aren't evil spells from some era of religious fanaticism. They're just words, and for such things context always matters, meaning that they can be said for all sorts of reasons that don't make one a racist.
What an existentially depressing book though, at least for me. It was wonderful, and worth reading more than once simply because it helps absorb more of its deeply complex aspects, but without a doubt it creates an unusual emotional impact.
and your second (valid) point doesn't change by one iota the fact that black on black violent crime is extremely pervasive in these communities and also the cause of the vast majority of murders of african americans. The FBI Uniform crime statistics, derived in part from solved murders and other violent crimes bear this out too. What you say about racist policies may be true but no white outsider is putting a gun into the hands of certain blacks and making them shoot other blacks. One sound criticism of BLM has been exactly this, a complete aversion for political ideological reasons to placing any focus on things that black communities themselves can work to change internally.
first hand experience = anecdote, which in turn means it's a completely,m worthlessly unreliable indicator of a general factual and statistical situation. You're confusing your specific impression from your life in a very tiny part of the vast tapestry that is the United States with a massive generalization that you claim is factual. Anyone here claiming that the Americans suffer from X or Y awful thing at absurd levels should actually try backing it up with a link or two to hard data that shows how much more these bad things apply to Americans than they do to those living in the (apparently) European paradise. As one comment a bit further down notes (no link to a source but at least they make a statistical claim) French people are on average among the world's biggest users of psych medication.
Yes indeed, because there are genuinely more democratic countries than others. China for example is very different from the United States or Canada in terms of governance, and so too is this the case if you compare say, Cuba and the Netherlands or any other number of western European states.
I don't see it. Literally billions of people live in tropical countries and somehow seem to manage fine. I myself live in a country that's almost entirely below the tropic of Cancer and while summer heat gets uncomfortable, it's far from unbearable. Let's put a brake on the hyperbole, at least so far, in the absence of concrete evidence of temperatures truly becoming unbearable for billions of people. If millions of migrants from tropical underdeveloped regions of the world are fleeing to the northern world, for now at least it's definitely not because of climate problems. Political troubles of all sorts are a much more immediately pressing issue.
Read the same book, along with the much denser "El Otro Sendero" (the other path), which focuses more on Peru alone, and to date I haven't found a better detailed chain of reasoning for why countries get rich and developed across the board, or stay poor, or as in many cases, get wealthier but with enormous discrepancies in who accumulates the wealth and how it's achieved/used.