larnmar

I wonder if he was there at the invitation of the Iraqi government or not.

I have the opposite reaction. In the old McDonald’s veggie burger, the main ingredients are peas, carrots, onions and potatoes. In an Impossible Burger the main ingredient is “textured wheat protein”. I would much rather have the old-school veggie burger which has the virtue of being made of stuff that sounds like real food.

Six top level comments, and four of them are of the form “whatabout democratic nations doing the same thing, huh?”

We don’t know that; we have a sample of approximately N=1ish (depending on what you want to define as a civilisation or a collapse) and we’re not done yet.

On the central conceit about people underestimating how much happens in a decade... how much has happened in the last decade?

I feel like very little has changed in the last decade. Technologically, socially, politically, it feels like we’ve lived through a decade of very little noticeable change, especially compared to other periods such as 1990-2000 or 1980-1990.

Perhaps, but fashions change fast. I remember the first environmentalism craze of the 90s, it didn’t last.

That’s not true, other people with ideas to fix it are labelled “heartless libertarian eugenicists who want to watch poor people die”

Really? I’ve noticed the opposite — people tend to want to blame people at the top, or the whole company, or whoever has the deepest pockets.

Looks like the previous thread turned into a shitshow though, maybe this one will be better.

Man, other people played these books with way more discipline than I did.

I don’t think I ever made it all the way through a book playing “properly”. Oh, I died? Okay, let’s just assume I didn’t...

Colonising other planets is a lousy idea; at the very best you could at massive expense colonise Mars, but it would be (a) almost certainly worse than Earth and (b) only s doubling of our resources.

Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was.

Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.

No, it’s probably just a result of local variation. Some buildings or low-density neighbourhoods are super friendly, some buildings or low-density neighbourhoods are unfriendly. There’s a lot of reasons going on, it’s dependent on individuals.

In super-friendly neighbourhoods I’ve found it’s often one person who’s doing all the work to keep everyone connected.

Do we have any research prior to the 1970s?

Could there have been an upwards blip in civic participation caused by, say, the shared experience of WW2, with everything since then representing a reversion to ordinary behaviour?

Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that should have been in the article.

What’s the difference between an “Afro-futurist” and a “white supremacist” apart from a palette switch?

I’m confused why the article doesn’t consider the initial question of whether the historical Buddha existed at all. Given the amount of ink that has been spilled over the existence or otherwise of the historical Jesus, and the even spottier historical sources about Buddha (we can’t even nail him down to a specific century), isn’t this question worthy of consideration?

How does this law affect the many HN readers who have side “consulting” gigs?

Sure, like when it’s a side gig. If you’re picking up a bit of extra dough writing a few articles a month on something you care about, and then the State of California suddenly says you can’t.

A better idea would be to quit linking health insurance to employment. Ban employer-provided health insurance and let everyone buy their own (reasonably regulated) health insurance as individuals.

The link between employment and health insurance is, from my perspective as an external observer, America’s worst idea.

None! I also don’t know anyone from Mason City, Iowa. But everybody’s gotta be from somewhere.

Seriously, if you’re writing a whole article about someone it seems worthwhile to mention if they’re from Zambia, but if you’re writing a single sentence it’s a bit off putting.

If your conclusion is “well obviously, the people of the future will share my ethics” then you’re missing the point of the exercise.

The point of the exercise is humility — to think about how people in the future might think your ethics are wrong and evil — not arrogance.

That’s hot but normal for Sydney.

These anecdata are from the 19th century, they don’t have much in the way of relevance to the way mining looks today, especially in a first-world country.

A few stats: https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/statistics-and-research...

in Australia’s enormous mining industry in 2018, there were nine fatalities. The fatality rate was 3.7 per 100,000. This puts it ahead of most industries but substantially behind “Agriculture, forestry and fishing” at 11.2 or “Transport, warehousing and transport “ at 5.9.

For further perspective, the death rate in Australian mining injuries is several times less than the murder rate in Chicago (23.8) or even San Francisco (6.3).

So although mining is still an intrinsically dangerous occupation which puts your soft fleshy body in close proximity with all sorts of heavy, moving, unstable or explosive objects, safety training, equipment and procedures have improved a lot over the centuries.

If Apple wants to respect human rights they’ll need to pull all operations and sales out of mainland China.

You can’t do business with the devil and claim your hands are clean.

> The suspension came after Spiers published a piece of code that created a pop up any time a Google employee visited IRI Consultants: an anti-union firm Google had hired. In December, Spiers was fired via phone call. A spokesperson from Google told The Guardian said the company had dismissed an employee who had “abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool”

This kind of model seems like an excellent way for political groups to push their agenda while staying at arm’s length.

The best way to cover your tracks would be to post about it in advance on /r/wallstreetbets so that you look like just another YOLOing idiot.

This gives me a great idea: Radio On Internet!

No seriously though, why isn’t there a platform that would let me host, or listen to, live audio broadcasts? I mean, you could do it by twitch or youtube, but something optimised just for audio would be great. Somewhere out there must be people with interesting taste in music who’d be happy to curate shows I could listen to throughout my workday.

Can anyone explain why PBS television stations are local rather than nationwide? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a local program on one, but they seem to have a huge extra layer of bureaucracy in order to broadcast the same programs in a hundred different locations.

The sad part (speaking as a non-American who has lived in the US) is that the negative PR campaign doesn’t even come from America’s enemies, it comes from within. And it’s not driven by ill will, as far as I can figure out, but petty tribalism.

At some point in the past few decades it became de rigeur among a certain fraction (eg those in this thread) of the US population to shit on their own country at every opportunity, to distinguish themselves from those flag-waving yahoos in the other tribe. Patriotism became heavily tribalised, and saying good things about America in certain parts of the country gets you ostracised as one of those uneducated Republican types who is too stupid to see that absolutely everything is so much better in every other country and if it isn’t then it doesn’t count.

Combine this with the US saturation of global media, and you can turn on the TV in every country and see Americans shitting on America. Eventually the message starts to sink in.

People in America need to get more perspective, and quit letting every single thing that comes out of their mouth be determined by some boring red vs blue conflict.