larnmar

On the other hand, shouldn’t the Center for Disease Control spend its time and focus on things that could reasonably be argued fall under the heading of “disease control”? By all means, gun violence research should be conducted by, say, the Department of Justice.

Like many policies in the US at this stage, the goal appears not to be good governance but simply “pwning the other side”.

Sure, if there’s one thing that will convince the masses that they should be eating weird vat-grown animal tissue, it’s telling them “Hey, all the poor people are doing it!”

It’s a peculiarity of modern American ethics that some people think that this would be significantly more ethical.

I’m pretty sure they were in fact real websites.

If the French can stop you from calling your chemically identical sparkling white wine “Champagne”, I see no reason why meat farmers shouldn’t be able to stop you from calling your industrially-grown bovine cell culture “meat”.

Personally I’d love a (competent) hair cutting robot because I simply don’t have time. The only day of the week I can get my hair cut is Saturday; I meant to get it done last Saturday, ran out of time, now I’m going out of town next Saturday and I am stuck looking terrible for the rest of the year.

If there were a robot at the mall I could get it done at 9pm on a Tuesday or whenever I have a moment.

On one hand, he’s getting problems from his “(mainland) Chinese talent agency”, and if you’re going to have a mainland Chinese talent agency then what do you expect?

On the other hand I also note that Bloomberg is also being very cagey about describing the President as the President.

If 99% of the Kansas City population are apparently getting by fine without public transport then why have it at all?

The problem is people seeing public transport as a virtue in itself rather than as a solution to a problem. I catch public transport every day, but I wish I didn’t have to. If I lived in Kansas City then I could drive to work, but instead I live somewhere that parking is too expensive, so I’m forced to catch a train that goes from somewhere I’m not to somewhere that isn’t where I want to be at a time that isn’t exactly when I want to go, and in the company of people that I didn’t choose to be with.

> The problem is, many such businesses have very old technology and must replace the entire pump at an estimated cost of up to $250,000 per station

This feels like a business opportunity. Surely there must be a way to build an adaptor?

> Storing passwords unhashed may 'get the job done', but every programmer should know better.

Not every programmer has to deal with passwords, though, so the generality is it is limited.

A programmer who has spent his whole career writing computational fluid dynamics simulations doesn’t need to know anything about storing passwords, but probably would have an equally idiosyncratic idea of what all programmers should know.

If you’re considering learning Esperanto I’d suggest spending some time teaching English instead.

So what are all the 7s and below doing these days?

The funny part is that Dan Rather and his producers were fooled by a deeply unconvincing fake — a supposedly Vietnam-era typewritten document that was obviously made using Microsoft Word using default settings. Furthermore, many many people continued to defend it as real for a long time after partisans on the other side had thoroughly debunked it.

If 2004 news could be fooled by a fake that took a couple of minutes to make, I’m not that worried that today’s news is any better.

Can you think of some examples of photoshopped pictures which have changed history in significant ways?

I’m amazed that there’s a Star Wars movie coming out this week and there’s practically zero buzz. Haven’t heard anyone mention it in real life, and even online it’s barely a topic of conversation.

Or Van Gogh prints, for that matter.

Hopefully in another 30 years, a machine/robot will gently raise you to a standing position in a way that’s optimal for recovery.

Article misses the important and interesting question of which countries/empires it’s actually true of.

From a quick look at a map, I suspect it must still be true of Britain and France, which maintain territories (albeit small) in the Indian and Pacific oceans in addition to their homelands. It doesn’t seem to be true of the US, though, which has a huge gap across the Atlantic and Eurasia from Puerto Rico to Guam.

Note: article never discusses, nor attempts to establish, the truth about caveman courtship.

Because I’ve already spent a fortune on these damn adaptors.

Unlikely; emotional expressions seem to be innate and hard-wired into the brain, hence the fundamental similarity between emotional expressions of groups separated for tens of thousands of years.

Governments love taxing stuff, and carbon taxes give them an excuse to raise taxes for something that seems like a “good reason”.

But of course they wouldn’t put one in without excluding everyone powerful enough to make a fuss about it.

Well, that’s unfortunate for them, but apparently the town is only fifteen miles from Chico, so they’re a lot better off than the residents of a lot of other places.

It’s like any other creative hobby — woodworking, metalworking (computer programming?) etc. There’s joy in using your hands and brain to make something enjoyable out of low-value materials. There’s joy in being able to show people “Look what I made!”

Creative hobbies do tend to be a bit male-coded or female-coded for various reasons. For some hobbies I suspect that the very single-sexiness of the hobby is part of the appeal — women join knitting circles as an excuse to hang out with other women, men go golfing as a way to hang out with other men.

Even then, mid 20th century philosophy is a pretty broad category. It contains stuff like Derrida but also contains stuff like Quine.

> I can't believe how political correctness and feminism have normalized a nigh-miraculous coincidence, that male brain == female brain, while male body ≠ female body, against the entire backdrop of evolutionary biology. It makes no sense

Bear in mind that for most of the last hundred-and-something years, the psychological profession has laboured under the blank-slate assumption that human psychology is 100% learned and the human brain is somehow a general-purpose learning machine; in which case the identically of these unevolved blank slates makes perfect sense.

As recently as the 1980s I remember my schoolteachers telling me about instinct, and how ducklings knew immediately how to wander down to the water and start swimming; but that humans are different, we don’t have instincts. (Admittedly I’m sure my local primary school was not exactly on the leading edge of psychology research, but still...)

Sorry I thought I was on a forum for people in the Silicon Valley tech bubble.

I’m confused about what sort of person (a) refers to soccer as “real football” but (b) doesn’t know what Premier League means.

In English, though, the distribution of meaning of the word “football” is more like:

340 million: Grid Iron

60 million: soccer

15 million: Aussie Rules (proper footy)

10 million: Rugby League

5 million: Rugby Union

Probably some Gaelic Football in there too for good measure.

It’s not that hard to take young kids to Europe.