ndiscussion

Nice chatting with you, thanks for humoring me. If we don't modify the constitution legally, how do you propose we do it? I am aware that the constitution doesn't mean much of anything in the courts these days. But how is this different from the law of the west? The powerful make the rules with no accountability.

Historically, people have burned the government to the ground and started with a brand new document. I suppose that's what most people are advocating when they wish to change the constitution in a way which it does not allow.

If not by law, how is it decided? Can I decide? I suppose I can if I become a supreme court justice or someone like Bill Gates.

The founding fathers certainly knew that the constitution would be hard to change - that's the whole point. They saw what happened to past governments with wimpy foundations. I really can't see the point of keeping the constitution at all if we are going to violate it due to "current sentiments" - it's all a sham.

Perhaps they would have voted for becoming a state even without their 2 senators, but that seems far from certain to me. Like the American Revolution itself, I just can't see Wyoming people sitting down and taking what's given to them.

Of course, my predictions about the future of America are different from most. I think we've only just begun to hear the rumblings of a deep conflict. This election was not the climax, but the prologue.

Can confirm, I lived in one of those apartments, now I'm very happy in a suburb. It's nice to be able to haul groceries to your place without walking 4 blocks from the car for each load.

Walmart for one (the largest employer in the United States). When was the last time you heard an employee tell you Merry Christmas?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/an-unmerried-woman/

From that article, Walmart tries to play it off like they only "suggest" their employees say Happy Holidays.

But I've worked at Walmart, and if you've ever worked at a place like that, you know that people who don't follow "suggestions" are quickly fired.

You're certainly more educated on the history than I am. My main point is that the smaller states would have never agreed to a representative democracy which made their desires 100% irrelevant.

There's enough small states like that to get some leverage. WY is one example, but there's many more. And as we saw in the civil war, states and people were willing to go to war to defend their interests, whatever those interests were.

I simply can't imagine the feds trying to conquer Wyoming. There are no cities to burn. There would be a rifle behind every shrub-brush, and the casualties would be so massive, and so demoralizing, that they would be forced to allow those states to form their own federation. It would be a high-desert Vietnam situation.

edit: I'm actually so ignorant on the history that I didn't realize WY became a state in 1890. The Great Compromise was in 1787. So this matter was already long settled by the time they had a chance to become a state - this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control.

Less land and water, but what about energy? It's extremely foolish and naive to waste the power of the sun.

Solar panels lead to lots of tech trash, e-waste which destroys the environment. Not to mention the buildings themselves and all the electronics required to keep such a farm running.

This kind of over-engineering will simply never work without a fundamental re-understanding of how our world works. It's just such a waste of resources. The "Mercedes" model. Make a really nice car for the first 50k miles, then sell it for $5,000 because each successive year of maintenance costs more than the car is worth.

That seems... like a creative way of putting it. Wyoming may not have existed as a state entity, but the people sure did. And they had their reasons for joining the federation - this is one of them.

We can certainly debate on the intent, but ultimately, the result is the same - no one says Merry Christmas anymore, and Christians are sometimes sad about this.

I think it feeds into the feeling of victimhood. It seems all-encompassing. Which makes these people sternly-pro-Merry-Christmas.

Many companies don't allow their employees to say Merry Christmas, because it could offend customers.

When you interact with public employees and 10 out of 10 say "Happy Holidays", it becomes a social norm. Breaking that norm then feels uncomfortable, and people who are already biased against Christians will seize the opportunity to say that Merry Christmas is insensitive.

You can only say that the messaging for "Bring Back Merry Christmas" is more aggressive - the tactics on the Happy Holidays side are certainly ruthless, because there's a profit motive behind it.

Agreed. It seems with our current "world plan" (infinite growth to prop up the asset class), the only way forward is to push people into smaller and smaller boxes with less and less liberties.

Someday we'll be saying that travel is only for the rich - everyone else will be forced to use VR, and they will be brainwashed to like it. As they say, American lifestyles are only sustainable for the 1%. The rest of us should eat bugs and live in pods.

As we move into cities, production becomes cheaper - which means we produce more, which means we can support more people, which means we need to increase efficiency even more.

I'm not sure that this is preferable to life without technology. Aren't family and small moments the things that make life worth living? Squeezing out a few more years of expected lifespan hardly seems worth the tradeoff to me.

Personally, I don't think this is sustainable.

Interesting, and not what I expected. I presumed it was something about slave morality ala Nietzsche's Will to Power. Useful idiots and all that.

It seems the strongest way to win arguments nowadays is to simply go on the offensive and ignore their claims. The opposite side has millions of tricks.

First, they hope you are stupid. If not, they will pretend to be stupid, and not understand what you are talking about. And even if you refute them, they may come back the very next day and claim that they won the argument.

When you post online, hundreds of lurkers may read your comment. If you don't even dignify the enemy with a response, they are much more likely to buy in to your emotional rhetoric.

What if we didn't crowd ourselves into cesspools of humanity ie cities?

I'm being a bit facetious, but ultimately, this lack of privacy is all self-inflicted.

But we already have big macs for $2, that's the difference. When squirrels encounter a big fat feeder with no obstacles, they take it easy.

Tyranny of the minority is a different problem, and I don't think it's a given that this will occur if you take away majority rule.

Think historically - would you really want the tyranny of the majority in the 1960s? 1920s? It's my opinion that minorities deserve a place at the table.

These things are all just opinion - there is no such thing as a "fair" district.

Or do you not really agree with this concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Voting blocks are how they are... and these kinds of changes will have sweeping, unpredictable consequences. I find it humorous that people have a big enough ego to think that they could get it "right".

More generally, what people consider "fair" voting policies are what benefit their political party.

That's not a fair representation in my opinion. Appeal to nature is saying cyanide is healthy because it's natural.

But when it's our own evolutionary biology, I think appeal to nature makes perfect sense. It's what we were born to do, literally. Antidepressants and stimulant drugs allow us to bypass this evolution, but at some cost.

A great mystery as old as the television https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/

I don't have a 4k screen currently but it looks like most TVs support 4k nowadays, so if my TV ever dies, I'll be sure to try this. Thanks for the viewpoint.

IANAL but wouldn't that be straightforward fraud?

Not sure if it still applies since I cancelled prime, but you can contact Amazon any time a package is late, and they will give you credits or extensions to your Prime sub. That was in the US a year or so ago.

A lot of it is probably caused by demographics - torrents are pretty popular in countries where 4k is not the norm and may not be accessible.

FWIW I have 20/10 vision (twice as sharp as "perfect normal") and have never seen the appeal of retina screens or 4k.

edit: Also the file sizes are vastly larger for 4k for an incremental benefit.

Regardless of your politics, it doesn't take much to believe that a person known to have months-long crack binges went on another binge. Recovery is hard.

I'm not highly educated on the matter, but here's an instance of a Zoom employee illegally working with the CCP (and other zoom employees) to crack down on dissidents: https://fortune.com/2020/12/18/zoom-china-employee-charged-c...

Wait until you read about Monarchy... I suggest Plato's Republic: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497

Wow, from TFA, an average $6,000 per case. Something big is coming.

Good point, I wasn't thinking of actual military mortars. But I think "mortar" often means consumer firework in modern parlance.

I was going to say that it's probably because people who had access to wheat would more likely have access to eggs, but it seems Chickpeas and Wheat were both first found around Turkey.

I find it sad that schools are having to use for-profit foreign-owned services like Zoom. If I had a child, I would have severe qualms with it.

Agreed, this seems like the most interesting part of the site to me. Fascinating history. I wonder what else remains to be discovered?

I have a hunch that we have so many simple egg-based recipes because they've gone through so much testing - perhaps in a hundred years we'll say the same thing of aquafaba.

thanks for sharing, these are awesome, and glad to see people running websites like this