PolygonSheep

> The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up.

The natives never fought amongst themselves for resources or territory? No victorious tribes ever enslaved or murdered their defeated foes?

This whole idea of conflicts between ethnicity and tribes and nations, master-and-slave and hierarchical societies is just some weird European pathology that, like smallpox, was unknown in the Americas pre-1492?

> I’m sure “rural America” would love that. The same for Amtrak.

How much of "rural America" is using Amtrak to get around? Their route map seems to indicate all their stations are in urban areas. It's not like they stop in every one-horse town.

As I understand it the ones really using it to get places are the Northeast Corridor, and the rest is mainly rail fans taking the land equivalent of a cruise ship.

> From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.

Wouldn't any for-profit media outlet, regardless of political orientation, painstakingly use data to build and hold their audience with a view to bolstering profits against a long-term decline in news subscriptions?

I really doubt CNN and MSNBC executives don't pay attention to show ratings, don't care about viewer feedback, don't know what stories get how many clicks, and have no concern over which way the bottom line is going.

So essentially the people in mid-size towns in Iowa were and are mostly racist (and not "implicit bias" racist but "shouting racial slurs and engaging in physical aggression" racist) but the national attitude during 2008-16 was holding them back from verbally and physically harassing people of color as they wanted to do, because they knew Obama would crack down on them like a ton of bricks.

After Election Day 2016 the formerly mild-mannered Iowans (a state so racist that America's first Black president won a majority of votes there in 2008 and 2012) decided to drop all pretense of being nice to people of color.

I'm sorry but it sounds frankly ridiculous.

What actually made midsize towns in Iowa unsafe to visit for persons of Indian descent in Trump's America? Did the Iowans suddenly get more racist? Was Dubuque declared a "sundown town"? Have the Iowans calmed down now that we live in Biden's America?

> Now that digital is ‘refragmenting’ it would be funny if the red disks came back to get around all these silos.

I'm not an IP law expert, but does anyone know why fragmentation isn't such a problem with music? You never hear someone complaining that they have to subscribe to eight different music streaming services to hear all the popular songs. It seems the big music streaming services all have pretty much all the popular artists and you can just pick one and listen to all the hits, regardless of which label they're on.

Why isn't it this way for video content?

> Now that digital is ‘refragmenting’ it would be funny if the red disks came back to get around all these silos.

I'm not an IP law expert, but does anyone know why fragmentation isn't such a problem with music? You never hear someone complaining that they have to subscribe to eight different music streaming services to hear all the popular songs. It seems the big music streaming services all have pretty much all the popular artists.

Why isn't it this way for video content?

> this just seems blatantly, clearly, obviously unconstitutional and yet there's been nary a peep about that aspect of it.

I think you could say much the same thing about a for-profit corporation running its own private government.

I'm not sure policies matter much in the end. If I went into a coma before election night 2016 and woke up today, how would I tell we just had four years of a hard-right authoritarian government and we are now about a year and three months into a moderate center-left government?

I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.

Most people have no idea (and don't care) how any of this stuff works. They don't know or care whether it's done with resistance heating or by running an air conditioner backwards. All they know is it's a machine which makes hot air. If you try to tell them how much more efficient it is to move heat from the outdoors to the indoors instead of just turning electricity into heat they will stare at you blankly and say "but it's a heater, right?"

I was homeschooled after 8th grade due to social problems at school (I was bullied to the point of being suicidal for being fat). This was entirely by choice on my part and this was back before online learning was a big thing (early-mid 00s) so it was all in paper books then.

I did quite well in the program and on the SAT I took to get into college in lieu of a high school diploma. I did okay in college too, graduating with honors. I really can't see what I lost by basically doing high school alone in my bedroom reading books and taking self-graded exams.

I think it can work with the major caveat that it has to be both voluntary and the student has to bring a genuine desire to learn to the table. Not all students do. I think Khan World School will work very well but for maybe 10% of students leaving 90% worse off. Conversely I think in-person traditional schooling will work well for 90% but make 10% worse off due to stuff like bullying.

It would be unconscionable to withhold something like Khan World School from the people it could benefit. It's okay that it doesn't work for everyone. Neither does the traditional system.

Litigation/malpractice probably plays a role too. I imagine doctors are under a lot of pressure to do everything by the book. If it works, awesome. If it fails, they can say they followed best practices and it's not their fault. If they deviate for any reason, they do so entirely at their own risk if/when it blows up in their face. It's just not worth it (in the expected value sense) to step out of line.

To be fair we could generate a lot more power a lot cheaper with circa 1962 (year The Jetsons began) environmental legislation.

I mean you would have to compromise on the environment a bit but it's by no means impossible to generate a ton of cheap electricity. It's not some lost art like Greek fire or Damascus steel.

You'd be surprised but some people want to call the grocery store and ask questions. Ask if X is in stock, if they can rent a rug doctor, if they can buy propane, if they can go there to pay this or that bill, what hours they're open, do they renew vehicle registration, etc.

Source: worked at Kroger when I was a teen.

Reuse is good but it's also kinda hard in two ways I've found: you will accumulate too many "reusable" plastic items (one or two coke bottles you reuse is fine, but what are you going to do with twenty?), and also some are tricky to reuse (how do I reuse my candy bar wrapper or shrink wrap my item came packaged in?)

My question for plastic recycling is: if it's so difficult to recycle why not just landfill it? It can't create microplastics, harm wildlife, or float around in the ocean if it's buried inland under feet of dirt.

I mean yeah it would be much better if we didn't use it at all but I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle anytime soon.

Your website looks way too much like an actual Microsoft website. If you showed this to me without telling the URL, it would take me a minute to realize it's not a real Microsoft site.

I think an actual human reviewer would have come to the same decision in this case.

> then it is reasonable to expect that they won't go too much further.

Is it reasonable to expect that whatever social/political forces have pushed them to do this will stop there?

It makes no difference really if Twitter is out in front leading this or being dragged along kicking and screaming against their will. Is there reason to think "okay you can all stop worrying it's definitely stopped here and won't go any further"?

Couldn't much the same thing be said about Florida schools "banning" books with so-called "critical race theory" and/or LGBTQ themes?

Students aren't going to get expelled for reading these books. Their parents aren't going to be criminally charged for buying them for their kids to take to school and read. Everyone in Florida is welcome to buy as many copies of these "banned" books as they want. The schools in Florida have just chosen not to buy some books they feel didn't have educational value. So what's all the fuss about?

Was it really accidental though? The dangers of lead exposure were known at that time. Midgely himself got lead poisoning in 1923 as a result of his tetraethyllead experiments so there's no way they couldn't have known it was harmful even in the very early days of leaded gasoline.

> most Western culture still lauds virtuosity playing and "skill" over most other things.

We must be in different Western cultures because I definitely don't see a lot of skill and virtuosity in most popular music.

The article just says it was a "cyber fraud incident" which is pretty vague. It may not have been a bill at all.

> I’m not sure, and that’s important: being trapped in a torrent of self-reinforcing falsehoods is something I fell for in my teenage-goth-New-Age phase, which Carl Sagen condemned in The Demon-Haunted World.

Genuinely curious here: how can you tell you've escaped one set of self-reinforcing falsehoods while being sure you haven't fallen into another, different set?

While I agree it's pretty dumb to burn country-level amounts of electricity solving sudokus and generate who knows how many millions of pounds of electronics waste (plus all the energy/pollution/etc to make it in the first place)... do these arguments actually resonate with the crypto fanatics?

If you're a sociopath running a pyramid scheme, climate change is probably pretty far down your list of priorities.

I think old religious buildings and art were better, but we only now have the great ones that have survived. There must have been a lot of cheaply built, unimpressive churches built throughout the centuries that were demolished and forgotten at some point. There must have been a lot of religious art that was the medieval/renaissance/etc equivalent of a kitschy Thomas Kincade painting that no one will remember after it's gone.

It's kind of like old books or old music. We remember the greats but for every Mozart there must have been at least a dozen 18th century composers whose work wasn't as good, never got traction, was never recorded on vinyl/cd and now might as well never have existed. There's like a curation effect over time.

Is it the party that has 11 out of 16 seats on the Houston city council?

(The Houston city council is, in theory, nonpartisan but one party has a de facto ~2/3 majority)

> I have the idea that it's related to atheism. Once you believe all of life and all of nature is ultimately some brute atoms buzzing back and forth anyway, then what your imagination creates is likely to look pretty brutalist. If you believe it's angels and God's creation all the way down you will place meaning and symbols into the large elements and every tiny bit. Anyone else can see this connection?

I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to religion. If you believe our life on earth is just a brief prelude to an eternity in something much better, why bother building anything beautiful? There'll be plenty of time for that in heaven. Indeed the best buildings and cities you could possibly build on earth pale in comparison to the shabbiest in heaven.

Additionally you wouldn't want beauty on earth to distract from the glory of God. The best way to build is pragmatic, as cheap, durable, and functional as possible with no wasted frivolity. Something like square buildings made of reinforced concrete placed close together so people don't have to spend a lot of time traveling.

So I think it's a wash. It seems like it could go either way honestly.

I think Google just simply doesn't need to be good anymore. They really did need to be good when they were a small company with a goofy name in a sea of small companies with goofy names. Now they are not. They don't need to stand out. They don't need to be better.

Until they have a serious threat from competition (you'll know this is the case when you hear a lot of non-technical people talking about "Binging" or "Yandexing" something instead of Googling) nothing will change.

> Y'all

As a Texan it sounds jarring and wrong when said by a non-Southerner. A bit like a lily white person suddenly dropping into AAVE. It's just cringe-inducing and I would like people who do it as an affectation (rather than something they grew up saying) to not do it.

Samsung makes enough refrigerators that if you told me 100,000+ people were pissed off enough about theirs to complain on Facebook I really wouldn't doubt it. Also what would you gain from complaining on Facebook? Are these people being paid by LG to trash Samsung products? Does Samsung pay people to trash LG refrigerators on Facebook in return?

Unless there's some kind of evidence to the contrary, I would just assume these people are unhappy with the refrigerator they bought.