astine

But that's really a distraction from the core issue. The thing about at-will employment is the it presumes that the employment relationship is largely between the employer and the employee. That assumption breaks down in the face of an Internet mob. This is part of the reason why the proof standard for how you treat complete strangers is different than the proof standard for how you treat people you know, including employees.

Furthermore, in the theory that underpins American capitalism, employment is an economic relationship. For example, if a burger flipper is sufficiently bad at flipping burgers, he shouldn't be a burger flipper, because her status as a burger flipper is predicated on her ability to do that job. Even in the most socialist systems that I'm aware of, basic competence is considered a prerequisite for holding a job. Moral qualities are usually considered less important unless they impact the job. In the American system, people are theoretically hired and fired primarily based on their ability to do their job, but Internet mobs change this equation thoroughly. Now, your political opinions affect your employability as well.

I think that this has profound implications for democracy.

Eh, I don't know. Munroe in Ballarat is a residential road but doesn't have sidewalks or street parking either. I mean, the gutter is nicer, but that might be down to a soil/landscape difference. Pine St might have the better drainage because it's been built up so high from the ground.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.5573014,143.8142714,3a,75y,...

McKinney is a town that has apparently undergone rapid expansion in the past 20-30 years and I'm willing to bet that Pine St was initially build well before McKinney reached its current population. If you believe that every single residential road needs to have a certain width and have sidewalks as a matter of course, I don't know that I can dissuade you, but I'm willing to bet that the residents on that road are not eager to give up a portion of their yards for a wider road and sidewalk and they almost certainly would rather that road not receive more traffic as a result of 'improvement'.

That said, there are definitely roads in Townsville Qld (your example of an Australian town that should have good infrastructure,) that look as 'bad' if not worse than Pine St: https://www.google.com/maps/@-19.3152528,146.8315158,3a,75y,...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/CS...

"A protest in Farmington organized to support local businesses has sparked outrage after a protester turned a New Mexico flag into a symbol that represents hate.

One of the organizers says this was all put on to support the small businesses in their area, as San Juan County remains on tight restrictions because of the high number of COVID cases in the county. “If the big box stores can open, and they were open 100 percent right away. Why can’t all businesses open safely? That’s kind of how it started, was just to help our local businesses, at least open a tiny bit,” said Shannon Carter.

Carter, family members, and friends who own small businesses organized the protest. She says several hundred people showed up and it was a good, peaceful protest.

San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari was also there, taking pictures with attendees, however, he has said it was simply to keep the peace. But it was a man holding the New Mexico flag turned into a swastika, that’s been raising eyebrows. The sign says, “what’s next concentration camps?”"

So, apparently not a white supremacist march but an anti-lockdown march whereby some asshole decided to compare the lockdown to Nazi contentration camps. This would be why it didn't turn up in my searches.

edit: probably the original image for reference: https://www.krqe.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2020/05/far...

It's also not like the nation can just isolate from the rest of the country. Much of the nation lives and/or works off of the reservation in nearby towns and cities. Bear in mind that by-and-large, the Navajo are not living a traditional subsistence lifestyle anymore. They simply don't have the land or resources to do that so the reservations are not self-sufficient.

The "common truth" is a bit more subjective, but I've definitely noticed people in my extended social groups having fewer and fewer information sources in common, as well as a smaller and smaller set of common beliefs. I'm not the only person I've come across who's had this impression.

I suppose that there is also the inverse problem where poor articles can use Wikipedia's relatively good reputation to give visibility to some pseudoscience or conspiracy theory. If it's really obscure, the only people who will be writing articles about are will be proponents who will then link to the article from their closed Facebook groups. It won't necessarily be obvious to non-experts what's going on so deleting certain kinds of articles could be a protection against that as well.

(I'm not any kind of Wikipedian btw; just speculating off of the top of my head.)

This shouldn't be that surprising when you think about the situation just a little bit. Antibiotics are important because they cover a wide variety of diseases that formerly were untreatable. This is the case because they all have the same cause: bacteria. Other classes of disease, such as cancer, aren't so simple. There isn't a single treatment that can reliably cure all forms of cancer and theoretically there really can't be. It's just a fundamentally harder problem. There's a lot a low hanging fruit in basic discoveries but then we hit a wall when we attempt to apply them to more difficult problems.

Back in the 50's (I think) there was a fascination with the possibility of weather prediction. It seemed reasonable at the time that because the weather was ultimately a deterministic system we could predict it months in advance just by figuring out the physics and running the correct calculations. Then we discovered chaos theory and "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and we realized that weather prediction was a fundamentally much harder problem than we could have predicted. We simply can't ever measure the atmosphere accurately enough to accurately predict the weather more than a few weeks in advance and even then we have to take a probabilistic approach.

There's a similar deal with fast planes as mentioned in the article. Back in the 60s and 70s all the big aerospace engineers wanted to be working on supersonic airliners like the Concord. Decades later, that effort seems to have been a waste of time. It turns out that the physics of supersonic flight present challenges and the economics of intercontinental travel don't really cover those challenges. The changes that have been made to airliners over the last few decades have been instead in terms of efficiency and safety. Even in the military sector, which can throw tons of money at pie-in-the-sky ideas has run into this. The most populous strategic bomber in the US Airforce is still the B-52 which was introduced in the mid 50s. We do have more advanced weapons, but we can't afford them, and we can't afford them precisely because of the changes that make them more advanced.

If someone in the late 60s wouldn't believe that we'd not repeat the success of antibiotics or return to the moon, it would have been because of misconceptions about the nature of the problems involved in the 60s rather than because of some form of decadence that settled in after the fact.

How is using a database safe then? Transactions."

Transactions are less an occasion where shared mutable state is made 'safe' during concurrency and more a situation where concurrent processes are forced to temporarily interact and operate in a sequential, non-concurrent, manner. They use locks under the covers. Databases manage to be parallel because different processes operate on different sets of data at the same time; they lock when two or more processes attempt to access the same row on a table. Transactional state access is still vulnerable to deadlocks and other difficulties of concurrent programming. This means that transactional state is not 'safe' in the same way that immutable and non-shared state are safe. It's just a much easier way of managing the kind of difficulties you have with shared mutable state than say, raw locks.

If I had to guess, I'd suspect that it's because there are a couple of ways to get it wrong when plugging in a USB drive or cable. You can get the orientation wrong but you can also accidentally put it in at a slight angle and have it catch. In the later case, just slightly adjusting your approach would get it in, but because you know that there is a chance of you having got the orientation wrong, you automatically assume that that was what happened and flip the orientation instead and end up flipping it back when you realize you were right the first time.

I suspect that the reason we make that assumption, that we got the orientation wrong and not the angle, is that that's actually what happens the majority of the time when we fail to insert a USB connector. We discount the angle problem because it happens so infrequently, and when it does happen we just get the impression that we got the orientation wrong, twice, which is something that sticks with us. Hence, the sense that there is a paradox about the orientation of USB connectors.

The problem here is that we're talking about Smith's LTV and not Marx's. Marx may provide his own reasons for believing in the LTV but he disproved Smith's. So the fact that Marx had these reasons are irrelevant if we're trying to justify Smith's adherence.

Though, it is worth pointing out Marx did develop his LTV in part by reading the likes of Smith and Ricardo. The reasons he gives for the LTV in Capital are absent in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in which he merely takes LTV as a given. Actually, that's not quite right, he quotes Smith, Ricardo, and Franklin among others in support of LTV so it's my conjecture that he in fact did see an inconsistency and run with the theory anyway. It was only later in his career that he felt the need to justify that decision.