clock_tower

I can't say that I'm a great coder, but I learned from ZZT and Megazeux back in the early-mid 1990s. No idea if something like that would work today, though, and both ZZT and Megazeux seem to be stagnant at present...

Experience is a good teacher. Dalrymple remarked on this in _Utopias Elsewhere_ -- how it sometimes seems that every society has to learn that Communism won't work the hard way.

> My observation about conservatives on this issue has been that they become defensive when they hear "conservatives have caused global warming with their capitalism, and the only solution is to repudiate the entire conservative world view".

Indeed. Things get particularly ludicrous when you hear people saying that Communism or something like it is the only way to avoid damaging the planet; there was no pollution like Communist pollution, and the Left was hostile to the first Earth Day -- it felt too much like Hitler.

I've heard the expression "watermelons" applied to a lot of this: people who are Green on the outside, Red on the inside.

> what we learned from the unrest that the U.S. faced during the Vietnam war era.

That the counterculture and the Communists were actively trying to make us lose a war? The author of this discusses real problems with the US -- situations like Guatemala, where we backed a feudal aristocracy, or Iran, where we set the country back considerably by helping overthrow Mossadeq -- and not just conspiracies carried out by our enemies.

Thinking about the meaning of "empire", I wonder if it would've been better for the US to have made various outright annexations after WWII. Not having to deal with an independent local government, or with self-interested local elites, makes things clearer and easier; the US's interventions in El Salvador or Guatemala would've been significantly less nasty if they had begun with annexation and the extension of domestic policies like EITC, Social Security, and property tax...

Microsoft's sponsoring Mono now, and they've always been pretty benevolent towards game companies, especially with how seriously they take backwards compatibility. I wouldn't worry too much, at least not at this point.

What I'm most surprised by is their straw-man alternative: "unalterable traits or unattainable pedigree," _in 2017_.

"I say, Langley, HBR is pure bosh. They've no respect at all for proper breeding, and their attitude towards Mr. Spencer's impeccable theories is shocking, really."

You'd think they'd disparage education, money, and connections, instead of inborn character and aristocratic bloodline... (Unless, of course, you _do_ need education, money, and connections, and they want some safer strawman to knock down.)

Speaking as a Catholic, I have no idea how people can break a treaty and think they're fighting for God. Isn't He traditionally called to witness that treaties will be kept sacrosanct?

Heil Hitler! /s

(Seriously, read Snyder's _Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning_ for how Hitler saw the US as a role model.)

Maybe in Wales? Modern England (and most of modern Scotland) is mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Romano-British.

I'd always heard "Europeans", not "European people"; if Google is just confused (and I wouldn't rule it out -- look up "Goofle Translate"), I think it's because "European people" is a pretty rare semantic construct.

From the grandparent's post:

> "The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours."

More like how IBM held off Sun Microsystems.

> What does "backed by the full faith and credit of a stable entity" even mean? Why does it matter?

I understand it to meant that the country in question will be a currency-recipient of last resort: the country will always accept taxes paid in this currency, and will use this currency to charge for government services and pay its employees. This ensures that there's always a market for the currency -- something that you don't have a guarantee of otherwise, unless the mode of payment has non-financial uses (like rice, cloth, nails, or cows).

I'm not surprised that Westinghouse behaved idiotically; they've always struck me as the Ford of washing machines, and I can only imagine what they're like at utility scale...

It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020 election... if it happens at all, that is.

> The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared.

And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.

> "2. Western civilization. 3. Winning."

It sounds like he needs to make up his mind. The core of chivalry is willingness to lose, if winning would violate your principles; think of how Richard the Lion-Hearted died, mortally wounded when a crossbowman missed and King Richard gave him a second shot. And what is Western Civ without the spirit of chivalry? A miserable pile of bureaucrats and gladiators, nothing special or remarkable, certainly nothing worth fighting for.

Someone had remarked that the SS is what you'd get if the Pentagon hired the Church of Happyology to create a new branch of the military. I thought this was hilariously on-point; but then I refreshed the page to see more discussion, and the comment was gone. Are the clam spirits angry today?

Absolutely true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

Uber (and presumably Lyft) does the same -- the theory being that they can destroy taxi businesses, then set their prices at anything less than a towncar service.

The failure mode of a big company is the same as that of a communist country, too: elite disconnect with real conditions, then stagnation, then bankruptcy, then horrible effects for the places that were dependent on it. Look at Seattle in the '80s, Moscow in the '90s, or Rochester, NY after Kodak fell.

The German model, where the employees' union is guaranteed a seat on the board of directors, is probably a healthier way of structuring a BigCo; often the workers can see which way the wind is blowing when the executives can't. _Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?_ is the book to read here.

I hadn't heard of that before, but I'll keep it in mind for sure.

I was going to say that the obvious solution is to not play -- to buy and hold based on fundamental value, and specifically seek out promising but undervalued stocks -- but then, that solution doesn't offer the kind of growth that VC wants, or that a Keynsian beauty contest offers when you win.

> The final solution to the underclass was thus implemented.

If "final solution" refers to relocating people, what term will you use if they're deliberately killed?

"Lunch break" sounds like it's paid or semi-paid; it seems a bit deceptive here. It sounds from the article like the Spanish are putting in 8-hour days, but interrupting them in the afternoon, so that instead of working 9 to 6 they work 9 to 8 or 9 to 9. Thus the streets busy until midnight, for example; this is a case of different scheduling, not lazy southerners.

"All fat with a tiny smidgen of protein" is an interesting way of describing egg yolks and olive oil. (Not saying that Helleman's is anything more than soybean oil and 3% egg solids, though.)

"Behaves like the thing in every meaningful way" needs to include nutrition -- and even then, sometimes where it came from and how it was made are also part of what it is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d'origine_contr%C3...)

Income will definitely be affected by getting on this list. See above, where tptacek says:

"More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow, becoming persona non grata with YC will force VC firms to make personnel changes."

But still, this will probably be good on balance. False accusations of this sort will certainly be something to watch out for, but now victims of real sexual harassment will have recourse.

Sounds like C64 emulation isn't particularly robust or mature. For the opposite extreme of things, look at something like DOSBox or ZSNES.

Rory Stewart, _The Prince of the Marshes_. It's about general dysfunction in the early Iraq War, but it's also about the meaning of life. Perhaps it's just how Stewart writes? (His _The Places In Between_ is also well worth reading, but is much better known.)

Tony Horwitz, all works -- especially _Baghdad Without a Map_ (which will leave you with a much healthier view of the modern Middle East) and _Confederates in the Attic_ (a dress-rehearsal for the Age of Trump?).

Pearl Buck, _Sons_. (Best to read _The Good Earth_ first, but you've probably already read it.) I doubt it's a very accurate depiction of China, and the characters' morality is hair-raising (while the narrator is so far off the deep end that he/she is impossible to take seriously); but it's a memorable adventure story firmly grounded in the plausible, and it dramatizes some important lessons about the dangers that can afflict families and middle age.

Not a bad idea -- I've only read his book on the formerly-Ottoman world (_Eastward to Tartary_, I think), but this sounds worth looking up.

Have you come across Tony Horwitz? He's goofier than Kaplan, but his writing scratches the same itch.

(Sorry for the late response!)

"Better" here just involves the assumptions that pain is worse than not pain, and that human life is intrinsically valuable. I'm fine with making both assumptions -- especially since I've read Timothy Snyder's _Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning_, which explores the thought of the most famous proponent of the mankind-needs-more-Darwinian-selection-pressure alternative. "I disagree with Hitler" isn't exactly compelling evidence for "my opinions are fundamentally subjective."

(I'm also of the opinion that the earth isn't flat, and that both sides of a contradiction can't be true. In those cases, too, I'm comfortable with saying that those who disagree with me are wrong -- and in uninteresting ways, too.)