drzaiusapelord

Yep this. RT is a dishonest propaganda outlet.

Nearly everyone wears cotton or synthetics, no one "needs" wool the same way you don't need the unique light a whale oil lamp gives. These are, again, vanities for the vain at the cost of animal suffering. Wool is also very expensive and the environmental cost of raising all these animals outweighs the biodegradable benefits.

Except in reality, leather is more or less a fast fashion item that comes and goes. People buy them and toss them as their fashion tastes dictate, again, its not the 17th century. Its very rare to have a leather coat you wear daily for decades. Even in poorer countries is expensive to get and treated mostly like a vanity item. Alternative fabrics and materials work just as well and they both end up in a landfill after a few years anyway. Also the leather industry is abusive and exploitative towards workers and exposes some of the most vulnerable people to carcinogens and poisons needed to "work" leather. Is your vanity item worth all this suffering?

In horseback riding combat, the horse needs to be strong, not the rider. The idea that diet played a role in this and not geo-politics and military tactics is a bit out there.

Red meat being tied to masculinity is big right now (Rogan, Alex Jones, alt-right, etc) and its sad that shoddy arguments are being made like this to keep people from mindfully considering what exactly it means to raise and slaughter all these animals, some of whom are empathic and social mammals just like us. Worse, meat consumption is tied directly to cancer and heart disease. You're not going to be "strong" on chemo and its not "strong" to be dead a decade or two or three before you should because of your poor diet. Not to mention the link to obesity, that often starts in childhood, so a lifetime of being obese also isn't "strong."

Sportsball toys can be made from alternative substances the same way we don't have whale oil lamps in our homes.

Its not the 17th century anymore, we can make those things from non-animal components. Leather and lanolin are a wholly unneeded vanity and for the vain they can just do with alternatives.

Its not the 17th century anymore, we can make those things from non-animal components.

Pre-90s dial-up MUDs sound fascinating to me. Do you know of any others?

This isn't "racial bias" and has nothing do with race, but the types of music MP3 developers, who were western men, decided to use as a reference. Famously, Karlheinz Brandenburg focused on making 'Tom's Diner' sound good, which suggests the mp3 model is strongly optimized to rock music and, as others have claimed, sounds sub-optimal when encoding non-Western music.

Your comment was good until you got into an unfounded and reactionary "reverse racism" accusation.

but we're drawn to "analog warmth" for whatever reason. We see it in guitars obviously with tube amps and analog effects pedals preferred over their digital counterparts. Vinyl has that messy analog-ish sound that we find pleasing in a similar way.

Shrill low-bitrate, lower-fidelity digital sound just doesn't evoke that feeling in us. The same way no one is asking for RealMedia videos on their home theater system, but prefer film grain on video and 3D CGI to look "messy" (another analog noise characteristic). We humans love noise apparently! I guess evolution built us for a noisy and messy world and digital sound just seems off to us. We'll make an effort to get closer to analog warmth but do out best to flee digital shrill.

Which is kinda a half measure too. My body has been responding amazingly to a vegetarian diet (w/vegan flex days) and anywhere between 16-20 hours of fasting a day. I combat the horrors of factory farming and what's done to these poor animals and gain all the incredible benefits of fasting, all the while still enjoying a normal lifestyle of 2 tasty meals a day. Meat seems like this weird socially acceptable yet dangerous extravagance, a bit like smoking, to me. I'm working my way to cutting out eggs and am glad to be doing so considering all the negative outcomes other studies have revealed about egg consumption.

If you look at all the studies uncritically and average out their findings, then the safe amount of eggs, imho, per week is between zero and two.

The study of the health outcomes of egg consumption, in general, is a bit out there. A 2009 study claimed the opposite, that 7+ eggs a week increased the odds of cardiovascular disease. There's a strong anti-vegetarian pop-culture under-current right now fueled by the alt-right, keto types, and 'masculinity' experts so small single studies like these will get a lot of attention, but I'd wait for someone to try to replicate it, or at least see it as one data point in hundreds of reputable egg studies that mostly seem to contradict themselves. The egg industry is a $10bn industry and politically very well connected. Some of these studies may be influenced by that. Evolution didn't seem to design us to regularly eat the eggs of other animals and we seem poorly adapted to do so.

Fun/depressing fact: There's one caged egg laying hen for every American.

Simple machines vs complex ones I guess.

A bicycle could be passed down the generations but not an electric car. Lithium wears down, software stops being updated, parts stop being produced, etc.

That's the price you pay for feaures. Clunky wired 1970s headphones don't fit my use case which requires headphones to be compact and wireless. The same way my electric car outperforms a super-serviceable Model T.

I remember that era pretty fondly and I don't ever recall just typing in random URLs, except maybe jokey ones like sex.com or fuck.com for kicks. We had Yahoo's search engine at the time and worked well enough. And to a lesser extent Lycos/Hotbot/Inktomi/DMOZ. The pre-Google web was pretty interesting and a bit more sophisticated than gets credit today. I also feel you were less likely to discover retailers on the web randomly. You'd more than likely hear about them first on the news or from friends and go from there. I don't think it was common to just discover some random e-tailer like we do today, put in our credit card, and expect the package in a couple days. You learned about Amazon from 60 minutes or your friend who subscribed to Wired magazine or the guy at the software store, not from a search engine.

I think the whole pets.com and travel.com is just the usual marketing logic at work and not really related to the limitation of search engines. Its just shady marketing tricks, a bit like how we see the .biz and other gimmicky tlds today.

I actually have this very TV and I think the smart TV aspects are pretty good, or at least passable, and the smart remote is very nicely engineered. I am sort of a snob with this stuff and just decided to spring for the AppleTV to control everything and to not be at the beck and call of what Samsung thinks is appropriate today especially in terms of ads and interfaces. I love the posh feeling of the Apple UI and it just feels so much more premium to me and cutting edge. With Samsung I feel like I'm in "Android world" where anything goes and no one really cares about polish too much as much as shipping the app and checking off a list of requirements. QA, performance, etc always feel so much worse in Smart TV land. I figure I only buy a new TV or box every 5+ years, so its okay to spend more to be happy. Over 60 months its really not a lot of money if you view it as a monthly expense.

I want it to "just work" and to me Apple seems to do that well enough. I do feel like if money was tighter I would have just toughed it out with the Samsung interface and been mostly happy. Currently, I do find myself cursing at how overly sensitive the Apple remote is and how tiny and easy it is to lose. Buying a white gel cover and setting sensitivity to low helped with this a lot, but that's just more money down the sink compared to just not being a snob and using the built-in system.

So did using computers in single user mode, but we wouldn't dare do that today. JS is, arguably, over-reaching and way too powerful for the web to be turned on by default.

The sad part is we're probably just one decent privacy bill away from making almost all of this go away. JS + an anti-regulatory political climate is the larger problem. The EU has tackled this heads on recently with its privacy laws. At a certain point, technical work-arounds just don't work and the bad commercial actors will always win unless there's regulation stop them.

1960's-1970s celebrity culture was full of young groupies sleeping with older men. Bowie, Jagger, Ozzy, etc were all doing it, and often brazen about it, so its not overly surprising that European intellectuals just wanted it formalized as they were doing it too. They felt it harmless enough for their own selfish reasons and wrapped it up into a 'autonomy of self' argument that, of course, was very self-serving. I think this is good evidence that when you stray outside of your specialty (adult ethics) then you can make some obvious mistakes in other specialized fields (children's sexuality). It probably doesn't help that you have both a strong anti-authoritarian movement and sexual revolution movement happening at the same time, which only added fuel to this fire.

Its still wrong, but anachronistically wrong a bit like how many elements the founding fathers put in which are good government but did so under the unforgivable sin of slavery. If that's too 'ancient history' for you, let's consider Brendan Eich's contribution to Firefox but also understand he is a homophobe. We can still use and appreciate Firefox's technical advancements without worrying about Eich's homophobia.

Age of consent skeptics are as old as time anyway. It rages on today in the modern libertarian party and incel culture. Anti-authoritarian and reactionary movements often become victimizers of children and women and racial/religious minorities because these groups are often protected by authority. When you remove authority, suddenly they are powerless and easy prey to whatever replaces that authority. The most obvious example are soldiers raping women in towns they take over.

Sometimes when I see people showing off these vast and intricate minecraft structures, Sims games, animal crossing towns, etc I wonder what social toll it took to get there. There's a lot of applauding people throwing healthier aspects of their lives away for game addiction on places like reddit or facebook. The story of the addict ignoring his kids, jobs, health, etc almost never gets out. It did briefly for WoW when "warcraft wives" made a fuss, but that died out, I imagine who no small PR effort from Blizzard, and now game addiction is rarely talked about, which is odd, considering so many mobile games are pretty much casinos.

I wonder if Windows ARM will be so mature that by the time these groups get x86 parity with Intel, it won't matter outside of specialized high-performance applications like gaming because we'll be migrating to ARM by then anyway.

How could this analogy work? There's no consequences to having a app with the word 'fuck' in it. Meanwhile throwing big parties obviously does to neighbors. I don't feel a lot of meatspace analogies work to things that are purely digital and can be filtered or ignored, while a houseparty with 100+ people and its noise and drunk drivers obviously cant be.

That's both inspiring and horrifying. I'm a little older than the demographic here and sometimes see myself on this somewhat stressful hamster wheel of "Okay I tired of x, now I should explore y." Then y becomes tiresome and I move on to z. Over and over. I wondered when that would end. I guess it never does. No one talks about what happens when your life becomes steady. You just get unsatisfied in other ways so then your hobbies take over. Worse, if you don't do anything like this and just become a TV/social media addict then you brain ages worse than being a productive forever learner. I think about the Buddhist idea of suffering and being forever unsatisfied here a lot and wonder if the meditation crowd has this better figured out.

Yep! They just call it in and someone picks it up. I think even if its a loss, its a form of intimidation. "See, we're the gatekeeper to your customers now, so you better sign with us so we get 20-30% of your revenue. Also we'll list your menu in our app with $1 added per item that we pocket on top of that and charge the customer a service fee on top of that."

Its an ugly business model.

>Microsoft and Google are planning to disable Flash Player in their Chromium-based web browsers, but no official word has been given as to when this will happen.

So you have two copies of flash on your Win10 computer. One is an OS library that you can see a bit of in the control panel. This is what Microsoft is removing with this update. The other is a containerized copy that Chrome and Edge ships with. That copy isn't going away until MS and Google say so, and if their metrics say there's a lot of flash use, then its going to stay for a while, maybe forever as a whitelist-only legacy technology. Its kinda this already, but I'm guessing it could be stricter, like forcing people to go deep into a menu to activate flash instead of helpfully popping up about it.

It is! Of course we animals are standing on the shoulders of hundreds of millions of years of evolution's fine-tuning. But to see it in action like this is incredible. Or a child from ages 2 or 3 to ages 4 or 5, is night a day. At 2 or 3, they're drowning risks in the tub. At 4 or 5 they're playing mario kart with you.

Great comment! So many, at least from my reckoning online, seem to assume complex AI is just a given and we'll have it soon enough, but the reality is that these things are mostly puppets and the kinds of brains you need to come up with a clever song and dance on your own as opposed to having one carefully programmed into you is night and day. I think there's a reason we don't have mini, less capable, robots like these in our homes. We have the bodies, sorta, but we just don't have the brains.

Dancing just isn't impressive and like you say, seems a lot like a higher tech version of Disneyworld. What I want to see is one of these, on its own accord, run into a burning building and save a child. Choreography just isn't impressive outside of the 'wow' factor. Without advanced AI brains, these bodies are almost useless shells and I imagine Google getting out of this space may have had something to do with that.

Or more closer to infosec, I think, is that I bought a house and it had 'cheap' locks that anyone with 10 minutes and a lockpick can open. Sure, maybe I should have considered some harder core stuff, but in the end thats what I have and what is practical for 100 good reasons. The same way corporate IT can only be so secure. So no one is really leaving the door open, its just with enough effort you can break any lock.

Which puts this further on the attacker. The attacker can't claim that I should have nicer things and he couldn't help himself. There's way too much victim blaming in information security.

Supposedly, that retails for about $30,000.

I guess you can't out Apple apple. Apple has the culture and cultural force to sell you a laptop with ports you don't like or a weird keyboard. Part of buying an Apple product is being on a certain cutting design edge and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac.

In the PC world, the consumer space is dominated by anti-design nerdy guys who demand every port imaginable, and for good reason, and the business end is similar with their own legacy demands. Big changes in any way, be it features or lack-of are frowned upon and mocked (no wireless less space than a nomad -lame).

No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. And even then, you can just bootcamp Windows or Linux and buy the 'real' Apple you want anyway. Honestly, its a small miracle something like Apple even exits in the tech space. Its usually a race to the bottom on half-cooked features, general cheapness, and terrible UIs. Somehow Apple broke free of that and never looked back.

Ok I'm guessing this is super naive, but holy cow someone sell me a home robot. Ideally something with a good enough arm to load small things into the dishwasher, or at least unload onto a surface, open the front door, get the mail, put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks, dust/mop/broom, mow the lawn, fold towels, fold clean clothes from a basket, replace toilet paper, clean toilets, scoop out kitty poops, and maybe make the bed. God what a timesaver that would be. I'd pay small car prices for something like that.

Charles Schwab does this with voice recognition. It certainly works, but I'm guessing its cheaper to use these legacy systems.

I think one thing worth mentioning is that any hole to the outside of your home is a huge deal from a maintence perspective. Animals try to get in through the exhaust holes, the 'flashing' around them goes bad and lets in air, they clog up with dust and dirt, the louver spring holding them closed ages out and lets cold air in, animals nest in there if the louver or grill breaks or rusts, etc. Oh and if we consider things like air fryers, toaster overs, etc then you potentially have a fire situation with whatever dust or food crumbs that may get stuck in there, a bit like a dryer fire because of lint.

I think no one wants a new hole in their home unless they can't avoid it. Its a hard sell all around I'm afraid. Not to mention the DIY spirit around electric appliances. They are such wonderful marvels because we can just buy them and plug them in! We don't need a credentialed professional running tubing or cutting through our walls to install them. A competitor asking for an exhaust port will simply get eaten up by the one not asking for it.

I feel the same way. As a city kid, I always felt left out because almost everything in US culture is based on the big suburban 'American Dream' home or, less often, rural life. I remember only being able to relate with Sesame Street because, gasp, people lived in apartments and hung out on city blocks with other kids just like I did! Kids books were a mixed bag, but definitely had more city representation than TV or movies.

On a more practical and aesthetic level, drawing cobblestone streets, cozy neighborhood stores, hand carved sandstone facade apartment buildings, etc is a lot more glamourous than drawing tract suburban housing, so I can see the appeal of it aesthetically. Also from what I've read about some of these authors, they were city people as well, so they just drew what they knew. The migration of the middle class to the suburbs didn't happen until many of these authors were well retired, so if kids are reading the more classic books, they'll see a bit more city life than usual and almost exclusively NYC where so many budding creatives had access to NYC's incredible publishing industry.

Lastly, kids can't drive. So if you want a kid having an adventure where he meets various storekeeps, neighbors out running errands, friends, pet stores, schools, etc then a walkable city makes the most sense. Walkable areas are just more communal and neighborly than suburban life as well. Its more realistic if a kid goes on an adventure in a city than in the suburbs were the only practical way around is being driven around. Bikes, less so, when the nearest store is 5+ miles away and there's no bike lanes. I also imagine parents are more comfortable with books not encouraging little kids to ride bikes in the street. As a parent, my recollection is that a lot of the books exist in a weird nebulous middle ground unless they outright take place in NYC or London or Paris for narrative reasons. Kids can walk through a urban downtown area with stores and neighbors but also end up in big suburban houses on big suburban streets in the same book and without taking a bus or a cab between either. So its probably hard to really divide this into city vs suburban if we want to be fair about it. Authors will do whatever fits their narrative. The walkable city is appealing but so is the big home, so why not have both?