gelert

While I agree the leap to linking geopolitics to LibreOffice's success is a stretch you are misrepresenting the American position.

The President of the United states, its commander in chief, explicitly did not rule out military action when discussing his desire to bring Greenland and the Panama canal under direct American control. The rhetoric of making Canada the "51st state" while less explicit a threat is still one. Greenlanders, Panamanians and Canadians all clearly see these as threats.

The Times is a UK newspaper with a British audience. I agree the HN title is disingenuous though.

Blizzard could make their own second hand hearthstone marketplace if they wanted to. NFTs don't create that possibility. Blizzard judged that it's more profitable for them to be the sole sellers of cards at their price. While NFTs would enable secondary markets in hearthstone cards to exist outside of Blizzard's ecosystem Blizzard doesn't want you out of their ecosystem.

Furthermore even if they introduced something like that I highly doubt they'd use "some public blockchain" the risks from that would outweigh the benefits - they'd just make their own infrastructure internally.

I don't see a way in which NFTs solve a problem that can't already be solved more simply. After all valve secondary markets for games like TF2 have existed for more than a decade without needing NFTs.

Early studies for new therapies are often much more promising than the therapy actually turns out to be once deployed on a mass scale. I absolutely agree that psychedelics should be explored as a medication of choice but some promising early studies don't mean that antidepressants like SSRIs no longer have a place or that the early promise will prove out in the long term.

I think the argument thrown_22 is making is that Americans would be less worried if it was Vine instead of TikTok because Vine is made in America. Tiktok is a globally relevant social network not only not from America but from what is increasingly seen as America's rival.

The argument isn't inputting on the value/harm done by the social network but rather the perception of that value/harm which is influenced by the sense that TikTok is foreign in a way Vine was not.

Speaking from the UK I have to say that is insane. Like all animals, humans included, cats belong outdoors and to deprive them of their natural rhythms is cruel.

I agree that we need to think about how to nurture bird populations but keeping cats pent up indoors is wrong - and is reflected by how much worse they behave when that is done.

Have you ever kept a log of the food you eat in a day? Admittedly I come at this from a very different perspective being obese, and having been much more obese in the past, but actively logging my food and retrospectively calculating calories gave me a much better sense of how much I was actually eating.

When you've recorded some data on that it would be productive to calculate your basal metabolic rate, which are the calories your body uses on the daily (so any exercise adds on to that). Comparing those two figures might be productive.

Of course there may be genetic factors going on but perception is so powerful it's the first thing I'd question

What's toxic to democracy is politicians lying, and then telling us that p;ointing out their moments of hypocrisy is what's doing the real damage. Describing reality is never bad.

Congratulations on realising that successful diseases reflect their environments and times in human history.

Were you alive during the Black Death I imagine you'd be talking about how, though you're no denier, it's the fault of people using ships to trade.

An interesting interview, it's nice to see a little more substance behind the decision.I also appreciate that the interviewer did ask some of the sterner questions e.g. Facebook throwing money away from it's business

Maybe it's just the years of science fiction talking but I can't help but see this in a dystopian light. I don't want my social world to be created by"Meta". I want to use social media, and the internet more generally, as tools which enrich my life but don't dominate it. Directly opposite to how Zuckerberg pitches "Meta" in this interview.

My experience of the pandemic has taught me the primacy of physical, human, interaction. A VR headset isn't going to bridge that digital void. What's more, the internet is already addictive enough, already threatening those interactions I value. I recently read the short story "The machine stops" by E.M. Forster (available at http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html ), and I can't help but feel Facebook is building towards the dystopia it presents.

I'm deeply uncomfortable with the vast scope of these ambitions. I'm lucky enough to be informed and privileged enough I can choose to ditch these companies but I worry for the many who can't.

As stated in the BBC article it's not banning those sexual acts, it's banning depictions (e.g. porn of them). And it's banning these ones in particular because they are considered by the UK Gov to be life threatening.

So it's not about freedom of expression because it's about selling porn. And the gov has a justification as to why these 2 acts because it believes they're dangerous (note they also banned strangulation but that didn't get talked about because few people disagree that strangling someone for pleasure is dangerous).

I like "Climate Catastrophe" more than "Climate Crisis" which is the term in vogue in left wing circles here in Britain. But I think I still prefer Climate Change because to me the other terms fail to relate that what's happened is we've hijacked earth's systems and it's changing in response.

For me, crisis and catastrophe are too immediate and too direct. What's insidious about the climate is how diffuse and difficult to comprehend it is. Additionally, while I do expect a lot of peoples lives to get more difficult in the coming decades (at least re: weather) it is by no means the end of the world, excepting of course island communities and countries for whom it literally is. That I am happy to call a crisis.

However, people in many countries around the globe are having fewer children and not due to reaching "subsistence level". Some of the biggest impacts in birth rates are education, particularly for women, and birth control, both things are the product of technology raising living standards. Birth rates are not declining today because of Malthusian cycles.

There is a difference between not celebrating and erasing. I agree with some of what you say here but I think asserting that not naming a telescope after somebody is erasing them from history is an unsupported leap - most people don't get their names on space telescopes and we don't think of them as having been erased.

To offer a more pessimistic case this was true for Google, whose Stadia product flopped, and it was true for Amazon, whose video games utterly failed to take off. Currently something like Microsoft gamepass is a far better choice if you want to subscribe and play videogames.

On another note, Netflix has experimented with videogames before using Telltale "choose your own adventure" style games and fitting them into their existing product. They also did a similar thing with Bandersnatch a choose your own adventure from the film side. So I think with the demise of telltale netflix might just be bringing that in house rather than trying to offer a wholesale alternative to existing videogame providers.

Well, one of the big risks of plastics are the hormonal effects which are still little understood. There are serious reasons to remove most plastics from our day-to-day lives which makes reclaiming/recycling existing plastics less desirable - we should be removing them.

No one here is questioning how hot the Earth is, the issue is sustainably accessing it in countries that are less geologically active.

This is a good link to start exploring the issue:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of...

Low tech magazine has a very definite agenda but I've found their writing really informative and I think they do a good job in raising how enormous an issue this really is.

I think the reply is meant to be a critique of the above comment.

They assumed that the first commentator was American, so said that given America entirely consists of land inhabited by displaced peoples (American Indians) that it's hypocritical to criticise Israel, which partially consists of that kind of land, for the same injustice.

I agree that removing scenes or adding product placement into existing works of art is very troubling but I'm not sure I would equate that to adding disclaimers to the start of a film. In my mind it's like an age rating - it's additional information which gives someone the information they need to decide if a film is appropriate for them or their family.

Instead Spain became a fascist power with close ties to Berlin. Hardly less of a threat to representative democracy. Spain was a dictatorship until 1970.

Collectivism might have also produced tyranny but it's not a good thing that a fascist won.

Basic nutrition, sleep and exercise aren't being fanatical about one's health. These are quite simple things which are nonetheless extremely difficult to learn if your childhood didn't set you up for those things (speaking from experience here). Meanwhile a "miracle cure" would be orders of magnitude more impactful I agree however it is many orders of magnitude less likely to occur. Therefore, I think you're wrong. In addition, I disagree with how you're framing these things as chores and purely in relation to life extension, these things improve quality of life and are good things to spend part of your life doing.

An interesting article, though note the easy conflation of Jewishness with Israelis. Being Jewish ≠ being Israeli and for many people they are quite distinct identities. Indeed, Israeli identity can be quite anti victimhood.

While I would hesitate to call the conflation anti-semitic it is at minimum quite misleading - and also a gross overgeneralisation of Jewish identity.

Unfortunately Epic's store on PC is being run at a loss in order to win market share and not expected to be profitable for another 2-5 years. So that wouldn't be a great comparison. The cut they take for their store is 12% but compared to other launchers on PC they provide appreciably worse features.

This is also a thing in London where certain views towards St Pauls Cathedral are protected.

An aspect of the low turnout in these referendums is Peurto Ricans choosing to boycott them. In this case, they don't necessarily mean that there is a lack of engagement.

The expression "Bank Holiday" is actually really common in the UK - I would expect most brits to know it. We use it to refer to a public holiday in which the banks are closed, there are quite a few every year. It has very positive connotations here.

I would have to say that 'derided by scholars' is a bit much. Most historians who are aware of the luddites in any detail would agree with this take. While Luddites were derided in the past since around the 1930s and works like Herbert Butterfield's the Whig interpretation of History Historians have been very wary of ideas like 'the march of history' and luddites are certainly presented within the scholarship as an example where views have changed away from that kind of narrative.

I'm not sure I'd class it as a parody but in case you haven't seen it Red Dwarf is a brilliant sci-fi comedy from the BBC in the mid-90s. It declines a little as seasons go on but the first few seasons are well worth a watch for a sci-fi fan.

Why do you believe that neural networks being better at chess would make it more boring? Genuinely I just don't follow the logic.