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There'a definitely a coordinated attack on Uber going in at the moment. Who is behind it and why, I have no idea. But I think I'm going to disregard any new "Uber is eeeevil" articles which just happen to pop up.

Hard to imagine a non-calculus based nuclear engineering program.

Sure, whatever, because of one mid-level manager being a perv?

Bayesian statistics is a fairly sensible approach to certain types of statistical problems, so I'm not sure why its proponents always seem to talk about it as if they're pushing some new religious movement with a lot of nudity, or Amway.

Especially since we have absolutely nothing to go on, in this case, except the word of one disgruntled former employee.

Maybe it's all true, maybe it's totally made up, maybe it's basically true but exaggerated and missing important information. We don't know, but plenty of people are happy to pile on.

Yeah, sounds reasonable.

Why draw the line there? Because hard drugs so directly impair the mind.

The "Stalinism" isn't so much about the actual soda, but more about the attitude that the government should have the power to just step in and ban whatever the hell someone has decided is a bad idea this week. Once you move from the presumption of freedom to the presumption that anything that might have negative consequences should be banned, it's hard to get back.

Personally I believe that whatever consenting adults get up to is none of the government's business, whether it's weird butt stuff or selling each other unlimited quantities of sugary water. If you're going to ban one, why not ban the other? They're both enjoyable to certain people and both have negative public health consequences.

It's funny because the people most likely to trust the government with the power to ban junk food are the ones least likely to trust the government to can mind-altering drugs.

A shitload of crimes are committed, and most criminals are pretty stupid.

When I was growing up, Michael Jackson was the guy who did boring versions of Weird Al songs. I loved "Fat" and hated "Bad" for being just like it except not funny.

To this day I still don't like Michael Jackson, probably because of that. Why just have a good tune when you can have a good tune and be funny?

Well, most people arrested are guilty anyway, statistically. People get too many ideas about the legal system from TV shows, and then when reality doesn't match their TV shows they assume it's reality that's fucked.

Or people don't like living on top of one another.

Give me a nice half-acre and a self-driving car to get me where I need to go.

Flight safety videos will probably still be shown on overhead monitors. Some kind of safety announcement is compulsory, and the video is a good branding opportunity.

I find that VX one pretty grating though, and will probably be seen as embarrassingly 2010s in a few years time. Some of the Air New Zealand ones are good though.

No actual numbers. After registration fees, fuel taxes, et cetera, to what extent are drivers actually being subsidised?

Let us assume that roads need to exist anyway.

I'm not convinced the baseline is that low, I think most middle class people still have discomfort or inconvenience which could be removed.

For instance I now sit in a comfy chair at home, but when I fly somewhere I'm stuck being uncomfortable in economy.

And then there's the big one: I have to go to work, every day, whether I feel like it or not. Inconvenient!

> Material things do not make people happy, at all.

Everybody says this, all the time. I would like to propose the controversial theory that actually material things do make people happy, at least within certain constraints.

When I was younger I had shitty cheap material things which made me unhappy. Now I have better stuff which makes me happier.

I used to have a shitty unairconditioned apartment. That made me unhappy. Now I have an apartment whose temperature isn't a problem.

I used to have cheap furniture, which was uncomfortable, and that made me unhappy. Now I have better furniture which is comfortable, I am happier.

I used to have a cheap unreliable car, which broke down and made me unhappy. Now I have a reliable, comfortable car I have no reason to be unhappy.

If you're a baseline-unhappy person (as I suspect the author is) then material goods are unlikely to improve your unhappiness. But I'm a baseline fairly happy person, I don't get unhappy unless there's a specific reason, like discomfort or inconvenience. Sensible acquisition of material goods can remove discomfort and inconvenience, thus making you happy.

There's a word for people who can't refrain from sharing their political opinions with their friends: they're called prats.

Unfortunately facebook in its current implementation seems hellbent on encouraging people to be prats.

Sonetimes the dates are inaccurate, but I've always been impressed by the ability of milk to go from totally fine to weird-tasting on precisely the use-by date.

Why would I want people sharing news?

If I want to read about what's going on with the world, I'll read a news site. If I want to know what's going on with my friends' lives, I'll read facebook.

A way I'd prefer: quit letting people share news on facebook.

Heck, let's go back to text-only status updates and I can go back to reading what my acquaintances are eating. That would be much more pleasant than today's facebook.

My code also crashes two times out of five.

Trump has been specifically talking about the countries which fail to spend the 2% of GDP on military which is (apparently) mandated by the treaty. The UK is fine in this regard (along with only four other NATO powers though).

President Trump isn't really interested in dismantling NATO, just in making sure that the US doesn't have to continue to shoulder quite such a large fraction of the costs.

You're right, the major war prior to the Falklands was Vietnam, and the British didn't help out in that one, so I guess there was no reason the US felt obliged to help out a decade later in the Falklands.

I guess it really depends on US-Argentina relations, and also whether the UK looks like they actually need any help.

The US could at least help out covertly. "Whoops, the entire Argentinian Navy just exploded at once! I guess the British must have more submarines down there than we thought!"

Realistically from what I've read, Argentina is so militarily depleted nowadays, and the UK has learned so much from the previous war, that Argentina couldn't even win a war against the British forces garrisoned in the Falklands, let alone the reinforcements. There is no chance of a serious war... although when I went to Argentina last year I found there's still freaking road signs by the side of the road with a map of the Falklands and proclaiming "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" (or whatever the correct Spanish is)

One of the main goals of the RN's aircraft carrier program is presumably to help out in any Falklands War II, and the US stayed out of it last time (for reasons I've never understood -- wtf Ronnie?)

It's happening already, but with pretty limited success. Voat is reddit for people driven off reddit. Gab is twitter for people driven off twitter. Neither of these is a roaring success just yet, but they're better positioned than the average clone.

In general I don't think the splitters are ever likely to gain half the market share of the original because 99% of people do not care for this kind of thing at all.

Leaving a small pool of people who have all those things, and are still desperate, due to overwhelming personality flaws.

True, but on the other hand people seem to believe their own opinions are "objective truth" more often than is justified.

This being the case, perhaps it's a nice idea to err on the other side for a change.

High barriers to entry to a dating app would seem to select for desperation.

Are you conflating "alt right" with "white nationalist"? If so you're either falling victim to, or participating in, a propaganda campaign designed to discredit all opposition by conflating it with its least savoury elements. You can't just go around calling everyone you don't like a "white nationalist", that's a term with a specific meaning. It's like saying "all leftists are communists".

That's motte-and-bailey.

Since "feminism" has no actual fixed definition, people arguing about it will define it as they see fit at any moment. When feminism is under attack, its defenders will retreat to a safely defensible position like "feminism is about equal treatment if the sexes". Once the attack has gone away, they will expand the scope of "feminism" considerably to encompass far less sensible and uncontroversial positions.

The "feminism" which gets attacked is not the same "feminism" that gets defended, making the word useless in an argument. Like "racism" the word "feminism" has become so overloaded that it no longer has any use in actual communication.