jabretti

Not the OP but to me a non-annoying philosopher would be someone like Russell, Quine or Dennett.

A good philosopher takes the time to define terms, explain the problem clearly, explain other possible views on the matter in a fair and accurate way, then explain their own view as clearly as possible, and then ideally pre-emptively discuss several possible objections or misunderstandings. A good philosopher understands that the subject matter at hand is already very difficult, and therefore the philosopher has an obligation to be clear.

Is it really right to call him a philosopher? I would more fairly consider him a "writer", in the vein of (though nothing like) a GK Chesterton -- capable of opining on philosophical topics but with none of the rigour or fairness expected of an actual philosopher.

I will believe it when I see it.

Assuming that some day I have a pressing need to travel from Bakersfield to Fresno, that is, because as I understand it there's still no commitment to construct the other parts. Train advocates assume that once the middle part is built the rest will inevitably follow, while train skeptics are looking forward to mocking the puny ridership numbers on the nowhere-to-nowhere line and saying "I told you so".

All these comparisons are unfair, because Japan had the good fortune to be bombed into oblivion in the 1940s, enabling them to start with a more or less clean sheet and 20th century technology.

In western cities (apart from Germany, also conveniently bombed) our train systems are stuck compensating for bad decisions made in the 1880s, and then the further bad decisions made in every subsequent decade to ameliorate those bad decisions. It's the physical equivalent of maintaining 150 year old legacy code written in Linear A (if you will pardon the mixed metaphor) except that you can't just throw it out and start again because you'd have to demolish tens of thousands of houses.

Jepthah made a vow to sacrifice whoever walked out of his front door first when he returned home; the fact that it's his daughter is portrayed as a horrible twist (I guess he was hoping to sacrifice a servant or something? How did this guy not see it coming? Though I just read another interpretation, that he expected it to be one of his animals) and the approval or disapproval of God is not recorded, nor is whether he

The point of the story seems to be that you shouldn't go round making stupid oaths, not that you should sacrifice your children.

This is naive. A bushfire is huge, hot, and fast-moving, consuming entire trees in seconds. Your mains-pressure water sprinkler will not deter an onrushing wall of flame in the least... and worse, an automated system would take water away from where it's needed.

You could probably sell a lot in Germany too. Germans are crazy about analysing their own feces.

It seems to me more like they're just trying to build firefighting drones.

It's not clear to me that they have any actual insight into how said drones might help, or how firefighting is done at the moment.

People tend to be quite capable of judging someone else's social class at a glance, though, or at least after a few words have been spoken. Racial cues are a pretty small part of it.

That sounds like a city-dweller's perspective.

Sure, I would almost certainly be dead, but life on Earth would continue, our species would continue, and our civilisation would continue (albeit with some major setbacks).

Besides, I don't think anyone's nuclear war plan is actually to destroy every major to semi-major city on Earth. In a realistic 1980s nuclear war, a lot of nukes would be targeted at military bases and the like. Plenty of others would destroy every major city in the US and USSR, plus each country's nuclear-armed allies. Maybe we here in Australia would get a nuke or two out of spite. But is anyone going to bother to nuke South America?

Is maximising diversity of ideas really the goal? Good ideas are worth a lot, bad ideas have zero value or negative value.

Diversity of ideas can be a good thing, but it can also mean diluting good ideas with ones that are valueless or actively harmful.

In my view it's an economic issue, not a technological one. If as much money had been spent on space travel as has been spent on computers in the last fifty years then we'd have cities on the moon, no problem. But "we" didn't, because it made no economic sense -- or at least there's a vast technological gulf we need to breach before it starts to make economic sense. Money to develop computers came from the pockets of individuals and companies because they wanted computers -- money for space travel came from government departments for reasons unclear even to themselves.

If progress in space travel seems slow, remember that almost all of the money going into it is spent by a single organisation whose budget is less than 10% of Apple's revenue.

I like to think that there is a tidally locked planet somewhere out there whose inhabitants like to argue about whether life could ever evolve on a rotating planet.

"I mean, it would be so unstable! Even with a thick atmosphere, temperatures at one point would fluctuate by tens of degrees, hundreds of times a year! Plants would be unable to photosynthesise for half the time! Animals would be blinded!"

Shark attacks are no more non-news than at least 80% of the crap that fills media outlets, and it's not the least bit suspicious. Shark attacks are lurid and scary and human attention is notoriously poorly distributed.

Yesterday, President Trump gave a speech about his trip to Asia, and 90% of the headlines were about the fact that he drank water during it.

Verifucation was intended as a way of distinguishing the actual profiles of famous people from fake ones. If twitter has now decided that they can dis-verify people for saying things they don't like, then twitter is implicitly endorsing the views of anyone who still has the check mark. So, good luck with that.

Also, contra this article, Richard Spencer, whatever his flaws may be, is not a neo-Nazi. He's certainly a white nationalist, and may possibly be a white supremacist, but he's not a neo-Nazi, and people really should stop trying to use these terms interchangeably.

Yep, that's an example of what a social media based propaganda campaign looks like in the US.

Thankfully, though, there are very important differences to what it looks like in China. Correct the Record has only the resources of one political party, not the entire government, and it exists in opposition to a bunch of equally well funded forces from the other party. You're free to call CTR out on their bullshit, whereas calling the CCP out on its bullshit can easily lead to prison camp or death.

In the US there are meme wars, but in China there are none -- just a boot stamping on the face of a Pepe forever.

Are you suggesting that the government causes shark attacks? Do they control the sharks, or just have agents to push the swimmers into their jaws?

Seriously though, democratic governments are much less good at propaganda operations than despotic ones, not necessarily because the people involved are much more honest on an individual level, but just because democratically elected governments are never really in all that much agreement about what sort of propaganda ought to be spread. The genius of democracy is that if you keep the people in power constantly fighting with each other they don't have as much time left over to screw the rest of us.

So although "whatabout the US?" is inevitably the top comment on every thread about the evils of China, I think that just sometimes we ought to actually pay attention to China qua China.