jajag

Also referenced in this article posted a few days back: "War is still a racket" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990298

Gut bacteria have beneficial effects, such as the ability to break down foods which would otherwise remain indigestible. If birds and bats have reduced gut microbiomes then it suggests they have a reduced ability to digest certain foodstuffs.

Also: the weight loss referred to is the reduction in gut bacteria mass.

So what's the quid pro quo? What do birds and bats loose (apart from weight) by having reduced gut microbiomes?

Very valid point.

But it's also how perfectly valid discussions can be completely shut down - certainly very corrosive.

But isn't the whole "Russian disinformation" thing in turn a way of discrediting information? Orwell was writing about this 80 years ago, it's never seemed more relevant.

Previous discussion on the possibility (mentioned in the article) that an advanced industrial civilization existed on Earth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840320

There's certainly evidence of bias in climate science, but if anything it's been towards understating the effect [1]

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...

If there is anything more to UFOs than just mass hysteria and wishful thinking, then I've always thought it much more likely that they are from a previous industrial civilization here on earth than being extraterrestrial - the PETM from 56 million years ago would be a good candidate for their home time.

It's true of a lot of ancient sites; Newgrange in Ireland is essentially a modern reconstruction, complete with a reinforced concrete substructure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange#Modern_conservation,...

The article mentions Project Vesta which was discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403570

Manual is always an option, but that's not my point. I've automated plenty of things in my life and know only too well that the task of automating a task is often a major task in its own right.

To paraphrase a famous quote on regular expressions:

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll automate.' Now they have two problems."

From the start of the AMA: "the public defender ... didn’t have time or the resources to prove my innocence". The defence isn't supposed to have to prove anything, that's the job of the prosecution - but what surprises me even more is that no-one seems to have picked up on that point. Suggestion for US readers - it's not a justice system if it imprisons innocence people at an overly high rate.

I totally agree with you - there's nothing wrong with bias, and it's completely unavoidable in the modern media context. News media needs to be honest about its biases, whilst still upholding standards of reporting & journalism.

That's an unachievable ideal, particularly and especially for complex stories (e.g. just about any political story) where there are too many facts to report, to much backstory to fill in, and an editor has to make a decision about what to leave in and what to omit.

I find the idea that there can be an unbiased news source deeply problematic. All reporting of an event has to be from a perspective, and has to make decisions about what to report, what to leave out; what to emphasise, what to play down. An honest news source should be one that is one that is honest about its own biases.

Related article in the same issue: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/americas-drift-to...

The article itself is very well written - intimate and sensuous.

Judge the content not the source.

In Russian, use Google translate.

I'm currently learning Spanish, and have to say that I don't find noun gender to be a huge problem, as generally (apart from some exceptions) if it ends in 'a' then it's feminine, and if 'o' then masculine. Compare that to German, which has no general and easy mnemonic for guessing a noun's gender, adds an additional gender, has a grammatical system where the article attached to a noun changes to that of another gender depending on case, and then to top it all off has no standard rule for creating a plural from the noun singular...

Ok, what counts as the "left" in the US and most European countries promoted globalization - the unreconstituted hard left, sure, not so much.

I agree with you that this is a consumption problem, but globalization is what has driven consumption for the past 30 years.

True, the right has been in outright denial of the facts, but the left has also been in denial about the contribution its policies have to the problem - they after all have been the cheerleaders for globalisation. No one is going to come out of this smelling of roses.

A lot of that air pollution is emitted producing products for the US & European markets.

God forbid that voters have a say!

All true - and yet this parliament seems remarkably reluctant to allow the electorate the opportunity to correct this state of affairs.

Well, (a) it's a hell of a lot faster than it has been for most of my life, and (b) it means that in my lifetime, a lot of the places I know & love will be seriously affected by - if not completely lost to - sea level rise.

I get the sense you don't live anywhere near the coast.

But things do move that quickly. Current projections [1] have global sea levels rising from anything between 0.3m and 2.4m by the end of the century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise