lopmotr

> more frequent & severe

If you don't quantify that, it's meaningless in relation to somebody's life expectancy.

There's not much solid about taxonomy of animals. Nature doesn't really have clearly defined classes, just rough clusters of similar organisms. It's the humans that like classifying things because it's easier for us to think about them and make predictions when we see them as classes rather than as individuals or even the whole global ecosystem as a single integrated super-organism. The more common features we can find in a class, the less thinking we have to do but it's OK if there are exceptions as long as it's not so many that it makes the classes useless.

I think you need data to support that 50% claim. Otherwise you could just as easily claim the other 50% thinks the same way about fascism. Maybe it's just extremists you're looking at.

"improvement"? The fact that you don't seem to see your own bias shows that you might be part of the "no common ground" problem. Are you willing to accept that changes which you see as making things worse might actually be improvements? Even changes favored by that person you spoke with?

They will be rewarded. It's half the tax of petrol vehicles and the fuels is also much cheaper on top of that.

Isn't the whole argument for public transport that it has lower CO2 emissions per passenger-mile than private cars? Electric cars in a country with a high proportion of electricity generated renewably (24% and rising) could be better than diesel busses.

New Zealand collects road tax on diesel vehicles using odometer readings. It generally works for heavy commercial vehicles where the owners have more to lose risking fraud but I know private vehicle owners who would wind back or disconnect their odometer to avoid the tax.

It's probably my different perspective not being an American. I haven't read those textbooks he mentions and all I hear about Indians is these blogs which present the same general picture. I understand now that Americans will have been exposed to different material at school so this could appear as a novel viewpoint.

The main protagonists are shown to have negative views of the immigrants. The Indians are presented as racists and judging people on superficial characteristics. That's probably the author's feelings being projected onto the subjects of his story. Yes, it makes it wrong if it's more historical imagination.

I guess I'm coming from a foreigner's perspective where I never read any of that writing from the pilgrim's perspective. All I see about Indians presents them as noble savages.

> denying the President-Elect after an election.

The official process is chugging along properly just as it always has. We have to wait till December for the Electoral College to make a decision. Why? Why don't they just read the news and decide based on that to appease the masses? Because robust processes aren't robust if you skip them!

Plenty of people denies the last president-elect after that election too. But the system kept on working because it's stable.

Fewer things to remember is important because humans are useless at that. Hardly anyone will have an intuition for how much pressure a kg/cm^2 is as well as a N/cm^2 and a N/mm^2 and a kg/mm^2 and a kg/m^2 and PSI and a kPa ...

While they're dying from genetic manipulation, they'll be surviving more diseases, car crashes, etc. The net safety will surely be better for your kids' and grandkids' generations than your own.

By exclusionary, I mean it excludes people, not words.

But if ñ is so important, then so are capital letters because "Olive" is a person and "olive" is a fruit. Imagine typing English without capital letters.

Oh sure. I think it's important too. Just that people misuse it which is probably why they get locked.

Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that.

I run a small forum and occasionally somebody will post a new question on an old thread that's about the same topic. My two theories are that either they searched, ended up on that thread, then just replied because it was in front of them, or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

I don't see the problem with "omg me too!" on an old thread as long as "omg me too!" is acceptable on a new one.

You have to draw solid regions, not an outline.

If it's going to be cheaper, why does it need government support? Won't industry just do it to be more competitive on its own? Or perhaps there's some kind of first mover/network effect/chicken and egg problem that the free market can't surmount on its own?

Absolutely. It's too late? For what? Temperature has already risen a little so obviously you can't change the past. Too late for some vague "catastrophe" is the implication. But science already tells us it won't be extinction, and the best estimate they have (that I've seen) is as many deaths per year in 2100 due to warming as we currently have due to car crashes. So it might be no big deal or it might be something nobody knows. Just like the future always is.

I've seen this fantasy before but it neglects the secondary effect that will be the parties adapting their campaigns and policies so they still each win about half the time anyway, just like they always have. It won't somehow turn the US into a one-party system. The party with the easy lead will spend less and be less good until their lead is not so easy anymore.

Incredible. I did the same thing decades ago and got the same diagonal lines. I couldn't work out what was going wrong.

Everyone uses Latin script because too much depends on it. Even "https" and ".dk".

Localized scripts are exclusionary to everyone else who has no hope of typing them or even identifying them in a unicode table to copy and paste.

A funny situation happens in China where even the most computer illiterate old person can type latin letters on a PC with enough patience just by matching appearance to their keyboard, but many old people are utterly blocked from typing Chinese characters because that requires learning a special input method which is almost a whole nother language itself. Before smartphones, they had to write them with a stylus on a writing tablet to get around this problem.

Half the English alphabet is excluded from domain names too. When are we getting capital letters? Let's just tolerate never having them and not worry, same as those other languages' odd letters. ExpertSexChange.com and PenisLand.net could use them.

Not death of the PC! Just the presence of more numerous and cheaper smartphones. They're superior to PCs for most people but not for everyone.

The suddenness is a problem because there isn't enough time to adapt? Implying that we'll adapt to climate change? Watch out for heresy there ;)

But asteroid or comet impacts. Comets in particular can come so fast and undetectably that we won't have time to react. We could prevent a comet impact if a few humans decided to build such a defense system, and we might be wiped out if those few humans decide not to do it. Sounds equivalent to nuclear war.

I generally agree with all you've said there. I guess I have so much personal experience with non-sexism prejudice in all kinds of ways that I don't really care about the plight of women as much. It seems like everyone gets it. If someone asks as question on StackOverflow, I judge them for having a default avatar or username. I judge them for having a teenage writing style. If someone writes in 3rd person or 1st person, you can judge them in either direction depending on whether other signals are consistent with it. I try to combat that in myself and treat everyone fairly, but ways to judge people are just overwhelming even without knowing their sex. You get judged by the way you walk, the way to look at people, the timing of your speaking, your age, your clothes, everything. You might say those features aren't innate and people can change them, but it can be incredibly hard for some because they're actually signals of some underlying qualities and if you don't have those qualities, you're struggling to fake the signals which is risky and difficult.

I think women may actually get a better deal overall because so many men are trying not to be sexist that they treat them well, giving them a free pass on all those other judgable signals. Men might not even understand that a woman is revealing her inadequacy by wearing the "wrong" clothes, while they'll openly laugh at a man exhibiting "wrong" behavior.

I agree. If the US doesn't like tax havens, then the US can tax the local operations of companies that are incorporated there. No need for any hand wringing. Or maybe the US does like tax havens because they kind of keep the actual operations and money in the US which helps the economy despite a lack of tax.

We'd have to start by admitting that almost nobody has the faintest clue about ethics beyond simply having been brainwashed into believing whatever arbitrary ethics they believe. Just look at the nonsense and disagreement about abortion. There are so many arbitrary standards people use to advocate for allowing or forbidding abortions at various ages. In my country, they recently adjusted the legal age by a few weeks, from one arbitrary number to anther arbitrary number. Curiously, I've only met one person who advocated for "post-partum" abortion. I think most people simply refuse to allow themselves to consider that because they aren't making any attempt at being ethical and only want to reinforce their own culture or demonstrate to their peers that they're "good" people.

How is that something to be sad about? In case your kids miss out and feel jealous? Surely if yours kids have only an average intelligence, you'll still be happy for them despite the fact that they probably can't achieve as much success as their most successful peers in any intellectual field.

Your attitude sounds like my Dad's attitude of being sad that my generation doesn't believe in God anymore or his own Dad's unhappiness at him for not being a proper loyal soldier in the Navy. It's tempting to believe that our own generation has the ultimate peak of right behavior and any change is for the worse, but it's also arrogant and repeatedly proven to be wrong.

Caring isn't fundamentally good or right. It just happens to be a feeling that humans have. We probably have it because it gives our species some advantage over other species. It might be that a more "right" way of behaving is aggressive eugenics to create better life for future humans or even a future species. Animals often do this by killing the runt of their litter or hen-pecking each other to death.

Of course, otherwise those fancy cameras would have no market and disappear. Just like film is pretty much completely gone now, as are glass plate cameras. The truly inferior tech disappears and what's left fits some extreme niche where it surpasses the cheap consumer stuff in some way. There are things you can do with a PC that you can't with a smartphone too.