"American" is the correct demonym for people from the United States of American.
Fun fact, there have been a dozen other countries which were "United States of X" throughout history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_that_include...
292 karma · joined June 11, 2024
Fun fact, there have been a dozen other countries which were "United States of X" throughout history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_that_include...
That's an interesting hypothesis.
I've seen many people suggest just the opposite- pretending to have a mild disability when filling in the form so that they get the boost from companies which use recruiting software that prioritizes diversity and inclusiveness in candidate pool.
Federal contractors are explicitly required to "take affirmative action to recruit, hire, promote and retain" people with disabilities, with a target of at least 7% of their employees be from that group. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/fe...
The exact lines are a bit blurry and subjective, but this is a decent overview: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/copyrightinfo/fairuse.html
If you're charging people to watch in a movie theater, you can't pretend that's educational. But if you want to show a video in a classroom that's relevant to the coursework, it's absolutely covered under fair use.
You are allowed to read books from the library and remember what they say, and use that information to inform your own future writing or speaking or actions.
You are allowed to listen to copyrighted music and learn from it. You can even play songs from The Beatles or Metallica in your garage as training.
You absolutely do have the right to "train your brain" on copyrighted material. Copyright restricts who is allowed to publish the work, not who is allowed to consume it.
Prior to Trump it wasn't really a thing, because both parties were still following the law and maintaining a functioning democracy, so people could date across party lines and just agree-to-disagree about taxes or whatever.
European medical studies had few non-white members because their populations had few such people until recent decades.
Lots of workplace accidents or exposures have led to medical knowledge, which are massively disproportionately male.
That is not a crime.
Uploading/distributing/broadcasting a song without copyright permission to do so, might conditionally be a crime, if that usage does not fall within "Fair Use" such as for education, journalism or commentary.
Let's stop ceding more power and control to the copyright cartel, and be careful not to repeat their propaganda that misleads people into thinking sharing books or other media needs to always involve a payment to some publishing corporation.
Accents vary by region and culture, not race. There is no such thing as "whitening" an accent.
People of Indian ancestry who were born and raised in Chicago or London or Vancouver sound like they're from Chicago or London or Vancouver, and it's racist and xenophobic to suggest that accents are racial, rather than regional and cultural.
This is such a perfect summary of contemporary American society with regards to politics.
I heard one person argue that as the far left progressives endlessly pushed "purity tests" against more extreme positions and became intolerant of any other opinions, it actually fed into why people tolerated or were willing to forgive bad things from the MAGA crowd. Many people felt like the Republicans accepted diverse viewpoints within the party, and people who'd made mistakes in the past, but the Democrats would cancel and exile anyone who wasn't perfectly woke.
It's not to excuse people who voted for Trump, but it does help explain the election results.
Trump is meeting with Putin without any representatives from Ukraine or Europe, and claiming that Ukraine is at fault for getting invaded and should just surrender everything to Putin.
Since Trump seems to be adversarial to China but very friendly if not outright subservient to Russia, it makes the China-Russia dynamic profoundly different.
I suspect if China invaded Taiwan Trump would shrug, but if China threatened Russia that Trump would come to Russia's aid.
Attacking clean energy, defunding medical research, mass purging federal workers. The Trump administration has done more to harm Americans in a few days than Al-Qaeda, the Soviets, Iran or China could have hoped to do in years.
My condolences to everyone affected by this and my thanks to everyone working to maintain a functioning society through this time.
Everyone should watch the fantastic documentary "Waiting for Superman" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/) that highlighted just how problematic the teacher's unions have become and how much of an impediment to education they are.
Even in cases of gross negligence (showing up to school drunk, completely failing to teach, etc) bad teachers just get bounced to another school. Teachers who physically assault or sexually abuse a student might remain on the payroll for years while the bureaucracy slowly reviews their case.
The unions have also prevented any form of incentivizing teachers to perform well or rewarding good teachers. In fact, the union leaders prevented the teachers from even voting on changes (that the majority of teachers wanted) that would have allowed good teachers to be rewarded and bad teachers to be removed from the classroom.
There are a lot of problems with education in America, but the teachers unions have to be right at the very top of the list.
There are plenty of people who drink alcohol around other alcohol-users and the social dynamic limits how much they drink (don't want to appear foolish or out of control around friends or coworkers, match number of drinks to the people they're with, etc).
There are also plenty of examples of people using "party drugs" on weekends socially and that those same friends are the first ones to voice concern if a person in the group starts using the drugs more often or in excess.
In many cases, it's when people switch from using drugs with friends to using them alone that is the turning point to addiction and problematic usage.
Babies in as diverse of backgrounds as Alaskans to Arabians were raised for thousands of years with significant face-coverings donned before going outside as the norm.
Being worried about "facial expression in strangers in public" because people covered their mouths as a harm to your baby's development is... about 10 steps past absurd. This isn't even making mountain out of a mole hill, this is making a mountain out of a grain of sand.
And of course, compared to the risks of permanently-lowered IQ due to covid brain damage, or permanent lung damage or the various fatigue and other issues millions of people suffered from covid, the risk from the infection to a baby is literally millions of times worse.
The outcome for society is that every single student got a sub-par education, because things moved at a glacial pace, had constant interruptions, students felt unsafe, the pace was so slow that students felt bored, etc.
A far better outcome would have been to make a small public school for the highly-academically oriented students (top-10%, future doctors and engineers) a disruption-free normal curriculum (middle-80%) and a special-needs school for all the students who had learning disabilities, behavioral issues, etc which prevented them from being able to thrive in a conventional classroom.
Your post is ironically just a pro-terrorism argument. You want terrorism targeted at CEOs to change their behavior.
There are a million different viewpoints on what acts are harmful and how to minimize or prevent those harms. It's better that we use things like voting and laws and courts to collectively reach consensus on when to use violence, rather than individuals killing people who disagree with them.
You can argue that this CEO should have been arrested for some crime and you can argue that said crime should carry the death penalty upon conviction. But that doesn't mean it's valid for a random person to be judge, jury and executioner based on their own personal concept of justice.
Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
I wonder how the current loneliness epidemic is intertwined with our current social/political climate and "us vs them" polarization.
I suspect almost everyone has some secret disagreements with their in-group, even if only by a matter of degree, but are afraid to voice that opinion. There have to be tens of millions of Americans who identify as a INSERT_POLITICAL_IDENTITY but disagree with some aspect of that group's platform, narrative or goals.
It's a wonder that anyone doesn't feel like their ideas are not shared by others.
Showing a driver's license to a police officer when stopped for a traffic violation seems reasonable to me. Showing a passport when crossing an international border seems reasonable. Showing some sort of ID to vote seems reasonable. Showing some sort of ID to receive social security or some other government-issued money seems reasonable. Showing a hunting or fishing license to a game warden seems reasonable.
But showing a government ID to access a website or post something online or walk down the sidewalk or buy something from a store would all seem unreasonable, dystopian and police-statey.
Your compromise sounds far worse to me than all the bots, extremists, vulgarity or whatever other problem it's supposed to solve.
The most fascinating part of Trump's success is that his supporters know he's lying, exaggerating and making stuff up on the spot and are ok with it. They believe he supports the things they support in a general sense and they believe all politicians lie and cheat, so they don't care even about his most egregious stuff.
I think there's a Dunning-Kruger effect, where people think they're being savvy about a corrupt system. The belief is that the whole edifice of American institutions is really just a facade on top of a corrupt system controlled by elites, and that Trump is being honest in a sense by exposing the corruption, but that his own obvious corruption is just a requirement to succeed in the way the game is played.
And of course Trump makes great use of this. The more he can get people to believe that the other side are liars and crooks, the more they'll tolerate his corruption and lies.
There is a strong culture of do what's needed to accomplish the mission. Even a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" to many challenges.
HN has a curiously strong hatred of libertarians (although also professing to dislike authoritarians?) so it's not surprising the comment got downvoted though.
Free to pursue our desires in a utopia.
Humans used to work manual labor to produce barely enough food to survive, with occasional famines, and watch helplessly as half of their children died before adulthood.
We automated farm labor, mining, manufacturing, etc so that one worker can now produce the output of 10, 100 or 100,000 laborers from a generation or two ago. Now those people work in new jobs and new industries that didn't previously exist.
Today we're seeing the transition from automating physical labor to automating mental labor. Just as before, we'll see those workers move into new jobs and new industries that didn't exist before.
Our society already spends 1000x more resources on children, elderly, disabled, unemployed, refugee, etc than would have been possible in the 1800s. The additional societal wealth creation from AI will mean that we can dedicate just a tiny portion of the surplus to provide universal basic income to everyone. (Or call it disability payments or housing assistance or welfare or whatever term if UBI doesn't resonate politically)
I don't want to eat a bag of processed garbage full of sugar, hydrogenated oils, artificial colorings and preservatives. But a banana or an apple, sure, good mid-afternoon snack. I'm probably a fairly normal eater for the demographic.
This election shouldn't be understood as some sort of "the oligarchs won", but rather that the American voters have signaled that they're "anti-woke" to the point that they can tolerate many other flaws in a candidate.
The social-progressive faction of the Democrats was too loud, too aggressive and too influential and alienated too many average Americans. The average Trump supporter wasn't voting for him because they were MAGA diehards, they just didn't want their kids' school to have drag queen story hour and they didn't want to be called racists every time Twitter users decided a new word was "problematic".
In four years, Trump will have done terrible damage to the country and world, but the 2028 election can be a landslide victory for the Democrats if they focus on housing, healthcare, childcare, education, environment and economy instead of race and gender.
Basically, it's bad, but it's temporary and fixable.
People who don't know what RNA, lymphocytes or spike proteins are, are nonetheless trying to make decisions about taking a vaccine.
People who don't understand statistics, can't comprehend graphs and don't understand fundamental physics are nonetheless trying to make decisions about climate change.
See also corporate tax law, Middle East ethnic divisions, AI, pollution, etc.
Our innate intuition is often entirely wrong and disinformation can often make compelling arguments that sound correct to non-experts. I'm not sure what the solution is. We all have to put our trust in others about the many things where we're non-experts, but obviously many people are choosing the wrong people to believe.
This argument makes no sense. There are a zillion different companies, research labs, VCs etc making investments into everything- better solar panels and better batteries and yeast that make biofuels and modular nuclear reactors and lower-energy CPUs and alternative ways to make fertilizer or concrete and on and on.
You're saying in essence, "Because a company with specific use-case X wants technology A, then technology B must be bad".
America fails its lower-income citizens by pretending they don't (or shouldn't) exist when making zoning and building codes and such.
Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter but drive up costs, and then act surprised that only "luxury" housing gets built.
College students can happily and healthily live in dorms on campus, and yet we treat it as unthinkable that someone working at McDonalds lives in similar conditions. And so we don't build the infrastructure and the McDonalds worker ends up with a far worse outcome, but at least it's out of sight and out of mind that they're sleeping on a couch or staying in an overcrowded illegally-sublet apartment.
One kid found the gun, looked over at his mom, who in turn looked panicked and rushed over to stop him and secure the gun and no one was harmed.
Another kid found a gun, looked over at his mom who didn't react, and then he shot his brother, and the family watched in horror as the child bled to death.
I fully realize anecdotes are useless for setting policy, but still useful for conveying meaning.
At some point, ignoring a problem doesn't mean it's not a problem.
It's great that you're in a position of safety, security and privilege to be able to regard politics as an insignificant side-show. Other people might have tremendous impacts to their life, safety, prosperity hanging in the balance.