We’re in the world of “you are who you voted for” but also “you are (the most extreme among) who voted for you” so anyone in any group (among the opposition) is equated with the most extreme of that group and therefore just plain evil so must be opposed with maximum force. Mom and pop pickup truck from (rural red state) are actually just goose-stepping storm troopers poised to strike at any moment.
Seriously! Just buy a used 3DS and hack it to run every game, emulator, etc. You can actually play DOS games and ScummVM games on it!
A few things to unpack here. Firstly, the most right wing people I know are PhD candidates in philosophy. They are huge proponents of the arts. They would argue that the anti-arts sentiment in the Republican Party today comes from their embrace of the working class and is not a traditional conservative value.
Secondly, the reason many of us disregard the STEAM acronym is because it’s meaningless. Arts encompasses all of the subjects outside of STEM so STEAM just means “all subjects” which is not something you can focus on by definition.
Why not vote against subsidies for farmers then? I’m just as against subsidies as I am in favour of land ownership. The biggest problem I have with subsidies and high taxes and government control of property is that it politicizes these decisions and pits special interests against the common good.
Once you create a subsidy it becomes very difficult to get rid of it, politically. The farmers who benefit from it will fight tooth and nail to keep it regardless of whether or not the subsidy actually benefits society.
It’s either your land or it’s someone else’s. In a place like China the government owns all the land which means it’s all owned by wealthy, ultra-powerful, ultra-connected party elites. At no point is there a situation where millions or billions of people all share land in common. There is always politics, there will always be powerful elites, there will always be people getting screwed over.
The difference with Denmark is that individual small people have a tiny bit more power than individuals in China. The fact that this results in progress being impeded is a tradeoff that brings enormous benefits for personal freedom.
Read about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Over a million people were forcibly displaced from their homes as a result. Many cities, towns, and villages were completely destroyed. The living conditions of the displaced deteriorated and their lives were irrevocably altered.
I don’t have a doorbell of any kind (the button isn’t even hooked up to anything). My neighbours are jerks but they won’t steal packages or anything like that.
We’re living in a low trust society that used to be a high trust society a few decades ago. I believe all of the problems you see in politics ultimately stem from this. Factionalism is tearing western society apart.
Mass production and volume discounting. A circuit board can have hundreds of resistors on it. If yours has one resistor go bad you can buy a new one and replace it. But do you think it’s reasonable for you to get that one resistor for the same unit price as the company that orders a hundred million resistors a month?
For one thing, your one resistor takes about the same amount of labour and shipping costs as a tape reel of 10 thousand resistors (about the size of a dinner plate). So you’re already paying 10 thousand times the unit price on shipping and handling for that one resistor! For a manufacturer it’s not even worth their time to sell you 1 resistor. So you end up going through potentially multiple intermediaries before you can buy just 1. Each level of middlemen adds to the cost for you.
Not really. Drip irrigation is pretty cheap. As are old tractors.
The expensive part is buying an acre of land.
Maybe if you’re using 18th century farming technology. In the modern day we have things like drip irrigation and tractors. Even a 1940s tractor is more than enough for a 1 acre plot.
It’s fine but you can’t really play sports or have a picnic or a barbecue or set up a slip n slide or many other fun activities that lawns are good for!
Also a dense jungle of food-bearing plants like tomatoes is highly susceptible to disease. Tomatoes need a lot of airflow to keep their leaves dry so they don’t develop powdery mildew.
Mechanisms of enforcement still need enforcers who respect the rule of law. If the enforcers stop respecting the rule of law and prefer to play power politics then the won’t help you.
Enforcers are part of the honour system. If they aren’t honourable then the system breaks down.
Yeah. I was just thinking about why zombies are so threatening. They represent the total collapse of the social order and a replacement of a large percent of the population of ordinary people with savage predators.
Yeah I think if you got rid of the lawn and just had narrow paths with everything densely planted with “useful plants” then it would feel less like a homestead and more like a jungle.
All systems are honour systems at their core. If no one respects the rule of law then laws don’t matter.
The major theme of the film is awakening from a false consciousness. It’s an existentialist picture. This leaves it open to any of countless interpretations unrelated to gender. I think many more people have interpreted the film as Christian with Neo in the role of Jesus and with some of the names of characters and places having biblical themes. The film’s actual depiction of gender is rather conventional, including the action girl trope shown by the character Trinity.
Taken together, these two details make it very difficult to support the Wachowskis’ claim in the text. If anything, the opposite could be argued.
But how long was it, how much more of this would they have to endure, or could they endure? The breathlessness of the air was growing as they climbed; and now they seemed often in the blind dark to sense some resistance thicker than the foul air.
As they thrust forward they felt things brush against their heads, or against their hands, long tentacles, or hanging growths perhaps: they could not tell what they were. And still the stench grew. It grew, until almost it seemed to them that smell was the only clear sense left to them, and that was for their torment. One hour, two hours, three hours: how many had they passed in this lightless hole? Hours - days, weeks rather. Sam left the tunnel-side and shrank towards Frodo, and their hands met and clasped, and so together they still went on.
At length Frodo, groping along the left-hand wall, came suddenly to a void.
Almost he fell sideways into the emptiness. Here was some opening in the rock far wider than any they had yet passed; and out of it came a reek so foul, and a sense of lurking malice so intense, that Frodo reeled. And at that moment Sam too lurched and fell forwards.
Fighting off both the sickness and the fear, Frodo gripped Sam’s hand. ‘Up!’ he said in a hoarse breath without voice. ‘It all comes from here, the stench and the peril. Now for it! Quick!’
Calling up his remaining strength and resolution, he dragged Sam to his feet, and forced his own limbs to move. Sam stumbled beside him. One step, two steps, three steps - at last six steps. Maybe they had passed the dreadful unseen opening, but whether that was so or not, suddenly it was easier to move, as if some hostile will for the moment had released them. They struggled on, still hand in hand…
— J.R.R. Tolkien. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The more money they have, the less happy they are. They’re addicted to making money, to watching the line go up and to the right. They’re addicted to trying to destroy the competition and buy them out, to consolidate more and more and more.
They are right when they say that wealth isn’t the key to happiness. They’re riding the bull and they don’t know how to get off.
We’d all be sitting on the back porch, enjoying an ice cold ginger beer at the end of long summer day!
More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.
My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.
Chinese food with baijiu.
Korean BBQ with soju.
Yakitori with sake.
Pub/bar snacks with beer.