Nobody points out broadly-studied theories and models and historical behaviors when arguing climate change; they just claim arbitrary consensus. They bring nothing to the table but "I have met with the Council and they have rendered their decision!"
Actually, plenty of people have offered this information. Most of us are tired of doing so.
At some point, when the 300th idiot claims, "Einstein's relativity doesn't make sense, and here's my crazy theory about why!" you just want to say, "Hey, go read a textbook." This often comes up around evolutionary theory too among the "skeptics." There are thousand-page long college textbooks on evolutionary theory, but you'll still get morons claiming that "there's no consensus" and "WHERE'S THE PROOF?!?!?"
It's no good to just tell people they can believe you or go look for themselves. That's not a strong argument point; it's a position that suggests you don't actually understand why you're taking a position, other than that it seemed like the one everyone else was taking.
Except we've reached the point now where the evidence has stacked up so much that it's no longer rationally sustainable to argue against climate change. Yes, if you're arguing about a particular theory or a particular model, of course you should cite details, just as in your economics examples
But 90% of the public "debate" for climate change is over whether it exists AT ALL. We can argue about the magnitude of the change or how much various factors contribute to its cause, but for those people who deny it's happening at all, it's really not up for debate anymore.
And that's the problem. At some point you just turn to the lunatic young-earth creationist and say, "Go reader the freakin' college textbook on evolutionary theory. When you've digested it, and you feel like you still can refute all of it point-by-point, maybe come back and we can have a discussion."
But they won't do that. Just like the climate-change denier won't do that. They don't want to have rational debate anymore. They've decided their position a priori, and they'll seek out whatever evidence will support that a priori argument.
At that point, it's no good to debate AT ALL. And that's why many of us stop citing stuff. We're just tired... it's not that we don't understand. It's that the other side is a bunch of people who aren't interested in rational discourse anymore.
It's interesting how quickly what was a job title for someone, became so quickly a term used solely the device. Where in the 1940's a "computer" was someone who did math, then by the 1960's, someone who did the same job as her peers 20 years prior was given that as a nickname.
I want to see proof that this was actually a nickname at that time. In the 1950s and 1960s it was still quite common to refer to humans who did intensive calculations as "computers." The idea that this particular person was referred to as "the human computer" as a laudatory nickname in an era when her job title was likely still "computer" seems really bizarre.
It sounds more likely to me that TFA was written by someone who didn't understand that people back then were still referred to as "computers," so they misinterpreted her title as a "nickname."
This is NOT to undermine her achievements at all -- by all accounts, she sounds like one of the most important computers of that time.
That's the excuse often given, but there were few artists who could match photo-realism......abstraction and 'style' were a way for artists to be successful without reaching quality technique.
That's overly harsh. It's certainly true of some artists, but as I explained in my post above in the thread, there's an expectation that was created sometime around the 19th century for continuous "progress" and innovation in art.
Why bother spending years learning classic technique only to be branded as "uninteresting" and "derivative"? Sure, if your goal is to paint portraits or to sell somewhat realistic landscapes at a county fair, that's a useful skill.
But if you wanted to be accepted as an "artist" by the elite judges who control the artworld, those classical techniques are often less relevant.
I have nothing against classical techniques, and I think they are worthwhile anyway -- but the people who aren't using or learning them aren't just making "excuses." Frequently they are trying to be appreciated by people who want something else, and for them such skills may be a waste of time.
As the center of gravity gains mass, formerly stable orbits become unstable and the orbiting bodies fall into the gravity well. This can result in chain reaction which seemingly acts like a giant vacuum cleaner.
One could argue the same thing about a star or even a planet. If enough stuff falls into any astronomical body, its mass could increase and orbits could destabilize.
Black holes are no different in this regard, hence the reason why it's weird to think of them as special kinds of "vacuum cleaners" that are different from other celestial bodies.
Except the proto-planets that did get sucked up in the Sun while our solar system was being formed.
Terms like "sucked up" are the problem. Suction is a specific physical thing created by a vacuum. In that case, the material that is "sucked up" is actually pushed into something else by the fluid pressure difference. It really doesn't make sense to apply this to proto-planets, since they were not pushed into the Sun by some external pressure.
Rather, they did not have sufficient orbital velocity to avoid falling into the gravity well. Using terminology like "vacuum cleaner" or "suction" is a really bad metaphor because it implies all sorts of things that aren't part of the physical scenario in question.
But can the AI itself then be considered art, as it has been made to make people observing it in action feel awe and astonishment at what it is doing?
It really depends on your definition of "art." I can "observe" a waterfall or an erupting volcano "in action" and "feel awe and astonishment at what it is doing."
Are they "art"?
I know what you mean, though. For most people, "art" has something to do with a special kind of "aesthetic" appreciation. If you are able to appreciate the actions of a computer program in that aesthetic fashion, then sure, why not call it "art"? For some, there are certain things that are always "off-limits" for that kind of aesthetics -- this is where you get that big debate with Roger Ebert that happened several years ago where he said that video games could never be "art." That's because he was convinced (as many art fans are) that certain kinds of things are open to aesthetic appreciation, while others aren't. Almost everyone has some sort of boundary there -- Duchamp's famous presentation of a urinal as a piece of "art" shows how one can ultimately push that boundary to absurdity.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps "aesthetic appreciation" is really just in the mind of the observer, and if the observer declares it to be "art," then why not? That's part of Duchamp's point.
Of course, I doubt you wanted to dredge all of this philosophical baggage up with your comment. But it really gets at the heart of what "art" is, and how one knows whether to consider something to be "art."
Something I often wonder is why we don't hear about 'new' geniuses in art. It's always the same guys from the 1700 and 1800s (once in a while an author from the 1900s sneaks in).
Uh, well, you might want to have a look here, where there are links to probably a couple hundred painters of the 20th century who are regarded as significant. There are many people in the art world who consider a lot of them to be "geniuses."
Now, your objection might be: "Hey, most of that stuff looks like crap compared to Rembrandt. Where's the good stuff like what he did?" Certainly many people feel that way about various artistic movements of the past century or so.
And for that, you'd have to blame German Romanticism of the 19th century, and "the cult of the genius." It's interesting that you use that word "genius," but artists weren't always seen that way -- Rembrandt wouldn't have been referred to that way in his lifetime. Artists used to be viewed a craftsmen, with particular skills -- some more talented than others. Centuries ago, being a painter meant learning the latest skills -- paint and materials weren't as good as they are today, so you needed to exploit the technology they had. Knowledge of perspective or the ability to manipulate and represent light and shadow took time for artists to figure out -- and so there was a gradual evolution toward the ability to create more realistic representations. The best painters were the ones who had incorporated this new knowledge to hone their craft.
That all started to change with the "cult of the genius" and the "Aesthetik" movement that began in late 18th-century Germany and spread during the 19th century. The emphasis went away from craftsmen participating in guilds or groups of people with knowledge, and more emphasis was put on the individual creator ("genius") who was supposed to demonstrate individual expression.
All of this is to say that there are hundreds of artists that could easily paint a Rembrandt-style painting today, probably as good as this computer did if not better. And there are probably thousands with the talent to learn how to do it easily, but they have no desire to.
Why? Because that would just be "derivative." It has already been done. The mastery of skill and technique is considered only what one does in school -- to become an "artist" today requires innovation. Painting a realistic expressive scene with interesting chiaroscuro like Rembrandt is a great "exercise," but the "geniuses" of the 20th and 21st century wouldn't be caught dead doing that as their own output -- unless they were doing it ironically or something.
TL;DR -- Rembrandt wasn't a "genius," since that whole concept of artist as "genius" hadn't yet been invented in his lifetime. And there are plenty of modern folks people call "artistic geniuses" -- but usually because of their unique innovations or individual ideas of expression, which are often quite different from the goals of someone like Rembrandt.
It's funny. This research spent a great deal of effort to identify the artist's "typical" approaches to individual and compound features; it then averages them to produce a work that feels like a Rembrandt.
But the only reason that it feels like a Rembrandt at all is because it is the centroid of all of his stylistic approaches -- a perfect average.
That's one way of looking at it. But actually the methodology as described in TFA was more to combine thousands of fragments of other paintings to create a composite.
I wonder if the result is therefore a little like the musical "compositions" created by the algorithms of David Cope. Cope has been doing this procedure since the 1980s where he has a program that takes dozens or hundreds of musical works by a particular composer in a particular genre as "input," and then claims to "compose" new works in that style.
To those who don't really know much about a Chopin Mazurka, for example, the result seems pretty amazing. But to those who actually know all the Chopin Mazurkas (there aren't that many of them), the listening experience is a bit surreal, since the "new pieces" sound more like odd mashups of bits of the old ones, often joined haphazardly together in ways that don't quite make sense.
I wonder if an art historian might have a similar take on this "new Rembrandt" when examining it closely. From afar, it certainly seems to have the general style of the original artist, but perhaps the details are an odd mashup whose "joints" don't quite blend well.
On the other hand, if they managed to make those "seams" invisible so the whole thing looks coherent, that'd be a much greater achievement. Also, it's unclear how much tweaking was involved in this project -- Cope was known to listen to hundreds of the "AI composed pieces" and himself choose the best of the lot to exhibit... presumably the few that actually made the most sense.
Why would the author of this article call a female voice that helps people a 'servant'.
Note that the word "servant" does NOT appear in either of the two linked articles. The word was introduced in the title/summary, obviously to make things sound as bad as possible.
Also, note that there is no on-topic article linked here. It's just two links to a couple random old articles which don't say anything like what the summary implies.
That seems kind of sexist and demeaning to me.
I think that's what the "anonymous" person who "submitted" this "story" was going for.
Or, to be more blunt about this, the whole thing is a TROLL to get people riled up here. Nobody's saying what the title or summary claims, except for the AC who supposedly submitted it.
As it said in the summary, referring to illegal immigration rather than illegal immigrants is an effort to avoid labeling people. While it is a technically correct description, there is more to language that technical specificity and precision. When discussing politically and emotionally charged subjects, labeling people as "a something or other", especially when referring to a group of people serves to subconsciously dehumanise them in the minds of the reader. Labelling people enables a cognitive shortcut that prunes any human attributes outside those implied by the label, and transforms them from "a human like me with complex motivitations and someone whom i could empathise with" to "outsiders that aren't like me and could be a threat and doesn't deserve any empathy, because all they are is [whatever label]".
While on some level I agree with you, I think you can take this too far. It's one thing to use a word for bigoted purposes and stereotypes, but there are sometimes that "specificity and precision" you mention is relevant.
There are some people who seem to use the word "illegal immigrant" as a kind of code for "lazy Mexican." In that case, I completely agree with your objections. If you're commenting on some people you see sitting over on the other side of the bar, and just refer to them casually as "illegal immigrants" (often without proof), then yes, you may be characterizing the person inaccurately. Even if you know their status, making reference to it for no reason often tends to associate it with various stereotypes among certain groups of people.
On the other hand, there are numerous places where the "illegal" status is relevant. People who immigrate illegally don't have sufficient documentation often to apply for jobs, they can't get various social services, etc. Thus, if you're referring to a group of people's work status, it's perfectly legitimate (and accurate) to note the "illegal immigrant" status.
It's important to careful avoid promoting lazy stereotyping, even on as seemingly innocuous a level as carefully avoiding some terminology because we are all chimps with buggy reasoning software installed, and we need to work around the bugs as much as possible.
Again, I agree with you that language can be used to reinforce stereotypes. But the specific problem with the term "illegal immigrant" seems to be that people want to put it on the euphemism treadmill. I've heard public speakers insist in interviews on using the term "undocumented worker" for all illegal immigrants, even if they didn't have jobs. They refused to utter the term "illegal immigrant" even though in some cases it would have been the most accurate term to use. The process here is to combat the bigoted equation of "illegal immigrant" = code for "lazy Mexican" by proposing a term like "undocumented worker" which sounds less objectionable ("undocumented," he just didn't file the right paperwork) and emphasizes the hard "work" many of them may do.
That is perhaps a noble idea to fight a stereotype, but I do NOT agree with it when it actually results in inaccuracies. In some contexts, "illegal immigrant" is the most accurate description available to refer to a specific group of people, i.e., those who immigrated illegally. When that immigration status is relevant for some reason, the term is not inaccurate.
But what some people are doing is trying to fight stereotypes by word replacement (the "euphemism treadmill"), which never really works. See the history of words for black people in the U.S.:
(1) In the mid-1800s, the word "black" was considered derogatory and inaccurate -- since most people have skin with various shades of brown, not literally black -- so there was an argument to use the term "colored" people instead.
(2) In the early 1900s, some black scholars objected to the term "colored" since it was sometimes used disparagingly and co
You wouldn't capitalize the "Phone System", would you? It just isn't a formal name.
Not usually, except if it were actually a proper name for a particular system.
You wouldn't capitalize the "Interstate Highway System"
Actually, yes you would, if you were referring to the specific Interstate Highway System that is recognized by the federal government as such. If you say "interstate highway system," you create an ambiguity: are you referring to the Eisenhower System, or are you potentially referring to the network of all highways that cross state borders (like U.S. Route 1, which goes all the way from Maine to Florida, and is thus an interstate highway, but it is not an Interstate Highway).
Now, I'll grant you that the standard use of the phrase "interstate highway" these days tends to refer specifically to the Eisenhower System, so there's an argument that capitalization is unnecessary. On the other hand, by doing so you eliminate a possible distinction between (1) all highways that are commonly numbered across state borders (i.e., "interstate" highways, which include both the Eisenhower System and the U.S. Routes) and (2) state numbered highways, which do not often maintain numbering across borders.
That particular distinction is probably not that useful in common language, so most people can abandon the capital for the Eisenhower Interstate System without losing anything important.
But there is a meaning distinction there, which differentiates the common use of "interstate" in all contexts vs. a specific system. The question is whether "internet" would justify a similar distinction in modern usage or not.
When speaking, there is no difference an upper and lower case letter. It's rare to hear anyone complain that the spoken form of some sentence is more ambiguous or otherwise problematic than the written equivalent.
Writing lacks all sorts of expressive capabilities that can be conveyed through speech. Cues like subtle rises and falls around words, highlighting a word through volume or pitch, etc. can all help us parse where a sentence begins/ends or to know that a specific word is referring to a person rather than a common noun with the same sound. We don't have those cues in writing.
Why we still use capital letters?
I'm not really a linguist, but you might as well ask why we still use punctuation, or why we put spaces between words, or why we spell things in the ridiculous mess that is English-language spelling. They are conventions. Language is about communication, and effective communication requires common understanding -- which relies on convention. We learn to parse patterns based on those conventions. When those conventions change suddenly, it's more difficult for people familiar with them to parse things, and the communication is less effective.
That's the very broad general answer for all such things.
For the specific notion of capital letters, they are used (and have been used for over a millennium) as cues for parsing language. They occur at the beginning of sentences, which is a signal to parse a new phrase. They occur for proper names (people, countries, specific places, etc.), which is a cue to differentiate a word from any "common noun" associations. They therefore provide a shade of meaning that is different in many contexts. Often such meanings could be determined from context too, but the capital letter is a shortcut that immediately identifies the word as a "proper" noun, which means it generally falls into a few specific categories. In cases of ambiguity, someone parsing a sentence can immediately know that the word is a person, or a specific place, or whatever.
Some other languages have other conventions for capitals that make this parsing role exceptionally clear -- see German, for example, where ALL nouns are capitalized. Is it "necessary"? Obviously other languages do without it. But for Germans, that is a grammatical cue to the function of the word in a sentence. In English, capitals also provide such cues, just for specific types of nouns, rather than all of them. But the meaning is still helpful in many contexts.
Could we do without capital letters? Of course. Ancient languages often did, and various scripts around the world don't really have an equivalent. But again, it's kind of like asking why we put spaces between words. Youcanreadasentencewithoutthem,andit'softenstraightforwardtoparseasentence. But the spaces make it quicker in some circumstances with less cognitive load for those familiar with the convention.
They seem like an unnecessary relic (another example: the difference between ',' and ';') that we should be working to simplify out of the written form of our language.
Commas and semicolons are completely different punctuation marks, and they imply completely different relationships about the words or phrases around them. (The one case of similar usage is in lists that are subdivided, but this isn't a particularly common use case. Even there, the point is that the semicolon helps delineate between comma-delineated lists of items.)
Could we eliminate semicolons? Of course, but then we'd lose some subtle meaning and parsing possibilities. We could eliminate punctuation altogether too, but it would be even worse.
We might as well ask why we have dozens of words for different shades of "blue." Why not just call them all "blue"? Well, in some contexts it helps to clarify things, and sometimes that lack of ambiguity can assist in parsing what someone else means (e.g., when trying to locate an item on
I like how chickens aren't cheap because they only have nutrients and not enough calories. And then flour is bad because it has calories.
Yeah, I don't think you can expect logic in a post so full of misinformation. Or even a simple thought, like -- why not combine the two? Chicken and dumplings, anyone? Or chicken and homemade bread? Biscuits? Classic combos of nutritionally dense with cheaper calories.
It's almost like he came to the conclusion that cooking was impossible for the poor a priori, so the only rational choice must be a McDonalds double cheeseburger, a bag of potato chips, and a box of Little Debbie snack cakes.
the vegetables on special don't keep. When you're working poor you usually have two jobs and pull 60/hr a week. Getting to the store every day isn't happening.
You know what does keep? Frozen veggies. I see them in every value grocery store. Generally cheap and frozen at peak flavor. Or buy the ones on special and freeze yourself if you can't use them immediately.
Bananas are just sugar. That's why they're cheap.
No they're cheap because they are grown in countries where labor is cheap and companies have fought to control those labor prices and keep workers' pay as low as possible. And only one exact same genetic variety is common for those cheap bananas, meaning they all ripen at the exact predictable rate, allowing vastly better large economies of scale in transport. But they aren't a great health food -- still better than most fast food of junk food.
Whole Chickens aren't cheap when you count the calories in them. They seem cheap because the weight of the skin and bones is part of the cost.
Whole chickens are amazing things, and you can often get 3 meals of more out of them for a family. The bones and skin are the most essential parts, providing flavor in the form of fat that can be rendered for sauteing things and collogen and other elements that can be harvested for a tasty stock. First roast your chicken. Eat much of the meat for meal 1. Then pick off the remaining meat and simmer the bones and skin for stock. Refrigerate and skim fat. Make chicken and veggie soup next day. Meal 2. Use and remaining chicken bits, fat, etc. And simmer bones again (what the French call remoullage) for a second stock to be used to cook rice or beans or some other thing. Meal 3. Labor intensive, yes. But lots of cheap meals.
Cheap cuts of beef aren't. They don't really exist anymore. Even 80/20 pink slime is $3/lb in a lot of places.
Buy large packs in bulk when on sale or special. Freeze if you can't use right away. Don't ever use store-bought ground beef. Buy a cheap meat grinder instead.... It's simple, fast, and tastes so much better.
But perhaps more important: if you're poor, stop trying to eat so much meat! It's nutritious, but think of it more as a small flavorant or garnish in most meals, rather than the centerpiece. Buy the cheapest toughest cuts and use in stew, etc.
Onions aren't food. They're a garnish.
Actually, they have quite a bit of nutrients, though not very concentrated. They do provide a lot of fiber, like many veggies. When I was low on money, I often ate at least an onion per day in soup or stew or whatever... Good for bulking up the food and making it both flavorful and more filling.
Like lettuce they're cheap because their complete lack of nutritional value means they're cheap to grow.
Again, completely wrong. Iceberg lettuce has no nutrition, and it's cheap because it can be stored long, which makes for better distribution and economies of scale. Other leaf lettuce is more nutritious but also often more expensive. Better to go with spinach of another darker green (frozen, if you need really cheap).
Eggs are up to $3/dozen for the off brand. They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones. Those are $4.39/dozen.
Eggs have become expensive of late. But I have no idea what you're talking about "not keeping long." Even cheapest eggs generally keep at least a couple weeks or more.
Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
Whole grain flour has a lot more nutrients. Why do they fortify white flour? To replace the nutrition that was removed. But yeah, flour shouldn't be a central component of nutrition --yet it can provide a lot of
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better.
As someone who also tends to make old recipes or experiment with traditional techniques myself, I can point out a number of problems with old and ancient recipes. Many are bland, because spices were expensive. And access to a wide variety of ingredients was seasonal and often only for the very rich. These recipes can be improved by "modernizing" them with accessible ingredients. Same thing with recipes whose ingredients have changed over time -- so-called "heirloom" varieties of vegetables, fruits, and even old varieties of grains can make a huge difference in flavor and texture. Just subbing in a food that has the same basic name today may not be getting at the original flavors at all. And of course tastes change over time and in different cultures.
A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty.
They're "tasty" because they're generally engineered to be a completely unnatural mixture of flavors our bodies are adapted to be attracted too, since those flavors were often rare in the past... And consuming them could be important to survival. Now the artificial combinations and availability of those flavors results in overeating and excessive calorie consumption.
I cook and bake a lot of things in fairly traditional ways, I bring them to parties or serve them to guests, and inevitably people are blown away by the flavors, which vastly exceed the quality and satisfaction from a McDonalds hamburger or boil-in-a-bag meal. I've taken a simple loaf of plain bread prepared in a traditional manner with only natural (sourdough) yeast, fresh whole-grain flour, salt, and water, with long traditional fermentation... And I've seen people just rip apart the plain loaf and eat it without accompaniment... Because it's so damn good compared to what they usually eat. Traditional simple fresh ingredients, old-school prep. Result is often: Wow.
I have nothing against fast food's achievements in terms of packing calories in cheaply and quickly. But the idea that traditional foods are all crap, and we should bow to the "super-tasty" Big Mac as if it were some amazing culinary achievement? I think you may just not have eaten enough traditional GOOD food prepared from good ingredients.
While I absolutely agree with you that finding the time when working multiple jobs is hard for poor people, the effort and skills are another major barrier.
If you have a $10-20 crockpot and a refrigerator (or better, a freezer), you can easily make meals by dumping a few ingredients together with 15 minutes prep on the weekend or day off. 4-8 hours later you come back, and you have meals for the week. It's no harder to microwave or reheat on the stovetop than a frozen processed meal or canned dinner, but often a lot cheaper. Instead of taking 5 minutes extra to drive to the fast food place, take 5 minutes to cut up some fruit or veggies or prep a quick sidedish to eat with your bulk meals you prepped in advance.
It takes a bit of work and planning, as well as a little knowledge about how to make a regimen like this work... But it doesn't have to take more than a few minutes per day and can save significant money. (A $20 family dinner from a fast food joint looks good until you realize you could often feed your family all their meals for half that with some planning.)
When I first used an iPhone, it refused to believe the possessive pronoun "its" was a word. It would always "correct" to "it's". After a few weeks of looking like an illiterate idiot because " Autocorrect" kept introducing errors into my messages, I had to turn it off... And it's been off ever since.
This is absolutely true. It seems to happen to me a bit more as I get older -- I accidentally type a word that sounds like what I'm trying to say, rather than the correct word. If I'm typing fast, it will often go unnoticed (and is also one of the harder things to see when proofreading fast too). These days, my most common typos as homophone errors, even though I clearly know the difference.
I've seen many airports that have free filtered water sources so you can refill your own water bottle at no cost. Those are the ones with special taps with enough clearance to hold a bottle under. There are always water fountains you can fill from. Even so, I see $2.50 bottles of water, but not as high as you say.
Why are you nitpicking about this? In the real world, many people would like to bring a beverage in their bag (perhaps something other than water), and they don't want to pay elevated airport prices. As for the cost of the water bottle, it depends on the size and the airport, but there certainly are plenty of beverages in airport shops I've seen go for $3-4 or more.
I have yet to find an airline that charges anyone for water. And I don't recall ever having to pay for soda there.
You've obviously never flown on a "budget" airline. Yes, water is generally free. But other beverages sometimes are not. (Personally, I have no problem with that -- if it shaves a few dollars off the cost of my flight, I don't need a "free" tiny cup of soda or coffee or whatever. But it still doesn't make it any less ridiculous that you can't bring your own beverage from home at a fraction of the cost.)
Of course paid for. And at the airport. And the prices are usually a lot higher than off-airport. So what? Those shops aren't run by the airlines, and are thus also not a profit center for them.
I'm not sure why you're arguing about this so vociferously. The TSA policy clearly makes more money for airport shops, who (as you agree) already charge high prices. Even if the airlines aren't in a conspiracy to make money, there is a good deal of money made off of this policy by someone... for no apparent reason.
Free beverages on the airplane, or carry on what you want.
"Free" beverages on the airplane are generally limited to about 4 oz. of whatever selections they have poured into a cup packed with ice. Sure, you can pester an attendant to get a refill, and they'll probably give you the can if you ask nicely, but the drink carts are generally intended to keep passengers barely hydrated -- if someone actually wants a decent amount to drink, they'll be forced to buy something in the secure airport shops.
Airline beverage carts are not a profit center for any airline
Probably true, though every time they sell one of their $7+ mini bottles, most of which probably contain less than $1 of hard liquor, it's hard to believe they aren't at least trying to make a profit.
Bottom line: there probably isn't an airline conspiracy, but TSA's liquid policy is nonetheless a pain and does actually require a lot of consumers to fork out money if they want to drink more than water past the security gates.
I'm convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as "very, very impressionable." I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, "I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports." So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his M.O., referred to in the press as the underwear bomber, you'll know I was onto something.
after the shoe-bombing scheme worked to perfection, Khalid the Droll announced to his cell, "When they've had a few years of taking off their shoes, I bet I can make them expose their private parts to full-body scanners." Not once has one of these after-the-fact analyzers considered the possibility that... Khalid the Droll is engaged in an elaborate scheme to embarrass us to death.
Gotta agree with Ratzo on this one. Use a plumbers snake. If you don't have one, try a plunger. If you don't have one, take the sink apart and usually you'll find a clog in the trap or something and can remove manually. If you don't want to do that, try something less corrosive than drain cleaner but more effective, like baking soda followed by flushing with vinegar, whi often can loosen a clog. Drain cleaner is just horrible chemicals only idiots and people who are too lazy to care about destroying their plumbing use.
They have a right to throw someone out who has a different opinion, but that doesn't make it ethical, mature or civil to do so.
Who is talking about "opinions"? Civil behavior is mostly about politeness. You can still express dissenting opinions, but you can choose to do it in a polite and rational manner. Or, in your terms, act "ethical, mature, and civil" and most sites won't censor you.
I can tell you that if a friend were to tell me to leave their house because I disagreed with them, they wouldn't be a friend any longer.
And that might be a reasonable choice. On the other hand, if friends told me to leave their house because I was drunk, shouting obscenities, and urinating and vomiting all over the place, I think they'd be perfectly reasonable for "censoring" those activities and throwing me out.
My post had nothing to do with censoring anyone for the content of their ideas -- it had to do with the fact that anonymous speech on the internet often devolves into impolite shouting of obscenities, whereas people are often a bit more reticent to do that if their comments are attached to their name (or even a durable pseudonym that they don't want to sully with a bad reputation).
Just to be clear -- I'm not saying anonymous speech should be prevented. But I am saying that it has the potential to cause a lot of problems, which may require some form of censorship to clean up. (Anyone who has ever hosted comments on a website understands the vast majority of anonymous comments tend to be problematic -- mostly spam, followed by various inappropriate or uncivil remarks, etc. Heck, look around at the ACs on Slashdot when browsing at -1. Compare the number of angry, shouting, uncivil comments from ACs to those of registered users with a record of participation.)
If it's a business, then they lose a customer. If it's a web site, then they lose a user. Keep it up and eventually you'll not have any friends/customers/users at all.
I said that explicitly -- that's your choice. You don't agree with a site's policies? Don't participate. There are a number of internet forums where I no longer participate for this exact reason -- comments were deleted not because they are uncivil or whatever, but simply because I disagreed. I don't stand for such nonsense, and neither should you.
BUT -- that has nothing to do with the fact that many people take advantage of anonymity to act like jerks. And they rightfully should be censored from "civil" discourse.
Yes, it's simply impossible that any internet site might actually want to promote more civil behavior by causing people to tone down their comments. Instead, the ONLY reason must be that such sites would like people to go around attacking other people in real life for their views. [/sarcasm]
Because censorship is civil behavior...
Yes, it is. It's pretty much the definition of "civil" behavior. Look at any traditional rules of "etiquette." It's all about requirements to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. You don't show up to a typical wedding or a funeral dressed in ripped jeans and a tee-shirt with profanity on it. That's not explicit "censorship," but it is self-censorship. You have other times and places to express yourself as you'd like, but the social norms may limit your behavior in certain contexts.
Now, you may choose to say, "I don't subscribe to that etiquette nonsense! I want to walk around swearing at everyone all the time!" That's your choice. In a public place, you can't really be censored for doing so. But that behavior most certainly would be considered "uncivil" by most. It's your choice to accept that judgment for your freedom to behave in such a way.
But to get back to websites -- they also are generally hosted by private individuals or corporations. And just like a private individual can say "leave my house" if they don't like your behavior, and a private corporation can say "leave the building" to get you off of their private property, so a site owner has the right to "censor" comments on their own site.
Now, you may object to such censorship -- in which case, you can choose to go to another site which has more lenient policies. That's your choice. Private people and companies censor stuff all the time when it comes to their private property: that's their choice.
And yes, frequently the times they censor people is to maintain the traditional definition of "civil" behavior. If a guy walks in off the street and starts urinating on the reception desk at a company, I fully expect him to be asked to leave to promote "civil behavior." Regardless of how mad he might be at the company, his behavior is "uncivil" by definition and subject to censorship on private property.
The other part is corporate data retention and data mining.
Years ago, when young Google was still seen as a genuinely benevolent company and "social media" didn't exist, I was interviewed by a newspaper regarding a hot and highly publicized issue involving hacking and the newly-voted DMCA that I got involved in. I wasn't careful about what I said to that newspaper, and it got republished on the internet.
Soon after, I realized Google never forgot anything: for the following 10 years, each time I'd go to a job interview, that episode of my life - and the unfortunate statements I gave to the newspaper - would come up in the conversation. For a good 10 years, I had to explain myself, and explain that no, I wasn't a dangerous hacker, what really happened, and that, yes, I can be trusted with company secrets.
Umm, I do feel for you and your experience. But I'm not sure how any of this is Google's fault or really has much to do with "data mining." It's just basic search indexing.
Instead, you gave information to a newspaper, who chose to publish it on a public website. Google's "intentions" here were neither benevolent nor malicious -- they were just indexing public information.
As far as I can tell, if you want to blame anyone, I'd put the blame on the newspaper -- unless their general practice was to publish everyone online, which case it's really your own fault for not realizing the implications of that.
I quickly realized I had to shut my trap and hide my identity as much as I could online, if didn't want whatever I did or said to bite my ass in the future ever again.
I had a similar incident years before yours probably took place, where I had an email correspondence with someone who hosted a website, and I made some corrections about what he had said, though it was an "off-the-cuff" email which wasn't particularly well thought-out. He later posted that email on his website without asking permission -- his intent was clearly good, since he wanted to provide more detail and another perspective. But to me it was mildly embarrassing. And ever since I've been careful whenever I use my real name or email online.
The fact that you can still find those emails from more than 20 years ago using Google (with enough work) doesn't make Google responsible for my embarrassment.
Google & Co aren't: they pose as friendly innovators, when in fact they're just out to make a buck on your back, regardless of how much they can ruin your life.
While I agree that Google is trying to make money (sometimes in questionable ways), and aggregating your data is useful toward that end, I don't follow how your particular anecdote demonstrates some nefarious purpose. You gave comments to a NEWSPAPER. Surely you realized that was already a public venue? And that newspaper decided to post that story on a public website.
Without some sort of search, the internet would be impossible to navigate. I'm not sure I understand how Google's choice to simply index public pages demonstrates their intent to "ruin your life" just to make a buck.
Funny that you neither backed up any of that statement with facts nor with links to reputable sources. Good job, hypocrite.
There is a link to a source -- click on my username. It will take you to my profile. You can go back and see the various comments I've made here over the years and how they've been moderated.
Most of my comment was only about my own experience, which is anecdotal, but which also contradicts the parent's anecdotal experience. That much is verifiable fact, which you could easily find.
Yes, my last statement was more of an opinion, but it's based on my experience here. If you disagree, please provide your own reputable sources, rather than just vacuous ad hominem attacks.
Have a nice day! Don't ya love that reasoned discourse promoted by AC status!!
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Nobody points out broadly-studied theories and models and historical behaviors when arguing climate change; they just claim arbitrary consensus. They bring nothing to the table but "I have met with the Council and they have rendered their decision!"
Actually, plenty of people have offered this information. Most of us are tired of doing so.
At some point, when the 300th idiot claims, "Einstein's relativity doesn't make sense, and here's my crazy theory about why!" you just want to say, "Hey, go read a textbook." This often comes up around evolutionary theory too among the "skeptics." There are thousand-page long college textbooks on evolutionary theory, but you'll still get morons claiming that "there's no consensus" and "WHERE'S THE PROOF?!?!?"
It's no good to just tell people they can believe you or go look for themselves. That's not a strong argument point; it's a position that suggests you don't actually understand why you're taking a position, other than that it seemed like the one everyone else was taking.
Except we've reached the point now where the evidence has stacked up so much that it's no longer rationally sustainable to argue against climate change. Yes, if you're arguing about a particular theory or a particular model, of course you should cite details, just as in your economics examples
But 90% of the public "debate" for climate change is over whether it exists AT ALL. We can argue about the magnitude of the change or how much various factors contribute to its cause, but for those people who deny it's happening at all, it's really not up for debate anymore.
And that's the problem. At some point you just turn to the lunatic young-earth creationist and say, "Go reader the freakin' college textbook on evolutionary theory. When you've digested it, and you feel like you still can refute all of it point-by-point, maybe come back and we can have a discussion."
But they won't do that. Just like the climate-change denier won't do that. They don't want to have rational debate anymore. They've decided their position a priori, and they'll seek out whatever evidence will support that a priori argument.
At that point, it's no good to debate AT ALL. And that's why many of us stop citing stuff. We're just tired... it's not that we don't understand. It's that the other side is a bunch of people who aren't interested in rational discourse anymore.
It's interesting how quickly what was a job title for someone, became so quickly a term used solely the device. Where in the 1940's a "computer" was someone who did math, then by the 1960's, someone who did the same job as her peers 20 years prior was given that as a nickname.
I want to see proof that this was actually a nickname at that time. In the 1950s and 1960s it was still quite common to refer to humans who did intensive calculations as "computers." The idea that this particular person was referred to as "the human computer" as a laudatory nickname in an era when her job title was likely still "computer" seems really bizarre.
It sounds more likely to me that TFA was written by someone who didn't understand that people back then were still referred to as "computers," so they misinterpreted her title as a "nickname."
This is NOT to undermine her achievements at all -- by all accounts, she sounds like one of the most important computers of that time.
That's the excuse often given, but there were few artists who could match photo-realism......abstraction and 'style' were a way for artists to be successful without reaching quality technique.
That's overly harsh. It's certainly true of some artists, but as I explained in my post above in the thread, there's an expectation that was created sometime around the 19th century for continuous "progress" and innovation in art.
Why bother spending years learning classic technique only to be branded as "uninteresting" and "derivative"? Sure, if your goal is to paint portraits or to sell somewhat realistic landscapes at a county fair, that's a useful skill.
But if you wanted to be accepted as an "artist" by the elite judges who control the artworld, those classical techniques are often less relevant.
I have nothing against classical techniques, and I think they are worthwhile anyway -- but the people who aren't using or learning them aren't just making "excuses." Frequently they are trying to be appreciated by people who want something else, and for them such skills may be a waste of time.
As the center of gravity gains mass, formerly stable orbits become unstable and the orbiting bodies fall into the gravity well. This can result in chain reaction which seemingly acts like a giant vacuum cleaner.
One could argue the same thing about a star or even a planet. If enough stuff falls into any astronomical body, its mass could increase and orbits could destabilize.
Black holes are no different in this regard, hence the reason why it's weird to think of them as special kinds of "vacuum cleaners" that are different from other celestial bodies.
Except the proto-planets that did get sucked up in the Sun while our solar system was being formed.
Terms like "sucked up" are the problem. Suction is a specific physical thing created by a vacuum. In that case, the material that is "sucked up" is actually pushed into something else by the fluid pressure difference. It really doesn't make sense to apply this to proto-planets, since they were not pushed into the Sun by some external pressure.
Rather, they did not have sufficient orbital velocity to avoid falling into the gravity well. Using terminology like "vacuum cleaner" or "suction" is a really bad metaphor because it implies all sorts of things that aren't part of the physical scenario in question.
But can the AI itself then be considered art, as it has been made to make people observing it in action feel awe and astonishment at what it is doing?
It really depends on your definition of "art." I can "observe" a waterfall or an erupting volcano "in action" and "feel awe and astonishment at what it is doing."
Are they "art"?
I know what you mean, though. For most people, "art" has something to do with a special kind of "aesthetic" appreciation. If you are able to appreciate the actions of a computer program in that aesthetic fashion, then sure, why not call it "art"? For some, there are certain things that are always "off-limits" for that kind of aesthetics -- this is where you get that big debate with Roger Ebert that happened several years ago where he said that video games could never be "art." That's because he was convinced (as many art fans are) that certain kinds of things are open to aesthetic appreciation, while others aren't. Almost everyone has some sort of boundary there -- Duchamp's famous presentation of a urinal as a piece of "art" shows how one can ultimately push that boundary to absurdity.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps "aesthetic appreciation" is really just in the mind of the observer, and if the observer declares it to be "art," then why not? That's part of Duchamp's point.
Of course, I doubt you wanted to dredge all of this philosophical baggage up with your comment. But it really gets at the heart of what "art" is, and how one knows whether to consider something to be "art."
Something I often wonder is why we don't hear about 'new' geniuses in art. It's always the same guys from the 1700 and 1800s (once in a while an author from the 1900s sneaks in).
Uh, well, you might want to have a look here, where there are links to probably a couple hundred painters of the 20th century who are regarded as significant. There are many people in the art world who consider a lot of them to be "geniuses."
Now, your objection might be: "Hey, most of that stuff looks like crap compared to Rembrandt. Where's the good stuff like what he did?" Certainly many people feel that way about various artistic movements of the past century or so.
And for that, you'd have to blame German Romanticism of the 19th century, and "the cult of the genius." It's interesting that you use that word "genius," but artists weren't always seen that way -- Rembrandt wouldn't have been referred to that way in his lifetime. Artists used to be viewed a craftsmen, with particular skills -- some more talented than others. Centuries ago, being a painter meant learning the latest skills -- paint and materials weren't as good as they are today, so you needed to exploit the technology they had. Knowledge of perspective or the ability to manipulate and represent light and shadow took time for artists to figure out -- and so there was a gradual evolution toward the ability to create more realistic representations. The best painters were the ones who had incorporated this new knowledge to hone their craft.
That all started to change with the "cult of the genius" and the "Aesthetik" movement that began in late 18th-century Germany and spread during the 19th century. The emphasis went away from craftsmen participating in guilds or groups of people with knowledge, and more emphasis was put on the individual creator ("genius") who was supposed to demonstrate individual expression.
All of this is to say that there are hundreds of artists that could easily paint a Rembrandt-style painting today, probably as good as this computer did if not better. And there are probably thousands with the talent to learn how to do it easily, but they have no desire to.
Why? Because that would just be "derivative." It has already been done. The mastery of skill and technique is considered only what one does in school -- to become an "artist" today requires innovation. Painting a realistic expressive scene with interesting chiaroscuro like Rembrandt is a great "exercise," but the "geniuses" of the 20th and 21st century wouldn't be caught dead doing that as their own output -- unless they were doing it ironically or something.
TL;DR -- Rembrandt wasn't a "genius," since that whole concept of artist as "genius" hadn't yet been invented in his lifetime. And there are plenty of modern folks people call "artistic geniuses" -- but usually because of their unique innovations or individual ideas of expression, which are often quite different from the goals of someone like Rembrandt.
It's funny. This research spent a great deal of effort to identify the artist's "typical" approaches to individual and compound features; it then averages them to produce a work that feels like a Rembrandt.
But the only reason that it feels like a Rembrandt at all is because it is the centroid of all of his stylistic approaches -- a perfect average.
That's one way of looking at it. But actually the methodology as described in TFA was more to combine thousands of fragments of other paintings to create a composite.
I wonder if the result is therefore a little like the musical "compositions" created by the algorithms of David Cope. Cope has been doing this procedure since the 1980s where he has a program that takes dozens or hundreds of musical works by a particular composer in a particular genre as "input," and then claims to "compose" new works in that style.
To those who don't really know much about a Chopin Mazurka, for example, the result seems pretty amazing. But to those who actually know all the Chopin Mazurkas (there aren't that many of them), the listening experience is a bit surreal, since the "new pieces" sound more like odd mashups of bits of the old ones, often joined haphazardly together in ways that don't quite make sense.
I wonder if an art historian might have a similar take on this "new Rembrandt" when examining it closely. From afar, it certainly seems to have the general style of the original artist, but perhaps the details are an odd mashup whose "joints" don't quite blend well.
On the other hand, if they managed to make those "seams" invisible so the whole thing looks coherent, that'd be a much greater achievement. Also, it's unclear how much tweaking was involved in this project -- Cope was known to listen to hundreds of the "AI composed pieces" and himself choose the best of the lot to exhibit... presumably the few that actually made the most sense.
Why would the author of this article call a female voice that helps people a 'servant'.
Note that the word "servant" does NOT appear in either of the two linked articles. The word was introduced in the title/summary, obviously to make things sound as bad as possible.
Also, note that there is no on-topic article linked here. It's just two links to a couple random old articles which don't say anything like what the summary implies.
That seems kind of sexist and demeaning to me.
I think that's what the "anonymous" person who "submitted" this "story" was going for.
Or, to be more blunt about this, the whole thing is a TROLL to get people riled up here. Nobody's saying what the title or summary claims, except for the AC who supposedly submitted it.
As it said in the summary, referring to illegal immigration rather than illegal immigrants is an effort to avoid labeling people. While it is a technically correct description, there is more to language that technical specificity and precision. When discussing politically and emotionally charged subjects, labeling people as "a something or other", especially when referring to a group of people serves to subconsciously dehumanise them in the minds of the reader. Labelling people enables a cognitive shortcut that prunes any human attributes outside those implied by the label, and transforms them from "a human like me with complex motivitations and someone whom i could empathise with" to "outsiders that aren't like me and could be a threat and doesn't deserve any empathy, because all they are is [whatever label]".
While on some level I agree with you, I think you can take this too far. It's one thing to use a word for bigoted purposes and stereotypes, but there are sometimes that "specificity and precision" you mention is relevant.
There are some people who seem to use the word "illegal immigrant" as a kind of code for "lazy Mexican." In that case, I completely agree with your objections. If you're commenting on some people you see sitting over on the other side of the bar, and just refer to them casually as "illegal immigrants" (often without proof), then yes, you may be characterizing the person inaccurately. Even if you know their status, making reference to it for no reason often tends to associate it with various stereotypes among certain groups of people.
On the other hand, there are numerous places where the "illegal" status is relevant. People who immigrate illegally don't have sufficient documentation often to apply for jobs, they can't get various social services, etc. Thus, if you're referring to a group of people's work status, it's perfectly legitimate (and accurate) to note the "illegal immigrant" status.
It's important to careful avoid promoting lazy stereotyping, even on as seemingly innocuous a level as carefully avoiding some terminology because we are all chimps with buggy reasoning software installed, and we need to work around the bugs as much as possible.
Again, I agree with you that language can be used to reinforce stereotypes. But the specific problem with the term "illegal immigrant" seems to be that people want to put it on the euphemism treadmill. I've heard public speakers insist in interviews on using the term "undocumented worker" for all illegal immigrants, even if they didn't have jobs. They refused to utter the term "illegal immigrant" even though in some cases it would have been the most accurate term to use. The process here is to combat the bigoted equation of "illegal immigrant" = code for "lazy Mexican" by proposing a term like "undocumented worker" which sounds less objectionable ("undocumented," he just didn't file the right paperwork) and emphasizes the hard "work" many of them may do.
That is perhaps a noble idea to fight a stereotype, but I do NOT agree with it when it actually results in inaccuracies. In some contexts, "illegal immigrant" is the most accurate description available to refer to a specific group of people, i.e., those who immigrated illegally. When that immigration status is relevant for some reason, the term is not inaccurate.
But what some people are doing is trying to fight stereotypes by word replacement (the "euphemism treadmill"), which never really works. See the history of words for black people in the U.S.:
(1) In the mid-1800s, the word "black" was considered derogatory and inaccurate -- since most people have skin with various shades of brown, not literally black -- so there was an argument to use the term "colored" people instead.
(2) In the early 1900s, some black scholars objected to the term "colored" since it was sometimes used disparagingly and co
You wouldn't capitalize the "Phone System", would you? It just isn't a formal name.
Not usually, except if it were actually a proper name for a particular system.
You wouldn't capitalize the "Interstate Highway System"
Actually, yes you would, if you were referring to the specific Interstate Highway System that is recognized by the federal government as such. If you say "interstate highway system," you create an ambiguity: are you referring to the Eisenhower System, or are you potentially referring to the network of all highways that cross state borders (like U.S. Route 1, which goes all the way from Maine to Florida, and is thus an interstate highway, but it is not an Interstate Highway).
Now, I'll grant you that the standard use of the phrase "interstate highway" these days tends to refer specifically to the Eisenhower System, so there's an argument that capitalization is unnecessary. On the other hand, by doing so you eliminate a possible distinction between (1) all highways that are commonly numbered across state borders (i.e., "interstate" highways, which include both the Eisenhower System and the U.S. Routes) and (2) state numbered highways, which do not often maintain numbering across borders.
That particular distinction is probably not that useful in common language, so most people can abandon the capital for the Eisenhower Interstate System without losing anything important.
But there is a meaning distinction there, which differentiates the common use of "interstate" in all contexts vs. a specific system. The question is whether "internet" would justify a similar distinction in modern usage or not.
When speaking, there is no difference an upper and lower case letter. It's rare to hear anyone complain that the spoken form of some sentence is more ambiguous or otherwise problematic than the written equivalent.
Writing lacks all sorts of expressive capabilities that can be conveyed through speech. Cues like subtle rises and falls around words, highlighting a word through volume or pitch, etc. can all help us parse where a sentence begins/ends or to know that a specific word is referring to a person rather than a common noun with the same sound. We don't have those cues in writing.
Why we still use capital letters?
I'm not really a linguist, but you might as well ask why we still use punctuation, or why we put spaces between words, or why we spell things in the ridiculous mess that is English-language spelling. They are conventions. Language is about communication, and effective communication requires common understanding -- which relies on convention. We learn to parse patterns based on those conventions. When those conventions change suddenly, it's more difficult for people familiar with them to parse things, and the communication is less effective.
That's the very broad general answer for all such things.
For the specific notion of capital letters, they are used (and have been used for over a millennium) as cues for parsing language. They occur at the beginning of sentences, which is a signal to parse a new phrase. They occur for proper names (people, countries, specific places, etc.), which is a cue to differentiate a word from any "common noun" associations. They therefore provide a shade of meaning that is different in many contexts. Often such meanings could be determined from context too, but the capital letter is a shortcut that immediately identifies the word as a "proper" noun, which means it generally falls into a few specific categories. In cases of ambiguity, someone parsing a sentence can immediately know that the word is a person, or a specific place, or whatever.
Some other languages have other conventions for capitals that make this parsing role exceptionally clear -- see German, for example, where ALL nouns are capitalized. Is it "necessary"? Obviously other languages do without it. But for Germans, that is a grammatical cue to the function of the word in a sentence. In English, capitals also provide such cues, just for specific types of nouns, rather than all of them. But the meaning is still helpful in many contexts.
Could we do without capital letters? Of course. Ancient languages often did, and various scripts around the world don't really have an equivalent. But again, it's kind of like asking why we put spaces between words. Youcanreadasentencewithoutthem,andit'softenstraightforwardtoparseasentence. But the spaces make it quicker in some circumstances with less cognitive load for those familiar with the convention.
They seem like an unnecessary relic (another example: the difference between ',' and ';') that we should be working to simplify out of the written form of our language.
Commas and semicolons are completely different punctuation marks, and they imply completely different relationships about the words or phrases around them. (The one case of similar usage is in lists that are subdivided, but this isn't a particularly common use case. Even there, the point is that the semicolon helps delineate between comma-delineated lists of items.)
Could we eliminate semicolons? Of course, but then we'd lose some subtle meaning and parsing possibilities. We could eliminate punctuation altogether too, but it would be even worse.
We might as well ask why we have dozens of words for different shades of "blue." Why not just call them all "blue"? Well, in some contexts it helps to clarify things, and sometimes that lack of ambiguity can assist in parsing what someone else means (e.g., when trying to locate an item on
I like how chickens aren't cheap because they only have nutrients and not enough calories. And then flour is bad because it has calories.
Yeah, I don't think you can expect logic in a post so full of misinformation. Or even a simple thought, like -- why not combine the two? Chicken and dumplings, anyone? Or chicken and homemade bread? Biscuits? Classic combos of nutritionally dense with cheaper calories.
It's almost like he came to the conclusion that cooking was impossible for the poor a priori, so the only rational choice must be a McDonalds double cheeseburger, a bag of potato chips, and a box of Little Debbie snack cakes.
the vegetables on special don't keep. When you're working poor you usually have two jobs and pull 60/hr a week. Getting to the store every day isn't happening.
You know what does keep? Frozen veggies. I see them in every value grocery store. Generally cheap and frozen at peak flavor. Or buy the ones on special and freeze yourself if you can't use them immediately.
Bananas are just sugar. That's why they're cheap.
No they're cheap because they are grown in countries where labor is cheap and companies have fought to control those labor prices and keep workers' pay as low as possible. And only one exact same genetic variety is common for those cheap bananas, meaning they all ripen at the exact predictable rate, allowing vastly better large economies of scale in transport. But they aren't a great health food -- still better than most fast food of junk food.
Whole Chickens aren't cheap when you count the calories in them. They seem cheap because the weight of the skin and bones is part of the cost.
Whole chickens are amazing things, and you can often get 3 meals of more out of them for a family. The bones and skin are the most essential parts, providing flavor in the form of fat that can be rendered for sauteing things and collogen and other elements that can be harvested for a tasty stock. First roast your chicken. Eat much of the meat for meal 1. Then pick off the remaining meat and simmer the bones and skin for stock. Refrigerate and skim fat. Make chicken and veggie soup next day. Meal 2. Use and remaining chicken bits, fat, etc. And simmer bones again (what the French call remoullage) for a second stock to be used to cook rice or beans or some other thing. Meal 3. Labor intensive, yes. But lots of cheap meals.
Cheap cuts of beef aren't. They don't really exist anymore. Even 80/20 pink slime is $3/lb in a lot of places.
Buy large packs in bulk when on sale or special. Freeze if you can't use right away. Don't ever use store-bought ground beef. Buy a cheap meat grinder instead.... It's simple, fast, and tastes so much better.
But perhaps more important: if you're poor, stop trying to eat so much meat! It's nutritious, but think of it more as a small flavorant or garnish in most meals, rather than the centerpiece. Buy the cheapest toughest cuts and use in stew, etc.
Onions aren't food. They're a garnish.
Actually, they have quite a bit of nutrients, though not very concentrated. They do provide a lot of fiber, like many veggies. When I was low on money, I often ate at least an onion per day in soup or stew or whatever... Good for bulking up the food and making it both flavorful and more filling.
Like lettuce they're cheap because their complete lack of nutritional value means they're cheap to grow.
Again, completely wrong. Iceberg lettuce has no nutrition, and it's cheap because it can be stored long, which makes for better distribution and economies of scale. Other leaf lettuce is more nutritious but also often more expensive. Better to go with spinach of another darker green (frozen, if you need really cheap).
Eggs are up to $3/dozen for the off brand. They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones. Those are $4.39/dozen.
Eggs have become expensive of late. But I have no idea what you're talking about "not keeping long." Even cheapest eggs generally keep at least a couple weeks or more.
Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
Whole grain flour has a lot more nutrients. Why do they fortify white flour? To replace the nutrition that was removed. But yeah, flour shouldn't be a central component of nutrition --yet it can provide a lot of
One of my minor hobbies is making old or ancient recipes straight from manuscripts or books, as close as I can. Something I've noticed is how much they really aren't that good. They're edible, to be sure, and they get you full and they're nutritious because they're always made from scratch. But they just ain't that good. There is almost always some simple optimization that would make them taste much, much better.
As someone who also tends to make old recipes or experiment with traditional techniques myself, I can point out a number of problems with old and ancient recipes. Many are bland, because spices were expensive. And access to a wide variety of ingredients was seasonal and often only for the very rich. These recipes can be improved by "modernizing" them with accessible ingredients. Same thing with recipes whose ingredients have changed over time -- so-called "heirloom" varieties of vegetables, fruits, and even old varieties of grains can make a huge difference in flavor and texture. Just subbing in a food that has the same basic name today may not be getting at the original flavors at all. And of course tastes change over time and in different cultures.
A lot of people ridicule McDonald's hamburgers or Applebee's entrees in the boil-in bags. But damn, that food is super-tasty.
They're "tasty" because they're generally engineered to be a completely unnatural mixture of flavors our bodies are adapted to be attracted too, since those flavors were often rare in the past... And consuming them could be important to survival. Now the artificial combinations and availability of those flavors results in overeating and excessive calorie consumption.
I cook and bake a lot of things in fairly traditional ways, I bring them to parties or serve them to guests, and inevitably people are blown away by the flavors, which vastly exceed the quality and satisfaction from a McDonalds hamburger or boil-in-a-bag meal. I've taken a simple loaf of plain bread prepared in a traditional manner with only natural (sourdough) yeast, fresh whole-grain flour, salt, and water, with long traditional fermentation... And I've seen people just rip apart the plain loaf and eat it without accompaniment... Because it's so damn good compared to what they usually eat. Traditional simple fresh ingredients, old-school prep. Result is often: Wow.
I have nothing against fast food's achievements in terms of packing calories in cheaply and quickly. But the idea that traditional foods are all crap, and we should bow to the "super-tasty" Big Mac as if it were some amazing culinary achievement? I think you may just not have eaten enough traditional GOOD food prepared from good ingredients.
It takes time. Time is not free.
While I absolutely agree with you that finding the time when working multiple jobs is hard for poor people, the effort and skills are another major barrier.
If you have a $10-20 crockpot and a refrigerator (or better, a freezer), you can easily make meals by dumping a few ingredients together with 15 minutes prep on the weekend or day off. 4-8 hours later you come back, and you have meals for the week. It's no harder to microwave or reheat on the stovetop than a frozen processed meal or canned dinner, but often a lot cheaper. Instead of taking 5 minutes extra to drive to the fast food place, take 5 minutes to cut up some fruit or veggies or prep a quick sidedish to eat with your bulk meals you prepped in advance.
It takes a bit of work and planning, as well as a little knowledge about how to make a regimen like this work... But it doesn't have to take more than a few minutes per day and can save significant money. (A $20 family dinner from a fast food joint looks good until you realize you could often feed your family all their meals for half that with some planning.)
When I first used an iPhone, it refused to believe the possessive pronoun "its" was a word. It would always "correct" to "it's". After a few weeks of looking like an illiterate idiot because " Autocorrect" kept introducing errors into my messages, I had to turn it off... And it's been off ever since.
This is absolutely true. It seems to happen to me a bit more as I get older -- I accidentally type a word that sounds like what I'm trying to say, rather than the correct word. If I'm typing fast, it will often go unnoticed (and is also one of the harder things to see when proofreading fast too). These days, my most common typos as homophone errors, even though I clearly know the difference.
I've seen many airports that have free filtered water sources so you can refill your own water bottle at no cost. Those are the ones with special taps with enough clearance to hold a bottle under. There are always water fountains you can fill from. Even so, I see $2.50 bottles of water, but not as high as you say.
Why are you nitpicking about this? In the real world, many people would like to bring a beverage in their bag (perhaps something other than water), and they don't want to pay elevated airport prices. As for the cost of the water bottle, it depends on the size and the airport, but there certainly are plenty of beverages in airport shops I've seen go for $3-4 or more.
I have yet to find an airline that charges anyone for water. And I don't recall ever having to pay for soda there.
You've obviously never flown on a "budget" airline. Yes, water is generally free. But other beverages sometimes are not. (Personally, I have no problem with that -- if it shaves a few dollars off the cost of my flight, I don't need a "free" tiny cup of soda or coffee or whatever. But it still doesn't make it any less ridiculous that you can't bring your own beverage from home at a fraction of the cost.)
Of course paid for. And at the airport. And the prices are usually a lot higher than off-airport. So what? Those shops aren't run by the airlines, and are thus also not a profit center for them.
I'm not sure why you're arguing about this so vociferously. The TSA policy clearly makes more money for airport shops, who (as you agree) already charge high prices. Even if the airlines aren't in a conspiracy to make money, there is a good deal of money made off of this policy by someone... for no apparent reason.
Free beverages on the airplane, or carry on what you want.
"Free" beverages on the airplane are generally limited to about 4 oz. of whatever selections they have poured into a cup packed with ice. Sure, you can pester an attendant to get a refill, and they'll probably give you the can if you ask nicely, but the drink carts are generally intended to keep passengers barely hydrated -- if someone actually wants a decent amount to drink, they'll be forced to buy something in the secure airport shops.
Airline beverage carts are not a profit center for any airline
Probably true, though every time they sell one of their $7+ mini bottles, most of which probably contain less than $1 of hard liquor, it's hard to believe they aren't at least trying to make a profit.
Bottom line: there probably isn't an airline conspiracy, but TSA's liquid policy is nonetheless a pain and does actually require a lot of consumers to fork out money if they want to drink more than water past the security gates.
...Osama is laughing his ass off.
Actually, it's apparently a guy named Khalid the Droll. As humorist Calvin Trillin predicted the Underwear Bomber in 2006:
I'm convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as "very, very impressionable." I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, "I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports." So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his M.O., referred to in the press as the underwear bomber, you'll know I was onto something.
Trillin did indeed say this, and you can find clips of TV interviews from 2006.
His theory makes as much sense as anyone else's:
after the shoe-bombing scheme worked to perfection, Khalid the Droll announced to his cell, "When they've had a few years of taking off their shoes, I bet I can make them expose their private parts to full-body scanners." Not once has one of these after-the-fact analyzers considered the possibility that... Khalid the Droll is engaged in an elaborate scheme to embarrass us to death.
Gotta agree with Ratzo on this one. Use a plumbers snake. If you don't have one, try a plunger. If you don't have one, take the sink apart and usually you'll find a clog in the trap or something and can remove manually. If you don't want to do that, try something less corrosive than drain cleaner but more effective, like baking soda followed by flushing with vinegar, whi often can loosen a clog. Drain cleaner is just horrible chemicals only idiots and people who are too lazy to care about destroying their plumbing use.
They have a right to throw someone out who has a different opinion, but that doesn't make it ethical, mature or civil to do so.
Who is talking about "opinions"? Civil behavior is mostly about politeness. You can still express dissenting opinions, but you can choose to do it in a polite and rational manner. Or, in your terms, act "ethical, mature, and civil" and most sites won't censor you.
I can tell you that if a friend were to tell me to leave their house because I disagreed with them, they wouldn't be a friend any longer.
And that might be a reasonable choice. On the other hand, if friends told me to leave their house because I was drunk, shouting obscenities, and urinating and vomiting all over the place, I think they'd be perfectly reasonable for "censoring" those activities and throwing me out.
My post had nothing to do with censoring anyone for the content of their ideas -- it had to do with the fact that anonymous speech on the internet often devolves into impolite shouting of obscenities, whereas people are often a bit more reticent to do that if their comments are attached to their name (or even a durable pseudonym that they don't want to sully with a bad reputation).
Just to be clear -- I'm not saying anonymous speech should be prevented. But I am saying that it has the potential to cause a lot of problems, which may require some form of censorship to clean up. (Anyone who has ever hosted comments on a website understands the vast majority of anonymous comments tend to be problematic -- mostly spam, followed by various inappropriate or uncivil remarks, etc. Heck, look around at the ACs on Slashdot when browsing at -1. Compare the number of angry, shouting, uncivil comments from ACs to those of registered users with a record of participation.)
If it's a business, then they lose a customer. If it's a web site, then they lose a user. Keep it up and eventually you'll not have any friends/customers/users at all.
I said that explicitly -- that's your choice. You don't agree with a site's policies? Don't participate. There are a number of internet forums where I no longer participate for this exact reason -- comments were deleted not because they are uncivil or whatever, but simply because I disagreed. I don't stand for such nonsense, and neither should you.
BUT -- that has nothing to do with the fact that many people take advantage of anonymity to act like jerks. And they rightfully should be censored from "civil" discourse.
Yes, it's simply impossible that any internet site might actually want to promote more civil behavior by causing people to tone down their comments. Instead, the ONLY reason must be that such sites would like people to go around attacking other people in real life for their views. [/sarcasm]
Because censorship is civil behavior...
Yes, it is. It's pretty much the definition of "civil" behavior. Look at any traditional rules of "etiquette." It's all about requirements to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. You don't show up to a typical wedding or a funeral dressed in ripped jeans and a tee-shirt with profanity on it. That's not explicit "censorship," but it is self-censorship. You have other times and places to express yourself as you'd like, but the social norms may limit your behavior in certain contexts.
Now, you may choose to say, "I don't subscribe to that etiquette nonsense! I want to walk around swearing at everyone all the time!" That's your choice. In a public place, you can't really be censored for doing so. But that behavior most certainly would be considered "uncivil" by most. It's your choice to accept that judgment for your freedom to behave in such a way.
But to get back to websites -- they also are generally hosted by private individuals or corporations. And just like a private individual can say "leave my house" if they don't like your behavior, and a private corporation can say "leave the building" to get you off of their private property, so a site owner has the right to "censor" comments on their own site.
Now, you may object to such censorship -- in which case, you can choose to go to another site which has more lenient policies. That's your choice. Private people and companies censor stuff all the time when it comes to their private property: that's their choice.
And yes, frequently the times they censor people is to maintain the traditional definition of "civil" behavior. If a guy walks in off the street and starts urinating on the reception desk at a company, I fully expect him to be asked to leave to promote "civil behavior." Regardless of how mad he might be at the company, his behavior is "uncivil" by definition and subject to censorship on private property.
The other part is corporate data retention and data mining.
Years ago, when young Google was still seen as a genuinely benevolent company and "social media" didn't exist, I was interviewed by a newspaper regarding a hot and highly publicized issue involving hacking and the newly-voted DMCA that I got involved in. I wasn't careful about what I said to that newspaper, and it got republished on the internet.
Soon after, I realized Google never forgot anything: for the following 10 years, each time I'd go to a job interview, that episode of my life - and the unfortunate statements I gave to the newspaper - would come up in the conversation. For a good 10 years, I had to explain myself, and explain that no, I wasn't a dangerous hacker, what really happened, and that, yes, I can be trusted with company secrets.
Umm, I do feel for you and your experience. But I'm not sure how any of this is Google's fault or really has much to do with "data mining." It's just basic search indexing.
Instead, you gave information to a newspaper, who chose to publish it on a public website. Google's "intentions" here were neither benevolent nor malicious -- they were just indexing public information.
As far as I can tell, if you want to blame anyone, I'd put the blame on the newspaper -- unless their general practice was to publish everyone online, which case it's really your own fault for not realizing the implications of that.
I quickly realized I had to shut my trap and hide my identity as much as I could online, if didn't want whatever I did or said to bite my ass in the future ever again.
I had a similar incident years before yours probably took place, where I had an email correspondence with someone who hosted a website, and I made some corrections about what he had said, though it was an "off-the-cuff" email which wasn't particularly well thought-out. He later posted that email on his website without asking permission -- his intent was clearly good, since he wanted to provide more detail and another perspective. But to me it was mildly embarrassing. And ever since I've been careful whenever I use my real name or email online.
The fact that you can still find those emails from more than 20 years ago using Google (with enough work) doesn't make Google responsible for my embarrassment.
Google & Co aren't: they pose as friendly innovators, when in fact they're just out to make a buck on your back, regardless of how much they can ruin your life.
While I agree that Google is trying to make money (sometimes in questionable ways), and aggregating your data is useful toward that end, I don't follow how your particular anecdote demonstrates some nefarious purpose. You gave comments to a NEWSPAPER. Surely you realized that was already a public venue? And that newspaper decided to post that story on a public website.
Without some sort of search, the internet would be impossible to navigate. I'm not sure I understand how Google's choice to simply index public pages demonstrates their intent to "ruin your life" just to make a buck.
Funny that you neither backed up any of that statement with facts nor with links to reputable sources. Good job, hypocrite.
There is a link to a source -- click on my username. It will take you to my profile. You can go back and see the various comments I've made here over the years and how they've been moderated.
Most of my comment was only about my own experience, which is anecdotal, but which also contradicts the parent's anecdotal experience. That much is verifiable fact, which you could easily find.
Yes, my last statement was more of an opinion, but it's based on my experience here. If you disagree, please provide your own reputable sources, rather than just vacuous ad hominem attacks.
Have a nice day! Don't ya love that reasoned discourse promoted by AC status!!