Depends on what kind, and what prep you're using. There's a few styles of tea where you are making, well, tea broth: you boil the water with the tea leaves in, and some where the tea leaves stay in the whole time so the last cups from the pot can be quite...bracing.
If you're using the coffee up at a sufficiently quick pace, don't bother with buying a grinder at all. Just buy it somewhere that will grind it for you as you watch if you're really particular about the length of time between it getting ground and brewed, or buy stuff that was shipped preground.
But, really, if you want a good grinder for cheap, hit up a thrift store or the like for an old coffee mill. The one I use is older than me, and very likely to remain functional even once an antique.
Having net neutrality be baked in on that level might also be actually preferable, especially since the ISPs being defined as common carriers by the FCC and having net neutrality regulations has failed quite entirely to prevent things like the MAFIAA from trying to get the ISPs to do their enforcement.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with MAFIAA.
requiring they be agnostic about the content of their pipes
This is exactly what Net Neutrality is.
If they are agnostic about the content of their pipes, they cannot take actions that would require they know what is going through those pipes. There are people, such as the MAFIAA, who are wanting them to take actions such as 'block torrents,' which require they know what is going through those pipes, and the success of such efforts serves as an indicator of if you actually have the desired ignorant pipes.
Do not confuse having net neutrality regulations with actually having net neutrality.
Which doesn't necessarily sound like any better an idea than leaving it to the courts, really, since bureaucracies typically work to expand their power, and doesn't change the fact that isn't the specific law I was looking for and we've got some pretty clear evidence that they're not functioning as common carriers even with net neutrality regulations in place.
What we want and need is for them to be common carriers. It may need to be done on the level of law, simply to allow them to have the ability to point to a specific statute when somebody takes them to court asking them to block access to part of the internet and say "We legally cannot." If it makes you happy, you can even have there be statutory penalties for them not being common carriers--I suggest something set up so the more customers hit and the longer they do it, the worse it is--and possibly some penalty going into place for trying to intimidate a common carrier into ceasing to act as one. That last one might get the ISPs happily on board.
And looking at the law you cited--it looks like most of the provisions don't really apply to ISPs. This is a Problem.
I'm not finding a reference for when the FCC got a law passed authorizing it to regulate the internet--the closest you get is the Telecommunications Act of 1934, but people had little concept of modern computers at the time, never mind most of the things we do with computers now. They'd consider the El Cheapo calculators we can pick up at a dollar store to be incredibly impressive and not just because those things can fit into a pocket.
It would be...reasonable to ask that, if the internet is going to be treated as telecommunications ect ect, that Congress actually pass the damn law saying as much. Having net neutrality be baked in on that level might also be actually preferable, especially since the ISPs being defined as common carriers by the FCC and having net neutrality regulations has failed quite entirely to prevent things like the MAFIAA from trying to get the ISPs to do their enforcement. (I would suggest not going for net neutrality but rather going straight to requiring they be agnostic about the content of their pipes--with them encouraged to know only the minimum amount of information required to ensure data gets where it's going, and not a single nibble more.)
Seriously, a lot of this feels like watching a group of people working on a program who keep implementing crocks with the assurance that these are only really temporary patches and they'll go back Any Day Now and implement a proper fix or at least a reliably-working kludge...with the distinct feeling that this 'any day' is going to be a few eons after the heat death of the universe. Can we please just implement the proper fix? One that might actually get us the real thing?
It might be better to think of it as being more like a pipe than a wire: Not only is there a limited amount that can go through, some things can really clog up the line.
What I actually would like here is if I could pick how my bandwidth got prioritized--I want to be able to happily stream something to watch after I've started a massive update downloading. If I'm on a small pipe, that's not something I get now; the thing that started first comes through first unless the program I'm using lets me manually cap the download speed...and most don't, and I've not met any that let me set it to pay attention to the overall traffic on the system.
However, this is Comcast. I doubt they're going to offer me the option of getting to choose myself what gets priority.
I also doubt that there's any actual point in trying to get them to obey net neutrality regulations. Enforce the current laws, force transparency upon them, give the current rules sharper teeth where necessary. If Comcast is a monopoly, it must be broken up.
I'm a bit stunned by a student of Ancient Greek culture applying the modern, Western concept of homosexuality on the period, not to mention skipping over some of the very unfortunate problems caused by the fact that the main sources we have for Spartan history are the Athenians--who cannot be trusted...to be accurate, anyway. To slight and slur the Spartans anytime they think they can get away with it? Hell yes. Some of the differences in values show up, too, because current thought is that Sparta was effectively a matriarchy--which is not something the Athenians saw as at all good, because in their opinion, women weren't really people. Which, incidentally, is also part of why applying modern Western concepts of sexuality is problematic...
[edit]... There isn't even anything involving pederastic relationships within the movie, there's no particular discussion of sexuality, and I would think that as a student of Greco-Roman culture you'd be very, very well aware how illegal it'd be to have included any pederastic relationships since 'beard growing in' at the time would mean 13-14 years old or so.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I was very careful to use the term "homosexual" exclusively in the context of adult male/male relationships. Elsewhere, I deliberately employed the more appropriate word "homophilia/homophiliac".
The term you want is adult male/male sexual relationships or things of that nature. Homophilia and homophiliac are still too connected to the modern West, and even there you have to be careful since even within Western culture there are groups that subscribe to the rule that you're only a homosexual if you're the receptive party.
That said, the only thing we've got firm evidence for is that it was a romantic relationship among the Spartans--some of the ancient sources actually explicitly say that it turning sexual was taboo, and what acts are and aren't permitted definitely varied by city-state.
The Ancient Greeks as a whole also saw no shame in a man being in a sexual relationship with another man--as long as he's not the receptive partner, which is also something that applies among the Romans. Calling Julius Ceasar every man's husband would have been a complement; it was calling him specifically their wife that made it an insult.
Your point regarding the absence of specifically Spartan sources in the historical record is not without merit - but we work with the evidence we have, not with the evidence we wish existed, n'est ce pas?
Oh, definitely, but this still is a thing you note. The problem isn't that there were not works--almost certainly there were--but that there are no known surviving copies. This is something which may change, even now.
As for the bizzaro notion that Sparta was somehow a matriarchy, despite its kings and ephors being exclusively male (and despite the popular, Aristotlelian notion that women were somehow "incomplete men") - well, that's news to me. I suspect it has little to do with the actual evidence from sources and artifacts, and everything to do with the endless quest for fresh topics for masters' theses.
There is, in fact, a sexual slur directed at the Athenians by the Spartans in both versions of 300. It occurs during the march from the Peloponnese to the Hot Gates (which somehow involves passing near Athens in Millerworld). You apparently missed it.
I'm a bit stunned by a student of Ancient Greek culture applying the modern, Western concept of homosexuality on the period, not to mention skipping over some of the very unfortunate problems caused by the fact that the main sources we have for Spartan history are the Athenians--who cannot be trusted...to be accurate, anyway. To slight and slur the Spartans anytime they think they can get away with it? Hell yes. Some of the differences in values show up, too, because current thought is that Sparta was effectively a matriarchy--which is not something the Athenians saw as at all good, because in their opinion, women weren't really people. Which, incidentally, is also part of why applying modern Western concepts of sexuality is problematic...
It's also a bit hard to believe that anybody who has seen or read 300 can believe Ephialtes might be the unreliable narrator, given that he is very very very very definitely dead before we're done. There isn't even anything involving pederastic relationships within the movie, there's no particular discussion of sexuality, and I would think that as a student of Greco-Roman culture you'd be very, very well aware how illegal it'd be to have included any pederastic relationships since 'beard growing in' at the time would mean 13-14 years old or so. (And that's just the start. I actually would quite happily do a graduate thesis on how ancient sexuality worked, because it's a lot less gender-based and a lot more Dominance/submission.) As for the rest? Seriously? It's pretty explicitly in-universe propaganda. From my experience with reading--occasionally in the original language--stuff from the period, the places where it's not accurate pretty much can be split between being a pretty likely guess on how they'd have written the account & things you cannot depict anymore.
But to take this back onto topic: Honestly, I can't really understand why they chose Snyder in the first place, especially since they'd done quite well with the Animated Universe which, admittedly, probably did as well as it did because WB's executives usually didn't meddle. Comic book movies have generally seriously benefited from being made by people into comics--with the noted exception of Burton, who isn't into them at all for mysterious reasons. He actually did get for a bit what was to become Superman Returns (after much, much meddling) and his proposal is the one version I'd have loved to see--his vision is straight out Golden Age and I'd have basically told him flat-out "Okay, but set it in the 1930s."
Really, despite having grown up on DC comics--Marvel was going through a period of heavy continuity porn to the detriment of new readers at the time I started reading--I'm pretty much OK with how the ratings are for the movies overall. That Wonder Woman wasn't a trainwreck is actually rather surprising, given WB's track record here.
I'm going to do a highlights reel for this, because I really don't want to waste time with you being stupid.
First off, you might want to reread what I said--'cost' does not always mean monetary cost, and I was trying to underline its human costs--and then reread the summary at least. It looks like they're proposing a new tool, using past examples, to enable better decision-making at the time of the disaster.
All costs are financial in one way or another. A human life prematurely lost is lost money, and an old life lost is often a gain, or at least less of a drain on money. This is such a minor part of the argument, I don't see much need to belabor it. But that's why we call it cost.
Either way, you're the one who decided that this is a financial choice.
Secondly, I had to get at least some training in how to handle suddenly-happening disaster situations because I might be working in some rather dangerous labs, so I can quite definitely tell you that no, you can very much know what might happen and what the rough odds are, and the people who opt to go in and get more intel know exactly what they're doing when the facility has properly-trained staff.
Rough odds is an understatement. I've worked in a lot of dangerous situations, and you prepare yourself as best you can, but if the facility is in total destruction mode, will you - the person who presumably knows all of the things that can go wrong - still be alive?
I'm not sure how to break it to you, but this is why everybody gets the training. If the facility is in total destruction mode, the last thing anybody needs is some idiot making the wrong choice because it 'seemed a good idea at the time' and making things worse...and yes, yes this is always, always possible.
Will all of the possible failure modes be discovered? The physical plant at Fukushima suggests otherwise, and let's not forget the human caused destruction at Chernobyl. Without that one dumb experiment, the plant would probably be happily generating electricity today.
Actually, from what I've seen from people who unlike you know what they're talking about what with being nuclear physicists and engineers? Chernobyl was a 100% predictable failure mode that they predicted themselves--that's kinda why it's so infamously dumb an experiment. It is an accident that's completely the result of them choosing to deliberately disable failsafes and then deliberately create the circumstances that the failsafes were intended to prevent. And this is why you have at least some of your failsafes designed so they cannot be disabled at all, ever, at least without it being shut down & reactivation required for starting it up again.
As for Fukushima? It was ruled to have been an avoidable accident. They'd actually been warned of the failure mode that happened, long enough ahead of time that they could have instituted any number of measures to ensure that there was no requirement for external power for the required cooling. It's actually impossible to say that even the severity of the earthquake or the tsunami were a surprise, because one of the events cited in the warnings was the 869 Sanriku earthquake & tsunami, which is incredibly close to the 2011 Tohaku one.
Oh, and a decent number of designs by that time avoid depending on things like pumps for cooling after having to do a shutdown, because it turns out people were quite aware that pumps can fail before 2011.
If you don't have a decent idea what 'burning and/or exploding reactor buildings' might result in, you have no business being responsible for them.
Which certainly argues for erring on the side of caution. As noted before, the evacuation was not a simple "JEEZUS K RYST! Get everyone the FSCK outa here NOW!
First off, you might want to reread what I said--'cost' does not always mean monetary cost, and I was trying to underline its human costs--and then reread the summary at least. It looks like they're proposing a new tool, using past examples, to enable better decision-making at the time of the disaster.
Secondly, I had to get at least some training in how to handle suddenly-happening disaster situations because I might be working in some rather dangerous labs, so I can quite definitely tell you that no, you can very much know what might happen and what the rough odds are, and the people who opt to go in and get more intel know exactly what they're doing when the facility has properly-trained staff. (This sadly cannot be said for Chernobyl.) If you don't have a decent idea what 'burning and/or exploding reactor buildings' might result in, you have no business being responsible for them. This includes being in the position where you are the one telling the person who officially gets to make the evacuation call if it's needed. Especially then, since it's basically your job to know those kinds of things.
Thirdly, you're not considering the converse situations, which have also happened. Unnecessary evacuations are crying wolf, and that's an incredibly well-understood problem. That's why tools like this are wanted in the first place; there are costs in this world other than money. The ones to consider most here are the costs in credibility and in human terms, since evacuations are not free of stress and such things as traffic accidents, and after some disasters there's a significant risk of roads being not necessarily safe for that level of use. Do you wanna be the guy who calls for an evacuation 'just to be safe' and the worst that happens is something like discovering the hard way that the key bridge was weakened to the point that it would collapse while fully loaded with evacuees? Would you be happy with getting known for calling for evacuations when it's not that big a deal often enough that people don't evacuate anymore--and die because for once it really was quite necessary to evacuate? Evacuations are not the calm, orderly things with end points at well-prepared evacuation centers with infinite capacity for all and their pets. They've got their own risks and dangers.
Anything that can reduce the fog and enable you to make better choices should be welcomed.
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
This part is the really, really important thing. One of the things that's been found out is that a lot of people will take a shorter but distinctly nicer life--and things like 'being a refugee' or 'stress & strain of being evacuated' have their own costs in life expectancy, too. Having a rough idea what your actual benefits and costs are help you make a good decision...and at the very least, it might be a Good Idea to not evacuate when the cost in life expectancy is more than that of staying put.
Note that I said it makes it harder to exploit them; it does not, sadly, completely prevent the exploitation. As somebody else pointed out, though, the stores are there to upsell people, to get them to buy the newest iPhone, more than they are to get you to buy iJunk in the first place.
Also, I live in a mostly Black/Hispanic/Native American neighborhood. We're also in Android country, and AT&T stores actually pretty hard to find despite being one of the major markets. Whomever was in charge of getting their cell network set up here kinda screwed up, and they early on got a local rep for dead zones everywhere. iPhones might have done a lot better here if they'd not started as an AT&T exclusive...
As somebody with a more than passing familiarity with Hispanic and Latino culture: Most of them are probably mixed race by the rules used by the US. How they define race is significantly different, because they follow different rules because they're from a different culture with a different history. Most probably do have a Spanish ancestor--but they may not look it, and they might not count themselves as part Spanish because that ancestor was too many generations back...and, in some groups, they might also not identify as Spanish, which is also an important part of it, by how they define things.
This is pretty much why race is considered a social construct, too. If it was biological in the sense most people think of race, such things as the definitions and rules of how people counted would be consistent and stable across cultures and time.
You can blame the banker for writing a junk mortgage but that still doesn't get the consumer off the hook for their own stupidity.
Yes, it does.
But you're probably one of those people who think economics is based on scientifically proven rational self interest and that the Invisible Hand creates the best of all possible worlds.
Blame is not a unitary thing that can only go on one party; it is expansive and quite capable of being on more than one side. The thing that would get the consumer off the hook for taking mortgage is if the banker lied to them to sell it.
Some of the blame should also go to the politicians and bureaucrats who decided to enable, encourage, and in some ways require the junk mortgages get issued--especially when there were less exploitative methods for increasing home ownership rates within these groups, but those weren't the same sexy vote-getters and/or would require the horrific effort required to engage in critical thinking. It's just so much easier to (over)simplify the problem & institute a solution to that instead of the actual problem.
TFA identifies an old, well known problem. Poverty creates a feedback loop that makes it harder to lift an area up.
What's a shame is that it gets reported as a click bait headline attacking Apple. It would be far more productive to frame to as a request to Apple to consider doing something good for that part of the city.
They are. They're not opening up an Apple store there, making it harder for them to exploit the customers by selling them a status symbol brand--one which mostly shows off that you've got the cash for the latest fashionable gadgets, with no care for getting the best value for your money.
You mean like NYC having the lowest violent crime rate of any major city in the US? (https://www.amny.com/opinion/homicide-rate-still-at-historic-lows-in-new-york-1.11210870). Yeah, that'd be horrible if they managed to do that everywhere.
I know enough about how homicide rates get determined to not trust any official count. I remember sitting there with somebody trying to figure out how the hell her hometown managed an official homicide rate of one when she was the person who found one of the other bodies. Well, part of it, anyway. Apparently in her hometown, suicides are capable of dismembering themselves and scattering their body parts.
Remove the Electoral College, and you have a situation where candidates only need pander to a small handful of states
Have a straight popular vote and candidates will need to appeal to voters everywhere.
Or keep the EC but allocate them pro rata[1] instead of all-or-nothing and you remove the incentive to ignore the ones that are either no-hopers or in the pocket.
[1] I think a few of the smaller states do this already.
Two states do, and I think that the second choice manages to strike the correct balance--a straight popular vote apparently was considered but rejected (I know a couple history nerds I could ask if I had a few hours to kill) and carries a significant risk that candidates will toss the small(er) groups under the bus to get the large(r) groups' votes.
Assigning the votes pro rata would force a broad-based popularity--and if you're still bothered by the votes of people in densely-populated areas 'counting less,' start encouraging people to spread out more. High population density isn't good overall, and the benefits it used to bring are steadily less and less requiring that crowding...
This was a request for comments, not votes. This is pretty much exactly what I expected when I saw that I was being offered a form letter instead of a petition.
What you should be offended by is the fact that the people leading the efforts on letting the FCC know that a lot of people would prefer net neutrality chose to do it by having us all spam them. A petition or donations to help pay for sending in a very nice, very well-done legal argument in its favor would have been more effective. I was pretty much expecting this result when I saw it was a form letter instead.
So did the EFF and OpenMedia make an obvious rookie screw up, or were they following the existing standard whereby form letters were considered?
It's an obvious rookie screw up, and I was outright mystified when the EFF directed me to where I could send one in via a helpful web app because it's a well-known one.
It's like they wandered in from some strange, strange alternate universe where form letters are considered and people really do get money from the Nigerian princes who randomly emailed them.
Form letters do dick-squat. If you want people to write letters, then you inform the people, but you do *NOT* tell them or even suggest to them exactly what they ought to write because 9 out of 10 people, however well-intentioned they might have otherwise been, will just not bother trying to put it into their own words when something else already exists. You'd get less people sending letters, but you wouldn't get a situation where 90% of the letters get ignored.
Actually, form letters do worse than nothing, because they show you've got at best a lot of people whose support isn't much past filling in a blank or two & clicking send at best. It's effectively spam. If you just want numbers, it's better to just get people signing a petition; you can provide the info needed for anybody who wants to write a letter on their own as well as sign the petition.
Of course. But 'Our senses are reliable' failed scientific verification; we can screw with sensory input, and we're working on understanding how it works in part through how we can screw with it.
If you skip the verification step, you're not actually practicing science. The key thing with science is a belief that "The universe is a rational universe, with rules which can be discovered through reason and testing," not a belief that "We can learn from our senses and experience."
Yes, it is. To believe in science is to believe that we can learn from our senses and experience; it's the belief that the world you see is the world that exists.
Science involves verifying those beliefs. The belief that the world you see is the world that exists has been tested.
I think hideen more accurately represents the mindset involved, especially given that anti-gravity devices would be harder to do than a moon landing--unless the theory is that it's just the footage that's fake...
If only we had the science to figure out if steam boosters could launch things into space economically or even at all.
The usual problem hasn't been if we've the science, as much as if we've not had somebody willing to insist that the conventional wisdom provide evidence and withstand testing. That's pretty much how science works; if you don't do your best to destruct-test your theories, it's not science, it's religion.
Unfortunately, one of the things I've learned over the years is how little IQ correlates to anything useful; at least once you get much past 1.5 or 2 standard deviations over the mean.
That's actually because the cutoff for things like IQs actually meaning anything is roughly two standard deviations from the mean--in either direction, not just over. Tests like IQ tests are functionally rulers that are just long enough to go that far on either side of the mean--once you get past that the ends, the actual number is pretty much insignificant.
Of course, there's problems if you were to just report those scores as something other than numbers, even though the actual numbers don't mean much anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what kind, and what prep you're using. There's a few styles of tea where you are making, well, tea broth: you boil the water with the tea leaves in, and some where the tea leaves stay in the whole time so the last cups from the pot can be quite...bracing.
There is overlap.
If you're using the coffee up at a sufficiently quick pace, don't bother with buying a grinder at all. Just buy it somewhere that will grind it for you as you watch if you're really particular about the length of time between it getting ground and brewed, or buy stuff that was shipped preground.
But, really, if you want a good grinder for cheap, hit up a thrift store or the like for an old coffee mill. The one I use is older than me, and very likely to remain functional even once an antique.
Having net neutrality be baked in on that level might also be actually preferable, especially since the ISPs being defined as common carriers by the FCC and having net neutrality regulations has failed quite entirely to prevent things like the MAFIAA from trying to get the ISPs to do their enforcement.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with MAFIAA.
requiring they be agnostic about the content of their pipes
This is exactly what Net Neutrality is.
If they are agnostic about the content of their pipes, they cannot take actions that would require they know what is going through those pipes. There are people, such as the MAFIAA, who are wanting them to take actions such as 'block torrents,' which require they know what is going through those pipes, and the success of such efforts serves as an indicator of if you actually have the desired ignorant pipes.
Do not confuse having net neutrality regulations with actually having net neutrality.
Which doesn't necessarily sound like any better an idea than leaving it to the courts, really, since bureaucracies typically work to expand their power, and doesn't change the fact that isn't the specific law I was looking for and we've got some pretty clear evidence that they're not functioning as common carriers even with net neutrality regulations in place.
What we want and need is for them to be common carriers. It may need to be done on the level of law, simply to allow them to have the ability to point to a specific statute when somebody takes them to court asking them to block access to part of the internet and say "We legally cannot." If it makes you happy, you can even have there be statutory penalties for them not being common carriers--I suggest something set up so the more customers hit and the longer they do it, the worse it is--and possibly some penalty going into place for trying to intimidate a common carrier into ceasing to act as one. That last one might get the ISPs happily on board.
And looking at the law you cited--it looks like most of the provisions don't really apply to ISPs. This is a Problem.
I'm not finding a reference for when the FCC got a law passed authorizing it to regulate the internet--the closest you get is the Telecommunications Act of 1934, but people had little concept of modern computers at the time, never mind most of the things we do with computers now. They'd consider the El Cheapo calculators we can pick up at a dollar store to be incredibly impressive and not just because those things can fit into a pocket.
It would be...reasonable to ask that, if the internet is going to be treated as telecommunications ect ect, that Congress actually pass the damn law saying as much. Having net neutrality be baked in on that level might also be actually preferable, especially since the ISPs being defined as common carriers by the FCC and having net neutrality regulations has failed quite entirely to prevent things like the MAFIAA from trying to get the ISPs to do their enforcement. (I would suggest not going for net neutrality but rather going straight to requiring they be agnostic about the content of their pipes--with them encouraged to know only the minimum amount of information required to ensure data gets where it's going, and not a single nibble more.)
Seriously, a lot of this feels like watching a group of people working on a program who keep implementing crocks with the assurance that these are only really temporary patches and they'll go back Any Day Now and implement a proper fix or at least a reliably-working kludge...with the distinct feeling that this 'any day' is going to be a few eons after the heat death of the universe. Can we please just implement the proper fix? One that might actually get us the real thing?
It might be better to think of it as being more like a pipe than a wire: Not only is there a limited amount that can go through, some things can really clog up the line.
What I actually would like here is if I could pick how my bandwidth got prioritized--I want to be able to happily stream something to watch after I've started a massive update downloading. If I'm on a small pipe, that's not something I get now; the thing that started first comes through first unless the program I'm using lets me manually cap the download speed...and most don't, and I've not met any that let me set it to pay attention to the overall traffic on the system.
However, this is Comcast. I doubt they're going to offer me the option of getting to choose myself what gets priority.
I also doubt that there's any actual point in trying to get them to obey net neutrality regulations. Enforce the current laws, force transparency upon them, give the current rules sharper teeth where necessary. If Comcast is a monopoly, it must be broken up.
https://slashdot.org/~Cinnamon+Beige criticized:
I'm a bit stunned by a student of Ancient Greek culture applying the modern, Western concept of homosexuality on the period, not to mention skipping over some of the very unfortunate problems caused by the fact that the main sources we have for Spartan history are the Athenians--who cannot be trusted...to be accurate, anyway. To slight and slur the Spartans anytime they think they can get away with it? Hell yes. Some of the differences in values show up, too, because current thought is that Sparta was effectively a matriarchy--which is not something the Athenians saw as at all good, because in their opinion, women weren't really people. Which, incidentally, is also part of why applying modern Western concepts of sexuality is problematic...
[edit] ... There isn't even anything involving pederastic relationships within the movie, there's no particular discussion of sexuality, and I would think that as a student of Greco-Roman culture you'd be very, very well aware how illegal it'd be to have included any pederastic relationships since 'beard growing in' at the time would mean 13-14 years old or so.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I was very careful to use the term "homosexual" exclusively in the context of adult male/male relationships. Elsewhere, I deliberately employed the more appropriate word "homophilia/homophiliac".
The term you want is adult male/male sexual relationships or things of that nature. Homophilia and homophiliac are still too connected to the modern West, and even there you have to be careful since even within Western culture there are groups that subscribe to the rule that you're only a homosexual if you're the receptive party.
That said, the only thing we've got firm evidence for is that it was a romantic relationship among the Spartans--some of the ancient sources actually explicitly say that it turning sexual was taboo, and what acts are and aren't permitted definitely varied by city-state.
The Ancient Greeks as a whole also saw no shame in a man being in a sexual relationship with another man--as long as he's not the receptive partner, which is also something that applies among the Romans. Calling Julius Ceasar every man's husband would have been a complement; it was calling him specifically their wife that made it an insult.
Your point regarding the absence of specifically Spartan sources in the historical record is not without merit - but we work with the evidence we have, not with the evidence we wish existed, n'est ce pas?
Oh, definitely, but this still is a thing you note. The problem isn't that there were not works--almost certainly there were--but that there are no known surviving copies. This is something which may change, even now.
As for the bizzaro notion that Sparta was somehow a matriarchy, despite its kings and ephors being exclusively male (and despite the popular, Aristotlelian notion that women were somehow "incomplete men") - well, that's news to me. I suspect it has little to do with the actual evidence from sources and artifacts, and everything to do with the endless quest for fresh topics for masters' theses.
I don't know, how about we start with Aristotle's claims about them? This should get you started on your run through this part of history. Yes, yes, it is Wikipedia, but it's a good place to harvest yourself some references including where to start in reading Aristotle.
There is, in fact, a sexual slur directed at the Athenians by the Spartans in both versions of 300. It occurs during the march from the Peloponnese to the Hot Gates (which somehow involves passing near Athens in Millerworld). You apparently missed it.
I'm a bit stunned by a student of Ancient Greek culture applying the modern, Western concept of homosexuality on the period, not to mention skipping over some of the very unfortunate problems caused by the fact that the main sources we have for Spartan history are the Athenians--who cannot be trusted...to be accurate, anyway. To slight and slur the Spartans anytime they think they can get away with it? Hell yes. Some of the differences in values show up, too, because current thought is that Sparta was effectively a matriarchy--which is not something the Athenians saw as at all good, because in their opinion, women weren't really people. Which, incidentally, is also part of why applying modern Western concepts of sexuality is problematic...
It's also a bit hard to believe that anybody who has seen or read 300 can believe Ephialtes might be the unreliable narrator, given that he is very very very very definitely dead before we're done. There isn't even anything involving pederastic relationships within the movie, there's no particular discussion of sexuality, and I would think that as a student of Greco-Roman culture you'd be very, very well aware how illegal it'd be to have included any pederastic relationships since 'beard growing in' at the time would mean 13-14 years old or so. (And that's just the start. I actually would quite happily do a graduate thesis on how ancient sexuality worked, because it's a lot less gender-based and a lot more Dominance/submission.) As for the rest? Seriously? It's pretty explicitly in-universe propaganda. From my experience with reading--occasionally in the original language--stuff from the period, the places where it's not accurate pretty much can be split between being a pretty likely guess on how they'd have written the account & things you cannot depict anymore.
But to take this back onto topic: Honestly, I can't really understand why they chose Snyder in the first place, especially since they'd done quite well with the Animated Universe which, admittedly, probably did as well as it did because WB's executives usually didn't meddle. Comic book movies have generally seriously benefited from being made by people into comics--with the noted exception of Burton, who isn't into them at all for mysterious reasons. He actually did get for a bit what was to become Superman Returns (after much, much meddling) and his proposal is the one version I'd have loved to see--his vision is straight out Golden Age and I'd have basically told him flat-out "Okay, but set it in the 1930s."
Really, despite having grown up on DC comics--Marvel was going through a period of heavy continuity porn to the detriment of new readers at the time I started reading--I'm pretty much OK with how the ratings are for the movies overall. That Wonder Woman wasn't a trainwreck is actually rather surprising, given WB's track record here.
I'm going to do a highlights reel for this, because I really don't want to waste time with you being stupid.
First off, you might want to reread what I said--'cost' does not always mean monetary cost, and I was trying to underline its human costs--and then reread the summary at least. It looks like they're proposing a new tool, using past examples, to enable better decision-making at the time of the disaster.
All costs are financial in one way or another. A human life prematurely lost is lost money, and an old life lost is often a gain, or at least less of a drain on money. This is such a minor part of the argument, I don't see much need to belabor it. But that's why we call it cost.
Either way, you're the one who decided that this is a financial choice.
Secondly, I had to get at least some training in how to handle suddenly-happening disaster situations because I might be working in some rather dangerous labs, so I can quite definitely tell you that no, you can very much know what might happen and what the rough odds are, and the people who opt to go in and get more intel know exactly what they're doing when the facility has properly-trained staff.
Rough odds is an understatement. I've worked in a lot of dangerous situations, and you prepare yourself as best you can, but if the facility is in total destruction mode, will you - the person who presumably knows all of the things that can go wrong - still be alive?
I'm not sure how to break it to you, but this is why everybody gets the training. If the facility is in total destruction mode, the last thing anybody needs is some idiot making the wrong choice because it 'seemed a good idea at the time' and making things worse...and yes, yes this is always, always possible.
Will all of the possible failure modes be discovered? The physical plant at Fukushima suggests otherwise, and let's not forget the human caused destruction at Chernobyl. Without that one dumb experiment, the plant would probably be happily generating electricity today.
Actually, from what I've seen from people who unlike you know what they're talking about what with being nuclear physicists and engineers? Chernobyl was a 100% predictable failure mode that they predicted themselves--that's kinda why it's so infamously dumb an experiment. It is an accident that's completely the result of them choosing to deliberately disable failsafes and then deliberately create the circumstances that the failsafes were intended to prevent. And this is why you have at least some of your failsafes designed so they cannot be disabled at all, ever, at least without it being shut down & reactivation required for starting it up again.
As for Fukushima? It was ruled to have been an avoidable accident. They'd actually been warned of the failure mode that happened, long enough ahead of time that they could have instituted any number of measures to ensure that there was no requirement for external power for the required cooling. It's actually impossible to say that even the severity of the earthquake or the tsunami were a surprise, because one of the events cited in the warnings was the 869 Sanriku earthquake & tsunami, which is incredibly close to the 2011 Tohaku one.
Oh, and a decent number of designs by that time avoid depending on things like pumps for cooling after having to do a shutdown, because it turns out people were quite aware that pumps can fail before 2011.
If you don't have a decent idea what 'burning and/or exploding reactor buildings' might result in, you have no business being responsible for them.
Which certainly argues for erring on the side of caution. As noted before, the evacuation was not a simple "JEEZUS K RYST! Get everyone the FSCK outa here NOW!
It started with the area
First off, you might want to reread what I said--'cost' does not always mean monetary cost, and I was trying to underline its human costs--and then reread the summary at least. It looks like they're proposing a new tool, using past examples, to enable better decision-making at the time of the disaster.
Secondly, I had to get at least some training in how to handle suddenly-happening disaster situations because I might be working in some rather dangerous labs, so I can quite definitely tell you that no, you can very much know what might happen and what the rough odds are, and the people who opt to go in and get more intel know exactly what they're doing when the facility has properly-trained staff. (This sadly cannot be said for Chernobyl.) If you don't have a decent idea what 'burning and/or exploding reactor buildings' might result in, you have no business being responsible for them. This includes being in the position where you are the one telling the person who officially gets to make the evacuation call if it's needed. Especially then, since it's basically your job to know those kinds of things.
Thirdly, you're not considering the converse situations, which have also happened. Unnecessary evacuations are crying wolf, and that's an incredibly well-understood problem. That's why tools like this are wanted in the first place; there are costs in this world other than money. The ones to consider most here are the costs in credibility and in human terms, since evacuations are not free of stress and such things as traffic accidents, and after some disasters there's a significant risk of roads being not necessarily safe for that level of use. Do you wanna be the guy who calls for an evacuation 'just to be safe' and the worst that happens is something like discovering the hard way that the key bridge was weakened to the point that it would collapse while fully loaded with evacuees? Would you be happy with getting known for calling for evacuations when it's not that big a deal often enough that people don't evacuate anymore--and die because for once it really was quite necessary to evacuate? Evacuations are not the calm, orderly things with end points at well-prepared evacuation centers with infinite capacity for all and their pets. They've got their own risks and dangers.
Anything that can reduce the fog and enable you to make better choices should be welcomed.
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
This part is the really, really important thing. One of the things that's been found out is that a lot of people will take a shorter but distinctly nicer life--and things like 'being a refugee' or 'stress & strain of being evacuated' have their own costs in life expectancy, too. Having a rough idea what your actual benefits and costs are help you make a good decision...and at the very least, it might be a Good Idea to not evacuate when the cost in life expectancy is more than that of staying put.
Note that I said it makes it harder to exploit them; it does not, sadly, completely prevent the exploitation. As somebody else pointed out, though, the stores are there to upsell people, to get them to buy the newest iPhone, more than they are to get you to buy iJunk in the first place.
Also, I live in a mostly Black/Hispanic/Native American neighborhood. We're also in Android country, and AT&T stores actually pretty hard to find despite being one of the major markets. Whomever was in charge of getting their cell network set up here kinda screwed up, and they early on got a local rep for dead zones everywhere. iPhones might have done a lot better here if they'd not started as an AT&T exclusive...
As somebody with a more than passing familiarity with Hispanic and Latino culture: Most of them are probably mixed race by the rules used by the US. How they define race is significantly different, because they follow different rules because they're from a different culture with a different history. Most probably do have a Spanish ancestor--but they may not look it, and they might not count themselves as part Spanish because that ancestor was too many generations back...and, in some groups, they might also not identify as Spanish, which is also an important part of it, by how they define things.
This is pretty much why race is considered a social construct, too. If it was biological in the sense most people think of race, such things as the definitions and rules of how people counted would be consistent and stable across cultures and time.
You can blame the banker for writing a junk mortgage but that still doesn't get the consumer off the hook for their own stupidity.
Yes, it does.
But you're probably one of those people who think economics is based on scientifically proven rational self interest and that the Invisible Hand creates the best of all possible worlds.
Blame is not a unitary thing that can only go on one party; it is expansive and quite capable of being on more than one side. The thing that would get the consumer off the hook for taking mortgage is if the banker lied to them to sell it.
Some of the blame should also go to the politicians and bureaucrats who decided to enable, encourage, and in some ways require the junk mortgages get issued--especially when there were less exploitative methods for increasing home ownership rates within these groups, but those weren't the same sexy vote-getters and/or would require the horrific effort required to engage in critical thinking. It's just so much easier to (over)simplify the problem & institute a solution to that instead of the actual problem .
TFA identifies an old, well known problem. Poverty creates a feedback loop that makes it harder to lift an area up.
What's a shame is that it gets reported as a click bait headline attacking Apple. It would be far more productive to frame to as a request to Apple to consider doing something good for that part of the city.
They are. They're not opening up an Apple store there, making it harder for them to exploit the customers by selling them a status symbol brand--one which mostly shows off that you've got the cash for the latest fashionable gadgets, with no care for getting the best value for your money.
You mean like NYC having the lowest violent crime rate of any major city in the US? (https://www.amny.com/opinion/homicide-rate-still-at-historic-lows-in-new-york-1.11210870). Yeah, that'd be horrible if they managed to do that everywhere.
I know enough about how homicide rates get determined to not trust any official count. I remember sitting there with somebody trying to figure out how the hell her hometown managed an official homicide rate of one when she was the person who found one of the other bodies. Well, part of it, anyway. Apparently in her hometown, suicides are capable of dismembering themselves and scattering their body parts.
Have a straight popular vote and candidates will need to appeal to voters everywhere.
Or keep the EC but allocate them pro rata[1] instead of all-or-nothing and you remove the incentive to ignore the ones that are either no-hopers or in the pocket.
[1] I think a few of the smaller states do this already.
Two states do, and I think that the second choice manages to strike the correct balance--a straight popular vote apparently was considered but rejected (I know a couple history nerds I could ask if I had a few hours to kill) and carries a significant risk that candidates will toss the small(er) groups under the bus to get the large(r) groups' votes.
Assigning the votes pro rata would force a broad-based popularity--and if you're still bothered by the votes of people in densely-populated areas 'counting less,' start encouraging people to spread out more. High population density isn't good overall, and the benefits it used to bring are steadily less and less requiring that crowding...
This was a request for comments, not votes. This is pretty much exactly what I expected when I saw that I was being offered a form letter instead of a petition.
What you should be offended by is the fact that the people leading the efforts on letting the FCC know that a lot of people would prefer net neutrality chose to do it by having us all spam them. A petition or donations to help pay for sending in a very nice, very well-done legal argument in its favor would have been more effective. I was pretty much expecting this result when I saw it was a form letter instead.
So did the EFF and OpenMedia make an obvious rookie screw up, or were they following the existing standard whereby form letters were considered?
It's an obvious rookie screw up, and I was outright mystified when the EFF directed me to where I could send one in via a helpful web app because it's a well-known one.
It's like they wandered in from some strange, strange alternate universe where form letters are considered and people really do get money from the Nigerian princes who randomly emailed them.
Form letters do dick-squat. If you want people to write letters, then you inform the people, but you do *NOT* tell them or even suggest to them exactly what they ought to write because 9 out of 10 people, however well-intentioned they might have otherwise been, will just not bother trying to put it into their own words when something else already exists. You'd get less people sending letters, but you wouldn't get a situation where 90% of the letters get ignored.
Actually, form letters do worse than nothing, because they show you've got at best a lot of people whose support isn't much past filling in a blank or two & clicking send at best. It's effectively spam. If you just want numbers, it's better to just get people signing a petition; you can provide the info needed for anybody who wants to write a letter on their own as well as sign the petition.
Of course. But 'Our senses are reliable' failed scientific verification; we can screw with sensory input, and we're working on understanding how it works in part through how we can screw with it.
If you skip the verification step, you're not actually practicing science. The key thing with science is a belief that "The universe is a rational universe, with rules which can be discovered through reason and testing," not a belief that "We can learn from our senses and experience."
Yes, it is. To believe in science is to believe that we can learn from our senses and experience; it's the belief that the world you see is the world that exists.
Science involves verifying those beliefs. The belief that the world you see is the world that exists has been tested.
The results were not precisely favorable.
I think hideen more accurately represents the mindset involved, especially given that anti-gravity devices would be harder to do than a moon landing--unless the theory is that it's just the footage that's fake...
If only we had the science to figure out if steam boosters could launch things into space economically or even at all.
The usual problem hasn't been if we've the science, as much as if we've not had somebody willing to insist that the conventional wisdom provide evidence and withstand testing. That's pretty much how science works; if you don't do your best to destruct-test your theories, it's not science, it's religion.
Unfortunately, one of the things I've learned over the years is how little IQ correlates to anything useful; at least once you get much past 1.5 or 2 standard deviations over the mean.
That's actually because the cutoff for things like IQs actually meaning anything is roughly two standard deviations from the mean--in either direction, not just over. Tests like IQ tests are functionally rulers that are just long enough to go that far on either side of the mean--once you get past that the ends, the actual number is pretty much insignificant.
Of course, there's problems if you were to just report those scores as something other than numbers, even though the actual numbers don't mean much anymore...