If anyone wants to experience church services they are available nearly everywhere
I take it you aren't a churchgoer then. This is much like saying "If anyone wants to experience a football game, they are available nearly everywhere". Different churches, sometimes even within the same denomination and town, are very different. For instance, mine is very supportive of social justice issues (eg: The Beatitudes), is proud of our many same-sex couple members (and from what I can tell the feeling is mutual), and openly discusses and incorporates the scholarly research on historical sources and inconsistencies in The Bible. There are other Churches of our denomination in our same city that dislike us so much, they started their own church camps so their kids won't interact with ours. So I think its quite fair to say that a Ted Cruz Christian would be very irate if you tried to tell him this particular church is interchangeable with his.
But you are also missing the entire point of live-tweeting. Its about sharing your perception of a shared experience more than it is about bringing those not in attendance up to speed. For example, my #JesusJazz tweets really would make no sense to people who weren't there when it happened. Same with #WiggsMadLibs. Its unapologetically an inside joke.
But seriously -- they will allow you to text, but not use your built-in video camera? How will they tell the difference?
Well, if you go from my idea from my previous comment, the same device that prevents light pollution from your phone to your neighbors would quite likely impede incoming light (eg: from the screen) as a side-effect.
If I'm a theater trying to get millenials in, I would setup this separate room and then take this a step further: show a text comments section above or below the screen and display (censored/moderated) comments from the audience during the movie - could be pretty funny/entertaining as an optional experience (go to normal room if you just want to watch the movie).
OK. I'd personally pay $5 more for this, if the moderators can limit themselves to just censoring trolls and spam. Actually, an algorithm that only accepted X-RTed and liked tweets geolocated to an actual theater showing that move at that exact point in the move would be pretty sweet. Or alternatively one that only showed high-rated tweets from within that theater right then, and gave each patron upvoting/downvoting and theater commenting karma, a-la Slashcode or Stackoverflow might be pretty cool too.
I wonder if I just gave someone their next stupid Silly Valley IPO idea? Nah. Probably already in the works anyway.
Likely unpopular opinion here, but I think it would be wonderful if they could find a way to pull this off, without the user contributing any noise or light pollution to the theater at large.
There honestly shouldn't be a problem with this, as long as the following can be accomplished.
No talking on the phone. Its used for textual purposes only.
Phone must be in silent mode. No rings, music, or notification beeps. Preferably no vibration noises either.
Tricky one: no excessive light pollution to other patrons. It seems like there ought to be some kind of device (polarized lenses perhaps) that could help with this.
If you could do all that, then others should be able to watch their movie in peace without you audibly or visually disrupting their experience, and yet you could still use your social media apps.
I'm one who follows twitter live-tweeting of mass events, and I could see where this might be something I'd like to see (perhaps even participate in) for something like a big movie release. Twitter greatly enhances my experience of viewing live sporting events (it like being in a big virtual sports bar), and similarly for other live events like political debates, and I do kind of miss that for movie viewing. You can participate in discussions about it afterwards, but you really miss out on those instant reactions.
...and yes, I livetweet my Church services (phone on silent of course). Often I get likes or retweets from the Church's own social media account before the service is even over. This is the world we live in now. Its only natural that theaters and movie studios want to participate too.
Olive oil has a certain flavor to it. We have some, and I'll happily use it for small cooking tasks like sautéing mushrooms (yum). But I tried a batch of brownies with it once, and it put a really funny taste into them. I say "funny", but my family was not amused. And its far too expensive to use for really large tasks like deep frying.
Olive oil has its uses, and it really shines for those, but its just not an everyday cooking oil.
using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter.....
the vegetable oils mentioned in the article are not necessarily the most commonly used (which are oils made of olive, sunflower, coconut, and palm).
Ummm..this looks wrong. The most common two cooking oils in the USA are Soybean Oil and Canola Oil. Soybean alone dwarfs everything else put together (but I threw in Canola because that's what my family uses for most needs). Soybean oil is a bit over 50% linoleic acid. Canola is about 20%.
So if you live and eat in the USA, this probably applies to you.
of highly opinionated articles about feminism -- but no corresponding articles, or sections, concerning men's issues their coverage is neither balanced, nor able to show how much abuse their "men's" writers would get, since they don't have any.
That would be a total false equivalence. If group A runs most everything and group B does not, then arguing for more rights and privileges for group B is a qualitatively different thing than arguing for more rights for group A. You could only fairly make that comparison if everything was both now and historically equivalent for both groups.
I don't think this should be a difficult concept. You don't see people get nearly as angry at kids punching adults in public as they do at adults punching kids. The power imbalance between the two makes them totally different circumstances. Everyone understands this.
To argue differently when the different groups happen to be racial and/or gender based is to imply that there is no power imbalance between the two. That's plain horseshit.
I don't know how things work in Europe, but in the USA this has been a complaint traditionally leveled against immigrant communities (we have our Chinatowns, etc). So far, it has never panned out, and second-generation immigrants all ended up learning English. Third generation almost never even know their grandparent's native language. (Which is actually kind of sad).
People are making the same claims about Hispanic immigrants to the US today, but the last time I saw someone try to study it, they found the same 2nd and 3rd generation effects. Ironically, I went to lunch while composing this with a guy who is a Catholic Deacon, and he (without any prompting from me) described this exact process among the Mexican families he services. The parents have trouble (as any adult does with a new language), but the kids are all fluent English users by the time they've been in school a few years. This is in communities where, due to the sheer numbers, all the current masses have switched to Spanish. So to an English-speaker it looks like "they are taking over", but in fact we are taking over them.
But perhaps Europe is already so linguistically diverse that things are different there? I don't know. But it seems like at least a possibility that the same thing goes on there as here.
We even see very uneven application of the law with regard to leaking so-called classified information, for example David Patraeus vs. Jeffrey Sterling
That's the main thing here. Having held a clearance myself, yes those huge legal penalties are a possibility. However, most incidents of mishandling involve a slap on the wrist and a very annoyed security officer who has to do a ton of paperwork. In extreme cases, you might see your clearance revoked, but I've never even seen it come to that. They just have the draconian penalties there so that in cases of true malice, its possible to come down on the miscreant like a ton of bricks. But that's almost never actually done, unless there's an actual case of espionage, or it somehow gets political.
So when you see someone demanding a full penalty for a non-espionage incident involving a politician, its pretty clear what's going on here, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with normal security procedures.
So far the only policy I have read that has likely had a positive change for security is putting security doors for the pilots and requiring them to be locked.
Actually, that enabled at least one incident. On Germanwings 9525 the copilot locked the door when left alone in the cockpit, then crashed the plane killing all 150. The pilot can be heard on the voice recorder banging on the door trying to get in. So that's 150 people dead because of that change.
The counter to this is to require 2 people in the cockpit at all times. While probably helpful, that's not an insurmountable barrier to mischief either.
the Black vote that keeps electing Clintons is going to realize
...
I'm not dismissing it as either ignorance or...
Yes you most certainly are. Your "is going to realize" is an assertion of lack of knowledge, Lacking knowledge is precisely what "ignorant" means. You are asserting that "the Black vote" is ignorant, and that is why they are voting the way they are. Not that they have reasons that a knowledgeable person in their position might agree with. Nope, they clearly just don't know any better.
Also, as this points out, he's actually a pretty shitty businessman. Beating the S&P 500 is pretty much the acid test for any investment, and he couldn't even do that. So even if you use the stupid "we need a businessman running the country" argument, you are arguing against Trump.
It's really a poverty problem and US politics is about the top end of town. Trying to fix racism issues without fixing poverty issues does not get a lot done.
Let's turn that around though. Do you think you can somehow solve racisim by getting rid of poverty? Not only is that a ridiculous proposition, but its provably false. Unarmed black people with good jobs are constantly getting shot to death by scared cops. A rich black person with an expensive car is liable to be pulled over just for driving it. That has nothing whatsoever to do with poverty.
This has been the typical line from Sanders supporters (and probably his campaign). It doesn't seem to be winning the votes of people of color at all. Given that they are undoubtedly this country's experts on the problem of racism, and more to the point a Democrat needs their votes to win the nomination, clearly economics alone is not going to be enough.
I actually think that the Black vote that keeps electing Clintons is going to realize that they are getting very little but lip service and affirmative action for their loyalty.
Oh, they realize that. Hop onto twitter and check out #EarnThisDamnVote or lose, which is mostly used by people of color. They are just voting strategically, like everyone else.
Having darker skin does not somehow magically make a person less informed or dumber. However, you do essentially live in a different country than a white person does. A country where getting pulled over for a traffic stop is not an annoyance but a life-threatening situation. A country where everybody (including other darker skinned people) is scared of you for no good reason. Scared people tend to say and do stupid shit, and you won the genetic prize of getting to deal with it every waking hour.
So if dark-skinned Americans tend to vote differently than you would, you really shouldn't be surprised. And dismissing it as stupidity or ignorance is just you making the problem worse.
It should not be paid for by corporate giants that censor it. That's neither for the nation nor public. It should be paid for by everyone
I wonder if you actually understand where NPR gets its funding. Its a lot more complex than this, and most of it is not corporate (and yes, even less is government).
First off, there's a difference between NPR and the NPR member stations. The stations are all individual entities, associated with NPR only in that they have to pay NPR for their programs. They are essentially customers.
For NPR itself, corporate sponsorships are a bit less than a quarter of their revenue. They get a bit less than half of their money from the member stations. The rest comes from things like satellite fees, grants, endowments, etc. So if there is one group NPR really needs to keep happy, its their member stations. Even in the aggregate, corporate sponsors are a lesser concern.
The member stations themselves do get roughly a fifth of their money from corporate sponsors too. However, they get the largest portion of their budget, more than a third, from their listeners (eg: the infamous "beg week"s) and a good chunk of the rest comes from other public sources like various governments or the CFPB. So the stations are also more beholden to the public than they are to "corporations", and far more than they are to any single corporation.
I listen to a lot of NPR, but I'm not really sure what would be gained by erasing all this and having the government take it over. Right now the whole system is incentivized so that their prime concern is to keep their loyal paying listeners happy. If all the funding came from Governments, their prime concern would have to change to keeping the Government happy.
As someone who lives in a state whose senators are climate deniers, the state government is run by fracking-earthquake deniers, and the school textbook committees get regularly staffed by revisionists and creationists, I really don't think I wanna see what happens when they control NPR.
The fact that they think they can change the culture to not be so hierarchical by sending down orders to be less hierarchical is kind of amusing.
When South Korea hired themselves a Dutch coach for their 2002 World Cup national team, he quickly discovered that there was an ingrained culture of deference that was really difficult to combat. I believe he eventually had to kick most of the veterans off the team to get his whole team on an equal social footing.
In the case of a large company, I don't think that's really an option. I'm not sure how they could combat that. Heck, I'm not even convinced a native Korean upper-level manager could even wrap their mind around the problem.
I will say this, though: Although Microsoft may have gotten egg on their faces, TFA does teach a valuable lesson about AI and how it reacts and assimilates into human society.
I'd say it shows how ugly the base level of discourse that everyone is absorbing is when you don't put a human morality filter on it. So the next time you see someone say something that's only a little shitty, you should really thank them for toning it down a bit rather than get upset with them.
In fact, I think I'll go over to the "Women's Salaries" story and do that right now. That should take the rest of the afternoon...
A lot of people are getting excited about genetic lineages these days, chiefly because we just recently got to where we can do them, and are thus finding out all sorts of interesting new things.
However, could you figure out someone is an "American" via genetics? If someone comes along 500 years from now, hits a graveyard, and discovers that most of the inhabitants genetic material came from West Africa, or from Eastern Europe, would it be reasonable for them to extrapolate that Americans must have had a culture almost identical to that in West Africa or Eastern Europe? If they did they'd be way wrong. Sure we've had influences from there.
OTOH: If they examine our writings, and those of people around the world, they'd quickly find that its essentially the same language used in Australia, South Africa, Jamacia, and England. A bit more research would find the closest relation to be that with England, implying a common ancestor. That would lead them to the (correct) assumption that our culture is largely similar to that found in those places.
Point being, for behavior (the thing we really care about for groups of people), language is the important thing. Genetics is almost beside the point. So this genetic finding is interesting, but says absolutely nothing about who is or isn't culturally Celtic.
Well, the problem with your assertion is that it amounts to a tautology.
Its not my assertion; its right there in the summary for this article. The fact that they are arguing against what "amounts to a tautology" is exactly my point.
As for the claim that two peoples sharing a common language at some point may not mean they ever shared a common culture... I'm really hard-pressed to imagine how that could possibly happen. Languages develop from other languages within a coherent culture. To assert otherwise would be to claim that somehow two completely independent people managed to independently develop the same language. The odds against that randomly happening would make even Han Solo blanch.
The summary is kind of bad, but probably only because the beginning of TFA itself is so horrible.
What they've found is that there's DNA in some 4000 year old remains that highly correlates with modern people in the modern "Celtic" area (Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), vs. the rest of Europe. The interesting thing about this is that the current guesstimate of the emergence of proto-Celtic from proto-Indo-European is only about 3000 years ago.
What this could reasonably mean:
The current guesstimate is wrong, and they actually split more than 4000 years ago. As an addendum, the Halstatt culture may not be the one and only indication of the proto-celts.
Celtic culture spread to the British Isles by cultural diffusion, not by the replacement of actual peoples. At least where those particular genes are concerned.
What it doesn't say:
The Irish are not Celtic. Not only doesn't it say this, its a patently absurd. Linguistically this is as much a settled fact as exists, and no archeology work is going to change that. We may not be sure where proto-Celtic originated (we weren't even before this), we may not be sure exactly when, but the evidence for the group's existence is unaffected.
Celtic is not Indo-European. Again, laughable. Its relation to Indo-European is so linguistically sound, that from a layman's perspective it can be taken as fact.
What this find does is add fuel to the already raging fire over exactly what archeological cultures were Celtic, and where and when it originated. That was already going before this though.
I wish to make a correction: the Obama administration has not yet unilaterally dropped the embargo
Even your correction needs a correction. The word "yet" there is just silly. This has nothing to do with Obama. Only Congress can remove the embargo. Considering our current Congress makes the term "act of Congress" an oxymoron, and has primarily spent the last 6 years cosplaying Khan from Star Trek II whenever Obama says he'd like something, I don't think anyone has to worry themselves much that they might soon do so.
I'm old enough to remember the 70's when legal integration was new, and white people would get up and leave a public pool if a black person got in. They weren't purposely being racist jerks, they were scared. They had this weird atavistic fear of getting black molecules on them somehow.
Its tough to describe in words, but if you've seen it before, that kind of behavior has a certain look to it. The behavior of the Republican Congress resembles nothing else I've seen since then as much as it does that. I've been watching politics all that time, and I've never before seen politicians treat their own proposals like infected waste after managing to somehow get an opponent to support it.
This doesn't look like typical politics; it looks like a 70's swimming pool.
This is both a very good point (which should be far more widely known), and entirely irrelevant here. In this case it is the Senate that matters, and senators are voted on by your entire state's electorate. No gerrymandering possible.
BOTH of NC's senators are Republican because a majority of the entire state of NC voted for the Republican candidate in 2010 and 2014.
..sort of. Because, once again, they are refusing to accept a big win, just because they don't like the guy handing it to them. As a result, they likely won't get their big win. Again.
I say "sort of", because the only people made happy by that kind of behavior are people who for some reason hate Obama more than they care about traditional Republican priorities. Thus when they turn around this election year and look at their own voters, suddenly they discover they are by and large motivated best now by populist racist rhetoric, and don't give a crap about traditional social or fiscal conservative values.
Basically, the Republican party has worked their tails off the last 8 years making themselves the party of Trump. I don't know who that's a win for, other than Trump.
Instead Garland is white, male, old, and relatively moderate. His impact will be far shorter and far less liberal than anyone else a Democratic president is likely to nominate. If you're a Republican it's easy to weasel out of the election year thing by saying that you forced Obama to nominate a compromise candidate. But if you keep it up and ignore the nomination you probably end up with President Hillary Clinton who nominates someone 15 years younger and more liberal.
This has been the story of the last 8 years: Obama pre-compromises to Republican complaints without any assurances of cooperation whatsoever, and then the Republicans refuse to even accept their big win, like what they asked for all along has somehow been tainted with Obama cooties now.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone wants to experience church services they are available nearly everywhere
I take it you aren't a churchgoer then. This is much like saying "If anyone wants to experience a football game, they are available nearly everywhere". Different churches, sometimes even within the same denomination and town, are very different. For instance, mine is very supportive of social justice issues (eg: The Beatitudes), is proud of our many same-sex couple members (and from what I can tell the feeling is mutual), and openly discusses and incorporates the scholarly research on historical sources and inconsistencies in The Bible. There are other Churches of our denomination in our same city that dislike us so much, they started their own church camps so their kids won't interact with ours. So I think its quite fair to say that a Ted Cruz Christian would be very irate if you tried to tell him this particular church is interchangeable with his.
But you are also missing the entire point of live-tweeting. Its about sharing your perception of a shared experience more than it is about bringing those not in attendance up to speed. For example, my #JesusJazz tweets really would make no sense to people who weren't there when it happened. Same with #WiggsMadLibs. Its unapologetically an inside joke.
But seriously -- they will allow you to text, but not use your built-in video camera? How will they tell the difference?
Well, if you go from my idea from my previous comment, the same device that prevents light pollution from your phone to your neighbors would quite likely impede incoming light (eg: from the screen) as a side-effect.
If I'm a theater trying to get millenials in, I would setup this separate room and then take this a step further: show a text comments section above or below the screen and display (censored/moderated) comments from the audience during the movie - could be pretty funny/entertaining as an optional experience (go to normal room if you just want to watch the movie).
OK. I'd personally pay $5 more for this, if the moderators can limit themselves to just censoring trolls and spam. Actually, an algorithm that only accepted X-RTed and liked tweets geolocated to an actual theater showing that move at that exact point in the move would be pretty sweet. Or alternatively one that only showed high-rated tweets from within that theater right then, and gave each patron upvoting/downvoting and theater commenting karma, a-la Slashcode or Stackoverflow might be pretty cool too.
I wonder if I just gave someone their next stupid Silly Valley IPO idea? Nah. Probably already in the works anyway.
If you could do all that, then others should be able to watch their movie in peace without you audibly or visually disrupting their experience, and yet you could still use your social media apps.
I'm one who follows twitter live-tweeting of mass events, and I could see where this might be something I'd like to see (perhaps even participate in) for something like a big movie release. Twitter greatly enhances my experience of viewing live sporting events (it like being in a big virtual sports bar), and similarly for other live events like political debates, and I do kind of miss that for movie viewing. You can participate in discussions about it afterwards, but you really miss out on those instant reactions.
...and yes, I livetweet my Church services (phone on silent of course). Often I get likes or retweets from the Church's own social media account before the service is even over. This is the world we live in now. Its only natural that theaters and movie studios want to participate too.
Olive oil has a certain flavor to it. We have some, and I'll happily use it for small cooking tasks like sautéing mushrooms (yum). But I tried a batch of brownies with it once, and it put a really funny taste into them. I say "funny", but my family was not amused. And its far too expensive to use for really large tasks like deep frying.
Olive oil has its uses, and it really shines for those, but its just not an everyday cooking oil.
using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter .....
the vegetable oils mentioned in the article are not necessarily the most commonly used (which are oils made of olive, sunflower, coconut, and palm).
Ummm..this looks wrong. The most common two cooking oils in the USA are Soybean Oil and Canola Oil. Soybean alone dwarfs everything else put together (but I threw in Canola because that's what my family uses for most needs). Soybean oil is a bit over 50% linoleic acid. Canola is about 20%.
So if you live and eat in the USA, this probably applies to you.
of highly opinionated articles about feminism -- but no corresponding articles, or sections, concerning men's issues their coverage is neither balanced, nor able to show how much abuse their "men's" writers would get, since they don't have any.
That would be a total false equivalence. If group A runs most everything and group B does not, then arguing for more rights and privileges for group B is a qualitatively different thing than arguing for more rights for group A. You could only fairly make that comparison if everything was both now and historically equivalent for both groups.
I don't think this should be a difficult concept. You don't see people get nearly as angry at kids punching adults in public as they do at adults punching kids. The power imbalance between the two makes them totally different circumstances. Everyone understands this.
To argue differently when the different groups happen to be racial and/or gender based is to imply that there is no power imbalance between the two. That's plain horseshit.
That's interesting.
I don't know how things work in Europe, but in the USA this has been a complaint traditionally leveled against immigrant communities (we have our Chinatowns, etc). So far, it has never panned out, and second-generation immigrants all ended up learning English. Third generation almost never even know their grandparent's native language. (Which is actually kind of sad).
People are making the same claims about Hispanic immigrants to the US today, but the last time I saw someone try to study it, they found the same 2nd and 3rd generation effects. Ironically, I went to lunch while composing this with a guy who is a Catholic Deacon, and he (without any prompting from me) described this exact process among the Mexican families he services. The parents have trouble (as any adult does with a new language), but the kids are all fluent English users by the time they've been in school a few years. This is in communities where, due to the sheer numbers, all the current masses have switched to Spanish. So to an English-speaker it looks like "they are taking over", but in fact we are taking over them.
But perhaps Europe is already so linguistically diverse that things are different there? I don't know. But it seems like at least a possibility that the same thing goes on there as here.
We even see very uneven application of the law with regard to leaking so-called classified information, for example David Patraeus vs. Jeffrey Sterling
That's the main thing here. Having held a clearance myself, yes those huge legal penalties are a possibility. However, most incidents of mishandling involve a slap on the wrist and a very annoyed security officer who has to do a ton of paperwork. In extreme cases, you might see your clearance revoked, but I've never even seen it come to that. They just have the draconian penalties there so that in cases of true malice, its possible to come down on the miscreant like a ton of bricks. But that's almost never actually done, unless there's an actual case of espionage, or it somehow gets political.
So when you see someone demanding a full penalty for a non-espionage incident involving a politician, its pretty clear what's going on here, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with normal security procedures.
So far the only policy I have read that has likely had a positive change for security is putting security doors for the pilots and requiring them to be locked.
Actually, that enabled at least one incident. On Germanwings 9525 the copilot locked the door when left alone in the cockpit, then crashed the plane killing all 150. The pilot can be heard on the voice recorder banging on the door trying to get in. So that's 150 people dead because of that change.
The counter to this is to require 2 people in the cockpit at all times. While probably helpful, that's not an insurmountable barrier to mischief either.
the Black vote that keeps electing Clintons is going to realize
...
I'm not dismissing it as either ignorance or ...
Yes you most certainly are. Your "is going to realize" is an assertion of lack of knowledge, Lacking knowledge is precisely what "ignorant" means. You are asserting that "the Black vote" is ignorant, and that is why they are voting the way they are. Not that they have reasons that a knowledgeable person in their position might agree with. Nope, they clearly just don't know any better.
Also, as this points out, he's actually a pretty shitty businessman. Beating the S&P 500 is pretty much the acid test for any investment, and he couldn't even do that. So even if you use the stupid "we need a businessman running the country" argument, you are arguing against Trump.
It's really a poverty problem and US politics is about the top end of town. Trying to fix racism issues without fixing poverty issues does not get a lot done.
Let's turn that around though. Do you think you can somehow solve racisim by getting rid of poverty? Not only is that a ridiculous proposition, but its provably false. Unarmed black people with good jobs are constantly getting shot to death by scared cops. A rich black person with an expensive car is liable to be pulled over just for driving it. That has nothing whatsoever to do with poverty.
This has been the typical line from Sanders supporters (and probably his campaign). It doesn't seem to be winning the votes of people of color at all. Given that they are undoubtedly this country's experts on the problem of racism, and more to the point a Democrat needs their votes to win the nomination, clearly economics alone is not going to be enough.
I actually think that the Black vote that keeps electing Clintons is going to realize that they are getting very little but lip service and affirmative action for their loyalty.
Oh, they realize that. Hop onto twitter and check out #EarnThisDamnVote or lose, which is mostly used by people of color. They are just voting strategically, like everyone else.
Having darker skin does not somehow magically make a person less informed or dumber. However, you do essentially live in a different country than a white person does. A country where getting pulled over for a traffic stop is not an annoyance but a life-threatening situation. A country where everybody (including other darker skinned people) is scared of you for no good reason. Scared people tend to say and do stupid shit, and you won the genetic prize of getting to deal with it every waking hour.
So if dark-skinned Americans tend to vote differently than you would, you really shouldn't be surprised. And dismissing it as stupidity or ignorance is just you making the problem worse.
It should not be paid for by corporate giants that censor it. That's neither for the nation nor public. It should be paid for by everyone
I wonder if you actually understand where NPR gets its funding. Its a lot more complex than this, and most of it is not corporate (and yes, even less is government).
First off, there's a difference between NPR and the NPR member stations. The stations are all individual entities, associated with NPR only in that they have to pay NPR for their programs. They are essentially customers.
For NPR itself, corporate sponsorships are a bit less than a quarter of their revenue. They get a bit less than half of their money from the member stations. The rest comes from things like satellite fees, grants, endowments, etc. So if there is one group NPR really needs to keep happy, its their member stations. Even in the aggregate, corporate sponsors are a lesser concern.
The member stations themselves do get roughly a fifth of their money from corporate sponsors too. However, they get the largest portion of their budget, more than a third, from their listeners (eg: the infamous "beg week"s) and a good chunk of the rest comes from other public sources like various governments or the CFPB. So the stations are also more beholden to the public than they are to "corporations", and far more than they are to any single corporation.
I listen to a lot of NPR, but I'm not really sure what would be gained by erasing all this and having the government take it over. Right now the whole system is incentivized so that their prime concern is to keep their loyal paying listeners happy. If all the funding came from Governments, their prime concern would have to change to keeping the Government happy.
As someone who lives in a state whose senators are climate deniers, the state government is run by fracking-earthquake deniers, and the school textbook committees get regularly staffed by revisionists and creationists, I really don't think I wanna see what happens when they control NPR.
The fact that they think they can change the culture to not be so hierarchical by sending down orders to be less hierarchical is kind of amusing.
When South Korea hired themselves a Dutch coach for their 2002 World Cup national team, he quickly discovered that there was an ingrained culture of deference that was really difficult to combat. I believe he eventually had to kick most of the veterans off the team to get his whole team on an equal social footing.
In the case of a large company, I don't think that's really an option. I'm not sure how they could combat that. Heck, I'm not even convinced a native Korean upper-level manager could even wrap their mind around the problem.
I will say this, though: Although Microsoft may have gotten egg on their faces, TFA does teach a valuable lesson about AI and how it reacts and assimilates into human society.
I'd say it shows how ugly the base level of discourse that everyone is absorbing is when you don't put a human morality filter on it. So the next time you see someone say something that's only a little shitty, you should really thank them for toning it down a bit rather than get upset with them.
In fact, I think I'll go over to the "Women's Salaries" story and do that right now. That should take the rest of the afternoon...
This is the big thing.
A lot of people are getting excited about genetic lineages these days, chiefly because we just recently got to where we can do them, and are thus finding out all sorts of interesting new things.
However, could you figure out someone is an "American" via genetics? If someone comes along 500 years from now, hits a graveyard, and discovers that most of the inhabitants genetic material came from West Africa, or from Eastern Europe, would it be reasonable for them to extrapolate that Americans must have had a culture almost identical to that in West Africa or Eastern Europe? If they did they'd be way wrong. Sure we've had influences from there.
OTOH: If they examine our writings, and those of people around the world, they'd quickly find that its essentially the same language used in Australia, South Africa, Jamacia, and England. A bit more research would find the closest relation to be that with England, implying a common ancestor. That would lead them to the (correct) assumption that our culture is largely similar to that found in those places.
Point being, for behavior (the thing we really care about for groups of people), language is the important thing. Genetics is almost beside the point. So this genetic finding is interesting, but says absolutely nothing about who is or isn't culturally Celtic.
Well, the problem with your assertion is that it amounts to a tautology.
Its not my assertion; its right there in the summary for this article. The fact that they are arguing against what "amounts to a tautology" is exactly my point.
As for the claim that two peoples sharing a common language at some point may not mean they ever shared a common culture ... I'm really hard-pressed to imagine how that could possibly happen. Languages develop from other languages within a coherent culture. To assert otherwise would be to claim that somehow two completely independent people managed to independently develop the same language. The odds against that randomly happening would make even Han Solo blanch.
The summary is kind of bad, but probably only because the beginning of TFA itself is so horrible.
What they've found is that there's DNA in some 4000 year old remains that highly correlates with modern people in the modern "Celtic" area (Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), vs. the rest of Europe. The interesting thing about this is that the current guesstimate of the emergence of proto-Celtic from proto-Indo-European is only about 3000 years ago.
What this could reasonably mean:
What it doesn't say:
What this find does is add fuel to the already raging fire over exactly what archeological cultures were Celtic, and where and when it originated. That was already going before this though.
I wish to make a correction: the Obama administration has not yet unilaterally dropped the embargo
Even your correction needs a correction. The word "yet" there is just silly. This has nothing to do with Obama. Only Congress can remove the embargo. Considering our current Congress makes the term "act of Congress" an oxymoron, and has primarily spent the last 6 years cosplaying Khan from Star Trek II whenever Obama says he'd like something, I don't think anyone has to worry themselves much that they might soon do so.
No "fixed". Its implied.
I'm old enough to remember the 70's when legal integration was new, and white people would get up and leave a public pool if a black person got in. They weren't purposely being racist jerks, they were scared. They had this weird atavistic fear of getting black molecules on them somehow.
Its tough to describe in words, but if you've seen it before, that kind of behavior has a certain look to it. The behavior of the Republican Congress resembles nothing else I've seen since then as much as it does that. I've been watching politics all that time, and I've never before seen politicians treat their own proposals like infected waste after managing to somehow get an opponent to support it.
This doesn't look like typical politics; it looks like a 70's swimming pool.
This is both a very good point (which should be far more widely known), and entirely irrelevant here. In this case it is the Senate that matters, and senators are voted on by your entire state's electorate. No gerrymandering possible.
BOTH of NC's senators are Republican because a majority of the entire state of NC voted for the Republican candidate in 2010 and 2014.
Because, as usual, Obama pre-compromised
..sort of. Because, once again, they are refusing to accept a big win, just because they don't like the guy handing it to them. As a result, they likely won't get their big win. Again.
I say "sort of", because the only people made happy by that kind of behavior are people who for some reason hate Obama more than they care about traditional Republican priorities. Thus when they turn around this election year and look at their own voters, suddenly they discover they are by and large motivated best now by populist racist rhetoric, and don't give a crap about traditional social or fiscal conservative values.
Basically, the Republican party has worked their tails off the last 8 years making themselves the party of Trump. I don't know who that's a win for, other than Trump.
Instead Garland is white, male, old, and relatively moderate. His impact will be far shorter and far less liberal than anyone else a Democratic president is likely to nominate. If you're a Republican it's easy to weasel out of the election year thing by saying that you forced Obama to nominate a compromise candidate. But if you keep it up and ignore the nomination you probably end up with President Hillary Clinton who nominates someone 15 years younger and more liberal.
This has been the story of the last 8 years: Obama pre-compromises to Republican complaints without any assurances of cooperation whatsoever, and then the Republicans refuse to even accept their big win, like what they asked for all along has somehow been tainted with Obama cooties now.