You're confusing the word populist, as it's applied to politicians, and populist, as it's applied to an ideologue. They're really used in very different ways.
A populist ideologue is someone who believes in popular rule. This could be anything from a direct democracy advocate to an anarchist. These people are generally left of center.
When a politician is called a populist, it's an insult. It doesn't imply any political ideology, be it left or right or other, it just means that they're catering to the lowest common denominator. They make lots of promises in order to gain power, promises which are generally infeasible if not outright impossible. Their supporters are either too ignorant to know they're being lied to, or too desperate to care.
But if it's overt and purposeful, it will repel those whose politics are not in line with the creator.
This is true, but you need to turn it into a point. So what? Why is this bad? Do we have to lowest-common-denominator everything? It is right and proper that not everyone should like everything.
In this case, the message isn't intended for the people who don't want to see it. So nothing is lost if those people don't want to watch.
You're describing fiction. They are not representing actual people, they're representing fictional people. You can make fictional people be anything you want, that's what fiction is.
I'm struggling to see your point here, but... Oh wait. I've seen this before. This is one of the common complaints about Star Trek. "It's too idealistic." "Humans wouldn't behave that way, that's not real." No, it's not real. It's not intended to be real, it's intended to be better than real. Star Trek is an optimistic look at the future, where this is an optimistic look at the present. It's supposed to be inspiring.
The typical complaint about this when it comes to Star Trek is that the break with reality is disillusioning, it violates some peoples' suspension of disbelief. I could maybe see that, if that's the issue you're having here, but if that's the case then it's really only likely to be a problem for people in a similar line of work to what's depicted. For the great majority of people this shouldn't be a problem.
Because *everything* needs to be about achieving purported social justice agendas?
Well media should certainly bend in that direction. I get that complaining about diversity policies has turned into a reflex around here, and some of that is certainly justified, but most of the typical complaints don't seem to apply in this instance.
Affirmative action hiring may ignore the reality of the job market, but that isn't an issue in a movie or on a TV show. In fact, if a diverse workforce has any value then this might be a more positive approach to achieving that. We know that the gender split among programmers starts in or before high school, based on the number of high school students who take CS AP exam, so if we want to really address the root of that divide then it needs to be at that age and not later on. Media is one way to do that.
Speaking in more general terms, since your statement was not about just this one issue, media functions as a feedback loop: it both reflects our values and shapes them. You can see the deleterious effect this has when it goes unchecked - just turn on the TV and watch a few reality shows and see the pit that we've fallen into. Some type of intervention is necessary to crawl our way out of that, and usually this comes in the form of an artist saying something like, "I would prefer not to make a pile of shit. I think, instead, I'd like to make a thing which says something. Which makes a difference... somehow. In some beneficial way."
You could use Startpage to test this, if you like. Startpage does anonymized Google searches, Duck Duck Go does anonymized Bing searches. This would allow you to compare the two without the personalization handicap.
My anecdotal experience has been the opposite, but I only tend to use Startpage when I can't find what I'm looking for on Duck Duck Go. So there's some confirmation bias there.
My guess: this is a company which has finally gotten around to paying customers for their private data, instead of just taking it and giving nothing in return. Paypal is still not a bank, remember, so they don't have the same limits on data monetization that banks do.
Another possibility is that they screwing the merchants for the extra money. Discover similarly offers relatively high cash back, but charges merchants higher fees to cover it. Since this is apparently a Mastercard I don't know how that would be implemented, but it seems like another possibility.
They most certainly are talking about naturally occurring fructose. Many of the people repeating the "sugar is poison" line are still getting it from Robert "Sugar is Poison" Lustig, and he's specifically talking about fructose when he says that. He makes the claim that it's not so bad when the fructose is paired with a large quantity of fiber, as it is in most whole fruits (but not fruit juices), but this isn't limited to just highly refined sugar, or white sugar, or unnatural sugar. It's all fructose.
The idea behind capturing carbon via trees isn't the individual trees themselves, it's reforestation. Forests do permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, even if individual trees do die eventually. (assuming someone doesn't come down and chop down the forests again)
Burying the carbon is another good option, but way more expensive. I'm not aware of any real large-scale proposals for this, let alone implementations. It's hard enough at this point just to get people to acknowledge the problem - spending those kinds of resources to address it seems infeasible.
It seems like the AC got your point just fine. You have twice now referred to TASERs as next-to-last-resort weapons though, and I don't know where you're getting the idea that they serve this role. TASERs are first-order physical compliance devices, used in this way for the reason that the AC gave: because their use is less likely to result in injury than other physical compliance methods.
Forcing compliance physically always comes after demanding compliance verbally, of course, but when it happens TASERs are generally the first thing that police turn to.
Valve could/should have gone the Gearbox route and just picked a dev to make the game on their behalf. They could still do this. They make some copout announcement: "It's time for us to acknowledge that our uncompromising pursuit of quality is just not going to allow for the development of a project so large and dear to our hearts as Half-Life 3, while maintaining the level of service that you expect from Steam. With this in mind we have reached an agreement with Dev X to complete the series in our stead. They'll be working from our notes and will have lots of input from the original Half-Life team. We think they're do a good job."
This allows Vale to rake in all that sweet licensing money, while putting no work into it themselves. It also gives them an excuse if the game doesn't live up to expectations, so the pressure's off.
When I saw the story title, this is what I was expecting: Microsoft had finally come to their senses and renamed the Xbone. "Ex-Box" is a little weird for a new name, I thought to myself, it's still confusing when you say it out load, but at least it works in writing. That's a step up. Obviously, I'm not sufficiently jaded.
The argument does matter when the argument is: "That functionality wasn't really there in the first place." The feature that they advertised was not to do a thing, it was to do a thing safely. Something which they were apparently unable to deliver.
So your complaint isn't degradation of a product, it's false advertising.
Weak. Sony has done a lot of bad things, but that does not vindicate their competitors. Microsoft is right up their with Sony.
On the other hand, Valve is at least somewhat less despicable and I have no idea what beef the grandparent has with Nintendo. At their worst, they've been kind of naive in some respects (online crap, child safety hoopla), but they've never done anything that I can think of to really betray the trust of their customers.
Well I'll grant, those safebrowsing lines certainly do make me uneasy. A little searching led me to this. According to... that dude, whoever he is, the browser is downloading a blocklist which it checks offline. So checking offline is good, but that does give Google your IP and, according to a linked post, a cookie which uniquely identifies you.
So, I dunno. I wonder about the value of those blocklists, I'm not sure I've ever encountered a blocked site.
And yet in the real world, I'm the fool because if I had bought bitcoin earlier on, I'd be filthy rich now.
This is wrong-headed. When you starting thinking this way, remind yourself: "The best possible investment is buying winning lottery tickets. Not the losing tickets, those are for suckers, just buy the winning ones."
Faith is a Christian invention. This isn't really what you're asking, but I think it's interesting: the idea that beliefs are important in a religious context started with Christianity. Specifically with Saint Paul's interpretation of a certain passage in the Book of Job. For religions older than Christianity, like Judaism, your beliefs don't mean squat, it's only your actions which matter.
So all of those weird rules that orthodox Jews follow, the ones which seem so silly - the Jews who are doing them think they're silly too. By doing them anyway, despite being silly, they are demonstrating their dedication to God. Taking God's rules to a ridiculous extreme - that's deliberate. It shows greater dedication to do something ridiculous than to do something obvious.
Growing up in a predominately Christian country, I didn't get that for a long time. I had always thought of religion as being about beliefs, but recognizing that for many religions that's not true clarified a lot of things for me. How could the Egyptians, for example, worship an evil god? Answer: "Worship" was really about asking for favors or appeasement. Priests of Set were performing a public service.
Anyway, the answer to your question is a little vague: ostensibly, all Jews are descended from Abraham. So it's hereditary. But many Jewish sects have adopted conversion practices. So it's not strictly about heredity, but it's not about faith either.
Fascism is much more than an economic model, and claiming that it has nothing to do with Nazis is a little ridiculous. Hitler explicitly supported fascism and described the Nazis in those terms. So fascism has that to do with the Nazis.
As for Trump... He hasn't explicitly said that he supports or admires fascism, but he's spoken often about how much he admires leaders and systems which function in a similar way.
I'll just quote from the wikipedia definition, to save you some clicks:
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.[8] Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.[8] Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.[9][10][11][12] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies.
"Sustainable source" is relative, for meat production. Meat is an inherently inefficient source of food, in an economy with developed agriculture. Your point about lab grown meat not being any more efficient, so far, is a fine criticism but that's part of what research is for. Lab grown meat certainly has the potential for being relatively efficient (though never as much as just eating grains), but it will take time and effort to reach that point.
As for your comment about over-population: agreed. That is the root of many of these problems. Efficiency wouldn't be nearly so important if there weren't so many people.
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing the word populist, as it's applied to politicians, and populist, as it's applied to an ideologue. They're really used in very different ways.
A populist ideologue is someone who believes in popular rule. This could be anything from a direct democracy advocate to an anarchist. These people are generally left of center.
When a politician is called a populist, it's an insult. It doesn't imply any political ideology, be it left or right or other, it just means that they're catering to the lowest common denominator. They make lots of promises in order to gain power, promises which are generally infeasible if not outright impossible. Their supporters are either too ignorant to know they're being lied to, or too desperate to care.
But if it's overt and purposeful, it will repel those whose politics are not in line with the creator.
This is true, but you need to turn it into a point. So what? Why is this bad? Do we have to lowest-common-denominator everything? It is right and proper that not everyone should like everything.
In this case, the message isn't intended for the people who don't want to see it. So nothing is lost if those people don't want to watch.
You're describing fiction. They are not representing actual people, they're representing fictional people. You can make fictional people be anything you want, that's what fiction is.
I'm struggling to see your point here, but... Oh wait. I've seen this before. This is one of the common complaints about Star Trek. "It's too idealistic." "Humans wouldn't behave that way, that's not real." No, it's not real. It's not intended to be real, it's intended to be better than real. Star Trek is an optimistic look at the future, where this is an optimistic look at the present. It's supposed to be inspiring.
The typical complaint about this when it comes to Star Trek is that the break with reality is disillusioning, it violates some peoples' suspension of disbelief. I could maybe see that, if that's the issue you're having here, but if that's the case then it's really only likely to be a problem for people in a similar line of work to what's depicted. For the great majority of people this shouldn't be a problem.
Because *everything* needs to be about achieving purported social justice agendas?
Well media should certainly bend in that direction. I get that complaining about diversity policies has turned into a reflex around here, and some of that is certainly justified, but most of the typical complaints don't seem to apply in this instance.
Affirmative action hiring may ignore the reality of the job market, but that isn't an issue in a movie or on a TV show. In fact, if a diverse workforce has any value then this might be a more positive approach to achieving that. We know that the gender split among programmers starts in or before high school, based on the number of high school students who take CS AP exam, so if we want to really address the root of that divide then it needs to be at that age and not later on. Media is one way to do that.
Speaking in more general terms, since your statement was not about just this one issue, media functions as a feedback loop: it both reflects our values and shapes them. You can see the deleterious effect this has when it goes unchecked - just turn on the TV and watch a few reality shows and see the pit that we've fallen into. Some type of intervention is necessary to crawl our way out of that, and usually this comes in the form of an artist saying something like, "I would prefer not to make a pile of shit. I think, instead, I'd like to make a thing which says something. Which makes a difference... somehow. In some beneficial way."
You could use Startpage to test this, if you like. Startpage does anonymized Google searches, Duck Duck Go does anonymized Bing searches. This would allow you to compare the two without the personalization handicap.
My anecdotal experience has been the opposite, but I only tend to use Startpage when I can't find what I'm looking for on Duck Duck Go. So there's some confirmation bias there.
Don't overthink this, the purchase of Sun accomplished it's primary goal: Larry Ellison got to wave his dick around.
A better company might have been able to monetize that purchase more effectively, but don't think that Oracle didn't get what it was after.
You could just point out that most religions don't care about faith. That's mostly limited to Christians, Muslims, and Mormons.
My guess: this is a company which has finally gotten around to paying customers for their private data, instead of just taking it and giving nothing in return. Paypal is still not a bank, remember, so they don't have the same limits on data monetization that banks do.
Another possibility is that they screwing the merchants for the extra money. Discover similarly offers relatively high cash back, but charges merchants higher fees to cover it. Since this is apparently a Mastercard I don't know how that would be implemented, but it seems like another possibility.
For anyone interested, here is the actual paper (paywalled).
Links from the CBS article were worthless and it took a little searching to find that, so I figured I'd post it for anyone looking.
Sugar is not our primary fuel. Glucose is our primary fuel. Sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
You two are talking past each other. Sucrose, glucose, and fructose are all sugars.
They most certainly are talking about naturally occurring fructose. Many of the people repeating the "sugar is poison" line are still getting it from Robert "Sugar is Poison" Lustig, and he's specifically talking about fructose when he says that. He makes the claim that it's not so bad when the fructose is paired with a large quantity of fiber, as it is in most whole fruits (but not fruit juices), but this isn't limited to just highly refined sugar, or white sugar, or unnatural sugar. It's all fructose.
The idea behind capturing carbon via trees isn't the individual trees themselves, it's reforestation. Forests do permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, even if individual trees do die eventually. (assuming someone doesn't come down and chop down the forests again)
Burying the carbon is another good option, but way more expensive. I'm not aware of any real large-scale proposals for this, let alone implementations. It's hard enough at this point just to get people to acknowledge the problem - spending those kinds of resources to address it seems infeasible.
You're entirely missing the point.
It seems like the AC got your point just fine. You have twice now referred to TASERs as next-to-last-resort weapons though, and I don't know where you're getting the idea that they serve this role. TASERs are first-order physical compliance devices, used in this way for the reason that the AC gave: because their use is less likely to result in injury than other physical compliance methods.
Forcing compliance physically always comes after demanding compliance verbally, of course, but when it happens TASERs are generally the first thing that police turn to.
Valve could/should have gone the Gearbox route and just picked a dev to make the game on their behalf. They could still do this. They make some copout announcement: "It's time for us to acknowledge that our uncompromising pursuit of quality is just not going to allow for the development of a project so large and dear to our hearts as Half-Life 3, while maintaining the level of service that you expect from Steam. With this in mind we have reached an agreement with Dev X to complete the series in our stead. They'll be working from our notes and will have lots of input from the original Half-Life team. We think they're do a good job."
This allows Vale to rake in all that sweet licensing money, while putting no work into it themselves. It also gives them an excuse if the game doesn't live up to expectations, so the pressure's off.
When I saw the story title, this is what I was expecting: Microsoft had finally come to their senses and renamed the Xbone. "Ex-Box" is a little weird for a new name, I thought to myself, it's still confusing when you say it out load, but at least it works in writing. That's a step up. Obviously, I'm not sufficiently jaded.
The argument does matter when the argument is: "That functionality wasn't really there in the first place." The feature that they advertised was not to do a thing, it was to do a thing safely. Something which they were apparently unable to deliver.
So your complaint isn't degradation of a product, it's false advertising.
Weak. Sony has done a lot of bad things, but that does not vindicate their competitors. Microsoft is right up their with Sony.
On the other hand, Valve is at least somewhat less despicable and I have no idea what beef the grandparent has with Nintendo. At their worst, they've been kind of naive in some respects (online crap, child safety hoopla), but they've never done anything that I can think of to really betray the trust of their customers.
Well I'll grant, those safebrowsing lines certainly do make me uneasy. A little searching led me to this. According to... that dude, whoever he is, the browser is downloading a blocklist which it checks offline. So checking offline is good, but that does give Google your IP and, according to a linked post, a cookie which uniquely identifies you.
So, I dunno. I wonder about the value of those blocklists, I'm not sure I've ever encountered a blocked site.
And yet in the real world, I'm the fool because if I had bought bitcoin earlier on, I'd be filthy rich now.
This is wrong-headed. When you starting thinking this way, remind yourself: "The best possible investment is buying winning lottery tickets. Not the losing tickets, those are for suckers, just buy the winning ones."
Faith is a Christian invention. This isn't really what you're asking, but I think it's interesting: the idea that beliefs are important in a religious context started with Christianity. Specifically with Saint Paul's interpretation of a certain passage in the Book of Job. For religions older than Christianity, like Judaism, your beliefs don't mean squat, it's only your actions which matter.
So all of those weird rules that orthodox Jews follow, the ones which seem so silly - the Jews who are doing them think they're silly too. By doing them anyway, despite being silly, they are demonstrating their dedication to God. Taking God's rules to a ridiculous extreme - that's deliberate. It shows greater dedication to do something ridiculous than to do something obvious.
Growing up in a predominately Christian country, I didn't get that for a long time. I had always thought of religion as being about beliefs, but recognizing that for many religions that's not true clarified a lot of things for me. How could the Egyptians, for example, worship an evil god? Answer: "Worship" was really about asking for favors or appeasement. Priests of Set were performing a public service.
Anyway, the answer to your question is a little vague: ostensibly, all Jews are descended from Abraham. So it's hereditary. But many Jewish sects have adopted conversion practices. So it's not strictly about heredity, but it's not about faith either.
As for Trump... He hasn't explicitly said that he supports or admires fascism, but he's spoken often about how much he admires leaders and systems which function in a similar way.
I'll just quote from the wikipedia definition, to save you some clicks:
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.[8] Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.[8] Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.[9][10][11][12] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies.
Where did you get the idea that they were standing for freedom of speech? What they said was, "It doesn't matter what we do anyway, so fuck it."
This isn't about principles.
"Sustainable source" is relative, for meat production. Meat is an inherently inefficient source of food, in an economy with developed agriculture. Your point about lab grown meat not being any more efficient, so far, is a fine criticism but that's part of what research is for. Lab grown meat certainly has the potential for being relatively efficient (though never as much as just eating grains), but it will take time and effort to reach that point.
As for your comment about over-population: agreed. That is the root of many of these problems. Efficiency wouldn't be nearly so important if there weren't so many people.
The parent's link does address your criticisms. Not in a terribly convincing way, but you're not contradicting its claims here.
That's quite an accusation. What are you referring to, exactly? Which line in about:config do I change in order to disable this?