Fortunately there are still a few Native Americans left alive. They aren't exactly prospering, but at least their story is being told
That's pretty funny. The native american population in North America today is probably about the same today as it was at the time of contact. When you said "a few" you forgot to add the word "million".
Don't forget the Taiping Rebellion, where the Chinese had to fight off the deranged escapades of delusional Christian converts. As many as 100 million died between 1850 and 1864.
Your own source gives contradictory numbers about total dead, but it seems to lean more towards a figure like 20-30 million rather than your 100. It also points out that the majority of those were due to famine and disease rather than "barbarity" as you would have us believe.
The more important issue, though, is that you've mischaracterized the entire conflict. This is explained by your own source:
"The Taiping Rebellion began in the southern province of Guangxi when local officials launched a campaign of religious persecutionagainst a millenarian sect known as the God Worshipping Society led by Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ....
Hostilities began on January 1, 1851, when the Qing Green Standard Army launched an attack against the God Worshipping Society at the town of Jintian, Guangxi"
In other words, the established imperial dynasty first targeted the Christians for persecution and then engaged in open warfare against them. Which you have somehow managed to spin into the exact opposite. Nice try there, but no.
Both sides were equal in terms of resources and technology, but in this case the Christians lost, and were demonstrably the most barbaric.
Nothing in your source supports this claim. On the contrary, passages like this suggest the opposite:
"Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed because after the collapse of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing Dynasty launched waves of massacres against the Hakkas, killing up to 30,000 each day during the height of the massacres."
I'm not going to pretend to know enough about the conflict in order to have an informed opinion about which side was more brutal... but I'm certainly not going to take your word on it given how badly you managed to spin the nature of the conflict thusfar.
I like how you cherry-pick little bits of history
Thanks. I like how you flat out lie about major chunks of history.
Let me guess, you are the product of the US public school system, or home schooled by fundamentalists, perhaps?
You've managed 3 incorrect guesses in one sentence. I'm not american, I definitely wasn't home schooled, and I'm pretty sure that "fundamentalist atheist" isn't a thing. While I dislike all forms of organised religion (and magical thinking in general), I dispise your sort of dishonest attacks on religion even more. Only a fool would make up reasons for attacking religion when there are so many legitimate reasons to criticise it.
I do however find a great deal of amusement in seeing how often my education, nationality, and religion are questioned by smug ignoramuses. Thanks for that.
Sailing problem #1: Doldrums (no wind) Sailing problem #2: Restricted in direction one can travel more than you might care to think Sailing problem #3: (The biggy): Your energy budget for electricity for everything you want for day to day living.
Sailing fix #1: fuel reserve. Whether electric or conventional, you can carry enough to get you through the slow periods. Sailing fix #2: IANAS but given several hundred years of history your second problem sounds like a PEBDAS issue. Sailing fix #3: the fact that you have sails does not prevent you from installing some solar panels for non-propulsion needs.
A mix of sail and solar-electric seems like a much better solution that this floating monstrosity.
Are these numbers right? 5.6g gold per TV sounds too high. That is about 1/5oz, which would be worth about 250$.
Back in 1990 when that TV was likely made those 5.6 ounces would only have been worth about $70. Given that a decent size set cost $600+ it's not that outlandish to think the gold in it made up ~10% of the total cost.
1. Based on medical research 50 lbs has pretty much been established as the maximum amount of weight an average worker should be expected to repeatedly lift. 2. Aircraft are heavily affected by weight distribution, and need to be loaded in a way that doesn't significantly change the centre of gravity. Stabdardizing passenger luggage makes the math easier when figuring out how to load it.
Since a consistent weight for luggage is helpful, it made sense to standardise the limit based on the max weight which baggage handlers could be expected to handle.
Foreigners use customary units too, they just convert them for public consumption. Once you know this, you start seeing it all the time. For example, European airlines always have a 23-kg (50-pound) bag weight limit. Why 23? Because it's 50 pounds.
Those types of examples are due to standards which were put in place by the US. If "foreigners" had set the standard limit it would probably be 20 kilograms, and the US would be telling it's passengers they're limited to 44 lbs.
aÂvailÂaÂbilÂiÂty É(TM)ËOEvÄlÉ(TM)ËbilÉ(TM)dÄ" noun the quality of being able to be used or obtained. "turkey producers had been losing sales because of the all-year-round availability of beef"
Sure, because the Royal Proclamation of 1763 wasn't a thing
Oh it was definitely a thing, it just has absolutely nothing to do with the Deceleration. Kinda like how the Microsoft EULA is also a thing which has nothing to do with the Deceleration. You can't just name random documents to try and support your position.
and the young United States of America didn't blah blah blah
Equally irrelevant.
The British weren't saints. Neither were the American colonists, nor the native Americans.
Who said they were? You seem to be arguing with yourself now. The fact that the Brits and the colonists did some bad shit has nothing to do with the meaning of this particular passage, or the broader question of whether "Indian savage" was an inappropriate phrase.
Yep, communism wins. Also crusades are a shit example; they pale in comparison to the very similar Islamic rampages through Europe. Then there's Genghis Khan, who probably beats both of them combined when it comes to the body count.
Holocaust is a decent example though. Not because of "the numbers", though. We're talking about barbarity, and the total death toll is just one aspect of it.
More or less questionable than executing women because somebody said they were witches?
The institutionalised slaughter of tens of hundreds of thousands of people over hundreds of years, vs the execution of a few dozen women in an isolated area during a moral panic?
I dunno, man, they're so close that I can barely tell them apart. It's like trying to decide what's worse: the transatlantic slave trade, or that one guy who locked his daughter in the basement. An impossible task, to be sure.
Try the real numbers. Availability of reactors in the US has ranged from 91.8% to 92.4% for the last three years, and that's extraordinarily high. Of the 441 reactors in the world, besides the United States, only Romania managed a greater than 90% availability for all three years, and Romania has just 2 reactors.
I stand corrected. However, as "stoatwblr" pointed out, your correction doesn't actually change the argument. Availability of nuclear is still far higher than any other source, and could be made even higher with newer designs. Whereas wind and solar availability isn't going to change much regardless of what improvements we make.
Right, I forgot, poor people can't make choices. They're just mindless automatons following a predefined program. Thank you so much for reminding me that I shouldn't think of them as human beings.
Makes sense. Kinda how the phrase "white supremacist" clearly implies that all white people are supremacists. Or how "Islamic militant" is obviously a deceleration that all Muslims are violent terrorists.
They have property rights same as everyone else. Don't be a spaz. The fact that reservations are designed to be a Communist Utopia is irrelevant to the individual rights of the natives themselves.
Those who prefer a true capitalist community tend to move off the rez and live elsewhere. Those who prefer the "traditional native society" tend to stay there. We don't have some berlin-wall type structure keeping them from finding a better life on the other side; they have the freedom to choose.
Wasn't it? That particular part of the US declaration of independence relates to the settler's desire not to be restricted in waging war with native Americans.
Nonsense. Far from imposing restrictions on waging war, the British crown had a history of encouraging Indian attacks against the colonials. THAT is what this passage is complaining about. It's pretty damn clear: "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages". As in "has actively worked to have indians slaughter our frontier colonists".
Historical documents, no matter how lofty and idealistic, are often filled with nasty little details that reflect more of the realities of the day than we'd like to remember.
Yeah, especially when you misinterpret them due to some misguided desire to find nasty little details.
Interestingly enough the very next paragraph which Jefferson wrote for the Deceleration was originally a condemnation of the British for failing to stop the slave trade. It was struck out of the final draft because the southern colonies objected, but, in the context of this discussion, it seems rather unlikely that in one breath Jefferson would be complaining "you won't let us kill the injuns" while in the next he's saying "you won't stop enslaving Africans", don't you think?
Certainly some tribes and the Aztecs had some questionable practices that were pretty brutal
You heard it here, folks; carving the still beating hearts out of (lowballing) 4,000 people in 4 days in order to celebrate the building of a temple is a "questionable practice". Rather akin to jaywalking in many ways.
There is no evidence they were more brutal than the white people.
Even if that were true, the Deceleration isn't comparing them to all white people in all of human history. There's loads of evidence that natives (even the kindler, gentler North American variety) were far more brutal than the British colonists / budding revolutionaries who wrote the thing.
Indian savages were the bioweapons of their time; indiscriminate killing machines paid off by the crown to slaughter it's enemies. Got a settlement that's giving you trouble? Offer the Indians some beads, guns, and booze. No more settlement.
Of course it was a bioweapon that also had a mind of it's own and tended to blow up in your face, which was rather a large downside.
The " theater experience " is currently so poor, you could give me the tickets for FREE and I still won't go to the theater to see the movie.
Have you considered for a moment the possibility that the world doesn't revolve around you?
It's a crazy thought, I know, but there is a slight possibility that movie theatres will continue being profitable even if you personally dislike going. Even more astoundingly, it appears that the reason why MoviePass is doing so poorly is that a bunch of people actually WANT to go, and the measly $9.99 monthly fee isn't enough to cover the cost of so many tickets.
I mean I'm certain that all of the theatre chains are absolutely heartbroken over losing you as a customer, but they do somehow seem to be muddling through without you...
$4.9 billion in subsidies as of three years ago, and still counting.
If you had bothered reading the article you linked to you would have seen that the subsidies break down as follows:
1. $750 million to build a solar plant, and $260 million in property tax breaks, on a project which New York state expects to generate 3,000 jobs and replace a Steel factory. 2. $497 million in tax credits for solar installation; a tax break available to ALL solar providers. 3. $1.5 billion in subsidies paid to solar consumers (ie. not paid to Elon or any of his companies). 4. $1.3 billion in undefined "incentives" to build a battery factory - probably also composed of tax-breaks intended to support an extremely profitable venture which will greatly benefit Nevada (later in the story they point out that Nevada expects to get back $100 billion in "economic impact"). 5. $517 million from collecting "environmental credits" from competitors. This is not "taxpayer money". 6. $20 million in yet more undefined subsidies for a launch facility; again, a great deal for Texas given the profitability of SpaceX.
Now, the original claim was that "an awful lot of tax dollars are spent inflating his ego", and, to support this claim, you linked to a jumbled mass of programs totalling $4.9 billion. Out of that $4.9 billion, we can discount $1.5 immediately since it was given to consumers as part of a larger solar subsidy which has nothing to do with Elon. That leaves $3.4 billion. We can further subtract the $497 million given to Tesla because, again, these are programs available to (and used by) all solar providers. We are down to $2.9 billion.
We can also take out the $517 million taken from competitors because... well, don't be stupid. Now we have $2.4 billion.
Of that $2.4 billion, $750 million is being used to construct a facility which the government will own. So that's about $1.6 billion left.
So the actual amount of money, according to your own source, which is being spent specifically to "inflate his ego" is about $1.6 billion... and, again according to your own source, almost all of this money is composed of tax breaks rather than direct spending. Tax breaks which, according to the government, should stimulate the economy to the tune of $100 billion over 2 decades.
The sensors and software detected the pedestrian just fine, but had automatic braking disabled, since the human "driver" was expected to handle that.
No. One set of software and sensors (the ones installed by the manufacturer) detected the pedestrian just fine, but had automatic braking disabled because the OTHER set of software and sensors (the ones installed by Uber) were expected to handle that. The driver was just a backup for the Uber sensors/software.
There's no question that the driver was criminally negligent, but the Uber software/hardware failed as well.
Slashdot Mirror
No u.
No research is done by scientists. Scientists use metric.
Not sure if retarded or trolling ....
Fortunately there are still a few Native Americans left alive. They aren't exactly prospering, but at least their story is being told
That's pretty funny. The native american population in North America today is probably about the same today as it was at the time of contact. When you said "a few" you forgot to add the word "million".
The rest of your comment is equally neglectful.
Don't forget the Taiping Rebellion, where the Chinese had to fight off the deranged escapades of delusional Christian converts. As many as 100 million died between 1850 and 1864.
Your own source gives contradictory numbers about total dead, but it seems to lean more towards a figure like 20-30 million rather than your 100. It also points out that the majority of those were due to famine and disease rather than "barbarity" as you would have us believe.
The more important issue, though, is that you've mischaracterized the entire conflict. This is explained by your own source:
"The Taiping Rebellion began in the southern province of Guangxi when local officials launched a campaign of religious persecution against a millenarian sect known as the God Worshipping Society led by Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. ...
Hostilities began on January 1, 1851, when the Qing Green Standard Army launched an attack against the God Worshipping Society at the town of Jintian, Guangxi"
In other words, the established imperial dynasty first targeted the Christians for persecution and then engaged in open warfare against them. Which you have somehow managed to spin into the exact opposite. Nice try there, but no.
Both sides were equal in terms of resources and technology, but in this case the Christians lost, and were demonstrably the most barbaric.
Nothing in your source supports this claim. On the contrary, passages like this suggest the opposite:
"Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed because after the collapse of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing Dynasty launched waves of massacres against the Hakkas, killing up to 30,000 each day during the height of the massacres."
I'm not going to pretend to know enough about the conflict in order to have an informed opinion about which side was more brutal ... but I'm certainly not going to take your word on it given how badly you managed to spin the nature of the conflict thusfar.
I like how you cherry-pick little bits of history
Thanks. I like how you flat out lie about major chunks of history.
Let me guess, you are the product of the US public school system, or home schooled by fundamentalists, perhaps?
You've managed 3 incorrect guesses in one sentence. I'm not american, I definitely wasn't home schooled, and I'm pretty sure that "fundamentalist atheist" isn't a thing. While I dislike all forms of organised religion (and magical thinking in general), I dispise your sort of dishonest attacks on religion even more. Only a fool would make up reasons for attacking religion when there are so many legitimate reasons to criticise it.
I do however find a great deal of amusement in seeing how often my education, nationality, and religion are questioned by smug ignoramuses. Thanks for that.
Sailing problem #1: Doldrums (no wind)
Sailing problem #2: Restricted in direction one can travel more than you might care to think
Sailing problem #3: (The biggy): Your energy budget for electricity for everything you want for day to day living.
Sailing fix #1: fuel reserve. Whether electric or conventional, you can carry enough to get you through the slow periods.
Sailing fix #2: IANAS but given several hundred years of history your second problem sounds like a PEBDAS issue.
Sailing fix #3: the fact that you have sails does not prevent you from installing some solar panels for non-propulsion needs.
A mix of sail and solar-electric seems like a much better solution that this floating monstrosity.
Are these numbers right? 5.6g gold per TV sounds too high. That is about 1/5oz, which would be worth about 250$.
Back in 1990 when that TV was likely made those 5.6 ounces would only have been worth about $70. Given that a decent size set cost $600+ it's not that outlandish to think the gold in it made up ~10% of the total cost.
What is significant about 50 lbs?
It's significant in two ways:
1. Based on medical research 50 lbs has pretty much been established as the maximum amount of weight an average worker should be expected to repeatedly lift.
2. Aircraft are heavily affected by weight distribution, and need to be loaded in a way that doesn't significantly change the centre of gravity. Stabdardizing passenger luggage makes the math easier when figuring out how to load it.
Since a consistent weight for luggage is helpful, it made sense to standardise the limit based on the max weight which baggage handlers could be expected to handle.
Foreigners use customary units too, they just convert them for public consumption. Once you know this, you start seeing it all the time. For example, European airlines always have a 23-kg (50-pound) bag weight limit. Why 23? Because it's 50 pounds.
Those types of examples are due to standards which were put in place by the US. If "foreigners" had set the standard limit it would probably be 20 kilograms, and the US would be telling it's passengers they're limited to 44 lbs.
aÂvailÂaÂbilÂiÂty
É(TM)ËOEvÄlÉ(TM)ËbilÉ(TM)dÄ"
noun
the quality of being able to be used or obtained.
"turkey producers had been losing sales because of the all-year-round availability of beef"
Sure, because the Royal Proclamation of 1763 wasn't a thing
Oh it was definitely a thing, it just has absolutely nothing to do with the Deceleration. Kinda like how the Microsoft EULA is also a thing which has nothing to do with the Deceleration. You can't just name random documents to try and support your position.
and the young United States of America didn't blah blah blah
Equally irrelevant.
The British weren't saints. Neither were the American colonists, nor the native Americans.
Who said they were? You seem to be arguing with yourself now. The fact that the Brits and the colonists did some bad shit has nothing to do with the meaning of this particular passage, or the broader question of whether "Indian savage" was an inappropriate phrase.
Yep, communism wins. Also crusades are a shit example; they pale in comparison to the very similar Islamic rampages through Europe. Then there's Genghis Khan, who probably beats both of them combined when it comes to the body count.
Holocaust is a decent example though. Not because of "the numbers", though. We're talking about barbarity, and the total death toll is just one aspect of it.
More or less questionable than executing women because somebody said they were witches?
The institutionalised slaughter of tens of hundreds of thousands of people over hundreds of years, vs the execution of a few dozen women in an isolated area during a moral panic?
I dunno, man, they're so close that I can barely tell them apart. It's like trying to decide what's worse: the transatlantic slave trade, or that one guy who locked his daughter in the basement. An impossible task, to be sure.
Try the real numbers. Availability of reactors in the US has ranged from 91.8% to 92.4% for the last three years, and that's extraordinarily high. Of the 441 reactors in the world, besides the United States, only Romania managed a greater than 90% availability for all three years, and Romania has just 2 reactors.
I stand corrected. However, as "stoatwblr" pointed out, your correction doesn't actually change the argument. Availability of nuclear is still far higher than any other source, and could be made even higher with newer designs. Whereas wind and solar availability isn't going to change much regardless of what improvements we make.
P.P.S. jaywalking and carving out beating hearts, both deplorable.
Right, I forgot, poor people can't make choices. They're just mindless automatons following a predefined program. Thank you so much for reminding me that I shouldn't think of them as human beings.
Makes sense. Kinda how the phrase "white supremacist" clearly implies that all white people are supremacists. Or how "Islamic militant" is obviously a deceleration that all Muslims are violent terrorists.
Oh wait ...
They have property rights same as everyone else. Don't be a spaz. The fact that reservations are designed to be a Communist Utopia is irrelevant to the individual rights of the natives themselves.
Those who prefer a true capitalist community tend to move off the rez and live elsewhere. Those who prefer the "traditional native society" tend to stay there. We don't have some berlin-wall type structure keeping them from finding a better life on the other side; they have the freedom to choose.
Wasn't it? That particular part of the US declaration of independence relates to the settler's desire not to be restricted in waging war with native Americans.
Nonsense. Far from imposing restrictions on waging war, the British crown had a history of encouraging Indian attacks against the colonials. THAT is what this passage is complaining about. It's pretty damn clear: "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages". As in "has actively worked to have indians slaughter our frontier colonists".
Historical documents, no matter how lofty and idealistic, are often filled with nasty little details that reflect more of the realities of the day than we'd like to remember.
Yeah, especially when you misinterpret them due to some misguided desire to find nasty little details.
Interestingly enough the very next paragraph which Jefferson wrote for the Deceleration was originally a condemnation of the British for failing to stop the slave trade. It was struck out of the final draft because the southern colonies objected, but, in the context of this discussion, it seems rather unlikely that in one breath Jefferson would be complaining "you won't let us kill the injuns" while in the next he's saying "you won't stop enslaving Africans", don't you think?
Certainly some tribes and the Aztecs had some questionable practices that were pretty brutal
You heard it here, folks; carving the still beating hearts out of (lowballing) 4,000 people in 4 days in order to celebrate the building of a temple is a "questionable practice". Rather akin to jaywalking in many ways.
There is no evidence they were more brutal than the white people.
Even if that were true, the Deceleration isn't comparing them to all white people in all of human history. There's loads of evidence that natives (even the kindler, gentler North American variety) were far more brutal than the British colonists / budding revolutionaries who wrote the thing.
Indian savages were the bioweapons of their time; indiscriminate killing machines paid off by the crown to slaughter it's enemies. Got a settlement that's giving you trouble? Offer the Indians some beads, guns, and booze. No more settlement.
Of course it was a bioweapon that also had a mind of it's own and tended to blow up in your face, which was rather a large downside.
Here's what they're not getting:
The " theater experience " is currently so poor, you could give me the tickets for FREE and I still won't go to the theater to see the movie.
Have you considered for a moment the possibility that the world doesn't revolve around you?
It's a crazy thought, I know, but there is a slight possibility that movie theatres will continue being profitable even if you personally dislike going. Even more astoundingly, it appears that the reason why MoviePass is doing so poorly is that a bunch of people actually WANT to go, and the measly $9.99 monthly fee isn't enough to cover the cost of so many tickets.
I mean I'm certain that all of the theatre chains are absolutely heartbroken over losing you as a customer, but they do somehow seem to be muddling through without you ...
I have a bunch of those Y-splitters and they're great, but that's not what we were talking about.
$4.9 billion in subsidies as of three years ago, and still counting.
If you had bothered reading the article you linked to you would have seen that the subsidies break down as follows:
1. $750 million to build a solar plant, and $260 million in property tax breaks, on a project which New York state expects to generate 3,000 jobs and replace a Steel factory.
2. $497 million in tax credits for solar installation; a tax break available to ALL solar providers.
3. $1.5 billion in subsidies paid to solar consumers (ie. not paid to Elon or any of his companies).
4. $1.3 billion in undefined "incentives" to build a battery factory - probably also composed of tax-breaks intended to support an extremely profitable venture which will greatly benefit Nevada (later in the story they point out that Nevada expects to get back $100 billion in "economic impact").
5. $517 million from collecting "environmental credits" from competitors. This is not "taxpayer money".
6. $20 million in yet more undefined subsidies for a launch facility; again, a great deal for Texas given the profitability of SpaceX.
Now, the original claim was that "an awful lot of tax dollars are spent inflating his ego", and, to support this claim, you linked to a jumbled mass of programs totalling $4.9 billion. Out of that $4.9 billion, we can discount $1.5 immediately since it was given to consumers as part of a larger solar subsidy which has nothing to do with Elon. That leaves $3.4 billion. We can further subtract the $497 million given to Tesla because, again, these are programs available to (and used by) all solar providers. We are down to $2.9 billion.
We can also take out the $517 million taken from competitors because ... well, don't be stupid. Now we have $2.4 billion.
Of that $2.4 billion, $750 million is being used to construct a facility which the government will own. So that's about $1.6 billion left.
So the actual amount of money, according to your own source, which is being spent specifically to "inflate his ego" is about $1.6 billion ... and, again according to your own source, almost all of this money is composed of tax breaks rather than direct spending. Tax breaks which, according to the government, should stimulate the economy to the tune of $100 billion over 2 decades.
Quelle horreur.
Why is it an either/or?
The sensors and software detected the pedestrian just fine, but had automatic braking disabled, since the human "driver" was expected to handle that.
No. One set of software and sensors (the ones installed by the manufacturer) detected the pedestrian just fine, but had automatic braking disabled because the OTHER set of software and sensors (the ones installed by Uber) were expected to handle that. The driver was just a backup for the Uber sensors/software.
There's no question that the driver was criminally negligent, but the Uber software/hardware failed as well.