SnakePlissken

6 ms·

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by SnakePlissken 9y ago
There's a fantastic book by Roger Crowley called Empires of the Sea that covers the Habsburg-Ottoman war for control of the Mediterranean. The early chapters go into great detail on the Siege of Rhodes, including Tadini's effort
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by SnakePlissken 9y ago
>>It is well known that land and wealth has been acquired by expulsion of people from different faith from your territory (I'm thinking for example expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain) The problem with this line of argument
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
Ted Cruz is probably more to blame in this case than Cambridge; he came across to many as supremely unlikeable/comically phony and clearly lost the mud slinging fights with Trump that dominated the Republican primaries. Whatever benefi
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
Google's Eric Schmidt proposed a plan similar to this (though in more ambiguous terms) back in 2014, sharing a draft with Cheryl Mills that was forwarded to the Clinton braintrust (John Podesta, Robby Mook and David Plouffe) and subseq
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
Gelernter summarized his view on the culture wars and the shift in America's elite class in a 1997 article in Commentary Magazine. It's an interesting take and certainly relevant to the current political climate. http:/&#x2F
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
I'd never heard of Luzia, but I just read into it a bit and it's definitely intriguing. Thanks for the response and the new rabbit hole to dive into!
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
A great companion to this article is the Planet Money episode on Venezuela's collapse [0]. It's only 20 minutes long and combines anecdotes with a basic bird's eye view in NPR's typical fashion. Venezuela didn't sa
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
I think the negativity is more focused on the "blockchain will revolutionize x industry" hype than on the blockchain technology itself. I've noticed a similar (and justified) degree of skepticism and fatigue here in regar
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
Can you expand on the evidence of "Negroids" in Brazil 40,000 years ago? I'm familiar with the idea of pre-Clovis settlements and the controversy around that, but I was under the impression these were thought to be earlier se
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
>I'd prefer if you just said it's because you'd like protectionism to lead to higher wages for American citizens. If he does want "protectionism to lead to higher wages for Americans", why is that wrong? The pu
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
I rarely see in coverage of these mass replacements what kind of positions are being affected, just "IT workers". The article says they're mostly back-office staff but I don't know what that means at UCSF. Are these soft
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
I understand and agree with your point ("a good answer", as I said). My point is that your position is weakened (for the individual you responded to and all other readers) by not naming the books and authors in question. Anyone no
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
A good answer for the distinction of suppressed inre: banned, but your post as a contribution to the discussion at large is weakened by the "wise mystic who won't reveal the whole truth for the good of the student" routine. Y
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
> How do we know that Plato wasn't reporting what Socrates taught him? And, if true, how can we be sure that Socrates didn't get the idea from someone else? Quite plainly, we don't know. It seems irrelevant, however, as t
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
Would you recommend someone new to Reynolds start with Revelation Space or the Poseidon's Children trilogy?
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
It's an understandable mistake (if it was one), as Plato wrote most of his works as dialogues between Socrates and other Athenians (including Republic, where the Allegory of the Cave originates). From another angle, the paragraph in re
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
There's a great anecdote about George Soros that this reminded me of: Despite the palindrome writing two dense books and conducting numerous interviews on his theory of 'Reflexivity'[0] as essential to his success, Soros&#x27
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by SnakePlissken 10y ago
Satan isn't a dreadful spirit of the underworld, he's basically a corrupted angel! I get where you're coming from, but this kind of pedantic hair-splitting with a condescending tone doesn't advance the conversation. Ther
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by SnakePlissken 11y ago
This is a common misconception. It's certainly true that if the stock market was a mere game of chance, there would be some coming up heads for many flips in a row. Where the analogy fails is that the successful coin-flippers break int
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by SnakePlissken 11y ago
I believe the argument is along the following lines: The more money that is placed into passive indexes (funds that merely attempt to track the performance of something like the S&P500 by owning a proportional, market cap weighted amoun
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by SnakePlissken 11y ago
Whenever I see the Internet Hate Machine in full spin I'm reminded of the following quote: "The sage of Toronto [Marshall McLuhan] had formerly spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by the ‘global villa
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by SnakePlissken 12y ago
Not to defend stockbrokers, but part of what made the tech bubble so uniquely frothy was that it was the first time retail investors could easily circumvent the Wall Street gatekeepers via online, discount brokerages. No doubt many mom and