bnralt

36 ms·

391.
by bnralt 4y ago
In my experience, the majority of the education time for STEM degrees is useless as well. Hell, a good chunk of the time isn't even spent on STEM (IE, you'll have required humanities and art classes as part of your STEM degree). B
392.
by bnralt 4y ago
It seems like this would be best solved by creating an arena where legs had an advantage? The whole advantage of legs is that you can traverse areas that aren't unnaturally flat (almost all areas in real life). Make every single arena
393.
by bnralt 4y ago
I think it's understated how well the current U.S. centered alliance has worked. I've never seen a name for it (G7 Alliance, maybe?), but it's broadly Western Europe, U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Kor
394.
by bnralt 4y ago
It's worth pointing out that American lawmakers also have ties with the Unification Church. A couple of decades ago its founder, Sun Myung Moon, actually had a coronation in a U.S. Senate office building that was attended by numerous U
395.
by bnralt 4y ago
I'm not sure how we can square the idea that integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms, yet somehow that if hermit kingdoms became isolated to the extreme they'll actually start to become very productive again. You have to b
396.
by bnralt 4y ago
Right, which is why I said it would be _extremely_ difficult to do. Consider this: any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment, dealing with the extreme lack of
397.
by bnralt 4y ago
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? Or even just the suburbs. Being able to simply manufacture on demand a self-contained and functioning soc
398.
by bnralt 4y ago
The average person is much, much more likely to get fired because of a Twitter mob than a Kiwi Farms mob. Twitter users got David Shor fired because he said riots often cause political blowback; Emmanuel Cafferty because someone saw him mak
399.
by bnralt 4y ago
> One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is that the West had a "simpler" alphabet of 26 characters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks (~20). Really? I feel like this is usually used as the main - sometimes only
400.
by bnralt 4y ago
> All of them have some form of sticking it to the man and doing what they want as their story line. True heroes are self-sacrificial and reluctant. Contrast Galadriel who acts like a self righteous dickhead This seems to be a recurring
401.
by bnralt 4y ago
Worth pointing out they didn't just rob the store, but they assaulted the store employee who tried to stop them[1]: > Gibson followed the student from the store, where they began struggling across the street, which is campus propert
402.
by bnralt 4y ago
Indeed. I was an elected official for a hyperlocal committee years ago. There was a specific hoop that our committee required people to do, but when I looked into it I found that none of the other dozens of committees had it, and it require
403.
by bnralt 4y ago
The vast majority of new is entertainment. If you're in a deep blue area that has never voted for Trump, and you know that you'll never vote for Trump, spending hours a day reading about how terrible Trump is doesn't inform y
404.
by bnralt 4y ago
I agree with all of your points. But it's worth pointing out that most "public intellectual" interactions become a form of Kabuki theater. It might be a friendly interview, where you can guess what questions are going to be a
405.
by bnralt 4y ago
Consider the last inhospitable area there was a rush to explore, Antarctica. The efforts to claim it haven't amounted to much, mostly because it's such a terrible place to build settlements. Chile and Argentina have tried to make
406.
by bnralt 4y ago
It also makes one question just how useful spending those resources on going to the moon in the first place. After spending all that time and all those resources (not just financial; it also occupied the time of our limited pool of top engi
407.
by bnralt 4y ago
There was an article from The Economist that was posted on Hacker News earlier today, arguing the SLS wasn't a good use of resources[1]. It got flagged and was removed, for some reason. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/
408.
by bnralt 4y ago
You almost never see a bunch of drivers arguing that it's OK to run red lights. It's quite common with cyclists; you can even look at the comments here and see several arguing that it's not a problem for cyclists to run red l
409.
by bnralt 4y ago
It seems like people get irrationally anxious and angry having to wait behind people moving slower in general. On paths that cyclists share with pedestrians, cyclists are usually even more angry and aggressive with pedestrians than drivers
410.
by bnralt 4y ago
After learning programming and CS on my own, I thought I'd go back and pick up on areas I missed by taking some courses at a university (I already had a degree). It was a fairly highly ranked university for CS (in the top 20), but the
411.
by bnralt 4y ago
> Does that include when he had fled to Italy in 1953? There were ~4 days between the Shah fleeing and royalist forces taking power. I supposed if you want to consider those a 4 day interregnum you can.
412.
by bnralt 4y ago
> This is the case in almost all parliamentary democracies. Iran _wasn't_ a parliamentary democracy at the time. It was a constitutional monarchy where an unelected monarch wielded significant political power. As I noted, he had jus
413.
by bnralt 4y ago
The U.S. didn't install the Shah. He'd been in power since 1941, when the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran forced the abdication of his father. He didn't have as much power as his father, so there was a power struggle between hi
414.
by bnralt 4y ago
France didn't control Lebanon for long, less than three decades and never as a colony. These pictures here were taken a couple of decades after Lebanese independence. I imagine the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the resulting turmo
415.
by bnralt 4y ago
> Poor kids and minority kids wind up in classrooms that are doubly starved for resources. People always assume this to be the case, but it doesn't seem to be true whenever I look at specific school districts. For example, D.C. and
416.
by bnralt 4y ago
At the very least schools should be trying to meet children at their level. I've seen children go an entire year without learning a thing in certain subjects, simply because the curriculum for that year is below their level. Not only i
417.
by bnralt 4y ago
Whats interesting to me is how which fringe disaster scenarios people decide are extremely important and which they decide are ridiculous seems pretty closely tied to their cultural circles. So, for instance, it's extremely unlikely th
418.
by bnralt 4y ago
To go even further: I imagine if the Arab world was politically unified with Europe today, there'd be a lot of people saying that it was always a unified Mediterranean cultural entity, sharing Monotheistic Abrahamic religions, Greek in
419.
by bnralt 4y ago
I wonder how much of this is true for therapy in general. When I've looked into it, the evidence for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a lot less than I would have expected, and there seems to be some question about how much of its
420.
by bnralt 4y ago
I don't think this has to do with the issue I mentioned. Google has gives a date for these articles when you do a regular search. As I mentioned, these are mostly around 2011. Again, these dates are coming from Google, not the site. I

More ›