jabretti

20 ms·

61.
by jabretti 9y ago
Not the OP but to me a non-annoying philosopher would be someone like Russell, Quine or Dennett. A good philosopher takes the time to define terms, explain the problem clearly, explain other possible views on the matter in a fair and accura
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by jabretti 9y ago
Is it really right to call him a philosopher? I would more fairly consider him a "writer", in the vein of (though nothing like) a GK Chesterton -- capable of opining on philosophical topics but with none of the rigour or fairness
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by jabretti 9y ago
I will believe it when I see it. Assuming that some day I have a pressing need to travel from Bakersfield to Fresno, that is, because as I understand it there's still no commitment to construct the other parts. Train advocates assume t
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by jabretti 9y ago
All these comparisons are unfair, because Japan had the good fortune to be bombed into oblivion in the 1940s, enabling them to start with a more or less clean sheet and 20th century technology. In western cities (apart from Germany, also co
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by jabretti 9y ago
Jepthah made a vow to sacrifice whoever walked out of his front door first when he returned home; the fact that it's his daughter is portrayed as a horrible twist (I guess he was hoping to sacrifice a servant or something? How did this
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by jabretti 9y ago
This is naive. A bushfire is huge, hot, and fast-moving, consuming entire trees in seconds. Your mains-pressure water sprinkler will not deter an onrushing wall of flame in the least... and worse, an automated system would take water away f
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by jabretti 9y ago
You could probably sell a lot in Germany too. Germans are crazy about analysing their own feces.
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by jabretti 9y ago
It seems to me more like they're just trying to build firefighting drones. It's not clear to me that they have any actual insight into how said drones might help, or how firefighting is done at the moment.
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by jabretti 9y ago
People tend to be quite capable of judging someone else's social class at a glance, though, or at least after a few words have been spoken. Racial cues are a pretty small part of it.
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by jabretti 9y ago
That sounds like a city-dweller's perspective. Sure, I would almost certainly be dead, but life on Earth would continue, our species would continue, and our civilisation would continue (albeit with some major setbacks). Besides, I don&
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by jabretti 9y ago
Is maximising diversity of ideas really the goal? Good ideas are worth a lot, bad ideas have zero value or negative value. Diversity of ideas can be a good thing, but it can also mean diluting good ideas with ones that are valueless or ac
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by jabretti 9y ago
In my view it's an economic issue, not a technological one. If as much money had been spent on space travel as has been spent on computers in the last fifty years then we'd have cities on the moon, no problem. But "we" d
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by jabretti 9y ago
I like to think that there is a tidally locked planet somewhere out there whose inhabitants like to argue about whether life could ever evolve on a rotating planet. "I mean, it would be so unstable! Even with a thick atmosphere, temper
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by jabretti 9y ago
Shark attacks are no more non-news than at least 80% of the crap that fills media outlets, and it's not the least bit suspicious. Shark attacks are lurid and scary and human attention is notoriously poorly distributed. Yesterday, Presi
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by jabretti 9y ago
Verifucation was intended as a way of distinguishing the actual profiles of famous people from fake ones. If twitter has now decided that they can dis-verify people for saying things they don't like, then twitter is implicitly endorsin
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by jabretti 9y ago
Yep, that's an example of what a social media based propaganda campaign looks like in the US. Thankfully, though, there are very important differences to what it looks like in China. Correct the Record has only the resources of one pol
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by jabretti 9y ago
Are you suggesting that the government causes shark attacks? Do they control the sharks, or just have agents to push the swimmers into their jaws? Seriously though, democratic governments are much less good at propaganda operations than des