pamqzl

6 ms·

1.
by pamqzl 9y ago
I'm always extremely skeptical when someone suggests that oral traditions could possibly have survived for long periods of time. That's twelve hundred generations! Given what we know about the speed at which Chinese Whispers ten
2.
by pamqzl 9y ago
And although now we've pushed literacy up from 80% to 90-something percent, I wonder whether literacy is actually lower than it was in the 1850s. More people are literate, but those who are literate are on average less literate, becaus
3.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Unless the statistical distribution of alleles is exactly the same (unlikely) from one generation to the next then humans would have to be evolving, wouldn't they?
4.
by pamqzl 9y ago
They don't want fairness either, they want "fairness". The difference between fairness and "fairness" is that "fairness" works out a little better for people like yourself than fairness does.
5.
by pamqzl 9y ago
What is the benefit of preserving rarely-spoken languages?
6.
by pamqzl 9y ago
But my dogecoins are still headed for the moon, right?
7.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Not that many internal combustion powered cars you can buy nowadays without touch screens and the like, either. Maybe not Tesla-level yet, but in five years I'd be surprised if most new cars weren't filled with screens in the plac
8.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Latino cultures already control all but two of the thirty-something nations of the Americas, do we really feel like they're under threat?
9.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Only in a legal sense are they different cities. I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly. I realise there's history and San Francisco wasn't always joined to San Jo
10.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Sure, as long as we can have a white Shaft. Seriously though, Britishness (in the genetic sense) is a fundamental part of James Bond's character. He isn't just British by citizenship, he's emblematic of Britain.
11.
by pamqzl 9y ago
So was Star Wars. But it turns out it's more profitable as the latter.
12.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Indeed. If you could rule by promise, and those promises were binding on future administrations, then executive power would be practically unlimited.
13.
by pamqzl 9y ago
The bizarre US insistence that places like San Francisco and Oakland are somehow separate cities baffles me. Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay Area, and it goes from San Francisco down to somewhere
14.
by pamqzl 9y ago
But I could, for instance, buy advertisements in support of my favoured candidate? I guess not on US TV or US billboards since they're under the control of the US. But if I buy ads on the internet that just happen to be seen by US citi
15.
by pamqzl 9y ago
If you give money to a government official in return for a specific favour then you'll both wind up in prison. But there are certainly a helluva lot of ways of for this transaction to occur without anyone ever directly saying "her
16.
by pamqzl 9y ago
No they're not, the second is just a clarification of the sense in which the first was meant. By comparison, take the statement "All men are not equal. Or at least, they're not equal in their ability to play football". T
17.
by pamqzl 9y ago
> non-profit humanitarian organization Which just happens to pay the Clintons' bills every time they feel like travelling anywhere, and direct money to whoever the Clintons want to do favours for. The election is over, we can all ad
18.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Or just a foreign individual? I'm a foreign individual who went around making comments on the US election... what's the difference between me doing it privately and a company doing it?
19.
by pamqzl 9y ago
You sound like me. All I can tell you is to fake it til you make it. It doesn't take that long before your lack of experience in the particular subject at hand ceases to be the limiting factor.
20.
by pamqzl 9y ago
And is the European perspective more valid than the American? Why isn't it Europe that's skewed? Also I note that "Europe" is a big place and quite politically diverse.
21.
by pamqzl 9y ago
I don't see why these people can't go back to their home countries and begin the same process that the rest of us non-US-citizens have to go through if we want to live in the US.
22.
by pamqzl 9y ago
IBM seems to have painted themselves into a bit of a corner by calling a bunch of largely unrelated research projects by the name Watson.
23.
by pamqzl 9y ago
I'd say there's certainly much odder customs than that. Touching someone is an intimate act between two people. A handshake is a gesture at the least intimate end of that scale. It's a way of mutually saying "we are no l
24.
by pamqzl 9y ago
If you shake hands with an unsanitary person you can easily sanitise your hand. If you hug an unsanitary person you'll need a shower and a change of clothes. Plus there's the smell...
25.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Yes, and they're often pretty clever with their juxtapositions, giving two completely contradictory takes on the same subject one after the other.
26.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Disagree. The Guardian is mainstream left, Breitbart is mainstream right. If you think Breitbart is too far right to be mainstream, check the identity of the guy in the White House and think again. If you think the Guardian is too far left
27.
by pamqzl 9y ago
How so? Are you sure you're not just assuming that your own point of view is the correct one?
28.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Yep. I've pretty much given up all news except the Australian Financial Review and am a lot happier for it (though for some reason I'm back on HN after many years... bad move)
29.
by pamqzl 9y ago
That's a bit like inciting sex at an orgy.
30.
by pamqzl 9y ago
Honestly I'd be far more worried about my kid being hit by a car than being a victim of any crime. Or maybe they try something stupid (we all did stupid things as kids and I don't expect my kids to be smarter than I was) and wind

More ›