pjlegato

45 ms·

451.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Well to do people could also much more readily flee the city to their country houses and escape infection, while poorer people had nowhere else to go.
452.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Not all leftists are Marxists, though they have come to dominate the field. The broad anti-capitalism of anarcho-syndicalism, combined with his well known criticisms of American and western power for so called imperialism, definitely slot h
453.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Sure, of course not all linguists who disagree with UG are anti-computationalists. (I don't know about "the overwhelming mass," but that is possibly the result of my exposure to a local concentration of anti-computationalis
454.
by pjlegato 10y ago
So the story is that the Great Plague actually was bubonic plague, as had always been believed.
455.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds with this excavation of neat coffin burials. The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths w
456.
by pjlegato 10y ago
The article, and many professional functionalist lingusts, confuse Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory and its later "parameters" revision with the much more general hypothesis, also advocated by Chomsky, that human language g
457.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Many -- perhaps even most -- of his fiercest opponents within linguistics agree strongly with most of his political views. George Lakoff, for example, is well known as a leading anti-Chomskyite linguist, and also as a vocal far-leftist whos
458.
by pjlegato 10y ago
"Obscure" does not mean "unimportant." It means few people know about it. I've lived in San Francisco and worked in the tech industry here for 10 years, during which time I've discussed this exact law with nume
459.
by pjlegato 10y ago
That's fine if you don't mind abandoning the externalities of the service. For example, when all your friends now communicate mainly on Facebook (or WhatsApp, etc.), then your choice is to either lose touch with your friends, or u
460.
by pjlegato 10y ago
I mostly agree, though I think that California's massive amount of readily available tech venture capital, as compared to anywhere else on Earth, is a far more important factor in its abundance of startups, rather than its obscure law
461.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Only in western democracies. In Russia and China, for example, the government has the legal right to monitor any communication whatsoever, and always has.
462.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Additionally, and more importantly, the governments of EU countries themselves do not respect any of the supposed privacy laws. All EU countries have their own intelligence services that are doing substantially the same thing as the NSA doe
463.
by pjlegato 10y ago
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco + Remote Clojure programmer / software architect / systems designer seeking contract gig. 20 years of pro software experience at your service. Extensive experience with Postgres, relational database mo
464.
by pjlegato 10y ago
It may be as you say. Can you present any evidence that "culture fit" is a filter to remove women and most minorities? "It seems to me..." does not count as evidence. Nor do demographic reports on the composition of co
465.
by pjlegato 10y ago
A tool -- a knife, say -- is merely a chunk of inert metal. It has no inherent meaning whatsoever. It is meaningful only insofar as it is placed into a social context. Any meaning is in the observers' minds, not in the tool itself.
466.
by pjlegato 10y ago
The point is, why would they bother even with the minute hassle of vetting and hiring an agency just to make a few pennies every year as compared to their existing billions? It's not even worth their time to do that much, apparently, s
467.
by pjlegato 10y ago
True. How about a punishing tax on any kind of unoccupied property, rather than specifying that it must be owner-occupied?
468.
by pjlegato 10y ago
This is an attractive trap. This mode of data modelling is actually quite terrible in terms of maintainability. It is precisely the problem with NoSQL database models. It doesn't mean there is no data model (schema), and it doesn'
469.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Yes. See, for example, Ferengis, a Star Trek race that are obsessed with money.
470.
by pjlegato 10y ago
I generally agree, but I wouldn't call the current structure artificial. That means it was somehow planned by a central artificer to have its current structure. The current social structure is rather the result of a very long and decen
471.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Got any examples of a self-funded business that was slow but eventually exceeded a venture-backed competitor? (Serious question.)
472.
The Culture of the Smug White Liberal(huffingtonpost.com)
2 points by pjlegato 10y ago|2 comments
473.
by pjlegato 10y ago
It means that, in the "real world" -- when you have a job or are operating a business, or are requesting donations for your non-profit, or otherwise interacting with people on a purely mutually voluntary basis, rather than because
474.
by pjlegato 10y ago
"Colonialism" does not exist as such. It's merely a sometimes useful intellectual abstraction, not a real thing. It has no objectives or purpose, because it does not and never actually existed as a real thing. It's merel
475.
by pjlegato 10y ago
It's disingenuous to call attention to US-backed guerrillas in South America without also noting that the supposedly "indigenous people's movements" in the region that these guerrilas were fighting against were not actua
476.
by pjlegato 10y ago
That's all entirely beside the point. The post was responding to another post claiming that historic socialists have been particularly great advocates of democracy, which is empirically false. Whether other systems have also been undem
477.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Perhaps you have heard of the People's Democratic Republics of East Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Albania? Socialism was imposed by a foreign occupying army. Or take the
478.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Several of these -- high end wine / online alcohol sales, travel tickets / private jet rental, high end all-natural pseudo-pharmaceuticals -- amount to little more than "this business is too risky when normal people are buyin
479.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Attention startups: THIS is what your public postmortems should look like. This level of detail and honesty, this level of specific steps that are being taken to prevent recurrence. 75% of startups try to sweep downtime under the rug and
480.
by pjlegato 10y ago
A rather thorough and objective characterization is available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-... A personality affectation characterized by the adoption of outmoded fashions, f

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