What I'm most worried about is the fabric of our society, not necessarily what policies the Grand Wizard in Chief ends up putting in place. Truth no longer matters. How the hell can we debate and have a contest of ideas when no one can agree on the same set of facts? There are going to be some huge cultural shifts in the next few years. I take comfort in the fact that conservatives and chosen to side with the uneducated, culturally backwards population of our country. It is not a coincidence that the more educated you become, the more you are exposed to other ideas and cultures (read: if you live in a city), the more liberal your thinking becomes. You cannot win if you pride yourself on anti-intellectualism.
Really into Kero Kero Bonito at the moment. Great pop. Think if a J-pop group got started in London.
I share your outrage at the fact this racist, misogynist pig will now be POTUS. I canvassed for Clinton; I was totally, 100% behind her. But I also don't think we can just get rid of racism and nationalism by extension. That is a slow process that requires re-education over generations, and in the meantime I think there are common ideas both Trump voters and Sanders voters share: anti-establishment, anti-elite, pro-working-poor. We should harness the anger and vitriol of the Trump coalition for our own ends. I don't think the targets of racism had any illusions that racism wasn't still alive and well in America before the election. I think the people who thought like that were people like me: white liberals.
I don't share the author's despair at all. Trump isn't going to stop immigration. Even illegal immigration. He builds a wall, they'll dig tunnels; you've heard it before. The white electorate is shrinking. Trump's coalition is unsustainable. When these people realize that coal jobs are NEVER going to come back (solar is getting too cheap and the benefits to consumers over coal is too obvious), they'll have second thoughts. Automation, fueled by AI, will become ubiquitous, and soon the only jobs left will be tech jobs, creative jobs, managerial jobs, etc. The manual labor jobs that white rural America reveres are dead. Their way of life is not just dying, it has been terminally ill since the start of the 21st century. People can only sustain active hatred for so long, it will soon fade away into apathy and acceptance. It is up to the Democrats to reorganize under Bernie Sanders' leadership. They need to bring these people, with all their warts, into the fold. If we can create new jobs with new technologies, we can stave off the worst of the coming automation revolution. But eventually we will need to shift the paradigm of how we think about jobs, labor, and what is necessary for a society to function.
I thought the website was really interesting. I do think there is room for a positive view of white identity, but obviously that has been poisoned by too many groups.
At this point I feel pretty resigned to at least the possibility Trump could win. It truly would be a wake up call, although for the worse. I want Clinton to win, I have canvased for her, but the fact remains that this is a divided society and we don't respect differing opinions. I want to talk to conservatives and assume good will and I want my representatives to compromise with them. I want functional politics, and I hate how polarized our media has become.
I love this band! I'm almost burned out on this album from playing it so much...
I only ever feel motivated if I am doing something I enjoy. Things like work or school are ordeals for the most part, but occasionally something comes along that I really care about and suddenly I find a huge amount of energy to follow through and do my best work. I wish I could have that energy for everything I do, but most of the time it feels way out of my control.
Years & Years released their album recently. Sweet dance pop album.
;_;
You did a great job explaining the neuron (afaik), and I learned a lot. This is a seriously interesting topic. I would love to understand more about all those dogs in those creepy google images, please continue!
You make your own meaning. Sure, we're all just chemical reactions that probably happened by accident, nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die, and we should probably just go watch TV, but that doesn't sound very fun. Just be alive, make yourself happy (making others happy is a big part of this, morality is a chemical reaction too) and spike it when you reach the end zone.
Uncle Bob has created a new article: Why hasn't Obama shown us his birth certificate? That's a really neat idea though. You're right that every social network service seems to clear old content out of the way, never to be seen again. It would be cool to have a network where everything stayed in one place.
I have an idea for a music streaming service that I think would be better than the ones that exist now. Imagine a service like bandcamp.com (bc lets literally anyone upload and sell their music, and it's very successful with the indie scene), but with a library as extensive as Spotify or Google Play. Now, imagine that whenever you buy an album from this service, you also get access to stream every other song in their library for a month, like an added bonus. So not only do you get to permanently own the album you bought, you also get access to everything else, with the knowledge that your time will run out after 30 days. So you buy another album! And you get another month of streaming! 1) Anyone would be able to distribute their music on this platform. Taylor Swift and Kanye West are playing on the same stage as that kid from your highschool who just released his mixtape on facebook. 2) No "subscriptions." You buy an album, you also buy a month of streaming. You can buy two albums at once, and you get two months of streaming. Once your time runs out, you still have the albums you purchased. Albums today cost about ~$10, the same amount as a month of Spotify Premium. 3) Support Artists. When you actually buy an album, a larger share of money goes to the artist than if the album had been streamed. Because you can stream everything, people might choose to buy albums from lesser-known artists and then stream more popular ones, if it's all the same to them. This makes the little artists happy. 4) You don't need a label to become a trending artist. This is probably why we'll never see this. Today, music labels do litterally nothing (OK, they have connections and fancy recording studios, but this is the 21st century and their bullshit will come to an end eventually) and get nearly all of the profits. On this service, anyone could upload their music and they'd receive the same share from their sales as anyone else. I don't know if enough people really care about music to buy into it though. I would sign up instantly if someone came out with a service like this, assuming they had useable apps to make it worthwhile. Most people today are fine with internet radio through Spotify or Pandora and would rather have their music chosen for them. They don't care about albums. tries not to sound pretentious
The PBS Newshour puts every episode on their youtube channel within minutes after it airs on television on the east coast. They also break up their episodes into segments if you aren't interested in watching the whole thing. I love the future. I also like Google News since I feel like an aggregator of different sources is probably better than going to just one newspaper/website. Aside from that: The Daily Show, NYT, NPR, local news websites, and then whatever floats to the top of Facebook or Reddit.
Last Friday I suddenly became really sick with a fever, sore throat, exhaustion, etc. Barely made it home from campus. When I did, I headed straight to my bed at 5 in the afternoon. It was comfy af. Music, a good movie, hot tea, a big blanket. These things make me happy, yup.
This album gets a lot better in the second half with "Cause I'm a Man" and "New Person, Same Old Mistakes." I dunno, I don't see myself coming back to it often, and I'd probably listen to one of their other albums instead.
So... is it time to buy bitcoin?
I'm a student, so: improve my skills, expand my portfolio, graduate, find a job.
Tagpro is an awesome, easy to learn, hard to master, multiplayer capture-the-flag game. Love it.
Ctrl+F "Rick and Morty" I'm disappointed, hubski :( It's only been 1 season (plus the two episodes that leaked) and it deserves every bit of hype it receives. It's a fantastic mash up of Dr. Who and Futurama and the best of those countless animated family sit coms.
So then explain to me how two equal things would have different outcomes? If I have two cars, they both are equally good at driving, but one wins 80% of races, then I can assume something is slowing down the other one. A perfectly level race track would mean each car would win 50% of the time (well, actually I guess they would tie, but that's not the point). If I offer a bunch of people a choice between two $5 bills, and people tend to pick the one in my right hand over the one in my left 80% of the time, then I can assume something is influencing them to pick the bill in my right hand. That's where I'm coming from. I don't understand how you can think men and women are equal and then be OK with men "winning" 80% of positions in a board room. The only way a meritocracy could put more men than women in a board room would be if men were better than women at the job. But neither of us agree with that. You also seem to think that requiring a certain portion of women in executive positions means that men would be unfairly discriminated against. I see it the other way around, that men who would have been unfairly promoted would be replaced by women who should have been promoted in the first place. >I_can't_change_your mind Do you see how that can go two ways?
This is a pretty cool example of confirmation bias. I was 100% sure the rule was a sequence of numbers that were all powers of some base... (2, 4, 8 - 16, 32, 64 - 3, 9, 27 - 5, 25, 125 - all got a "yes"), but it turned out to be something much simpler/different. It's like if you turn into a certain news channel every day and always see stories about [group of people] doing [thing you disapprove of], you might think that there was something wrong or inferior about [group of people] that causes them to do [thing you disapprove of], rather than something more subtle.
It's interesting to see how homophobic groups have adopted the language and style of civil rights activism. Saying things like "It's scary to tell people about who I am," or "you're not alone" in an uber-personal black-and-white PSA-style video. I dunno, that's all I have to say about this video after OftenBen so eloquently articulated my initial reaction.
John Oliver will make life after Jon Stewart worth living.
I've had Vince Staples' new album on repeat the last few days: http://www.npr.org/2015/06/21/414701194/first-listen-vince-staples-summertime-06
This was a fantastic interview.
I would argue that this is the "social pressures" I mentioned. When all your life you see women do a certain set of things and men do a different set of things, it is hard to go against the norm. Yes, and in America today they don't get maternity leave. If women (and men) were guaranteed adequate parental leave, then this wouldn't be a problem. After the first few months of the child's life, if there was affordable child care for every child, then parents wouldn't have to worry about having one parent stay home, and both women and men could return to their careers with minimal disruption. I make no apologies for my belief that women and men are equal. That's what I believe, that's what the women I've talked to believe, and so I form my opinions from that starting point. If you guys think men are inherently better at having a career, that it isn't just normalized discrimination and an unwillingness to accommodate women's healthcare that has existed in our culture for centuries, then we aren't going to come to an agreement.men and women have different preferences
women have children
I think creating a ritual is important. So far in my life, the hardest thing to do consistently has been exercise. I try to go running 3 times a week, but really that's more of an ideal since something usually comes up to mess with my schedule. To get back into "the groove" I just keep my mind focused on the "high" you feel from exhaustion after a hard work out. I guilt myself by imagining me as a fat lazy blob who sits at his computer all day never leaving his basement apartment. But occasionally there are stretches of time where I am able to make it a ritual to get up at 7:00 am every other morning and go running before the sun gets too hot, and during those times it's never a question of "do I want to run today" because I just do it. I remember how great I felt two days ago and it's easy to do it again.
Hmm... that's an interesting point. I feel like if this guy was a CEO or someone with authority over employees, then he should resign, because he would have power over other people and his antisocial views would contribute to a less productive workplace. But if this is just a random guy helping out, just like all the other people helping out, and no one is really committed to stay with the project in the first place, then maybe the project should live or die based on whether or not people are willing to continue working with him. It's like if a charity denied a contribution from a wealthy donor because the donor is homophobic. Should the charity really care who the money comes from? That said, I'm not entirely sure what it's like working on a project like this, maybe I don't understand the dynamics.