helloworld11

Apparently, based on contemporary accounts, opinion was varied, but they were meaty and easy to catch. A bit of selective breeding would probably make them ideal poultry farm animals.

But nowhere near as captivating for media soundbites and news posts. The dodo is one very symbolic bird and just about everyone recognizes it right away.

Also worth noting that dodo birds were reportedly very tasty and meat-rich, so farming millions of them as a resurrected species for food is hardly out of the question.

If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.

VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.

"But crypto is a terrible idea. People who violate banking regulations are criminals, Why do we need cash? I pay for everything with my card, it's sooo convenient!" Say many naval-gazing, privileged people on this very site who've never had to deal with the grotesquely regular bullshit of third world banking and government finance...

Get "canceled" in your own work or social sphere, or in social media in a way that filters down to your work or social sphere for saying, writing, being recorded doing (or saying) something that doesn't fit the dominant ideological narrative of modern culture, and maybe you'll rapidly find out just why and how some people get scared of cancel culture. Sure, Stalinist show trials or Maoist purges these things in our modern western world certainly are not, but examples abound and in a non-lethal modern context, they can be very damaging indeed.

Second this recommendation. I loved Contagion, and watching it during the early days of our own very real recent pandemic put a whole new spin to an already great film.

Deep Impact doesn't quite deserve a place with the others. Its depiction of an asteroid impact and many other things is surprisingly realistic considering the source material.

If the magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, completely, as it did on Mars at one point, it would take literally billions of years for our atmosphere to totally degrade away. It would take at least tens of millions for it to degrade appreciably. The magnetosphere of Mars failed just 500 million years after our red neighbor formed, and even after the several billion intervening years, and after having started with much less overall atmospheric bulk than Earth, Mars still has some atmosphere left (very little to be sure, but we're talking about billions of years of being bathed in solar wind and radiation). In other words, if our magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, you likely wouldn't have to worry about major atmospheric failure for many generations of your family's lives.

Caveat: Even with the atmosphere fully present, the magnetosphere does indeed stop many charged particles that a gas barrier does not, and this would definitely be an immediate problem to surface life to some extent (how much is debatable however). We'd also be much more susceptible to electronic and electrical grid damage caused by a much larger percentage of solar storms that would have previously been too weak to do much because of our giant magnetic shield..

For many of them, not even that. Is Socrates outdated, or Thomas Jefferson? How about Picasso? The first of these is widely believed to have been what we would today call a pedophile (this being common in his culture and time), the second was a slave owner and the third was an abusive, jealous womanizer.

Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.

The very idea of art becoming "outdated" because of changing political and social norms is absurd. Even if most of us no longer share the sentiments behind a piece of human cultural history or its creators, doesn't mean we should reject it as a part of our history or not be able to appreciate something of it at the very least for reasons of historical learning. A vast proportion of history's most interesting thinkers, creators and writers were full of flaws that in some cases would today be considered literally criminal, should they be erased from modern appreciation because of this foolish idea of "outdated"?

A certain site that has the words "The" "pirate", "bay" and org in its URL. It's where a friend of a friend that I know through a second cousin stumbled upon their frequently used copy of Office 2007 (and quite a few other things)...

That they make up a small proportion of the population is indisputable. Just check disposable wealth demographics. That they tend toward greater average intelligence than many in the average is certainly much more debatable, but at least in terms of access to better education resources, yes. Though I think that yes, on average, many of those who made their own wealth are better at problem solving and planning than the average.

For many people disgusted by seeing a person like Holmes having it easy despite being egregariously guilty of criminal offenses against others in several terrible ways, it's not hypocrisy in the way you try to describe. Instead it's simply being angry that a justice system which regularly hammers much poorer people into the ground for often very minor offenses then treats a wealthy criminal like her with kid gloves in specific ways.

One can support reforms against punitive justice and still be disgusted by something like this, or one can also support prison reform while considering Holmes's crimes bad enough to merit a fairly strong degree of punishment in this specific case. Basically: complex subjects like this are full of nuance, and strawmen need not apply to and honest debate.

In general, wealthy people make up a small proportion of the population and tend (though not always) towards greater intelligence, or at least education, than the average. Both of these factors make them less likely to show up in prisons in general. It doesn't have to be about connections and special favors. Sure, many wealthy people can afford better legal defense and the justice system definitely makes things easier for them, but the rich do indeed go to real-people prison if they fuck up badly enough and get caught doing it.

Despite all of these reasons, it still strikes me as incredible, and that labs wouldn't try to create a customer-oriented sales process. Where I live, in my country, anyone at all can go and get any number of lab tests for any reason they please at very competitive prices that are widely advertised. Doctors also often prescribe tests, but you go get them yourself from a commercial provider and don't need to prove any doctor prescription for them. Overall, it's great simply because the pricing is low through competition and getting a professional lab test done is very quick and easy.

I find it absolutely incredible that at any time in the U.S, under its laws, requesting something as fundamental as blood tests about YOUR OWN body from a private lab needed doctor permission. How would such rules even be justified? A person wanting to have their blood tested is not the same as someone trying to self-dose with possibly deadly medications.

Prey tell, how do you live? How would you in practice have your children and other family members live? If you're even moderately well off, very little if nothing stops you from seeking exactly the life you idealize in your comment. Resources for learning all its hard tricks and labors abound (largely due to the very same capitalist-fed internet of commodified information sharing that you disdain). But by all means, decide for hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers that their lives of toil were preferable to the things generations of them strove for despite "having to" consume more.

From the same sorts of people who supported and nurtured the so-called philosophy and deeds of SBF with such profound future analysis, this new sort of analysis. It's rather amusing.

It's not just the anecdote, it's everything that it implies, based on decades of history books, literature, many other anecdotes (some excellent ones right here in this thread). A cheap comment that dismisses complex things in its criticism of a complex thing isn't any less facile for pretending to be lightly stated.

Yes, absolutely. Cuba not only trades with the EU, but also regularly with Canada, another major US ally and does so without legal or political consequences for either Cuba or Canada. The embargo was a shameful disaster of U.S political policy in how it was applied, but also in its PR damage, because it let a grossly corrupt, authoritarian regime spend several decades justifying its nearly every failure on this one U.S political measure with the help of useful idiot supporters in the U.S and elsewhere. The embargo never stopped Cuba from being much better off. It's own rigid, backwards ideology and self serving leaders did.

Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd. Of course Yeltsin understood that his own country had dealt with many problems that the U.S had never had to face, but this didn't blind him to the fact that they could have done much better after so many decades of propaganda, and failed to do so because of many self-created problems. The smack to the face that was the supermarket showed him just how far his huge country had fallen behind. It was not stupidity in "failing to compare plausibly" that affected him, it was seeing that even fundamental aspects of well-being were inexcusably failing in the USSR.

Your comment is very blind to this basic fact, and excuses atrocious mismanagement with platitudes about tsars.

Germany and Japan, as well as China, were absolute wastelands of ruin and destitution after the second world war, and had suffered decades of terribly backwards previous leadership, yet they made good on enormous well-being changes in much less time than the USSR had to do the same by the time of Yeltsin's supermarket visit.

This thing about them needing to pay for data out-of-pocket makes little sense if you actually live in Mexico City or know its subway. The vast majority of the line is covered by a free wifi service paid for by the government, which runs throughout the train lines and stations with only occasional interruptions. Just as passengers can use it, so too can the drivers. It even works pretty well most of the time, certainly enough of it for only modest interruptions.

Also data packages in Mexico are pretty cheap. For the equivalent of 10 dollars, you can buy enough to use whatsapp, web browsing and other social media as well as make phone calls to all of North America almost without limits for 30 days. If you're really short on cash, a package costing just 1 dollar buys you two days of the same services.

Cry me a river. Build something based on a third party platform and expect possible consequences like this as its vagaries and ownership details change. Most of the post reeks of self absorption and naval gazing. Yep, some billionaire that for the moment isn't quite popular among the glitterati of social justice and elite media bought a major social network only to change it in ways you don't like. It happens, adjust. It might be fashionable to pour shit on Musk but nothing new or horrible happened here as far as the world of tech is concerned. Twitter was treading shit with all kinds of bad policies long before space man came along to apply his own brand of convoluted management..

Nonsense. As a fellow Canadian I can safely say that MANY Canadians have plenty of fragile ego problems and are plenty rude too. Let's not generalize between two whole countries. Canadian media and government policy also has an obsessive complex with "differentiating itself" from American culture, to the point of becoming tedious about it, but that's another story.

Donnie Darko, btw.

I'd argue that the answer to this fundamental question is fairly simple: Does your specific instance of a certain activity have an extremely high likelihood of causing immediate or rapid and obvious, direct and quantifiable harm to others? If not, then prohibition should be tabled away. I'd also personally argue moral constraints on prohibitions under the rubric of basic individual rights to do things that don't verifiably and materially or physically harm others but in purely utilitarian terms, my first point is a good metric in my view.

There of course also activities that individually cause little to no harm but which in the agregate are dangerous for society as a whole. In these cases. I'd argue that long-term total effects and difficulty of enforcement should be balanced against a likelihood of mitigation strategies being effective without resorting to outright individual prohibition, but that's a complex question in general. In any case, for sex work, it doesn't even enter the picture, except for on the question of enforcement of prohibition (which has never worked for prostitution and shouldn't be applied anyhow).

Unlike many ancient structures, the Pantheon has mostly been left intact across the millennia. The Dome is entirely original and so is most of the remaining structure. From what I know, the majority of the restoration and renovation work has been to the interior ground-level walls and some of the exterior along the ground level, but even these are mostly minor renovations. In this case, what you see truly is for the most part what always was, and especially for the main awe-inspiring part, the great dome.

Those who want (and wanted) to did. There are however still many people who not only live their lives as they please but also say and display whatever silliness or ugliness they like on social networks, craving the attention perhaps but also gloating in the offense they cause. Others just don't care either way. The feedback mechanism may be there now like never before in history, but the human responses to feedback are largely the same they've been in many other times or places.

So you.... argue against my points by doing exactly what my second point mentions? It's certainly possible that global warming and human-caused climate change are partly responsible for what you quote (I don't deny that both exist), but again, for the obtuse: pointing to a single unusual weather event as an argument for a vastly complex multi-century global trend is as absurd as when a person who doesn't believe in global warming being real argues their idea by pointing out that it snowed more than normal for a few days in their town.

It seems to be fine to throw shit at "deniers" (damn I hate that phrase, it gives a scientific subject that should be tacitly open for debate a wholly religious air that no technical subject ever deserves) for doing that but somehow any random warming anecdote or attention-grasping headline doing the same to argue for the dangers of climate change gets a free pass?