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People should really check Isaac Moreno's Youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@IsaacMorenoGallo/videos

Isaac is a civil engineer that worked for the Spanish road service and amateur historian.

He routinely refers to GIS techniques in his videos and work to uncover the routes of both Roman roads and aqueducts in Spain.

He is involved with a state-sponsored website for the Roman road layout in the province Castilla-León:

https://www.viasromanas.net

He consulted on and presented a documentary series on Roman engineering for the Spanish public TV, RTE:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRMFqXMPhK3OtGKkveDC9...

You can check his website for all his scholarly work (papers, etc):

https://www.traianvs.net/vias-romanas/

There is Spanish Youtuber called Isaac Moreno that is really worth checking out for anyone interested in Roman roads and Roman engineering in general.

https://www.youtube.com/@IsaacMorenoGallo

This is a terrible article.

To understand why, I refer everyone to the amazing Youtube channel of Isaac Moreno Gallo.

https://www.youtube.com/@IsaacMorenoGallo

There are several videos with English audio if you do not understand Spanish.

Here's a representative sample:

"The most ancient engineering told to the most modern engineers" https://youtu.be/pk4xa6Tzwvk

"How the Romans screwed up and how those who interpret them screw up." https://youtu.be/uwZbHPmcO7M

"Roman Engineering 1 of 4" https://youtu.be/SdU6FSjdFag

Isaac also created a TV programme about Roman Engineering for RTVE that you can find on YouTube.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX9K6BsUtIfJaMieISPGbsNLs...

It's Spanish only AFAIK, but worth watching for the commissioned 3d renders of the different devices and techniques.

TL;DR We need more engineer archeologists to avoid misinterpreting archeological evidence

Isaac is a civil engineer for the Spanish government, and an amateur historian that focuses on Roman technology and civil engineering, particularly roads and hydraulics.

There are a number of tropes and myths about Roman technology that stem from the fact that archeologists are very unlikely to have an engineering background and thus lack the knowledge to correctly interpret some of what they uncover.

As Isaac explains and shows in his videos, Romans supplied their cities with fresh water from springs only, never from rivers, rain or any other still water. They possessed the topographical and geodesic knowledge required to map terrain precisely and route both roads and aqueducts for hundreds of miles with the necessary and adequate slope.

Furthermore, they understood pressure and routinely siphoned water across significant elevation differences and their pipe engineering was able to handle several atmospheres.

They always captured the entire stream and dumped the excess flow directly into the sewers which were kept clean with running water. There is evidence of several of these distribution points in different cities.

With all of this in mind, I'm skeptical of the dating precision of the sites. I find it suspicious that there is absolutely no difference between health in the Imperial heyday and health in late-empire times when maintenance was deficient and water supply irregular and thus no permanent running water in the sewers, thus rats, thus diseases.

I would guess the samples are actually of the same times or at least from places with deficient sanitation for whatever reason.

Some other article tropes he specifically addresses are:

- lack of toilet privacy: they likely built stalls in wood like we do now; they just did not last

- the shared sponges: these were likely for dislodging stuck material and cleaning the toilet, not the body; again, just like we do nowadays

Isaac also created/maintains two websites:

http://www.traianvs.net/index.php - the scholar version of his channel with articles and papers

https://www.viasromanas.net - a GIS-based site to map, identify and promote Roman roads in the Spanish region of Castilla y León

I'd say the author is referring to Germany, regarding renewables. The connection being that CH imports electricity from Germany.

Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends

Whose bike, again?

The controversy is not insider trading. It is executives exercising their share options during buybacks the price of which they themselves decide.

They decide when to buyback and choose to do it at market highs. This is not sound management and is not in the interest of the shareholders.

I learned about it in a recent edition of "The Intelligent Investor".

Most executives are shareholders only during the brief moment it takes exercising their options. They are not shareholders in the investor or even trader sense.

The claim that this amounts to distributing dividends is also not true. Options which is most of what the executives are holding don't earn dividends.

Because to earn dividends you must be a owner i.e. actually hold company stock.

To profit from buybacks you only need the option of buying the stock at a lower price than the buyback price.

The CEOs and other CXXs of these firms often have large amounts of options included in their comp packages.

This is why buybacks happen at market highs instead of market lows as sound management principles and common sense would suggest.

Increasing shareholder value by increasing equity value is just a pretext. The real purpose of buybacks is a swindle to funnel company money directly into the pockets of the C-Suite through what in the books appears a routine management operation.

These executives decide on the buybacks and exercise their share options just before, thus pocketing millions in company money and actually hurting shareholders.

Shareholders get the blame despite having little to no power and seeing their investments ruined and looted. Also, in many firms, a lot of shareholders are also employees.

You can find it better told here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-sto...

What people forget is that even if Americans may be divided, they're not sacrificing any of their territorial sovereignty to other countries.

Anyone seriously suggesting anything like this be done to America would be met with total annihilation "warnings" from any administration.

Also, bear in mind the Brazilian Amazon territory borders British, French and Dutch interests in Guyana, French Guyana and Suriname respectively.

I count the parent, and a couple more replying with something-must-be-done answers at the suggestion that the territory be forcefully or otherwise removed from Brazilian sovereignty.

There are other comments in other sub-threads.

Also, this pretext isn't a new idea, and there's heavyweight international support for it.

“Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us,” Al Gore, then a senator, said in 1989.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18barrionuev...

The Latin-American Bishops Conference denounced this back in 2007:

The growing assault on the environment may serve as a pretext for proposals to internationalize the Amazon, which only serve the economic interests of transnational corporations. Pan-Amazon society is multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious. The dispute over the occupation of the land is intensifying more and more. The traditional communities of the region want their lands to be recognized and legalized.

https://www.celam.org/aparecida/Ingles.pdf Paragraph 86

The Brazilian Amazon territory borders British, French and Dutch interests in Guyana, French Guyana and Suriname, respectively.

So, I don't see a horde of enemies, but I see an agenda.

In my view, Bolsonaro's tenure is viewed as an opportunity to further this agenda, and that's if he's not in it himself.

If environmental disasters are enough pretext for questioning sovereignty, shall we compile a list, together with the territory to be subtracted? I suggest with start with North America. I'll go first:

- Deepwater Horizon platform; Gulf of Mexico, 2010.

Funny how no one proposed to remove California from US sovereignty when the fires were raging awhile back.

Or the Gulf of Mexico coast with the Deep Horizon incident.

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Não vai encontrar razoabilidade aqui, amigo. Esta gente julga que manda no mundo inteiro.

English is atypical in its irregular pronunciation rules IMO. At least compared to Latin languages. And it doesn't have accents that change the pronunciation in otherwise similar words.

As such, people are aware that you just have to know how to pronounce every particular word, rather than relying solely on orthography.

Anyway, your example isn't very good: "light" and "lite" are homophonous anyway.

A better one would be "calm". The "l" is almost mute. Presumably, one could "simplify" the orthography to "cam". And you would pronounce "kom" or "kam" according to context.

I claim one of the pronunciations would eventually disappear, sooner or later.

If you're asking for a "scientific study", I don't have one and I don't even know where such a thing can be found.

But the country I'm from has had 3 orthographic reforms in the 20th century. The last one being all about removing supposed "mute" consonants - but which acted like accents in that they altered pronunciation of the word.

There is a trend that confuses this (apparent) simplification trend with "evolution" or "progress".

Don't fool yourself, though.

Accents are there for a reason.

Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

Even if only because the context won't be discernible. But, generally, because of the principle of the lesser effort: it's always easier to just read what is there than thinking which pronunciation applies.

Eventually, the words will become homophonous (edit: assuming there are other words which differ only in the accents) - you'll effectively loose the words or they'll change, probably for worse.

The language will become more ambiguous and more dependent on the context knowledge - which will be hard to get if you don't know the language well to begin with.

In other words, you've just made the language "harder" to learn.

So, in effect, it's not a simplification at all.

http://portlandobserver.com/news/2018/apr/25/celebrate-asian...

Yes. I don't know their motivation the same way a man is presumed innocent in a court.

But people are not courts. So I do not need, not is it practical, to act like one.

However, I do know the justifications their proponents present for it. And I do know that they're frivolous. They just claim it will somehow make the world better.

They set up a conjecture - that abstract people abstractly suffer when they read those words - and proceed to impose a real action based on the conjecture: we have to delete the words.

Notice how no actual person is presented has having suffered from reading these words in Python code, let alone questioned (like a witness in a court, btw). So no actual suffering is presented.

Yet, the actions, the imposition, is concrete. It is actual. Some very actual people will have something imposed on them directly and indirectly because of this frivolous conjecture.

And the conjecture is frivolous precisely because it is an extraordinary claim - that people suffer when they read 'slave' in the context of Python code - that is presented without a single shred of anecdotal evidence, let alone proof or demonstration.

Not really.

It's not the particular choice of words that bothers people. It's the fact that they either have to submit to the frivolous power-trippers or die on a hill they don't particularly want to, in this case defending the word 'slave'.

You're saying they should just submit, despite the fact that they realise the whole point of it all just is their submission.

In other words, submit to the bully because, otherwise, you're just as bad as him.

Also, there is something else. Due to Taleb's principle of the intolerant minority[1], people that feel this is frivolous are faced with a choice: either submit to the frivolous intolerant zealots or die on a hill which no one really wants to die on; in this case, defending the word slave and be accused of defending actual slavery.

That can piss people off too.

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

edit: spelling

I think the underlying issue is not "that it goes too far".

I don't believe anyone would oppose "going this far" in terms of reducing or abolishing actual slavery.

I think what pisses people off is the utter frivolousness of it all. We all know that this is actually not doing anything about actual slavery.

Replacing the word slave in Python or software in general will do actually nothing for actual slaves in the world nor will it change the minds of actual slavers and actual slave owners.

So whilst people probably do not care that much about which specific word is used, they get pissed off by the frivolous sanctimony displayed by the proponents of the change.

There is no controversy whatsoever.

Essentially, you're implying the French are chauvinists that don't care about "non-frenchmen", because they write in French. You are also implicitly accusing these specific French people of being chauvinists because they wrote the jobs section in their native language.

This is completely unwarranted. As they've commented they didn't just have the time to translate the section.

Furthermore, I would add, that seemed obvious from the start to me and it's the charitable, or generous, interpretation anyway.

Therefore, you strike me as someone who looks for reasons to be aggravated. So I wouldn't hire you.

Because they didn't translate their jobs section yet, that makes you think you wouldn't be welcome?

I certainly wouldn't hire you, after reading that.

Looks like you're insecure and looking to be offended.

They contend the interceptor missiles can be quickly re-purposed to deliver nuclear warheads.

EDIT: or the missile installations, I don't remember exactly.

I don't have a link for you, but I remember Putin saying this in the Stone interviews.

The zionist bit I don't quite follow either.

But it seems clear that modern art has turned into a speculative multi-million dollar business, so "Rothschild" doesn't seem out of place, with them being the most know financial capitalist family.

And since the artists themselves tend to lean on the left and extreme-left of the political spectrum, "communist" doesn't seem an inept term either.

Well, I had to search for the actual terms, because I didn't find them in the post. They're in a comment to the post. So the actual post isn't even using "euphemisms".

In any case, my point is that "zionist" isn't a euphemism for "Jew" or "Jewish". It describes a specific political (at least) ideology - which has radical, extremist militants.

"Zionist" cannot be anti-semite unless one believes all Jewish persons are zionists.

I understand why radical zionists would want to pass that on as true, but it's not.

Many Jewish people oppose Zionism on political, humanitarian and religious grounds.

Are all Jewish persons zionists and/or communists? Is that being implied in the post?

The reason banknotes are worth anything is because you need them to pay taxes and fees to your/a sovereign.

They literally entitle you to pay the corresponding amount of taxes and/or fees (e.g. for market transactions) to the sovereign, which you cannot pay otherwise.

Hence why they are not mere pieces of paper with ink anymore a stock share or bond is: they're titles - the value is in what they entitle you to, not the physical substract they're on.

Bitcoin doesn't entitle you to anything other than creating a new ledger entry in the distributed ledger book that is the blockchain. Except unlike most ledger books, the Bitcoin blockchain does not record transfers of actual property between parties - it records the transfer of abstract numbers (which cannot be property in and of themselves).

Because, in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.

People here seem to fundamentally misunderstand authority.

They seem to think it is something that you "use", rather than something that you have - specifically, the property of morally obligating someone to do something.

Hence the silly statements like: "I believe all authority should be questioned" - which is, of course, absurd.

Questioning authority simply means there is no - and cannot be any - authority.

Which is different from questioning someone's authority - whether that someone really has or has not the authority on a specific concrete situation.

That is ridiculous.

There was a court order to stop that action.

What sort of democracy is it when you can just ignore court orders?

If they wanted to protest then they should've organised protests and demonstrations. If they really wanted to make a point, organise a symbolic voting and have someone face the charges.

To go ahead with the whole thing was reckless. The courts cannot afford to allow themselves to be ignored.

That's the very opposite of the rule of Law!

They organisers knew the courts had instructed police to stop it.

If they wanted to protest then they should've organised protests and demonstrations, which are perfectly allowed in Spain. That would be the democratic way. Not to insist on breaking the law and disobeying court orders.