mitochondrion

It would seem that Walter is not so Bright.

The quote suggests that Silicon Valley CEOs spend a significant amount of time thinking about politics, and their engineers do not.

Besides administrators and sports programs, glamorous campus amenities and affirmative action admittees.

The US government gets to define racism, if legal requirements to employ a precisely calibrated ratio of whites, women, blacks, and latinos are any guide. This is America, after all, and that’s what freedom means.

People are fired for racism all the time. You don’t disagree with that, do you?

The fact of the matter is that, broadly speaking, basic programming is a suite of cognitive processes that pretty much all come online at the same, reasonably above-average IQ, and they are irreducibly complex; they cannot be further simplified except by rote execution of formal process, at which point you should just let the computer handle it.

Have you encountered Julia, and if so, what did you think of it?

NYT is just giving MSFT its pat on the head for being "with it".

In a more humane age, they were housed in asylums.

Then Reagan happened.

I'm sometimes amazed at how afraid otherwise competent software dudes are of a bit of sysadministration.

To be fair, the sort of people who used to live there then are not of a kind with the variety that live there now. Most of those who could leave — undoubtedly like yourself — did.

Long live the Gates?

Do you not self-host?

Why not just scrape the site? I don’t see what the problem is.

When you say "pre-Trump-era industrial region", do you mean that there is now more industry there, or less?

they are inherently fuel inefficient compared to devices with wheels

Total cost will be lower.

they are noisy, a problem which can probably never be solved unless breakthroughs are made in science-fiction fields like anti-gravity

Not electric, though wind may be a problem if the FAA allows a free-for-all, which it probably won't.

airspace is very limited. In my country, we have already serious planning problems with the current amount of air traffic

With human pilots, sure. With autonomous vehicles, nope. They'll swarm like birds or insects.

it's not sustainable from nature-perspective

Airborne wildlife will learn to avoid population centers and "skyways".

flying is inherently weather-bound

Only with human pilots. Autonomous vehicles will care only about ice and lightning. Severe wind, sure, but that's fairly rare in most places.

flying is heavily regulated, which poses barriers

The FAA just relaxed its regulations and will relax them more in the future. Everyone wants the personal airborne vehicle, especially winkled old bureaucrats in Washington.

social opposition will always be a thing unless 100% security is neared and near-100% noiseness is reached

This may come as a surprise, but policymakers don't really give a damn about what the public wants. Autonomous vehicles will be more safe than human-piloted craft, which is enough, and electric, which is silent.

This being said, I really, really, really do like the idea of hopping in an airborne transportation device and go straight to any place in a +-(a few hundreds of KM) range.

Good, because you're going to get it.

P.S. Re: +/- several hundred kilometers: There's no such thing as negative range.

California is undergoing a demographic transition.

It really just depends on who exactly the "public" is that is inhabiting the "public spaces". I'm sure this Khosla fellow wouldn't mind his property being used by beautiful surfer girls in bikinis who don't leave litter behind. Maybe he just wants trashy people to stay away from his property.

What did you think they meant when they said "national security"? Obviously it was something like, "we are the nation and we need to secure ourselves from all enemies foreign and domestic".

Bend over for your ritual digital pat-down. Good citizen.

That sounds perfect. Is it too much to ask for three company names to start me off in looking?

The current uniformity predates GMOs, it stems from F1 hybrids that are effectively clones, and the legislation that makes it practically illegal to sell or plant non-patented seeds.

Granted.

But in the grand scheme of things, this is as equally an astonishingly new situation as is mechanized agriculture. A hundred years ago, most people lived and worked on farms; now it's like 1% or something like that.

I know that Monsanto's shareholders need to make rivers of dosh, boatloads of cash, money hand over fist, but I don't understand how in practice they've managed to get a vice-grip on everybody's family jewels.

Well, all GMO products are subject to the same pressures of divergent interests. If you eat things, and if some GMO products you might eat are bad, and if the only genetic-modification-related insight you have into what you eat is "is-GMO" or "not-GMO", then the (entirely rational and reasonable) heuristic to adopt is an "hysterical" avoidance of GMO products.

Also, the reason why a person does or does not do such a thing is rather of less importance than what that thing is that he does or does not do. For example, if pigs carry disease, and your religion proscribes you from eating pigs because "God says so", your life is preserved whether or not you or anyone else have any conception of germ theory whatever.

we're increasing biodiversity

Are you sure? Farmers used to have their own subtly different strains of crops at the individual, village, town, and country levels in a kind of expanding concentric ring pattern. Now, at least for cash crops, it's just a few varieties all "manufactured" by one central power.

The problem with GMO foods is not that they have been manually manipulated by man, but that they have been manually manipulated by men with interests not necessarily congruent with the persons eating them: namely, the emphasis of crop yield, appearance, and appealing ("cheap") taste over soil quality, sustainability, nutrition, and general "goodness" — in short, the pursuit of short-term private profit over long-term social good, at the expense of commons which before modern technology were simply practically inviolable.

"Hola amigo" is an expression that many US Americans understand and do occasionally use to greet one another

I suppose that depends on your definition of "US Americans".

Their families have mostly been saying the same thing.

To be fair, they probably just want grandchildren.

The federal government tends to be corrupt in ways less "shallow" and outrageous, but on a much more enormous breadth and scale.

Trusts and LLCs out the ass. Legal entities within legal entities within legal entities, held offshore in some cases, and so on. Personally, I literally don't hold a single titled property in my own name, and never will.

(If you don't understand what I'm getting at: applying responsibility for extreme actions to huge groups of people is ridiculous)

Does that apply to the white nationalists as well, or just the half of the mob you view as on your side?

I don't have a definition of racism, so I can hardly update it, can I?