Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "TED" channel.

  1. Jonathan, Only half right. America has some things to be proud of in its relations with China. First of all, America's relations with China started out as a straight and honest trader. I have heard it said that there were 13 ships from South Carolina in the port of Canton on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. Your original China Clippers. They weren't selling opium, as the English were later to do, nor slaves. Just straight, honest commerce, cotton for tea and silver mainly. Later, in the nineteenth century, as Britain, Germany and France were destroying China on straight imperialist grounds -- teaching the lesson that Japan learned and copied with even greater viciousness -- the United States, for the most part, stood to one side, honestly, and perhaps somewhat stupidly, interested in teaching Christianity while sometimes, though not often enough, opposing the very principle of imperialism. Despite its fine principles, the United States managed to get itself involved in the Opium Wars on the wrong side, which is a damn shame since unlike Europe they had sound principles. Teddy Roosevelt did one small, though perhaps insufficient, thing to try to rectify the damage. While the European powers imposed huge indemnities on the defeated Chinese after the Boxer Rebellion, the Americans returned half of their share of the ill-gotten money as grants -- to found Yenching College, the basis of today's world-class BeiDa, University of Beijing. America's largely good record continues with Nixon, with the excellent elder Bush, and then with Clinton and Obama. Only the ignorant thug Trump has spoiled America's record, carrying out a record of simple juvenile delinquency, the cost of which we do not know. Kevin Rudd's sketch here is completely sound and is what we shall have to try to reconstruct once this ugly Trump interlude ends. There are difficulties no doubt, rights of investors, America's imagined loss of "intellectual property," (this consists mostly of us showing them how to make the stuff we want to buy using their cheap labor and high rate of savings) and what-not. These are minor. The big problems are that Navarro is a lunatic, Lighthizer a fine mind from the sixteenth century, and Trump a sad blundering halfwit. The good news is, the Chinese are grown-ups and can make allowances for these obvious facts. The sad news is that right now China is taking advantage of them. They are very busily making friends and commercial alliances around the world, some at America's expense, and all of it brought about by the Trump farce force at work.
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  2. People in their 20s are sharp?
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  3. Robin Johansen, We are so lucky to have you among us. Your wisdom has enlightened us all. Thank you for bringing us this novel but useful information.
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  4.  @waitingforgodot355  There are a bunch of intellectual skills for this. "What if I'm wrong?" is one: if you think stuff through from more than one direction there's a good chance you're really thinking, not just skimming. I suspect, but I don't know, that real competition encourages genuine thought. Rock climbing, for instance, where it's you against a very real void or at minimum the big solid Ouch! of a fall, is conducive to careful, which may mean deep, thought. But it's an excellent question. A lot of what we think is thinking is really just lightweight gliding.
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  5. Well said, obviously correct -- and sadly pre-Trump.
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  6. Ray, Well done. Your post is a sound antidote to several rather stupid and ignorant little squibs posted by obvious know-nothings..
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  7. Joe, A pleasure to run across your good TED talk.I very much liked your emphasis on "working with" the body. This represents a level of medical thinking a whole generation more sophisticated than the traditional ways -- in which we tended to think of the body as a machine, to be worked on, to be fixed. Obviously, it's more than a mere machine -- and it fixes itself if we can give it the chance. May I make one suggestion for improving your talk in future? You started out with the "Suppose you're a soldier in battle" thingie which is all too popular in the United States. The US has been at war with one or several different peoples as long as I can remember, probably all your life. People are coming to think of this as normal, which it emphatically is not! Why not try to address America at its best? "Imagine you're a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in South East Asia. You hear a boom half a mile away, and you know, Uh-oh, another kid has found a land mine. So you reach for the kit and start for the door..." The military guy will have a Medevac helicopter on its way. The kid in the Peace Corps volunteer's story needs you and your first aid. That could be a real life story in many places in the world today -- and it would be a real-life story you were bringing some blessed relief to. Best wishes -- and congratulations. -dlj.
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  8. Cynicism, the wit and wisdom of the dolt. Despair, the only sin.
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  9. That's how you pronounce "bombardier." This Tennesse guy may be thinking of the word bombardeer or bombardeir-- but that means an artilleryman, not a guy aiming bombs from a plane: Definition of Bombardeer - Green Gonzo www.greengonzo.com/dictionary/Bombardeir.html One who used or managed a bombard; an artilleryman; a gunner. [Archaic] (b) A noncommissioned officer in the British art..
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  10. Purp, Different word. A bombardeer or bombardeir is an artilleryman historically. If it has any meaning today it would be a guy with a grenade launcher, incidentally the most lethal weapon for foot soldiers. Google is your friend.
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  11. +Isaac Karjala Isaac, Quite the opposite. In the years after the Soviet Union went down a lot of the best accountants around were immigrants from Russia: they were really good because they'd been used to keeping three sets of books, for show, for the Party, and for themselves so they could keep their lies straight. There was a shortcoming sometimes. A friend had to fire a bunch of Russians he had fired。 He said they were incapable to accommodating themselves to the idea that it was possible to make money legally. -dlj.
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  12. IWashMyOwnBrain  Thanks.   There's one other side effect to ll of this: just when the Sicilian Mafia had pretty much accomplished its long-term goal, getting all its kids into law school or medicine, and going at least as legit as everybody else, along come the bloody Russians. So we haven't gotten rid of the Mafia the good ol' fashioned way, by including the best and getting rid of the worst.  (Bill Gates calls it "revise and extend.")  Instead we've still got it, only it speaks Russian now instead of Sicilian.     My Sicilian in-laws, on the other hand, are doing fine.  Suddenly their grandparents turn out to have been from Milan, and my nephews win scholarships to private schools. Milan, take note.  Not even half-measures like maybe Rome, or quarter measures like Naples.  I had them checked out by my local Sicilian "investor": They are from the next village over from Castello Gondolfo of "Godfather" fame.  My connected friend says of their people "They are not of us, but they were never against us.  They are good people."  Reassuring.  I guess...   Cheers,   -dlj.
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  13. And nobody keeps their pickle barrels at 20,000 feet...
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  14. Good, sound, decent guy! Good, sound, decent advice, too!
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  15. "This is a really subtle distinction," he says at 6:44. "Subtle"?? He's saying insulin resistance causes obesity, not obesity diabetes. 180 degrees is, in the words of the fine Mighty Mouse, "about at subtle as a hand grenade in a barrel of oatmeal."
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  16. "Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity." No doubt true. On the other hand one of the problems of the world is people being promiscuously creative without any facts whatsoever. It is important, particularly in the hyper-powerful United States, that people start getting a grip on at least a generally shared array of basic fact.
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  17. Van, Somebody has sold you a three-cornered dog. Nothing in your speech just now is correct. None of it. I could cry at the stupidity of what you have just spoken. All wrong. Biden has more than 270 votes. That's all you need to know. But there's something you missed: it isn't that complicated: if everything doesn't get settled amicably, it's open and shut: the speaker of the House serves as President. President Pelosi sounds fine to me. And I think it throws enough terror into Mitch that he'll be reasonable.
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  18. Bad Sign: this is an Important Topic. Therefore TED have let the guy go 35% over length. I'm sure the guy is brilliant, and what he says is as plausible as the message of any other cancer wunderkind. Still he's a sloppy writer, and even a wee bit of discipline would have let him edit this down to length. "Dietary factors" means "food."
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  19. That's about right: just a sort of calm flat "Yeah, Jacob, you're doin' it pretty good." But I can't just leave it at that. I gotta add something about Snarky Puppy: it is really incredible to see how on top of his own set of incredible skills and creative abilities he also has a totally far out ability to lead and bring out the best in a huge diverse crew of vastly capable freaks working together. Just a lovely thing to see!
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  20. This is such a lot of dull ignorant crap! Information age? That was when Ugg told Gogg there was a sabre-toothed tiger across the gulch and we'd better get the women and babies back in the trees. Augmented cognition? Can somebody tell this fool about the caves of Lascaux, puh-leeze?
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  21. Re 6:25: When I peel an onion I certainly can or could peel a few or several layers down and find more layers. Very often there comes a last single-layer followed by two or more cores. Two is frequent. Three sometimes turns out later if at all. I think Gell-Mann's model of how our science approaches whatever-it-is is probably correct. But it doesn't work for onions. I don't think this suggests a multiverse; it suggests that some of the other -verses might not be unitary in themselves, i.e. a multiplicity of multiplicities. Um, multiplying "all the way down"? Toward the end, he lists the "unreasonable effectiveness of certain parts" of mathematics. What an overdue and welcome limitation that "certain parts" is! This superb speech is a reminder of how good TED used to be. Damn! And Murray Gell-Mann recently passed away. 'Nuther damn!
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