Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Big Think" channel.

  1. And the evidence for Donald Trump being really really rich is...? -dlj.
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  2. "God-like technology"? Has this guy looked at a can-opener lately? Has he even looked at canned food?
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  3. Seems odd that anyone would publish the views of  man who clearly does not understand the meaning of the term "zero-sum."   A zero-sum situation is one where gains on one side are equal in magnitude to losses on an opposite side.  In this case we have two different sorts of gains going on, with one set of gains being  faster than the other. This is not zero-sum.   Both the man and his editors and publishers are obviously fools. -dlj.
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  4. I think you're projecting, Sam. Your post describes yourself pretty well, seems to me.
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  5.  @HaploidCell  Haploid, You're trying to read "How exactly did..." as meaning "How did..." That one word is the difference between a hostile sneer and a genuine question. Matthew batted it back beautifully. Good work, well done, and thank you, Matt!
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  6. @Carmen Victoria Carrizo That was just an answer.
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  7. No American bank will touch Trump. Deutsche Bank, financing the Washington Post Office Hotel is a.) very well collateralized, and b.) signed on with Trump back when he was known for his in with Democrats, e.g. chatted with Bill Clinton on the phone all the time, and DB was in trouble with a Democratic Administration. The golf clubs he owns lose money. His hotels are running on empty. Trump Tower elevators don't get repaired. The plane's Federal Aviation license didn't get renewed until the press caught on. These are the errors of a guy without the money to replace the staples in the office supply cabinet. If he loses, I'd expect to see him in bankruptcy court as soon as he gets through with the Trump University case. If he wins, the honest members of his family are going to have a hard time keeping the operation afloat without crossing the line on influence peddling. Sad. -dlj.
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  8. Michael, A unique kind of convicts: the ones who were smart enough to talk their way out of the noose in an age when almost everything carried the death penalty. Stupid pickpockets got hanged. The smart ones got a ticket to the New World down under. Add in a couple of generations of lively ladies, and you've got an interesting natural xperiment. Not the worst sort of genetic screening Karma has ever come up with...
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  9. Pretty slick, but not very plausible.
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  10. Ship of Theseus. You rebuild it one part at a time: is it still the same ship when you're changed every part of it? Google is your friend, assuming you couldn't understand it from the context of her speech. What you're missing is the fact that you could have looked it up in half the time it took you to type your stupid post.
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  11. Sit Solitary Sit,   What's your theory?  America needs more half-truths about health, about government programs, about the value of research?   The man is probably not a fool within his specialty.  He is, on the other hand, an utter nit-wit in phrasing things for public consumption -- and his editors should be fired for not having corrected him before this stuff got out.   Now then, what's your excuse for yourself today?   -dlj.
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  12. I think Fermi was answered at the time, at Los Alamos. Feynman asked Fermi, "You look quizzical. What's up?" Fermi said, "Where are they?" Feyman replied "It's the Hungarians." And that was that.
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  13.  @JRobertMorse  I think I got the whole thing. You're quite right that the historical books record periods of slavery and other ugly parts of the primitive life of the Hebrew tribes. You're also quite right that interpreted sensibly the Bible endorses the moral equality of all humans. Your word is "broadly," and I'm not quite sure what you mean by it, but it is obvious that if we are in God's image then we are in some very essential sense the same, and hence equal. You do have one small thing wrong, however. "Hon," for honourable, is usually capitalised, and I think that's a bit excessive, even for a Yale, or is it Harvard, Professor.
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  14. Note the date: 2011. 😂😜🤣😆🤣
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  15. One of the things that helped America was the invention of fire: all the records of the debt for the first trans-continental raiload were stored in a shack in Utah, apparently. Shack burned down. No records of who owes what. Awww. Such a shame. Nobody got paid. Leland Stanford ended up with enough spare cash that he could start his Junior University. Wonderful thing, that fire stuff.
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  16. Elle, (or Toi), rinse. repeat.
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  17. You are too generous. The tic-tac-toe example is just plain stupid. It is not an example of minimaxing at all. As any fool can see there is one way of winning right away and all other moves lose with the next O in the middle. To be charitable, maybe the guy was tired. More likely he was overwhelmed by the brain rot that has already destroyed the mind anyone who thinks that being a genius on YouTube is a worthwhile ambition.
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  18. None of your post is true, anonymous machine. (and your spelling is lousy!)
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  19. Gamer, You realise, I assume, that all that AI is going to be programmed by a lot of the people you read posting around here, don't you?
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  20. Actually, Belmiris, Meditation Man runs the entire comic book industry, directing it by the penetrating power of his high-frequency F-Waves alone. He does it to keep people like you distracted, and since the beginning of the Trump Administration, he has kept enough people's attention on their comic books to fend off World Wars III, IV and V.
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  21. There is only one question about Goertzel's kind of AI: who controls the switch? Can humans pull out the plug or not?
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  22.  @chipchipperson101  Not just a chip on the shoulder, your whole being is a chip, hunh? You're quite wrong. Malpeli comes off as a thoughtful and responsible person just stomping an arrogant sneering little creep.
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  23.  @BenjiShock  Ben, Your message would make a whole lot more sense if you named just one "leftist" and showed something they'd said which was incorrect. If your leftist turned out to be representative of any large body of opinion, and not some acid-head nut-case, then you might have a point. As it is, you aren't even a competent name-caller, you're just wandering around muttering vague imprecations.
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  24. Every day could be "take your kids to work" day if we were serious about ourselves. If offices are factories for women workers, then why don't they all have nurseries? I'm not claiming that would be any ideal of family relations, male-female or parent-child. It just seems to me the very first small step off rock-bottom of ignorance, stupidity and savagery in the way we go about designing a society.
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  25.  @ansc6472  Most terror acts in the United States are committed by "Christians," though few of the people involved would be considered such by most regular church-goes. From Wikipedia: " The politically conservative Daily Caller News Foundation using data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), found 92% of all "ideologically motivated homicide incidents" committed in the United States from 2007 to 2016 were motivated by right-wing extremism or white supremacism.[41] According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right-wing extremist groups.[42][43]" If you're really interested in the answer to your question, anonymous "ANSC," I suggest you Google up "Right Wing Terrorism," "Left Wing Terrorism" and any such subjects that occur to you, and then follow the threads of your choice. Google and Bing are your friends.
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  26. What a peculiar heading, "Disaster for Muslims." Nothing in what she says supports the notion that riots are anything but general harm all around.
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  27. but "Professor" has got to be the funniest first name I've heard of anyone having this week.
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  28. Heri, Virginia sprang into wealth on free labor in the tobacco economy but then became a backwater with the introduction of slavery. In sugar plantations, contrast the poor productivity of historic slave societies and the Stalinoid system that destroyed wealthy Cuban agriculture, with the wealth and efficiency of the Florida industry -- with its highly skilled, extremely hard-working, and pretty well paid Jamaican and Islander labor. They are simply worlds apart. Now if we could just get the Teamsters in there we'd triple the wages, double the productivity, and things would be better yet. Slavery is inefficient at the level of the individual and the job, and it is destructive at the levels of communities and civilizations. You should think before you post.
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  29. Think Axelrod, University of Michigan. + th late, great Anatol Rapoport. -dlj.
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  30. And the reason prices are where they are is half the smart money thinks they should be higher, and half the smart money thinks they should be lower.   -dlj.
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  31. David Lloyd-Jones The stupid money is intramarginal, sitting at positions far away from where the real action is, which is why cults and anti-science are annoying but usually not dangerous. -dlj.
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  32. David Lloyd-Jones How about revolutionary breakthroughs? Game-changing innovations? Sudden leaps into the future. Half of them are backed by stupid people, and don't go anywhere; hlf the other way, smart and working. That's how we know the difference between smart and stupid: by looking in the rear view mirror. The two balance each other out pretty much, but the balance eventually changes. Usually slowly. -dlj.
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  33. David Lloyd-Jones So everything's on the bell curve and all change is gradual, right? Wrong. The normal distribution is a quality, only in the ideal, of collections of observations. Not of the things or actions being observed. There is nothing normal about reality: it's all unique. Actual observations are roughly power curves, not normal distributions. "Central tendency" is a pious hope. Only sound judgement has any tendency to what seems, ex post facto, to be central. -dlj.
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  34. Excellent! Watch out world: this intelligent common-sense thing seems to be spreading! -dlj.
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  35. jason bourne Jason,   My main contribution on cancer is that you would save more lives by spending a fraction of this money on prevention.   But of course you'd already done your homework, so you knew that, right?   -dlj.
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  36. "The whole thing is a free lunch." Cheers, -dlj.
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  37. zipcode penny in the slot temperature and several others, all of them fairly random, imho... Hmmmm. I think this is a wee bit odd, and wonder if the guy has adopted it deliberately, or what?
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  38. No, Mo.
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  39. She does not make any very good point. She takes the fact that Einstein thought very competently about the result of the Michelson-Michaels Experiment interpreted as a demonstration of the speed of light, then applies her idiosyncratic way of thinking about it to it to create a speech -- advertised incorrectly as a Big Think. While we're at it, the "If you can't break through a wall you climb over it" yawp is childish American self-improvement talk of the kind used to pump up life-insurance salesmen. In real life, very few of us ever want to break down walls, and when we want to get to the other side of one we use the door.
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  40. The Abbott, Flatland, metaphor for thinking about higher numbers of "dimensions" in the reality we live in, as opposed to the toy universe of his novel, is wrong. The time of Minkowski space is subtracted from the three "spatial" "dimensions." It is not added as it would be on the Abbot-metaphor model, for a tessarect universe of a five, six, etc. Euclidean whatever-they-ares. The word game fails immediately at our actual reality.
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  41. Stephen, You're quite right about the bad style of those attacks -- but IQ does matter. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because George Bush didn't have the brains to handle Dick Cheney, a very bright and utterly wicked man. IQ quite apart, personality matters: in the US crazed authoritarianism, perhaps the retreat of bright folks wanting security in an uncertain world, is a major threat to everyone and everything. -dlj.
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  42.  @Ausf  " There are only two types of employee, profitable, and fired" you say. A wee bit simple-minded, don't you think? The boss' daughter is the obvious joke exception, but quite seriously, a large part of any organization's work is self-maintenance, of very indirect profitability, and speculation about the future, a great deal of which is waste. Cynicism is generally the wisdom of the dolt, a cheap laugh, but rarely a useful analysis.
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  43. mykmir, So? The upshot was he toddled along behind Cheney's every bluster, and his Presidency was a disaster, for Iraq, for America, and for GW's reputation. The man is a dolt, and the fact that you and Mickey Hershkowitz believe him to be an ambitious dolt and carrying a torch for the family -- and perhaps for what he foolishly thinks are his father's failings -- merely amplifies the sorrow and the pity. -dlj.
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  44. Dan, The idea that we have more sensory inputs to distract us today than people had in the past seems to me totally horseshit. If you go outside and lie on your back in a park at night, look up at the sky and listen to the million bugs around you, then try to list it all, you will realise that your cave people a zillion years ago were just as overwhelmed as you are -- or just as under control as I am. The cave people could lump it all together, "stars. bugs. same old same old," or they could try to analyse them, "hmm, less Moon tonight, and the bugs are quieter. I wonder if the bugs are reacting to the Moon? Or is the weather colder and does that have anything to do with it?" I imagine they had different ways of looking at stuff, differing between people, and differing for each person depending on their mood or perhaps on their conscious aim. Doncha think? Uh, did you try thinking?
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  45. OMG, how this woman maunders on! The first four minutes are just stupid blither.
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  46. Genesis 1:27.
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  47. Did you ever see a screen door that didn't have free will? From there on out it's just a matter of quantity, mobility, and ability to control the power switch.
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  48. What makes you think the Internet public is interested in your ignorance, Michael?
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  49.  @bboytorch134  Hunh? You want to add a second truth, that you're insistent about your ignorance? OK, look on the bright side. Famously, "The good thing about ignorance is, it's curable." But, my goodness, just listen to what the woman says and then go Google up the parts that are new to you. Why parade the fact that you're both ignorant and too lazy to do your homework in public? Sheesh! Or just think of some of the famous agitators back then, Emily Pankhurst of the Suffragettes, Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood, all the women like Condie Rice's mother who kept the Republican Party alive in the South -- until Richard Nixon came along to destroy it with the Southern Strategy.
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  50.  @Rishi123456789  I think you're still back in 2011, too, Rishi. The good ol' days when America had friends and allies.
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  51.  @Rishi123456789  You're still back in 2011, Rishi, in the ol' days when America had friends and allies.
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  52.  @Rishi123456789  America has friends, including me. The current Administration has no friends except fools, grifters. and followers of the Putin crew.
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  53. Violet, So Nelson Rockefeller died and Olivia Snow was never born, is that your theory? Republican Liberals seem to me about as rare today as they ever were. The difference is that a few percent of the electorate and consequently a very high percent of the elected post-holders in the South switched from Dixiecrat to Republican. Not much happened elsewhere. Remember what counts in politics is three percent at the margin: this results in a whole lot of 100% changes in the party in office. There's only one butt in each chair, and it isn't 55% this 45% that, it's one or the other. Suburbanization in the post-WWII period enabled the Republican Party to recover from its Coolidge-Hoover disaster, and the depopulation of the country-side is one of many factors destroying it now and over the coming decade. Neither of these large social changes meshes very well with your apparently press-inspired little history.
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  54.  @qhack  Sorry, is is bad. It imagines a unitary force called "The Republicans" and imagines it takes yes-no decisions. That's two errors, things she gets entirely, 180-degrees, wrong.
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  55.  @amef15  I don't think he's planning on farming, nor on dong anything useful. He's going to live on canned goods, then start sending us posts about how much he misses the city when he is up to his ears in his own garbage.
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  56. This is silly, "majoring in minors." Somehow this woman has grown up not understanding the notion "notion." What she is camping on about is that scientists work with objective reality. Duh. Looking at reality as limiting is simply one aspect of one's own self, not a particularly interesting fact about reality out there.
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  57. This is cheating, Suzman. You've gone and looked at the real world and then sneakily worked your observations into your YouTube post. This is deviant behaviour. Careful, Suzman, careful.
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  58.  @jodihouts6032  Poor wikkle paranoid DC thinks everything is about him -- or maybe he's just pretending to think everything is about him, a sort of "We're like Donnie Fats" affectation popular in his circle.
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  59.  @aperson2730  Keep those cards and letters comin' laze an gennulmen out there in Yootyu Blan.
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  60. "Americans used to be better at using their critical thinking skills." Evidence? Maybe you should go back and run the video one more time. 'Course I gotta admit your claim is self-referential: it is evidence for itself -- but only one data point. I want to see more than evidence you've created yourself. :-)
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  61. "That world," the liberal international order, "has gone away," sez Sean McFate.Don't think so. There's resistance to its evolution. That resistance is currently loud, ignorant, and ugly, with Trump, Orban, al-Assad, Erdogan its prominent symbols. The fact remains, behind all the noise, the liberal order is what feeds us all. Trade, united global tertiary education, open media, science -- all under criticism from the faux "conservatives," the yowlers, but all functioning powerfully and well. That world isn't going away. The people who wish it would go away are old white geezers dying off fast. There are 7% fewer of them every year. The sky is not falling, Chicken Little, Turkey Lurkey.
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  62.  @chipchipperson101  Thank you. Cheers, -dlj.
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  63.  @europeansovietunion7372  Ham, It's perfectly natural that you should not consider your own speculations hostile. They are certainly possible. I just think they're unlikely. If he were neutrally interested he could have gone to Google, couldn't he?
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  64. Skyblazer, I agree -- but one of the prerequisites has got to be the much deeper and wider undersanding ND development of the tools of nonviolent resistance. Any bureaucracy, and any government, of any form whatsoever, operating on any theory whatsoever, will sometimes act cruelly, stupidly, antidemocratically, and viciously. Nazi Germany only lasted 12 years because others put an end to it -- at a cost of tens of millions of lives. We need nonviolence to prevent a world fascism. -dlj.
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  65. Competition does not make companies strong. Competion is what keeps companies weak that no single corporation can take over the Whole Thing.
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  66.  @justinm2697  Because employees having a life is a prerequisite for businesses having a business. The question you want to ask yourself is, What is the use of a business that can only exist through the disruption of families' basic functions? If you want to put it in Chamber of Commerce terms, what future does an economy have in competition with others that can function humanely?
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  67. Don't think so, by far. It's not difficult to think of ten worse if you simply go through them in order in your mind. Probably one of the slicker liars, though, and a disgusting exploiter of lingering racial divisions.
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  68.  @aintnoslice3422  NoSlice, I share your sentiment, but your history is plenty flaky. That huge increase in the debt under Obama was Bushlet's doing, so I'd have thought that alone would put CheneyBush ahead of Reagan on your list of evils. Count them for first-worst, Cheney, and half marks for an assist to Bushlet, is how I would score it. (If anybody wants to object that Cheney wasn't elected president, the answer is obvious: Neither was Shrub. Cheney at least carried out the work of the office, dishonestly though he did it.) Your claim "that virtually every current problem with America can be traced back to Reagan" is just plain nuts. In fact that whole long paragaph is crazy. You're right about the wrongs. You're just plain silly in lumping them togeteher into the immediate past. Cripplling corruption? Hell, every President from Andrew Johnson to Wilson beats Reagan at that. Enough: this is trivia, and not worth arguing about. Your heart is in the right place. Now if you can get your historical fact base to catch up with it, you're going to be a solid piece of work. Go back and hit the books. Start with the Lafollettes and Eugene Debs, and work your way up to the present with Beard and the histories of the new Deal, and you're going to be in fine shape. In solidarity, -dlj.
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  69. Thank goodness for Newton. Before he came along, nobody knew that apples fell off trees, so we couldn't have mined coal or made steel without him. Railways? Compasses on ships? Don't forget that apple! Gee, Michio, you're just wonderful.
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  70. There is no perfect world. Perhaps you mean things "would be" different in such a world. It's called a hypothetical. When you learn to handle complicated structures like that in English you might be within range of expressing yourself on YouTube.
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  71. Tina Brown, a woman who came close to wrecking every magazine she has ever touched with her cheap Brit formula of sex, violence, and money, criticizing algorithmic editing? It is to larf.
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  72.  @davidbrown180  All channels delete posts. Political subjects attract some number of cranks, many of them vicious and hateful. The comment mechanism, which you can find under the three grey dots above at the right, gives you to option of flagging them, and the various social media employ thousands of English-speakers in third-world countries to plough through all the garbage and delete the worst of it. This means that some of the most well-educated and hard-working people in places like the Philippines, many of them students paying their way through college, get their impressions of us by reading the worst of our filth.
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  73.  @XenoTravis  You're right that the US is not the most dishonest. Nor the most bigoted, nor the worst of anything else. The power of American media, however, make America most widely visible. In war, though, America probably is the most dangerous. Iraq looks to us like your usual sort of government lies, Dick Cheney laying down examples for the younger Donald Trump to think of as normal. For hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families, however, those lies resulted in dead relatives, most young children. Vietnam, the insane assertiveness of the sexually insecure JFK, is similarly a matter of between one and two million unnecessary killings. The simple power of American technology makes politicians' lies and insecurities into mass death. With great power comes greater responsibility -- and the Kennedys, Cheneys, and Trumps have not learned this.
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  74. "People" aren't getting angrier. Old farts are grumbling, the same way old farts always do. Right now the old farts of the entire world are the baby boomers, the bulge in the population brought about by pennicillin and optimism after WWII. These geezers are being hit by their grandchildren's college fees, they're hitting their pensions which can be ugly, and they're moaning in their beers. The good news is, 7% of them are dying every year. Poor Trump is seeing his supporters die in front of his eyes. Sad.
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  75. Pamela, All the evidence on "illegals" to the United States is that they are more law-abiding, peaceful, and productive than the average of "regular" Americans. They pay their taxes but they don't collect Social Security: net net, it's us "natives" that are living on the backs of the migrants.
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  76.  @lazyjim1  No it isn't. It's a stupid remark based n incorrect "facts" about migrants, freeloaders, welfare, and everything else. she's a sour, ignorant person, and you are silly to take her seriously, Jimmy.
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  77. Ahem. "The queen of the sciences." I think it's fair to say, though, that it's different from the other kinds of knowledge that we bundle together as "the sciences." Mathematics is the only science in which certainty of correctness is at least in principle possible. Physics? Hell, you go twenty-five or thirty significant digits and the next one could be any of ten possibilities. :-)
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  78. Bernie Sanders would probably make most if not all tertiary education free -- which would enable America's next post-industrial miracle.
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  79. Ah, that wonderful suggestion that one's own inability to imagine constitutes evidence in a substantive discussion. -dlj.
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  80. Micky, Get a grip on yourself. What you say is not wrong, just slightly out of balance. Remember, cynicism is always and everywhere a tool of reaction. You can often get a cheap laugh or a warm fuzzy of superiority out of it, but it's almost impossible to do anything good with it.
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  81. Scot, I know your type. I betcha you're one of those folks who thinks that a Christmas tree is a perfectly find model of a heirarchy -- but the control point is the trunk near the ground (sorta where the rabbits might gnaw on a sapling to bring it down and get the leaves), and not the fairy on top, right? Your problem, Scot, is that such a picture of trees vis a vis heirarchies might take 15 seconds of thought. Fifteen seconds of thinking is not one of Niall's specialties.
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