I think this argument is invalid from the standpoint of what groups of people he is talking about. The people who tend to value free education by supplementing with tax dollars tend to vote democrat. People who want to keep education expensive and withhold tax aid tend to be republican. Particularly in these modern times: the exit polls show that the more educated you are, the more likely you were to vote democrat. The most educated people seem to be electing those who would like to make education low cost.

Given this, the argument that 'education is kept expensive to keep competition down' is unlikely (though not impossible) to come from an educated person...because the statistics show that this tends to not be the values of an educated person. The educated 'club' tends to value exactly the opposite, and wants everyone to be educated.

We need to get over this "marriage is forever" BS.
It's a construct from an earlier stage in our social evolution and it's irrelevant to modern times. We as animals did not evolve to mate for life.

I propose expiring marriage contracts. Choose the length of your marriage. All asset division and child custody at the end of the contract determined in advance. If you want to keep the contract when it's over then just sign an extension.

Your video, A catchy little tune for modern times, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

He didn't "beat the heck out of her", he lost the popular vote. The majority of voters voted for Clinton. Those votes were stolen by the worthless Electoral College and an immature, pedophile-enabling, chronic liar was put in a position of power.

The first thing that needs to happen to restore America to sanity is flushing the Electoral College. It's a useless relic, and serves zero purpose in modern times.

It does have to do with writing code.

I have to deal with a source code repository that's full of tabs at work every day. Indentation for code may be composed of spaces and tabs, or spaces only. If tabs are present, then everyone working with the code has to use the same tab width setting, otherwise the indentation will be fubar.

If two people save edits using a different tab width setting, then there really is no way of fixing it up beyond auto-indenting it all and saving with a consistent tab setting.

The advantage of tabs is saving a few bytes on file size, which is completely undetectable in today's world of html email and xml everything.

The film, however, makes no sense, because the only way you can find out about a fundamental disagreement on spaces v tabs is by opening someone else's file in your editor, and finding the indentation all messed up. It's not something you can tell by looking over a shoulder.

The difference between emacs and vi, by the way, is that emacs has several good vi emulations, but it would be laughable to think of an emacs emulation in vi.

Emacs used to seem a completely outsized pig of a program, but in our modern times it's actually tiny. Still, you would expect a vi-champion to want tabs instead of spaces, not vice versa.

Not a lot of understanding displayed here, I'm afraid.

Doesn't Netflix have Dagon and Necronomicron: Book of the Dead? I looove John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy and The Mist RULES! Frank Darabont has also made many a Stephen King flick (Shawshank especially).

Off the top of my head, I would say HP Lovecraft isn't simply about madness driving horrors, it's biological horror, rather than supernatural. So almost anything by David Cronenberg, a lot of Japanese and Korean film, such as Akira, Uzemaki, The Ring movies, (which is based upon a Japanese folklore, but in modern times became biological horror, the Ring is actually a hybrid biological, technological virus), etc.

Also, the Matthew McCant-spell-his-last-name's True Detective breeches the Lovecraftian realm on a subtle and then not so subtle way in the end, such as the concept of "black stars" in a constant daytime of white background. I would say it's pre-Lovecraftian mythos from authors in the 1800s writing nihilistic almost biological horror, more just heavy uncomfortable writing. I can't recall the primary author who inspired Lovecraft beyond Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm.

Anyway. I love horror, thrillers, suspense, nihilism, pulp and gothic literature.

I think it's a matter of degree. Prior to WW1 (Or to say, around the turn of that century), the Jewish faithed presence was quite small. Roughly ~90% of the population was non-Jewish faithed. There was very little conflict prior to WW2, because prior to that, the immigrants purchased their land from the locals. As per the nature of humanity, the only conflict-free methods for transfer of property are : inheritance, trade/sale, or gift.

The League of Nations was inconsequential. As a result of WW1 Britain captured the territory of Palestine from its previous occupiers (Turks, by one title or another, dating back to the Roman empire), and by right of conquest could do as it pleases with it.

I refer to religious insularity, not genetic.
Yes, they are quite accepting of anyone with Jewish faith. Almost the entire Jewish faithed population in Israel, regarding this last century, is either immigrant, or born of said immigrants. The Jewish faithed population rose from around ~600k to ~7 million between 1947 and today. Even taking into account the rule of thumb 'population doubles every ~40 years', that would leave the population roughly 85% immigrant or children thereof.

Which in turn elucidates many of the issues at hand in modern times. Land prices are extreme, with more people than there is room for, so expanding for living room is a necessity. Hence colonial expansion into greater Palestine is inevitable. Further, the dramatic division in income equality puts a lot of social pressure on the government, which the government can further alleviate by expansion. A, because it can relocate those that can't afford to live in more expensive areas, and gives those people a place to busy themselves taking care of, and B, because the inevitable tensions that come from displacing the previous residents causes the government to serve as a protector from those unfortunates that were offended, which serves as a good distraction from other problems that the government isn't doing well to fix. Essentially, the same formula that nations have followed throughout history (Heck, Australia can thank its current existence for similar policies in Britain).

-scheherazade

That's in part to do with how during WW2 Europe had the bulk population of Jewish faithed people.

Outside of Europe, the population of Jewish faithed persons was scattered throughout little towns and ghettos (in the social sense, eg. like NY's Chinatown for the Chinese).

There was a small-ish population of Jewish Poles (called the Zionists) that had in the WW1 era moved to Palestine and bought land together to form their own communities.

Basically, the high concentration of Jewish faithed persons in Europe in the WW2 era made it easy to target a large percentage of their overall population.

Judea (Referred to as "Palestine" by the Romans - hence why in modern times Judea was called Palestine) had converted from Judaism to Christianity around 300 ish AD (under the influence of Rome), and then to Islam around 700 ish AD (Under the influence of the Islamic expansions). By WW2, Judaism was an archaic religion in the middle east. Similar to Zoroastrianism, where small pockets still can be found, but its otherwise not represented.

It's not till after WW2 (1948) when Britain carved out the nation of Israel from [at the time British colonial] Palestine, and surviving Jewish Europeans immigrated there from Europe, and subsequently Jewish faithed Arabs/Burburs immigrated there from around the middle east, that there was another major concentration of Jewish faithed persons to be found.

(This is when the Arab vs Israel conflict(s) began. A fun irony is that much of Israel's military in 1948 was German equipment (bf109s, etc), and much of the Arab equipment was British (spitfires, etc).)

(The Nazi government did a lot of killing, tho. The Soviet Union alone lost ~10 million soldiers, ~14-17 million civilians, and ~1-2 million Jewish persons.)

One of the reasons why Israel is so insular in regards to non-Jews, is because their overall population is small enough that they would be bred out of existence in a few generations.

-scheherazade

@ChaosEngine
I would say you were onto a more useful definition of feminism in the beginning of the thread... all decent human beings in modern times must believe women are people; but they would only be feminists, if they are trying to reshape society's institutions to reflect that. Feminism, as you point out, would then be the civil movement with actual goals to achieve, whereas treating women with decency is a personality trait or a matter of good upbringing, without any specific goals. You can be either decent or a feminist, both, or neither.

A lot of people - conservatives, progressives, religious folk, etc. - believe women are people,* and treat women with respect in individual interactions, because they're decent folk - but they aren't actively trying (except by non-participation) to change the laws, cultures, or conditions that put women at a disadvantage. The ones who are feminists, OTOH, are the ones who, in accordance with their strategy and in their context, are trying to enact change.

In this way, being a decent person doesn't qualify or disqualify you as a feminist, just as being a screechy asshole doesn't qualify or disqualify you as a feminist - it's all about whether or not you are participating in the movement. I'll admit - my definition excludes a lot of people who call themselves feminist, and it includes a few people who wouldn't call themselves feminist - but still there's something about this definition that seems so much more, I don't know, useful, than saying 'you either believe women are people or you don't.'


*To take a slightly extreme example, I'm sure many Saudis would be adamant in saying that they believe women are people, it's just that they don't believe all people should drive cars. Such as, for example, women and children.

It's extremely important to note that, at the collegiate level, it is taught in introductory sociology courses that feminism is exactly what she says it is. Feminism by its traditional definition is actually a pretty crappy thing, which most people from both sexes would agree on in modern times. While feminists have done wonderful things for women's rights, her message of gender equality is really refreshing.

It's worth noting though that in Europe the word Gypsy, or variants of Zigane / Zigeuner, is a racial slur and used in modern times in actual, horrifying violence against minorities. I mean to the point where it's used by the same people who paint swastikas on walls before they raze tent villages.

http://www.newstatesman.com/human-rights/2014/04/why-europe-failing-protect-its-roma-population-hate-crimes

In the US this is obviously not a thing, and it still doesn't make sense to me to start writing G*p*y (I just see 'guppy' when I read that) but there is a history of racism against the Romani going back centuries, as well as a modern culture of extreme marginalization and exclusion.

I don't want Europeans to go around casually using the N-word and thinking that that's only a disgusting term when it's used in the US, so I guess I wouldn't want Americans going around casually saying Gypsy either, if it can be avoided?

Munich at 2:50, and of course this video has been colorized in modern times, probably in the last few years. There is a well known BW version that's been around for a while...

Ha!

I am facebook friends with some ardent and passionate vegans. One of them posted that photo without commentary.

My first thought was -- honey. You should listen to my 90 year old father talk about living on a farm in Oklahoma. That old saying of eating everything but the squeal? They weren't exaggerating.

Modern times mass produces and sorts what a handful of people did to one pig.

That's true for a post industrial POV.
When machines already exist, and you just need energy to get things moving.

The energetic concerns of bygone eras were :
Whale oil, and later kerosene. For lighting. (note: back then, a day's work would only buy minutes of light)
Firewood, and later coal. For heating.
Manpower was the only energy user when it came to food production.

Early machines such as the combine were horse drawn, and did not need an energy architecture in place. (ignoring "food" as an energy)

Later machines used steam power, and hence could piggy back on the already existing wood/coal energy architecture (in turn stimulating it to grow larger).

Once the machinery industry was established, and the revenue generation was in place, it was possible to invest in improvements and alternative energies - ultimately leading up to oil burning machinery being common.

In any case, historically, industrialization drove the energy industry. (As it should, why have an industry to produce a product (energy) that isn't needed?)
And industrialization depended on a conducive society. A place where an inventor could own his invention, and could sell it, allowing things that were no more than ideas or garage trinkets to transition into products - which in turn place demand on other resources such as [forms of] energy.

In the past, there was nothing, so everything was build from the ground up. Industries grew out of nothing, they weren't established up front.
Modern times are different, where you have investment capital from entities who's entire existence revolves around investing, and you can front the establishment of an industry in the calculated hope of future demand.
(Granted, lords/aristocrats had a hand in industrial investment. Just not the kind or scale that you can see today.)

What you say applies a bit later, when industrialization was already well under way. Like when Thomas Edison used investment capital to fund power plants and an electrical network, in order to power the first [practical, but not 'first'] light bulb in New York.

-scheherazade