The slow ethnic cleansing and land theft being perpetrated by a close American ally, supported by many of the biggest American corporations and capitalists, seems a comparable situation.
The whole LGBTXYZ discussion is somewhat weird to me. How about letting people's sexual preferences be their own business? I would rather be free from knowing what goes on in people's bedrooms, I don't think this is an unreasonable request.
Your example of the HR person who has to make decisions about medical issues obviously falls in a different category, but even in this case discretion could be assumed to be the default.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned: 'Friends' in your teens and twenties are often really about having someone to hang around with while looking for a mate. So you won't look like a lone loser at the club, or in social situations, or so that you get to meet members of the opposite/preferred sex through the group.
Once people get married and have kids, all of that falls away, and so do the 'friends'. You don't hook up with new people, because either they want partners to ride shotgun with them while hunting for a mate, or they are set up too. What's left are people you have a real connection with, usually people you were friends with since you were kids, and those few family members you can stand being around. For many, that is a small to non-existing group. What's left is your wife and kids, and honestly? The best company there is, IMHO. And I am not worried about what I will do when the kids leave and my wife divorces me, silly me.
> One thing I haven't seen mentioned: 'Friends' in your teens and twenties are often really about having someone to hang around with while looking for a mate. So you won't look like a lone loser at the club, or in social situations, or so that you get to meet members of the opposite/preferred sex through the group.
I have never thought of my friends that way. Nor have I ever met someone who gave me the impression they thought of their friends that way. Maybe not everyone thinks life revolves around "looking for a mate"?
I can attest that I had a couple of such friends. I didn’t realize it at the time but once you get a girlfriend, they just fall away (I didn’t analyze as to why but fall away they do).
I do think fondly of some of them. I’m grateful for having met them and for all the fun.
It's a hemisphere centered on Jerusalem, with North to the left. "ROMA" is across the Med to the left of the labyrinth just below center. At top right, it's easy to identify the Persian gulf and Red Sea; it appears that Somalia is disconnected from the African continent and infested with Dracones. At bottom left are the British isles, you can see "LONDONIA" just up the Thames, across the English channel from the Seine which flows from the cathedral representing Paris.
The circular outside edge represents the oceans, compressed to a narrow band of shoreline - the Atlantic at the bottom, Arctic at the left, Pacific at top, Indian at the right. There's some discussion as to whether the round world was assumed to be spherical or disc-shaped, with most historians assuming that it was believed to be spherical and that the oceans were simply connected on the 'back' of the map (where the Americas would be).
It's an interesting projection, expanding some areas to give detail based on religious importance and familiarity more than absolute geographical size.
An absolutely terrific book about (among other things) this is The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin. He goes into a lot of detail on how map making in Europe for the longest time was driven, as you say, more by religious importance than anything else. Interestingly when Europeans did get more serious about accurate maps this was for a large part driven by the search for the fabled Prester John, a Christian king thought to be ruling in India or Africa.
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, self-driving is a feature, not a product.
I'm pretty sure once LIDARs become cheap commodity hardware then every line will have self-driving, just like it has happened with every other new thing in automobiles since forever.
I think the big papers (New York Times, Washington Post) have always been the voice of the establishment. I remember reading their editorials broadly condemning the labor movement while it was fighting for basic rights (and being slaughtered by public and privatized law enforcement) in the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps at times more humanist than others, but nevertheless.
I also think it is really obvious that it would be this way. There is hardly any money in selling newspapers, even well before the internet completely obliterated that business. But shaping public opinion? That is valuable beyond measure, for the right (moneyed) interest groups.
Washington Post seems to be a lot better about being a neutral outlet with quality journalism. Although... being owned by Bezos makes me wonder how long they can remain that way.
I don't know that the editors and writers profit directly, beyond their salaries. More like the companies are run at a loss in order to control the conversation. Of course seats are filled with people that push the line the owners prefer.
The owners like to think of themselves as the decision-making elite of the country, and the White House flatters that delusion by giving them illusion of being consulted. This creates sympathy for the WH's views at the top of the NYT, and that attitude percolates implicitly to the editors.
Since this is a very politicized topic, as a Muslim I feel it is worth pointing out that there is nothing in Islam that promotes having many children per se (this topic is even omitted in the linked Wikipedia article).
On the contrary, Islam does not forbid contraception or even abortion, up until four months of gestation.
I found the information about haplogroups interesting. It shows the migration paths out of Africa for both your mother's and father's ancestors (only men show the father's haplogroup). Not only was the background information about human migration very interesting, but the results also tallied well with our own speculations about parents' heritage.
