The story I’ve heard was that GPS was invented due to Sputnik. The Doppler shift in its beeps proved its speed and thus its orbit. Somebody (in the Navy?) wondered if the “reverse” could be done: could you listen to various shifting beeps and figure out your location?
I’ve been telling people this for years. Bookmarking is for dynamic data. You bookmark the weather website. You don’t bookmark recipes. Personally I use Evernote and its web clipper. Unfortunately it doesn’t download images, but I wrote a little program using their API to replace the img tags with embedded resources.
No, it’s not unfair to treat it as bad without any other evidence. When all you know is “Mexican restaurant” you judge by that. You can’t live your life only making judgements once you have “all” the facts, as if that’s even possible. There seems to be this unspoken assumption that the thought process must be stereotypes leading to death camps. It is possible to say, “Based on my life experiences thus far I do not enjoy the company of black people/Mexican food/whatever” without thinking “and therefore we should kill all those people”.
The bias may be justified to you (since you just want to get a good meal somewhere and don't want a 9/10 chance that it's bad), but it's still unfair to the perfectly good Mexican restaurants that you won't eat at.
Fair is a word for children. It’s unfair to the Italian restaurant that you’re eating Mexican. It’s unfair to the grocer that you’re eating at a restaurant. It’s unfair that you’re buying groceries instead of seeds. As adults have told children for thousands of years, life isn’t fair.
Sure, but much of the fairness we argue about as adults is due to fundamental disagreements about morality or how the world should work. “It’s not fair that tax cuts benefit the wealthy.” Republicans think it’s not fair to take money from people who earned it. Democrats think it’s not fair for some people to have more wealth than they’ll ever use while others have so little. But the concept of “fairness” doesn’t do anything to help us resolve that disagreement.
But at the same time, there are some aspects of fairness that do appear to be innate - as in, they're observed in very small children regardless of the culture they're from, in experiments where they're asked to share (or not share) something that they have, or assess how someone else shared theirs. Extreme "wealth inequality" - as defined, say, through the amount of candy each child has - is universally seen as unfair, for example, although you also have to account for parochial altruism. Bonobos also demonstrate similar attitudes.
So it appears that our evolution as social species has set some hard boundaries. Abstract ideologies can go beyond them, of course, but their real-world success seems to correlate to some extent with how much they do or not - I would argue that ancap definition of "fair" is so unpopular precisely because it's so out-of-bounds wrt our biology.
It doesn't need to help us resolve the disagreement to be useful to explain why the disagreement is there in the first place, though.
And, in practice, there are large groups of people who do share the broad definitions of "fairness", and therefore saying that something is fair or unfair is useful to communicate the idea within those groups. This is not something that people really like to see put quite so explicitly, but when we say something "this should not be so because it is unfair", it carries an implicit "... and I don't care what those who disagree with me about what 'unfair' means think".
Does anybody actually take the SPLC seriously anymore? Violent racism having been largely eliminated from the US, they accuse ever more moderate and irrelevant groups with being the reincarnation of the Clan. I don’t want a dozen idiots who like to drink beer and play dress up with hoods and swastikas as my neighbors, but they’re not an existential threat to anybody either. When you treat these minor groups like the reincarnation of Hitler, you don’t have the ability to call out serious threats when they do arrive. When everything is Nazis, nothing is Nazis.
I was just about to say that. SPLC has a history of calling the balls and strikes on matters such as this in a highly uneven fashion. Whether an incident can be called ‘terrorism’ is much too open to interpretation to trust a politically biased organization with such a study. There are too many instances like this one to take them seriously:
It’s impossible to avoid relying on third parties. Somebody has to lease you the DNS name; we’ve already seen that used to punish sites. Somebody has to host your server or sell you an internet connection. Moving to Tor is the only way to protect yourself from those means of punishment, at which point you’ve lost 99.99% of any audience you might’ve had. You might as well just go to a physical newsletter.
Assuming lithium reserves work anything like oil reserves, the quantity of reserves depends on market process. When oil sells for $20/bb, oil that costs more than that to extract doesn't count towards the reserves. As the price goes up, the reserves increase, because you can extract oil from more challenging circumstances. This is why we've had 20-30 years of oil reserves for the last 50 years.
That is a big assumption but yes, I understand that "reserves" != "all", and you rightly describe the interrelationship between price and what is considered "extractable".
Even so, as an initial "world reserves" estimate, it's absolutely puny. Take into consideration that past the first "dozen years" demand will increase massively, at full adoption lithium will likely be short lived as a primary material to base batteries on. We don't know the extraction potential for whatever the "remaining" and "unknown" reserves are but thankfully EVs aren't intrinsically tied to lithium like ICE is to oil, so if lithium becomes overmined we are more likely to switch to other materials than go to extremes to extract more of it.
So, it took almost 100 years until the mainstream understood what should have been blatantly obvious to anyone who thinks about it: Oh right. Oil is limited.
I mean, sure, if we search long and hard enough we will probably almost always be able to find/produce something, but I don't think asking 1 million per liter of gas would be such a great idea.
Hoping that there will always be a scientific breakthrough just "right in time" to solve our resource problems is great. I love optimism. It's also extremely irresponsible to depend on it.
