still no hyperloop after all this time? what a surprise! these people risk their lives to build a tunnel for cars, maybe someone should have told all knowing all powerful elon that tunnels for cars have existed for over 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Street_Tunnel
YouTube is willingly complicit in bot activity when it makes their stats look good. They don’t care about bot subscribers or comments as long as it drives engagement
And their Facebook/Twitter accounts have no meaningful engagement at all. 123 followers on Twitter, which is pathetic. Even I managed to get ~600 followers, mostly from when my blog ended up on the HN frontpage. I barely posted on Twitter. It's a massive discrepancy from their 6.3 million YouTube subscribers. Together with the view count rollercoaster, this does not smell kosher.
So it seems that a bad faith bullshitter who will abuse any system to bits to earn a buck is engaging in bad faith bullshit behaviour on account of being a bad faith bullshitter who will abuse any system to bits to earn a buck. I am shocked I tell you. Shocked!
Lol I almost went for that pedantry. However technically America is not a continent (under most definitions of continent) but North and South America are. :P
Unless you grew up in a place that taught a six-continent model instead of a seven-continent model and it was NA/SA consolidated instead of Europe and Asia into Eurasia.
Also: continents are bullshit.
Also also: America is the United States of America in the English-speaking world.
> Also also: America is the United States of America in the English-speaking world.
As an Australian English speaker, I will normally call it “the US”-the only time I ever call it “America” is when speaking to our 7 year old, because I know she knows what “America” means but I worry “the US” might confuse her; but with older children (such as our 12 year old) and with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me. In everyday speech, “the US” is (in my experience) more common than “America”, although both are understood as referring to the country; for the continent I use the plural (“the Americas”) to avoid the risk of confusion.
Using "United States" or "the US" is fine, but where "America" is used in the English-speaking world it still predominantly refers to the United States of America; but Australia is a big country. Given a large enough population of individualistic people—and there are a lot of individualistic English-speakers on Earth whether people such as yourself who share your particular hang-up or just contrarians—exceptions are not notable.
You are suggesting that preferring “the US” to “America” is due to myself being “contrarian” or “individualistic”, but I don’t agree-I’m not just describing my own personal usage, I’m describing my experience of the usage of other people around me-which assuredly is not an unbiased random sample of the general population-I think “the US” is preferred in more formal registers, and coming from a tertiary-educated upper middle class professional background, such people naturally tend to have a greater preference for more formal terms (even in informal contexts) than people at the other end of the educational/socioeconomic spectrum do-so it is understandable why I might hear “the US” more often than “America”, but people inhabiting different social contexts it would likely be the inverse
> I will normally call it “the US”-the only time I ever call it “America” is when speaking to our 7 year old, because I know she knows what “America” means but I worry “the US” might confuse her; but with older children (such as our 12 year old) and with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me.
It’s not wrong nor incorrect to call this an individualistic choice, and I mean, I’ve always perceived Australians as fairly individualistic people, but perhaps you feel differently? I’ll defer to you if that’s the case, it’s not a point I wanted to argue about, nor is it intended to be derogatory or disrespectful.
You are going out of your way to refer to America differently in different contexts though, and claiming that one variation feels incorrect. I stopped short of calling you specifically a contrarian because you didn’t express yourself like one, but that’s still a personal hang-up. It might be a shared personal hang-up with some of your cohorts, but it’s not one that any other Australian has ever confided in me, especially unprompted, and I don’t go around prompting people for terminological preferences on this subject. Most Australians I know or have known just call America “America” unless it’s like, the news.
Yes, but that’s part of the point: in the most formal registers, “America” is incorrect-if you’re a lawyer drafting a legal contract, or an academic writing an article for a peer-reviewed journal on international relations, you’d be much more likely to write “the United States” (or “the US” for short) than “America”-and if despite that you wrote the second rather than the first, it is likely someone else would “correct” it in the editorial process
So there is a very real sense in which “the United States” is more formally correct than “America”. But it is of course context-dependent: using the most formally correct term is likely pragmatically incorrect if your audience is a classroom of average seven year olds
Also, formality of speech isn’t just determined by context (a legal contract or a peer-reviewed article versus speaking to a primary school class)-it is also determined by the background of the speaker (and audience)-people who come from more educated/professional/higher SES backgrounds tend to speak more formally even when speaking informally; the same is true of higher IQ people and higher AQ people (AQ=autism quotient, measuring autistic traits)
I understood you the first time, mate, and I've been very patient with your exceptional disposition on this subject.
That said, your personal choice in vernacular doesn't really override that when someone refers to America in the English-speaking world, that refers to the United States of America. It might be different in say, the Portuguese-speaking part of the world, but that's not really my business.
I think we’ve been talking past each other here - because you are talking about receptive language (understanding what other people say), and on that topic I said at the start the same thing as you are saying now - whereas I’ve been talking about expressive language (what you choose to say). A lot of words/phrases/usages a person might view as formally incorrect (or at least deprecated) but nonetheless have no trouble understanding what is intended when someone else says them.
While we (outside the US) use “American” to refer to something or someone who comes from the US, AFAIK, only Americans call the US “America”. And even on the “American” part, more specific language, such as “US-based”, “US-resident”, is often used.
You are right but it is more complex than that… e.g. as I mentioned earlier, (as an Australian) I will usually say “the US” not “America”, but in certain contexts - talking to younger children for example - it will be the other way around
I’ll immediately know I’m talking to someone from the US. It’s a bit like someone saying the hood of a car and we understanding they are referring to the bonnet. We don’t call it “hood” here, or, I suspect, anywhere else in the English speaking world.
> We don’t call it “hood” here, or, I suspect, anywhere else in the English speaking world.
Canadians use "hood", or at least I've never heard one refer to the "bonnet" of their car, although apparently "bonnet" is supposedly still used in Newfoundland.
Oh my god I cannot stand reading this anymore, why do so many people parrot that like it's some gotcha phrase.
"A cat is not a pet, it's a feline."
Things can be multiple things at once. The US are a republic and a democracy. Republic = not a kingdom, democracy = power to the people. Close but not exact synonyms.
most ycombinator folks can't seem to distinguish things outside the software realm. Maybe if all these super ultra mega smart engineers and developers could focus on utilizing existing hardware more efficient we wouldn't need to constantly build these energy sinks.
also, it has been known for quite some time how damaging the near total reliance on cars and the associated infrastructure at that scale is. If you do absolutely nothing about climate change when you have the most resources to do so, then I cannot feel sorry about anything that's happening.
I feel like being forced to spend 40+ hours at any/every job has to create more work to justify that amount of time (an "agreement" that people died for when they were working in factories, not that its based on anything realistic or 'scientific'), and that's not very inspiring and takes SO MUCH ENERGY, at least for me.
On top of that you then are faced with this constant increase in "tech" that is supposed to do so much amazing stuff / make everyone more efficient, so now you are forced to do even more work in those 40 hours or get squeezed by wealth inequality? The new AIM chatbots coming out now can do so much! wowee! now I can be in 4 meetings at once?
Then on top of THAT you also have to wake up each morning facing global climate change where there is no real effort to change the course (you can say all you want about renewables, but as long as these graphs keep going up we're all going down https://www.climate.gov/).
People do get value and meaning from their work, whatever it is, it just feels like this mindset and social structure of the industrial age doesn't match up with any of the challenges we face nor does it feel like it fits with all the knowledge and technology that has been developed. What's the point if what we're doing on a day to day basis takes so much of our energy and then just gets us closer to human caused environmental destruction no matter what it is?
I'm less pessimistic. I'm convinced that technology will at least considerably decrease the amount of trouble caused by climate change. There are a lot of options, and we will converge to a 'golden' combination of strategies to deal with the effects of climate change. Today we can make huge rockets that can land themselves vertically. What will tomorrow bring?
This sounds like a fallacy. Just because technology is helping humanity achieve incredible things (for profit), it doesn't mean it will be employed to make advancements in climate change prevention strategies (until it's too late?). It hasn't been until now, anyways.
I don't think we will be in time to prevent climate chznge to a large degree. However I'm quite hopeful that technology will seriously decrease the cost of the consequences of climate change.
I'm not saying everybody should be an entrepreneur, far from it, but a decrease in entrepreneurship at a societal level hurts everyone. You can see that too, right?
the extreme excess and total neglect of the end of the lifecycle / negative externalities that every god damn company on earth likes to push onto people and the environment is the problem. Nobody said plastics aren't useful, why is that so hard to understand?
"Netflix does contribute financially to the FreeBSD Foundation and has done so since 2012. Last year they engaged at the "platinum" level with contributing more than $50,000+ USD to the foundation." (2019)
Took about five seconds to Google, it's the first result for "netflix donations to freebsd".
it's interesting seeing our intentional or subconscious goal of "dominating" nature disconnect us further from the planetary systems that we are a part of. The economy and money was invented by us. Putting the economy's well-being in front of the human's or the earth's was very plainly a mistake.
