moptar
moptar on Hacker News
Anyone who needs to distinguish 20 shades of green would develop the ability to do so. That's more culture or experience than language. Having names for them just means they have some need to communicate that information. You could do the same in English by drawing words or codes from color lists like websafe, Pantone, etc.
An example where language forces our thinking and even actions instead of simply allowing us to express it easily is plurals. Plurals force us to include unneeded number information in a lot of our thinking and talking. We have to have at least 2 cars to say "I have some cars" when showing off, otherwise admit that we only have one. You can see it in writing that uses "I" or "we" too. It reveals how many people it represents. A 2-person company can look much bigger than a 1-person company because it can use "we", "our", etc. just the same as a 1000000 person company does.
A lot of disagreement on this but it's basically true. Homeowners want to protect their investment and their comfortable lifestyle so they make sure local government restricts others from diluting what they have. If more houses could be built on the same sized sections, then poorer people would move in because they'd be cheaper. Poor people tend to be more of a disturbance to their neighbors so that would make the incumbents lose what they paid for when they bought their high priced properties in peaceful suburbia. Same goes for hotels which attract transient people that the existing property owners want to keep away.
This happens on many scales. We don't want poor strangers living in our bedroom, on our lawn, in our suburb or in our country. So we have trespass laws, zoning and immigration restrictions to protect us from them.
It's a pity that with so many people photographing it for so long, nobody stopped to think of making a well-aligned higher resolution time lapse.
For all the complaints, this sounds like a great deal for the Gtk developers. They don't have to plan ahead of time which version is going to be the stable one. If one ends up working well and they want to start on new ideas, they can just leave it unchanged, declare it to be the stable one and move on. Developers are people too and they would want a system that makes it easy for them.
Is it really a problem for application developers either? When you start your project, just pick the latest stable version and stay with that throughout. You can ignore all the subsequent updates and be sure that your stable version's API won't change.
The unstable versions are surely just for people who want to play with the new features early, not people who are worried about compatibility.
If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
It seems to be that way. Weren't the Nuremberg trials supposed to have established the idea the soldiers, or at least officers passing orders along can be guilty even if they're following orders? I suppose those were for more clear cut war crimes and the Iraq soldiers were mostly quite removed from the actual killing they triggered.
I don't understand why there's such unanimous words of support for someone who directly contributed to the half million deaths in the Iraq war. I know it's unrelated to his case, but perhaps his prison sentence and current predicament can be seen as karmic retribution. I know that's not how justice works, but I don't think we'd see such enthusiastic support for a serial killer who had trouble supporting himself after getting released.
The extent to which it cost human lives is a function of the arbitrary emission standards that governments have set. Those standards are obviously chosen as a trade-off between too many harmful consequences of pollution and being too expensive for car makers to comply with. So it's not as clear as "VW killed people" but more like "VW killed more people than we expected them to." The standards themselves still allow some harmful emissions to be released. If had more relaxed standards then all the extra harm caused by the VW cheating would simply evaporate.
I agree that not listing every oil spill isn't required to make a view American centric. That's not the issue though, it's a straw man. What's American centric is to focus on America even when similar things exist elsewhere.
That's kind of like Godwin's law. It's worth comparing things to the Nazis to reveal how little we despise other bad actions. But we have unreasonably strong negative feelings about both Nazis and terrorism, so it's not really helpful.
That's a sadly America-centric view of the world. Shell's spills in the Niger Delta are just as bad or worse and nobody cares because it's some weird foreign country that doesn't appear in their news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Ni...
The total volume of oil spilt was on the same order of magnitude - about half that at Deep Water Horizon. But the environmental and health problems are perhaps worse. It's close to shore and there's hardly any cleanup work, compensation or health protection.
People who can't afford it shouldn't expect it to just be given to them. I spent a long time not being able to afford a house and when I couldn't afford rents, I simply moved elsewhere. I never imagined blaming some nebulous group for that inconvenience. It's just part of life.
Any change in the housing market it bad for someone. Rents going down can cause owners to lose their homes. Rents going up upsets people who want the security of living in the same place but are't willing to pay for that luxury by buying their own house.
More interesting is what the long term picture would look like if the AirBnB is left to carry on unimpeded. Whatever it is will surely be better for people in general. It might hurt some people who feel entitled and got caught by surprise, but that's how progress works. There are usually losers along with people overall being winners.
That's not why we do conservation. We do it because we don't want the bears and other species to become extinct. In ongoing cases of people vs large mammals, the people always win. This kind of thing can't be a long term problem. Eventually the bears will die back to a sustainable population living away from people.
There's a philosophy idea that in order to say we can "see" something, we have to be able to collect consistent information by several different methods. For example if all we have is a STM, then we don't know which parts of the image are artifacts and which are real so we haven't seen anything. But if we have an STM and crystallography, we can have more faith in the features that are common to both images - such as interatomic distances and the geometry of crystal structure. But we still couldn't say that we've seen the shape of an atom since that would look different in each instrument's image.
A great example is people who "discovered" lost cities under the sea. They saw regular patterns of lines on the seafloor in Google Earth and interpreted them as ancient roads or walls. But they were only seeing artifacts from ships that had sailed back and forth in straight lines collecting data. If they had looked both at those sonar scans and some other data for the same location, they would have only seen the lines on one image and been able to conclude that they were either an artifact of the sonar or below the level of sensitivity of the other instrument.