pamqzl

I'm always extremely skeptical when someone suggests that oral traditions could possibly have survived for long periods of time. That's twelve hundred generations! Given what we know about the speed at which Chinese Whispers tend to drift, the idea that any story can last 1200 generations is an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof.

Hundreds of Aboriginal tribes had hundreds of contradictory myths on hundreds of subjects. Most of them are verifiably false (e.g. those rocks over there are not, in fact, the remains of three young women who got turned into stone for disobeying their father). Some of them are probably correct by complete accident.

As for gigantic animals... well, they're a pretty common motif in myths and stories all around the world. Maybe it's some distant memory our cultures all have of the larger animals that used to live around here... or maybe it's just because giant animals are cool. In Aboriginal myths, giant animals are often really really giant, because they're used as explanations for geographic features -- e.g. rivers are caused by the meanderings of a giant snake.

And although now we've pushed literacy up from 80% to 90-something percent, I wonder whether literacy is actually lower than it was in the 1850s. More people are literate, but those who are literate are on average less literate, because we've pushed our educational standards down in an effort to pick up those last 20%.

Unless the statistical distribution of alleles is exactly the same (unlikely) from one generation to the next then humans would have to be evolving, wouldn't they?

They don't want fairness either, they want "fairness".

The difference between fairness and "fairness" is that "fairness" works out a little better for people like yourself than fairness does.

What is the benefit of preserving rarely-spoken languages?

But my dogecoins are still headed for the moon, right?

Not that many internal combustion powered cars you can buy nowadays without touch screens and the like, either.

Maybe not Tesla-level yet, but in five years I'd be surprised if most new cars weren't filled with screens in the place of traditional instruments.

Latino cultures already control all but two of the thirty-something nations of the Americas, do we really feel like they're under threat?

Only in a legal sense are they different cities.

I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly.

I realise there's history and San Francisco wasn't always joined to San Jose by unbroken urbanity, but arbitrary legal structures should keep up with geography.

Sure, as long as we can have a white Shaft.

Seriously though, Britishness (in the genetic sense) is a fundamental part of James Bond's character. He isn't just British by citizenship, he's emblematic of Britain.

So was Star Wars. But it turns out it's more profitable as the latter.

Indeed. If you could rule by promise, and those promises were binding on future administrations, then executive power would be practically unlimited.

The bizarre US insistence that places like San Francisco and Oakland are somehow separate cities baffles me.

Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay Area, and it goes from San Francisco down to somewhere south of San Jose and back up to Richmond. That's a big city, but not one of the biggest.

But I could, for instance, buy advertisements in support of my favoured candidate?

I guess not on US TV or US billboards since they're under the control of the US. But if I buy ads on the internet that just happen to be seen by US citizens there's nothing the US can do about it, right?

If you give money to a government official in return for a specific favour then you'll both wind up in prison.

But there are certainly a helluva lot of ways of for this transaction to occur without anyone ever directly saying "here is your bribe".

No they're not, the second is just a clarification of the sense in which the first was meant.

By comparison, take the statement "All men are not equal. Or at least, they're not equal in their ability to play football". The second statement is obviously true, the first is controversial.

Why is that so? How can all men be equal if they're so obviously unequal in just about any metric you might choose to measure them on? Because they're equal in one specific sense: that we (most of us) believe they should have equal rights.

> non-profit humanitarian organization

Which just happens to pay the Clintons' bills every time they feel like travelling anywhere, and direct money to whoever the Clintons want to do favours for.

The election is over, we can all admit that the Clinton Foundation is pretty stinky.

Or just a foreign individual?

I'm a foreign individual who went around making comments on the US election... what's the difference between me doing it privately and a company doing it?

You sound like me.

All I can tell you is to fake it til you make it. It doesn't take that long before your lack of experience in the particular subject at hand ceases to be the limiting factor.

And is the European perspective more valid than the American? Why isn't it Europe that's skewed?

Also I note that "Europe" is a big place and quite politically diverse.

I don't see why these people can't go back to their home countries and begin the same process that the rest of us non-US-citizens have to go through if we want to live in the US.

IBM seems to have painted themselves into a bit of a corner by calling a bunch of largely unrelated research projects by the name Watson.

I'd say there's certainly much odder customs than that.

Touching someone is an intimate act between two people. A handshake is a gesture at the least intimate end of that scale. It's a way of mutually saying "we are no longer complete strangers, we are two people who know each other well enough to actually touch each other... but not too much".

If you shake hands with an unsanitary person you can easily sanitise your hand. If you hug an unsanitary person you'll need a shower and a change of clothes.

Plus there's the smell...

Yes, and they're often pretty clever with their juxtapositions, giving two completely contradictory takes on the same subject one after the other.

Disagree. The Guardian is mainstream left, Breitbart is mainstream right.

If you think Breitbart is too far right to be mainstream, check the identity of the guy in the White House and think again.

If you think the Guardian is too far left to be mainstream then check the identity of the previous guy in the White House.

How so? Are you sure you're not just assuming that your own point of view is the correct one?

Yep. I've pretty much given up all news except the Australian Financial Review and am a lot happier for it (though for some reason I'm back on HN after many years... bad move)

That's a bit like inciting sex at an orgy.

Honestly I'd be far more worried about my kid being hit by a car than being a victim of any crime.

Or maybe they try something stupid (we all did stupid things as kids and I don't expect my kids to be smarter than I was) and wind up drowning in the river or falling off something.