Posts by Blakey 20 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2011
I mean, our intrepid reporter apparently thinks you add the milk immediately and then steep the bag in the now much colder mixture of milk and water rather than steeping, removing the bag, then adding milk. A bizarre habit that should be punishable by law.
So maybe the seppos could teach them a thing or two.
The Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone ones were "fighting fantasy", "Choose Your Own Adventure" was actually its own brand of gamebook - without any stats to track, die-rollijg or combat mechanics. I didn't like them because they were "for little kids", unlike my own very grown-up copy of "DEATHTRAP DUNGEON".
>>I never imagined they considered "updating" those texts, rather, I imagine they will be deemed problematic and removed / banned / burned.
Yeah, that thing that definitely happens. Fuck me blind.
>>Why? It's not your word to be offended by - unless you are a Slav, because "slave" come from from the ethnonym "Slav". The Black Sea slave trade was a major source of slaves for Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia for at least 2500 years until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, the Atlantic Slave Trade lasted about 300 years.
And to think you are accusing other people of being ridiculous. You know, I know and everyone else knows that's not how language works. Why waste your time copy-pasting the history of the word slave? All very interesting I'm sure but it has literally nothing to do with its modern usage.
Maybe someone who has slaves in their recent family history - who is likely at at least one point in that family history descended from the rape of a recent ancestor by the master who owned that recent ancestor - might prefer not to be reminded of that while working on computers?
Do you really think anyone believes it will make slavery disappear to stop using it in a casual euphemistic way? It's just a respectful gesture acknowledging that slavery was an open practice recently and is still happening today. We also stopped using "rape" euphemistically for similar reasons, to acknowledge that yes, it's a terrible thing and no, it isn't comparable to losing at a video game.
Funnily enough the sky hasn't fallen, and no it hasn't stopped rape but no one said it would. That's a ridiculous straw man cooked up by ridiculous people who don't want to make even the slightest effort to be accommodating to anyone who isn't like them. It's really not a lot to ask.
That sounds more like the amount spent by the foundation, which isn't just a bank account he transfers money into - it's an investment fund.
So first it invests in the stock market, which given the state of the world economy is driven by extractive relations with the poor countries and populations he claims to be helping, then it spends the proceeds of that investment on laundering Bill's reputation and bullying those poor people into spending their money the way he says is best. I believe the actual endowment was on the order of hundreds of millions, at a time when he was worth tens of billions.
Even if he had given away 45b directly, it still wouldn't in the least affect his standard of living. He hasn't earned that money, no one can, it's a ridiculous amount to be owned by one family and it's absolutely crazy that we collectively allow certain individuals to enjoy so much wealth that they could end world hunger forever without even noticing a change in their personal standard of living rather than taking that excess - you know, leaving them with that level of money beyond which their lifestyle is utterly unaffected - and say, ending world hunger. Or trying to save the literal billions of people who are currently endangered by climate change.
But no, all that wealth is theirs because they were the bastards who were greedy and rapacious and unscrupulous enough to exploit, extract, cheat and murder-by-degrees their way to tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth. It's fucking revolting, it's backed up by nothing more or less than everyone agreeing that they can have all that simply because they say it's theirs, and it's going to kill billions. The fact that they are willing to condescend to spend a small fraction of their wealth to make themselves look good and treat the poorer parts of the world like their own personal plaything isn't actually especially admirable. All this extreme wealth in the hands of a few billionaires is the very reason for much of the poverty they claim to fight, anyway.
He's not "trying to improve the world". The foundation (a) does not draw from their own wealth but rather from the proceeds of an endowment they settled on it years ago, it's a major investment fund that contributes to a lot of the problems it claims to fix by participating in the very financial processes that cause poverty in the global south, and (b) is, in reality, the method by which he influences world politics. It's very much his way or the highway. As an example, trying to eliminate diseases like malaria involves, by definition, putting resources into wholly extinguishing it in areas where it's already scarce, which is the least efficient way to actually save lives - but if you are a poor African nation either you send your money in that.very inefficient way and help Gates with his ego-driven goal of ending malaria, or you don't get access to some of the wealth that he made selling software that ran on computers whose owners could only afford them because the minerals were all-but-stolen from poor African countries.
He's also much admired for spending on education but there's been at least one instance of him saying he knows how to educate better than the experts, so this poor nation has to implement his educational plan if they want to get the money, then several years later, much money spent by the country he was helping (remember, he's not just telling them how to spend the grant, which would be bad enough, but also how they need to spend their own money if they want the grant) and millions of children "educated", the whole thing was quietly abandoned when it was discovered that no, coding a few pieces of software 40 years ago then abusing various financial regulations to amass so much wealth that you personally could end world hunger and it wouldn't affect your standard of living at all does not in fact equip you to know better than the experts how to educate a nation's children.
And sure, maybe it's better than if he kept it all. If someone only killed one person it'd be better than if they killed ten. This is not how he "helps the world". It's how he uses a small fraction of his wealth that has been set aside in an investment fund for years now (afaik he hasn't settled any further endowments on the foundation since establishing it) to exercise global influence and launder his reputation. The simple fact of one person having tens or hundreds of billions of dollars is wholly indefensible, especially in a world with looming climate disaster and widespread poverty, and doubly so when the wealth of these goons comes from the brutal extractive economic relationships that Gates and people like him have fostered with the global south and that are largely responsible for the problems he claims to be fixing.
It's all even more morally bankrupt than the already extremely shady and disturbing nature of his rise to prominence. There's a couple of rather good episodes of the citations needed podcast that is fully researched and goes into the disturbing nature of billionaire philanthropy and the way it's one big sham that both benefits the philanthropists, reinforces the systems that enrich them and extract wealth from the global south, and is a way for the ultra wealthy to exercise political control.
Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire: Bill Gates and Western Media https://player.fm/1sMMSS
Episode 46: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire, Part II - Bill Gates in Africa https://player.fm/1sSLJe
I take your point, but we are all, in fact, standing on what is by orders of magnitude the most explored place in the solar system - unless someone other than us has explored the rest of it in depth, and not Earth, and we haven't heard about it?
Go here.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-theory.htm
See the part about "In scientific and medical circles"?
Scientific theories are NOT hypotheses that we are a little bit more certain about. They don't graduate to become "facts". A theory is a body of knowledge that describes empirically observed data, and remains valid until contradicted by data. "Fact" is not a term that has much of a place in real science.
What these people are advancing are not by any means "theories". They're not even useful hypotheses because they aren't based solely on observable phenomena and are, therefore, unfalsifiable. What these people are advancing is religion, not science. It has never been science. It will never be science. Science does not work that way.
It is insulting to people doing actual science to have these hypotheses advanced as scientific, not least because if the people advancing them are PhDs, it is entirely reasonable to infer that they're arguing in bad faith - aware that what they are advancing is untestable, and refusing to advance testable hypotheses, rather preferring to chant "But what if goddidit", ad nauseum. It distracts from useful discussion and is
is not, never has been, and never will be, a hypothesis that has "graduated". This is an irritating misconception to see constantly pushed by people I generally agree with.
"Theory" refers to a body of knowledge. "Musical theory" isn't a pretty good guess about music - it is the body of knowledge that describes the way music works. That is what theory means in the context of science. Stop spreading this BS about, it doesn't support your position. At all.
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