Search found 2633 matches
- Tue May 21, 2024 6:23 am
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: United States Politics Thread 46
- Replies: 1431
- Views: 446221
Re: United States Politics Thread 46
zompist, I mostly agree with your points here, but one small nitpick. This is a red herring, but the Nazis never won a majority. They had 33% in November 1932 (but Hitler was named chancellor anyway, as a result of negotiations with the conservatives). The election of March 1933 was not free, but e...
- Mon May 20, 2024 6:34 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: United States Politics Thread 46
- Replies: 1431
- Views: 446221
Re: United States Politics Thread 46
Note, I wasn't justifying Biden, but explaining. The general rule in US federal politics is that you have to appeal to the "independents", the tiny minority that actually does switch votes between parties, frequently and whimsically. The Independents are not overwhelmingly pro-Israeli lik...
- Mon May 20, 2024 5:48 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: United States Politics Thread 46
- Replies: 1431
- Views: 446221
Re: United States Politics Thread 46
It's depressingly simple: not supporting Israel is political suicide. A recent poll shows 58% very or mostly favorable views of Israel. And it was over 60% for the entire period 2005-2023... often over 70%. You don't get ahead in US politics by bucking that kind of trend. Er, it looks like 35% Demo...
- Sun May 19, 2024 5:13 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: A planet that moved around its star at more than 99% the speed of light.
- Replies: 10
- Views: 265
Re: A planet that moved around its star at more than 99% the speed of light.
If you're orbiting a black hole, avoid the plunging region:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/world/bl ... index.html
Responsible black hole owners will put up warning tape, but this is not always present.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/world/bl ... index.html
Responsible black hole owners will put up warning tape, but this is not always present.
- Sun May 19, 2024 3:56 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Random Thread
- Replies: 3734
- Views: 453021
Re: Random Thread
What should, theoretically speaking, happen if an object that has a number of ants on it is brought to a different place, a place that is very far away - at least by ant standards - from the ants' original colony? Let's assume the ants are all workers, with no queens, drones, or larvae among them. ...
- Sat May 18, 2024 4:24 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: A planet that moved around its star at more than 99% the speed of light.
- Replies: 10
- Views: 265
Re: A planet that moved around its star at more than 99% the speed of light.
If I remember special relativity correctly, if we watch a spaceship going at .99c, we see it slowed down by a factor of 7. However, the people on the spaceship see us (and the whole universe) flying past them at .99c, so they see the universe as slowed down. The planet doesn't work like this, becaus...
- Fri May 17, 2024 8:08 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Venting thread
- Replies: 1940
- Views: 15029304
Re: Venting thread
The "landlord" claims that she's going to explain everything tomorrow [...] [*]The pièce de la résistance: the photos she sent "of the place" weren't even of a residence in Europe , but they were of an apartment in Québec. I can't believe I didn't notice the American plugs in th...
- Fri May 17, 2024 2:48 am
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: United States Politics Thread 46
- Replies: 1431
- Views: 446221
Re: United States Politics Thread 46
Yeah, look at your own page. Democratic support, 87%; Republican, 28%. Who controls the House? They controlled the house back in 2020 (but not the senate). Exactly. Which is why they passed a federal $15 minimum wage law in the House in 2019, and it died in the Senate. This raises the question: Why...
- Thu May 16, 2024 4:22 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: United States Politics Thread 46
- Replies: 1431
- Views: 446221
Re: United States Politics Thread 46
Support for raising the minimum wage to at least $15 is about 62%, yet we don't get that and no politicians get punished for failing to deliver it. About six-in-ten U.S. adults (62%) say they favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 40% who strongly back the idea. About four...
Re: Caizu
the Copts would be shocked to hear that they are speaking a nonexisting language. Coptic has not had native-speaker transmission for multiple hundred years now, so while they may technically be speaking it, that statement needs qualification. what?? then how did some of the French and English peopl...
- Thu May 16, 2024 6:01 am
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: United States Politics Thread 46
- Replies: 1431
- Views: 446221
Re: United States Politics Thread 46
A thought that occured to me too is that -- from my foreign, limited perspective -- Republicans are pretty easy to read and have better luck implementing their policies. Depends on what you consider their policies to be. The one thing they can all agree on is cutting taxes. They were unable to repe...
- Tue May 14, 2024 4:09 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: British Politics Guide
- Replies: 1936
- Views: 1019805
Re: British Politics Guide
Why is the collection of built-up areas that serves as the capital of the UK generally called "London" and not "Westminster"? This would be an interesting philological study, though I suspect the answer would be "You have to call it something, and that something has always ...
- Tue May 14, 2024 3:32 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: English questions
- Replies: 1406
- Views: 450585
Re: English questions
Here’s a really interesting English sentence I was presented with recently: 1. If I hadn’t’ve had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. Neat find, and your initial syntactic analysis is good work. I think I could say this, especially if it's even more abbreviated: If I hadn'a... So far as I can tell ...
- Mon May 13, 2024 9:16 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
- Replies: 734
- Views: 137874
Re: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
so they're both fascists, and we're all fascists too if we prefer any of them wins (cause what you here mean by support is just that, a vague preference, at least on my part) I don't get the word games... is this 1952? "Fascist" means anyone to the right of Fidel? Again, we've been here b...
- Mon May 13, 2024 5:16 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
- Replies: 734
- Views: 137874
Re: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
You support a US fascist and you support a Russian fascist. You are a fascist. and legally antisemitic too, I suppose. but seriously now, i support neither: i just care to a similar degree about americans and non-americans, and so if something is going to be bad for americans but good for the rest ...
- Sun May 12, 2024 1:16 am
- Forum: Conlangery
- Topic: AI in conlanging - present and future
- Replies: 24
- Views: 596
Re: AI in conlanging - present and future
I got ChatGPT to estimate the total number of words it has been exposed to in all of its training. [...] It’s ultimate estimate, IIRC, was 5 quintillion. There are some estimates of the total size of the Internet, but I don't think they're comparable... consider how much of the Internet is pictures...
- Sat May 11, 2024 5:16 am
- Forum: Conlangery
- Topic: AI in conlanging - present and future
- Replies: 24
- Views: 596
Re: AI in conlanging - present and future
I then asked it to estimate the number of words spoken by human beings in the last 100,000 years. Again, caveats abounded... Eventually it gave a figure of, IIRC, 15 quintillion. That is probably in the ballpark. A study online says people say about 16,000 words a day. Let's say each human does 40 ...
- Fri May 10, 2024 10:10 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4692
- Views: 2064599
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
OK, I have a question for any French experts out there: when and how did mathématiques become plural? And is it related in any way to the English phenomenon? I'm no expert, but I do have a Larousse, which says the word was singular or plural till the 18th century; while Etymonline says the English ...
- Wed May 08, 2024 4:54 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: The voice of the dead: AI chat sharing thread
- Replies: 10
- Views: 296
Re: the voice of the dead
Interesting stuff, especially the first one. I am still impressed by LLMs' ability to (seem to) remember what they're talking about. Though even in the first transcript, it forgets in the last response that you were talking about the dead. Now, I understand how it can create stories, pseudo-reports,...
- Wed May 08, 2024 3:31 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
- Replies: 734
- Views: 137874
Re: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
i'd prefer a crazy orange man win and is a lot friendlier towards russia and north korea We did learn things in the 1990s— some of them the same things that should have been learned in the 1920s. And one of those is that there is no fake fascism. Edging toward fascism with a smirk and a wink is not...