Also: Buckminster Fuller has a 90% chance of being a total crazy. 100 pages into one of his books and he's already suggested that maybe dolphins are actually descended from people.
A++ photos. I read somewhere that he said it's only foggy in Dubai like a couple days a year, and then it's only there for a few minutes after the sun comes out, so he only got these cool photos because it's his full-time job to take photos of expensive buildings in Dubai and so he was one of the first photographers to crack the "pre-dawn secret dubai fog" market.
But this is a good reminder that even if you have the most corporate job of all time, e.g. taking photos of expensive condos to sell to princes, then if you want you can still squeeze in some art.
Zohaib Anjum, a real estate photographer took astonishing pictures of Dubai covered in clouds. In his photos, Dubai looks like a fairyland rising from a sea of fog.
One reason for this disparity is that kids’ food requests meant drastically different things to the parents.
For parents raising their kids in poverty, having to say “no” was a part of daily life. Their financial circumstances forced them to deny their children’s requests — for a new pair of Nikes, say, or a trip to Disneyland — all the time. This wasn’t tough for the kids alone; it also left the poor parents feeling guilty and inadequate.
Next to all the things poor parents truly couldn’t afford, junk food was something they could often say “yes” to. Poor parents told me they could almost always scrounge up a dollar to buy their kids a can of soda or a bag of chips. So when poor parents could afford to oblige such requests, they did.
Honoring requests for junk food allowed poor parents to show their children that they loved them, heard them and could meet their needs. As one low-income single mother told me: “They want it, they’ll get it. One day they’ll know. They’ll know I love them, and that’s all that matters.”
Junk food purchases not only brought smiles to kids’ faces, but also gave parents something equally vital: a sense of worth and competence as parents in an environment where those feelings were constantly jeopardized.
To wealthy parents, kids’ food requests meant something entirely different. Raising their kids in affluent environment, wealthy parents were regularly able to meet most of their children’s material needs and wants. Wealthy parents could almost always say “yes,” whether it was to the latest iPhone or a college education.
With an abundance of opportunities to honor their kids’ desires, high-income parents could more readily stomach saying “no” to requests for junk food. Doing so wasn’t always easy, but it also wasn’t nearly as distressing for wealthy parents as for poor ones.
I would argue SpaceX is Mostly Good® because it will reduce costs significantly in areas that we already outsource to other private companies. Defending the cost of the Space Shuttle pricing is defending the monopoly prices we are forced to pay to "United Launch Alliance" (ULA), which is just a company Lockheed and Boeing formed so as not to compete with one another.
I'm telling y'all, your hatred of Jeff Bezos will possibly be vindicated by history, at least until he cures Malaria or whatever like Bill Gates is doing in his second act. Hatred of Elon Musk is less likely to be vindicated. Electric cars, solar panels, and cheap space flight are probably not going to be the things we're mad about in a hundred years.
who fucking could have foretold that a super heavy lift semi-solid fuelled launch vehicle to launch a fully reusable orbiter that brings 7 people to orbit along with a mission payload would be more expensive than a non-man-rated cargo and light satellite launch vehicle
i’m no fan of the space shuttle either but this is like saying someone’s an idiot for owning a minivan when they could just use a moped. y'all are real dumb about space travel on here lately
Jeez dude. That is really shitty. No wonder the police beat his ass.
gotta park a block or two away when i drive and get home late (2am)
just as I step out of my car, this big, out-of-breath guy in a weed farm shirt yells at me, “Are you american?”“ or something, and then proceeds to demand I call 911. He’s a businessman, just in from Las Vegas, staying at an Airbnb. Two cops beat him up at the bar and he needs me to call the cops.
*blank look*
“Were you born in this country?”
“… call the cops on the cops?”
He slams his hands on the roof of my car a bunch of times and yells something about millenials and a bunch of sexist stuff. This cycle repeats a couple times, with almost constant eye contact, for a total of about 5 minutes, during which he yells “Hashtag America“ I don’t know how many times.
How neat is this - video capture of Orca whales while hunting seals. Original caption:
pinnsvinn Today we can count ourselves as one of the lucky few to witness killer whale predator behavior. These are Type B killer whales displaying the typical wave predation on a crabeater seal. This seal (who we aptly named Velcro The Wonder Seal, aka Kevin) survived 35 waves by these four whales over the course of almost 2 hours, to finally evade and escape the pod. A seal escaping is almost unheard of, and hadn’t been witnessed by any of the naturalists on board - some with over 30 years of experience in Antarctica. Needless to say the ship was in a state of euphoria after this epic show of willpower and determination on both sides.
My life in a single review. Uber driver is mad at a different Uber driver using the car to drive Uber. So he gives the Getaround app 1 star.
I wrote a previous review that was mostly aimed at Uber drivers, however I neglected to mention that Getaround doesn't take its own business serious. They rent to Uber drivers that are slobs, degenerates and that are desperate enough to SLEEP IN THESE SHARED CARS! 90% of the rentals I've booked have been A COMPLETE embarrassment and has affected my rating. My latest rental smelled like the previous driver had just finished smoking a FAT joint and fresh morning body odor. My first Uber passenger commented on it, the others rode in uncomfortable silence (probably wondering if their driver- me- was high as a kite and decided to skip the shower offered at the local homeless shelter).
I'm still long on Nate Silver though. Like 1) This is just some statistical measure reflecting how often a member votes with trump vs. the trump vote percentage in their district in 2016. So it's not like Nate Silver's gut or anything. 2) You get credit for making a public guess and then not hiding it when it isn't what you expect.
Point being, I much prefer the Silver model of punditry where you make a guess up front and are honest about the results. The alternative is just make up bullshit constantly and never revisit things that you fuck up.
FiveThirtyEight is wild because most of the time it’s pretty conventional and hard to find much fault with their analysis, but when they fuck up it’s crazy shit like being 49 points off on how often
Cory Fucking Gardner
is going to vote to support his party’s president’s agenda.
What's great about unsold luxury apartments is that most of them are built by companies specially created for that purpose and invested in by superrich developers. Basically, if the investors want the best return on their investment, they will eventually sell the things at a loss. So London still gets homes at whatever the market rate is, which helps rents go down. Everyone wins except 1) developers and 2) rich people who bought early and could have saved money waiting. Seems like the target audience of this article would be more excited about this.
More than half of the 1,900 ultra-luxury apartments built in London last year failed to sell, raising fears that the capital will be left with dozens of “posh ghost towers”.
The swanky flats, complete with private gyms, swimming pools and cinema rooms, are lying empty as hundreds of thousands of would-be first-time buyers struggle to find an affordable home.
The total number of unsold luxury new-build homes, which are rarely advertised at less than £1m, has now hit a record high of 3,000 units, as the rich overseas investors they were built for turn their backs on the UK due to Brexit uncertainty and the hike in stamp duty on second homes.
Builders started work last year on 1,900 apartments priced at more than £1,500 per sq ft, but only 900 have sold, according to property data experts Molior London. A typical high-end three-bedroom apartment consists of around 2,000 sq ft, which works out at a sale price of £3m.
There are an extra 14,000 unsold apartments on the market for between £1,000-£1,500 per sq ft. The average price per sq ft across the UK is £211.
Molior says it would take at least three years to sell the glut of ultra-luxury flats if sales continue at their current rate and if no further new-builds are started.
However, ambitious property developers have a further 420 residential towers (each at least 20 storeys high) in the pipeline, says New London Architecture and GL Hearn.
Henry Pryor, a property buying agent, says the London luxury new-build market is “already overstuffed but we’re just building more of them”.
“We’re going to have loads of empty and part-built posh ghost towers,” he says. “They were built as gambling chips for rich overseas investors, but they are no longer interested in the London casino and have moved on.”
Ah, yes, they currently have all of the goofball flags up the US has ever had, including the "Don't tread on me" snake. Never knew they once had the confederate one up as well.
First video is good fiction. Second video is real. Go to 2:24 on the second video and turn your volume up.
Campaign to Stop Killer Robots | Slaughterbots
In response to growing concerns about autonomous weapons, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of AI researchers and advocacy organizations, has released a fictional video that depicts a disturbing future in which lethal autonomous weapons have become cheap and ubiquitous worldwide.
Support for a ban against autonomous weapons has been mounting. On Nov. 2, more than 200 Canadian scientists and more than 100 Australian scientists in academia and industry penned open letters to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull urging them to support the ban.
Earlier this summer, more than 130 leaders of AI companies signed a letter in support of this week’s discussions. These letters follow a 2015 open letter released by the Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 20,000 AI/robotics researchers and others, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.
“Many of the world’s leading AI researchers worry that if these autonomous weapons are ever developed, they could dramatically lower the threshold for armed conflict, ease and cheapen the taking of human life, empower terrorists, and create global instability,” according to an article published by the Future of Life Institute, which funded the video. “The U.S. and other nations have used drones and semi-automated systems to carry out attacks for several years now, but fully removing a human from the loop is at odds with international humanitarian and human rights law.”
“The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is not trying to stifle innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics and it does not wish to ban autonomous systems in the civilian or military world,” explained Noel Sharkey of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. Rather we see an urgent need to prevent automation of the critical functions for selecting targets and applying violent force without human deliberation and to ensure meaningful human control for every attack.”
Nice, dude. Running is like meditation where you don't have to practice in order to be good at it. You just naturally empty your mind of all thought.
last time i ran for exercise was 2011 and I distinctly remember not being able to go quarter mile without having to walk it out and catch my breath. tonight i ran 2 miles in under 20 minutes while conversating and didn’t so much as get a stitch or a cramp or anything. might have to make a more regular thing out of this.
This is the fascinating/tragic thing about the US military. It's really a (highly effective) welfare program for lots of people. You can either sit around in your home town with its garbage economy and opiate problem or you can get free healthcare, education, and a job for basically as long as you want in the air force, army, etc.. Plus it's much more highly respected than most of the jobs that are available in your home town.
One of the strange things about A/B politics is that most liberals who would gladly fund such a program if there were no guns involved. Maybe that's the way to UBI: just expand the national guard, include free education, and then slowly phase out the requirement to fight in wars if they break out.
Crude mortality rates are lower among U.S. military members than their civilian counterparts; service members must be healthy when they enter service and deaths from illnesses are relatively infrequent. From 1990 through 2011, there were 29,213 deaths of U.S. military members while on active duty (crude overall mortality rate: 71.5 per 100,000 person-years). Th e most deaths occurred in years when major combat operations were ongoing; from 2004 to 2007, war-related injuries accounted for approximately 40 percent of all deaths. From 2000 to 2011, two-thirds of all deaths unrelated to war were caused by transportation accidents (n=4,761; 37%), other accidents (n=1,358; 10%) and suicides (n=2,634; 20%). From 2005 to 2011, the proportion of deaths due to suicide increased sharply while the proportion due to transportation accidents generally decreased; as a result in 2010 and 2011, suicides accounted for more deaths of service members than transportation accidents…. In 2005, in the general U.S. population, the crude overall mortality rate among 15-44 year olds was 127.5 per 100,000 p-yrs.
This is beautiful. Khakheperre almost certainly meant "it sucks that everybody is the same", but 4000 years later, the recognition we feel toward what he's saying ironically causes the opposite meaning: "isn't it wild how similar we all are."
The Circle by Dave Eggers is basically the story of the Facebook dream coming to fruition. A++ highly terrifying. Apparently the movie is awful though.
Why did Vikings have ‘Allah’ embroidered into funeral clothes?
A new investigation into the garments - found in 9th and 10th Century graves - has thrown up new insights into contact between the Viking and Muslim worlds.
The breakthrough was made by textile archaeologist Annika Larsson of Uppsala University. To unlock the puzzle, she enlarged the letters and examined them from all angles, including from behind. Read on
sharks fin is banned in california but not not actual shark meat bc theres plenty of “least concern” sharks on this side of the pacific. like ive been to places that served shark tacos and sandwiches and i imagine the meat from the fin could go on those but if you say its specifically shark fin now thats illegal and heinous. wonder why
Ibn Khalawayh (a Persian scholar of Arabic and the Koran) noticed that the Arabs had a thing for the lion. He wrote: “In all the speech of the Arabs and all the books of Arabic philology put together, there are no names for the lion besides what I have written for you, number roughly five hundred names and epithets.“ A selected list includes:
Some of these look like the creatures from pitch black. Like Paraceratherium what in the actual fuck. No wonder we hunted all that bullshit to extinction as soon as possible.
My last weird and awesome skull post was really popular, so I decided to do one about something else I’m excessively interested in: Megafauna! This isn’t at all a comprehensive list of the coolest ones, not by a long shot, so you should definitely look up some of the BBC docs on Youtube or google ones from your continent!
The cave bear! (N. America)
‘Hell Pigs’ (N. America) Actually entelodonts, unrelated to pigs at all and more closely tied to hippos and cetaceans! Dat sagittal crest amirite
The Stag Moose @allosauroid brought to my attention that this is the skull of the
Irish elk, Megaloceros, not a stag moose! (Eurasia) Which stood 6 foot at the shoulder/withers
Platybelodon (widespread) Google artist renditions of these guys, you won’t be disappointed
Barbourofelis! (N. America) Like a smaller smilodon, with much cooler teeth. Look at those incisors!
Megatherium (S. America) Primitive sloths the size of elephants!
Titanus Walleri (N. America) Other continents had equally large if not larger ‘terror birds’
Paraceratherium (Eurasia) One of the largest terrestrial mammals we’ve ever discovered. It was actually a species of hornless rhino! Google artist recs of these guys, too
Diprotodon (Australia) The largest known marsupial, which was the size of a hippopotamus and stood 6 feet tall
I saved Glyptodon (S. America) for last, because these things have some of the weirdest skulls I’ve ever seen. They were technically armadillos, but reached the size of a Volkswagen Beetle!
Was explaining Christianity to a dude who grew up in Turkey today. Protestantism is pretty confusing by itself, but Protestantism x Politics is like triple challenging, so this is quite helpful.
