Your definition for non-sequitur is correct, however the conclusion that Predators are failing to come of age is a logical conclusion of the stated premise. The actual issue, which you pointed out, is that of using a false or faulty premise (that all Predators in the movies are on their first hunts). The validity of an argument isn’t a function of how true a premise is. So you were right that op was wrong in their conclusions, you just mislabeled the issue

I mean, the absolute cheapest place to put it would be DC if the constraint of not moving the capitol is in place. About 4 million federal employees in the US, DC metro area has about 9 million, so plenty of room, plus most of the federal buildings and offices are right there already. Fairly urban and with a reasonably robust public transport system too. Think you were going for someplace like Kansas, but whatever savings you get on real estate evaporate after you have to take into account cost of transportation to and from DC plus building out the new city’s infrastructure

No in the strictest definition of SAD, where the winter and fall depress you. I have reverse seasonal affective disorder, where the same happens to me but in the spring and summer. The sun saps all my energy away and I thrive in the cold and the dark. All of my positive emotions dull from April until around mid-October every single year. Give me snow and clouds any day over shorts and sunlight

Think it’s just a familiar form factor for the product given that most are used to how the former birdsite’s apps (both first and third parties) looked and operated. A few of them are even made by the same developers who had made third party apps. May eventually drift towards something else, but at least for the time being, telling people “instead of logging into this website, you log into this website” and everything else works and looks the same is an easier sell especially during the mass adoption and scaling phase of the platform

My degree and professional training is all in physics. Biggest one for me is that they use “high temperature” when relating to superconductors like we’re going to have superconducting phones next year, when in reality high-T superconductors are still colder than 100 K (-173°C, -280°F). Also they gotta stop flipping out over Water on Mars. That’s so passe, there’s a literal list on wikipedia on how many times that’s happened. On the plus side though, most have just stopped trying to explain anything around physics and instead go for a more “x does y cause physics” approach

Just in case

Swiss Army knife, bottle opener, pocket pen, and most important of all: one of those wavy keys to open toilet paper and paper towel dispensers

In my opinion, most Mountain Goats songs. John Darnielle is an amazing songwriter, and he tackles very difficult subjects, especially in his earlier stuff. The Sunset Tree album is all about growing up with an abusive step-father, Tallahassee about a couple who fall apart, Full Force Galesburg about a small town you can disappear in, etc. Some of my favorites include “The Mess Inside” about two people that can’t find the love they lost, “No Children” about a couple that hate each other, and “Jeff Davis County Blues” about a sort of meditative experience after a breakup. I’d give it all a listen. To go even deeper, the albums All Hail West Texas and In League With Dragons have sort of companion podcast seasons (I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats) where Darnielle and Joseph Fink of Welcome to Nightvale go through each song, the inspiration, the meaning, stuff like that.

I have read receipts on with my wife, but no one else. Too much pressure, especially for someone like me who habitually clears notifications even if I haven’t addressed anything

Depends a lot on your interests! Some good ones I’ve aggregated over the years:

• Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow: Daily links for reading by a very pro-decentralization and free web person
• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: History and Pop Culture, usually one post per week on Friday
• Pedestrian Observations: Public transportation and urban design
• People’s Policy Project: RSS feed for articles from the only crowd funded think tank (Lefty if you’re interested)
• Bartosz Ciechanowski: Great blog with interesting animations, all very well researched. Only downside is that you usually have to use the RSS feed as a method of knowing when the article is posted and following the link to the website, plus he usually only posts one every 3 months or so
• xkcd: Old guard web comics, always fun to read

There are a lot of great RSS feeds out there though! I encourage you to see if your favorite blogs or news sites or things like that also have RSS feeds and suggest consuming them on there (for example I read CBC and Radio Canada exclusively through RSS) as it usually streamlines the whole reading experience.

If you use Apple’s Ecosystem, I would also suggest using MacStories’ Find RSS Feed Shortcut which will grab any available feeds from any website you feed it and let you copy the link to your clipboard to add to your favorite app. Enjoy!

Someone who lives in California not originally from here chiming in. For me personally, I hate it because of the weather. I live in SoCal, which people claim to have good weather, but to me it’s hell. It never rains, the sun is always shining, and it’s always hot while most apartments don’t have AC. This may sound lovely to you, in which case more power to you. I’m the kind of person where the sun saps all energy out of my body and I prefer being cold to warm, so this sucks. Other main downside is housing cost. My 650 square foot one bed apartment in suburban LA costs over $2000 a month and it’s cheap for the size and area. Maybe Northern California is nicer, but SoCal ain’t it

Currently: None. I guess you could swing a semi-benefit that it gives more power to smaller states so they don’t “get overrun” by the big boys, but the way most states decide their electors, this happens anyways and would probably be better without the EC. Unfortunately to get rid of it requires a Constitutional Amendment which is very hard to do in this country (only 27 times in 230 years under the Constitution, 11 of which were proposed with the Constitution). There are a couple sneaky ways states are trying to get around this. I think CGP Grey has a video or two all about the Electoral College if you’re interested

Historically: Actually more than people think. It was difficult to spread information around the nation cause it was really big for the technology at the time. The optimistic idea behind it was that a state could hold their elections, the electors would then be informed what the desires of their electorate would be, then they would spend a month moseying up to the Capital (originally NYC, then Philadelphia, then DC) and once they got there they could then vote for the President using not only the desires of their electorate, but the most up to date political information. The cynical view is that this allowed the wealthy and powerful to elect other wealthy and powerful men to be President. Real history probably places the true reason somewhere in between

Not sure if this qualifies, but the Church of Scientology. Not cause I think it’s got some good points or that I vibe with any of their ideas, I just think everything about the structure to the Bridge to the mind of LRH is super fascinating

But I don’t understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it.

But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.

A couple notes on this. Firstly, just as an argument perspective, this is a burden of proof fallacy. Just because “not-capitalism” may not have a good answer, doesn’t mean capitalism has a good one or even just a better one. I could be mischaracterising your argument, if so my bad, this is just how it reads to me. Secondly, I personally believe that socialism offers a better answer and a good one at that, which all revolves around incentives. A collective-ownership structure has more incentive for social well being, such as avoiding climate disaster, than a purely capitalist structure does.

As a side-note, I also think you’re mischaracterising capitalism by including governing bodies, but you’re doing it in a manner that’s only one logical step away from socialism. By a government placing restrictions on a market or producer, say by defining a carbon emission cap, the market is no longer operating at true efficiency. While not fully capitalist anymore, that’s still okay though as it’s serving a social purpose. Zoom out a little and you can see other markets in which the government should set limits in. Now the whole economy isn’t operating as a true free market. In this case, the government is defining what the social good is, and (at least in democratic nations), the government defines that based on the voice of the people. The problem with this is that it’s reactive. I can pass as many laws as I want saying you can’t emit carbon above a certain level, but I can only enforce it after you’ve gone over that cap at which point the damage is done, and some may make the economic calculation that it’s worth it if you get more profits (fines are in essence “legal for a price” after all). If the government owns the industry, this can be prevented before happening.

Also free markets can exist without capitalism. I think another person somewhere on this thread mentioned worker co-ops, which are not a capitalist institution.

As a parting thought, I would also point out that one of if not the most efficient energy companies in the United States (in terms of energy produced per dollar input) is the TVA, a state-owned enterprise.

For me personally, I’m not necessarily anti-capitalist as a whole; I think it has its place. I think people incorrectly place how old capitalism actually is. Sure in the Medieval Period, people bought and sold goods like how we think of markets, and they even had currency to exchange for it, but it was still much more of a bartering based system. Capitalism itself is also a very cultural phenomenon, only emerging out of Europe (in India for example, capitalist thinking was anathema to the cultural norms and took many years to take hold once the British invaded). In reality, there was a period of time in which all of a sudden, resources in Western Europe and the Americas become suddenly abundant and a system had to be put in place to handle that, and the system was capitalism. Here’s some of the main problems, some of which have been pointed out by others:

1. Capitalism is based off of a system which inherently assumes infinite growth which is not possible

2. Free markets require easy and free access to information to govern things like price setting, but that information is almost impossible to obtain accurately

3. Capitalism even in its purest form is not a complete enough theory for governing an entire economy. Capitalism only has mechanisms for providing resources (money) to workers and capitalists (owners) which leaves out a full third of the population. That last third are non-workers, primarily made up of the old, the disabled, children, students, home caregivers, and temporarily unemployed

4. Capitalism enforces power imbalances in a population that make capitalism less effective. For a market to work most effectively, all parties involved (buyers and sellers) should be on equal footing, but they never are and never can be

5. Less of a functionality point, but I personally believe that there are some things that morally shouldn’t be governed by a market structure such as healthcare or food access

As parting thoughts, I would say that capitalism is not a bad thing in the short term. It’s effective at getting a country going to the point where they can become socialistic in the future. Karl Marx himself based his theories in “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital” on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”. He also said that “capitalism is pregnant with socialism”. Capitalism is a tool to get to an end goal, it isn’t the end all be all system it’s made out to be though, and it’s also not the only tool that can get you there (see the economic theory of developmentalism).

Sorry for the long post, but I thought the detail was necessary.

TL;DR: Not a bad thing in and of itself, but a flawed system it’s time to move on from

Sort of non-tech. Working as an RF Engineer with my Physics degree