Yeah our willingness to sanction Russia and all their oil, plunging europe into shortages kinda falsifies that theory. I wonder what the actual reason is :)
I almost did this in a literature class. I think it was the second day of the class, and we'd read James Joyce's "An Encounter". The prof read aloud sections of a published analysis of the story -- out of some big tome -- and asked us to discuss it. The analysis was so vacuous and absurd that I came inches from simply walking out, which would have been awkward because there were only like 8 students in the class. Mentally, I mapped out my path to the registrar so that I could drop the class and began checking out.
After a bit of classroom discussion, from which I abstained, the professor threw the book in the trash (clang! it was a metal trashcan) and gave a speech about how the analysis was gibberish, and how you can't just make up stuff about what a story says. He then walked us through how you might actually obtain useful insights about what the story means to say. It was apparent he gave that spiel every semester.
Good god "deep thinkers" extrapolating ridiculous meaning from art/literature is a huge pet peeve of mine. Not too long ago I heard an art curator pull statements out of thin air about the political atmosphere of the time(400yrs ago) based on the angle the picture was drawn from. Incredible what a waste of time an art degree is.
The social effort required to leave into a 15 s statement is so high that you would not have done that. Why make grandiose claims about things you won't do? Like, you're telling me no one has ever said anything absurd to you and you've stayed? Bullshit.
Why do people care so much about GDP, the number is higher now than for my parents generation but it is much harder for people now to buy a home/start a family. A recent thought I had is that less durable consumer goods actually increases our gdp by the same factor that it makes us poorer. If you have to replace a refrigerator every 5 years instead of 10 you are spending twice as much to have a fridge but GDP says you are twice as rich.
GDP is kinda like measuring a programmers productivity by LOC production. It is correlated with productivity when you are not judging based on it but once people start optimizing for it it no longer correlated.
> Why do people care so much about GDP, the number is higher now than for my parents generation but it is much harder for people now to buy a home/start a family.
That's true everywhere. Inflation has been low for the last 20 years. Consequently interest rates interest rates have been low, and so asset prices have been spiralling upwards for the last 20 years. Spiralling asset prices means the price of a house is a higher multiple of your yearly income. And yes, if you happen to be at the house buying age at this time in the cycle it's downright unpleasant. We all know interest rates will likely rise, and that will cause a great deal of pain to people who maxed out their borrowings when rates are at record lows. Japan is the spiritual home of low inflation and high asset prices so it's been going on much longer there. But this has been happening in most countries, and most of them have growing populations.
I live in Australia. I find Japan's hand wringing about the "our standard of living is doomed if out population density keeps dropping" downright funny. Japan has slightly worse GDP per capita than us (which I would put down to Australia's abundant natural resources). But when it comes to population density, there is simply no comparison:
Yeah. Why are people so obsessed with increase in GDP? Why does it have to grow all the time? I saw somewhere it's referred to as "rich people's yacht money" and that feels correct with everything going on.
Awesome if true. However it is unlikely we are getting sodomy laws back, republicans never actually get wins. They just exist to slow down the lefts agenda. Not that long ago Obama publicly said that he thought gay marriage should never be legal, something he obviously did not believe. I think people forget just how much things have changed in the last 10 year.
Could you elaborate on what you mean? The intention is not to have a finished configuration that requires no more work, but to provide a template on which further customizations can be made.
Yes slave is derived from the word slav as they were the victims of the brutal ottoman slave trade for hundreds of years. We should be nicer to our slavic bretheren.
I recently had an experience where I specifically ordered a part from the US for fast shipping. Something like a week or two later there was no activity on the shipping label, turned out it was being shipped from China. I called customer support and was told they would give me a refund. So I bought a replacement under the assumption the refund would process. The part mysteriously showed up the next day even though the shipping label said it was still in china.
I eventually got my refund and returned the product to seller, but it took something like 4 hours of phone calls over 11 different calls and 3 weeks and threatening a charge back. I haven't shopped at newegg since then and have been using Amazon since. Not ideal but they are much more reasonable about returns.
