Antibiotics are some 90 years old. Before then, STDs were a death sentence.
K-selection is civilization. r-selection is feralization. One of the goals of religion was to tame r-selected behaviors and to encourage K-selected behaviors.
> the message that some politicians have been using ("trade agreements are evil!" "immigration is bad!" "the EU is making us abuse you!") has taken hold
Or, perhaps, the dissatisfaction was there all along, and the politicians are merely exploiting the pain of a faction of the electorate. Humans are tribal. They don't become tribal overnight because a politician told them to do so.
Or, alternatively, reproduce abundantly and use your children to make alliances with families that actually do matter.
You're advocating having few children in a thread related to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom whose founder had 20+ wives and some 100 children. That is how all the warring clans in the Arabian Peninsula were united and pacified: by marriage.
It's the other way around: you need to prove that what he says is merely feel-good baloney.
Otherwise, every person is insincere, including both yourself and I.
Side anecdote: While I haven't met and talked with the guy in person, I know a person who has. Her impressions of him was that he was an honest man who cared about his country.
Take what people say with a grain of salt unless there is reliable source that backs them up.
It is safe to assume that people with non-trivial power are very seldom sincere when making public statements.
If Dubai's elite's descendants will be riding camels some decades from now, then why does Dubai have a national wealth fund?
The truth is that Dubai's wealth fund may invest in YC or in VC funds, and some of those mocking Dubai's future will be working indirectly for the elites that run Dubai. To distract people from such master-slave reality, a bit of self-deprecation can be charming.
You're living in a fantasy world in which people you admire matter. Try to make fertilizers out of "hi-tech services". Try to eat "renewables". Inventors, scientists and engineers haven't really mattered much since WWII and the Cold War.
> Inventors, scientists and engineers haven't really mattered much since WWII and the Cold War.
What has mattered more? The only reason oil is valuable is because it powers our technology. The contribution of agriculture to global GDP is about 4%. Yes you can't eat a smartphone but absolutely anybody sound in mind and body can grow food. Not so many can design smartphones. And they do matter[0].
It's surprisingly difficult to grow food at the rate of 8.5 tonnes per hectare (Belgium) without petroleum-fueled water pumps, tractors, and harvesters, natural-gas based ammonia fertiliser, fossil-fuel-obtained potash and phosphate, fossil-fuel-based pesticides. Or water and arable land.
Take all that away and you're Zimbabwe, with 0.3 tonnes.
Humans already command or control some 25-40% of all primary plant production (NPP, or the photosynthetic ceiling), much of that made possible through modern mechanised architecture.
In the works already mentioned (Smil, Weissenbacher), the immense increases in ag productivity through such advances as assisted irrigation, mechanised plows, disks, seed drills, fertiliser, harvesters, etc., etc., are addressed in detail.
GDP, and economic prices generally, are exceptionally poor measures of net contribution and value. (Or of true real costs.)
Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr, otherwise quite a technological optimist, discusses the failure of GDP to capture the true impacts of, say, antibiotics or vaccines. Their price-based contributions to GDP are de minimus, but their impacts on overall well-being are tremendous.
Quoting Samuelson, if a man marries his maid, the GDP goes down. That is how smart GDP-based arguments are. Wait until the population gets close to the carrying capacity again, and let's see how your GDP argument holds.
Perhaps you only know tech oligarchs. But if you look at the list of billionaires, you find also mining oligarchs and fossil fuel oligarchs. So much for the argument that raw materials do not matter...
Physicists invented nuclear racketeering, which made them celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s. We live in the age of the MBA, not in the age of the scientist. That golden age is gone, unfortunately.
He absolutely dominated news coverage, with over twice the airtime devoted him than Clinton, 1144 minutes vs. 506. Andrew Tyndell produces an annual report of major commercial TV news coverage:
http://tyndallreport.com/yearinreview2016/
He gained insane amounts of "earned coverage" -- airtime obtained without paying for it. Over $2 billion.
however how much of his coverage was positive versus her positive coverage?
If anything the press's doubling down against him helped him because it also showed independents how in bed the press had become with one party.
Love him or hate he has a personality and he correctly realized that with a highly negative press it was best to portray them as the establishment as well.
The part I respect is he stomped on all three establishments which do their best to control Washington (RNC, DNC, and the Press).
This is an indirect measure, but shows major themes in discussion of news on Twitter, by Echelong Insights. Included, and pictured, is Twitter discussion of 17 major election-related stories. Three of these, the Electoral College, Fake News, and Steve Bannon, are principally or completely post election day phenomena, but the remaining 14 occur during the election cycle.
The two most dominant stories -- Wikileaks/Hacking (33.083m) and Clinton's Email (21.124m) stories dwarf the others (Deplorables, 5.989m being the runner-up). None of the Trump negative stories (Tapes, Taxes, Melania's speech, Paul Manafort, Trump University) come close, and several discussions which could have appeared quite notably don't: Donald Trump's live speech requesting that Russia hack his opponent's emails, or Clinton's claims that Trump would be Putin's puppet. These make absolutely no appearance here -- though whether that represents poor methodology or lack of actual impact isn't clear.
Keep in mind that Twitter isn't a public opinion survey, nor is it front-of-mind awareness of news. It's a proxy for both, and proxies can be useful or deceptive.
If there's an element here that's most powerful and useful, it's the relationship between leading and non-leading items: power relations are strong. Again, from first to third ranking here is a five-fold reduction in tweets. From first to 17th, a 25-fold reduction of interest and attention, at least on Twitter.
Given that the utterly misleading emails story dominated both Clinton coverage aand polling of voter awareness, whilst Trump's Russian connections and worse continuously were swept under the rug,vry much of it.
I was a bit inaccurate there. I meant only the candidates who spend on the order of republican and democrat nominees. Independents can't afford to and they don't get votes. Except one or two guys in the 90's/2000's who got a big share at a huge financial expense.
Who even knows the name of any independent candidate? They don't have advertising to tell us what they stand for or make us believe they're big enough to win.
The alternative explanation is that candidates who run as independent aren't popular enough to garner either donations or votes. If they were, they could have won the primaries for one of the major parties. Like Trump did, certainly no favourite of the Republican establishment.
If the election had been about the popular vote, both campaigns would have been run totally differently. So you can't really infer anything from her winning the popular vote.
Popular vote doesn't mean much because nobody optimized for it. It's like saying one soccer team won over the other because they touched the ball more times. But that's not the goal of the game, so it proves no point.
As others have already pointed out, the fact that Clinton won a plurality of popular vote in and of itself doesn't matter very much, other than to add support to the idea that the country is pretty divided and that neither side would have had any sort of mandate.
Debatable. Take these sites with grains of salt, but leave with the idea that the results of each in combination taken with salt still skew the results ALOT.
Would you expand on this? By most voters do you mean registered voters? Or that Clinton didn't win a majority? From the popular vote results I've seen, Clinton won a plurality of the votes. Not that the popular vote determines the outcome of the election.
From the point of view of how electoral votes are decided (excluding faithless electors), it is determined by plurality, not majority. A state's electoral votes go to the candidate who receives the most votes (a plurality), not the one who receives more than half (a majority).
Isn't losing an election by running it wrong worse than Win running it right? People are pointing Clinton and DNC incompetence as merit. California alone is responsible for this "magnitude", and it only proves how good was Trump' strategy.
