Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

A dozen cosmere novels is what, four years of writing for him?

No?

Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.

Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member proportional and local 3-5 member districts elected via STV like they do in Ireland.

Emacs is a bunch older than common lisp.

One of its more idiosyncratic design decisions was using dynamic scope, rather than lexical scope. They did add in per-file lexical scope, though.

It also just doesn’t implement a lot of common lisp’s standard library.

Emacs unfortunately uses Emacs lisp, not common lisp or scheme.

If you’re worried about the cost, have you looked into getting it through your library? That’s how I did it.

Merriam Webster is a descriptive dictionary. They don’t tell you how words “should” be used, they say how words are used.

Using literally as an intensifier goes back literal centuries. The earliest written citation we’ve found of that usage goes back to 1769. It can be found everywhere from Dickens to Brontë.

It’s also hardly the first word to go on a similar path towards becoming an intensifier. Very originally meant “genuine”, really meant “in fact”, absolutely meant “completely”, etc.

But who complains about sentences like “I was really bored to death”, or “I was absolutely rooted to the ground”? Does saying “it’s very cold” just mean “it is a genuine fact that it is cold”?

Literally still means what it means. You can’t use literally to mean “yellow”, for example. People aren’t generally confused when they come across the word.

Prescriptivism is mostly just an unprincipled mishmash of shibboleths someone pulled out of their rear end hundreds of years ago, classism, and knee-jerk reactions against language change.

For example - why do people distinguish less vs fewer to refer to countable vs uncountable nouns? Because someone wrote in 1770 that they thought that distinction was elegant, despite not actually reflecting the way English at the time was spoken.

Why is ain’t “not a word”? Because it originated in the speech of poor people, and was used less commonly by rich people. People roll their eyes at new business-speak because it comes from rich, powerful people, but look down their nose at language innovations from poor hillbillies and other disfavored groups.

And you can find writings from old prescriptivists complaining about literally every change in the language, such as hating the new ambigious use of singular ‘you’ when ‘thou’ was perfectly good and unambiguous or hating phrases like ‘very pleased’.

Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.

Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn’t really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.

Soy milk is great, but it’s not a good milk substitute.

It should taste beany, and that’s not really what I want with my cereal. A Chinese cruller, on the other hand…

What do you imagine happens to old dairy cattle? We just compost them?

Dairy cattle absolutely get slaughtered for food. If you eat them, though, they were probably in your burger or hotdog.

That’s because older animals are less tender than young animals, and consumers prefer tender meat.

If you knead bread by hand, it’ll have some human DNA in it from e.g your skin cells. It’s almost impossible to cook or process food while preventing it from getting literally any human cells into it, because humans are shedding cells and DNA literally all the time. You can wear gloves, hairnets, and frequently mop up, but eliminating the problem entirely is hard.

Both a vegetarian burger and a beef burger are probably going to have more human DNA in it than either a steak or a pot of black beans would.

Pigs and chickens don’t eat air, you know.

70% of US soy becomes animal feed. Some of the rest is used industrially, or becomes biodisel. Relatively little US soy becomes soy sauce, tofu, etc.

Soy subsidies, in practice, mostly function as a chicken and pork subsidy.

You’ll notice that we heavily subsidize animal feed crops like corn and soy, and spend much less money subsidizing fruits and veggies, nuts, and other legumes like black beans or lentils.

No.

Honey bees are dying because of parasites and pests, pathogens, poor nutrition, and sublethal exposure to pesticides.

It’s not just one thing. Most of those things on their own won’t even kill them. For example, Varroa mites will kill an already weakened hive, but not a healthy one.

Lawns absolutely contribute to poor nutrition, due to habitat loss. Same with all the mowed grass we have everywhere in suburbia. Monocropped agriculture does as well, because bees do best with a variety of flowers.

I’ve let the back part of my property grow wild the past couple years, and it’s currently filled with a ton of goldenrod, chicory, and a bunch of other random flowers. You would not beleive the number of honeybees I’ve seen back there at once, or how loud the buzz was.

Similarly, there’s a reason I see a ton of fireflys in my yard, but I see almost none in my neighbors yards. It’s because they’re well- manicured green wastelands

But I guess non-action and bootlicking while we wait for our thoroughly bribed politicians to do nothing is better.

Nation-wide action, of course, is best. Something like the green new deal or even a market-based solution like cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.

On a local level, though, there’s a lot of action that can be done.

Nation-wide, the biggest category of carbon emissions is transportation, at 28% of all emissions. Over half of all transportation-related emissions are from cars and trucks.

The amount people drive is closely tied to local urban design, which comes down largely to local zoning regulations and infrastructure design. Those are primarily impacted by the people who show up at town meetings and vote.

Advocate for walkable, mixed-use zoning, improved bike infrastructure, etc. Most people aren’t “drivers”, “cyclists” or “public transit riders”, they’re people who want to get from point A to point B as easily as possible and will take whatever is best.

The problem with gas stations isn’t their LCD screens.

A large number of gas stations are franchises. Breaking the LCD screens hurts the local franchise owner, not whichever fossil fuel company they’re working with.

More to the point, breaking LCD screens accomplishes absolutely nothing. Most people don’t drive because they love driving, they drive because of zoning, sprawl and a lack of reasonable alternatives. If you get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure without fixing the underlying car dependency, they’ll be stuck at home.

Being a much better language than Java isn’t exactly a high bar.

Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.

Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off

Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.