ckarmann's comments

Off the top of my head:

- Only take a plane when absolutely necessary.

- Live in a city, sell your car and take public transport

- Reduce meat consumption (at least beef and lamb which are a lot worse than the others). You don't need to eat meat every single day. Also try tofu, tempeh and seitan; you may find you like them.

- Vote with this topic in mind, even if it might hurt you financially.

I don't know how people hired and paid by the government in place are automatically less suspicious than volunteers who just want to help the community. Yes, I have the opposite bias :)

In France the counting process is open and anyone can observe it and report any irregularity. Also the way it is done, you have to have a conspiracy of a least 6 people if you want to meddle the result.

In practice, I've observed that rather than fanatics, volunteers are usually mild people who are just doing the work as a nice sunday activity who doubles as a democratic tradition. They are the same people you see picking up trash or doing other menial work for the community. Of course, my sampling rate is quite low, so take that as a grain of salt.

Stupid question: can you watch it if you have arachnophobia yourself?

For me one of the weirdest use of this book was a vegan (and animal rights supporter) friend who copy/pasted on Facebook the speech of Old Major, the eldest pig who incite the Revolution, who was explaining to the animals how bad the farmer was treating them. For her it was perfectly expressing her feeling that farming animals was a monstrosity and she was completely ignoring that the speech was designed by the pig to manipulate the listeners (the other animals) and that it was a metaphor of communism. So for her, the issue was indeed the farmer, not as symbol of capitalism, but simply as a farmer exploiting living beings. All symbolism was evacuated and all that remained was a rousing speech for animal rights.

I suppose all book interpretation eventually shows the ideology of the reader. It doesn't even have to respect the presumed intention of Orwell who, from what I know, never expressed any support for veganism or actual animal rights.

I'm French and when I hear about this kind of things in the USA, I wonder why this data even exists? Why do people register as Democrat or Republican in the first place and why do the laws even allow it? I understand that it facilitates the organisation by the state of the primary elections. But it so obviously goes against basic principles of confidentiality of vote that it far outweighs the purposed benefits. And why don't the parties organize their own primaries?

I team up with two colleagues and we get one such box every month, delivered at work, that we share. It's not very expensive (10$ per month per person, where I live that's the price of one takeout) and just a bit too much candy.

An actual lottery is usually low-effort: you buy a ticket, scratch something or pick numbers, that's all. So even though you'll probably never win, you don't lose much. Working thousands of hours is not like that.

The equivalent of lottery with video games would be spamming app markets with shitty games made in a week-end, hoping it catches up somehow. One day someone will make another Flappy Bird, but it will probably not be you.

Stars that can produce elements up to iron and spread it through a supernova are massive and have relatively short lifespans of 10-30 million years. Since the Universe is 14 billion years old, we have had already more than a hundred generations of such stars before a 10-billion years-old planet has formed, so the necessary elements are probably there.

I lived one year in Sweden (in Lund, near Malmö). Easily one of the two nicest places I ever lived in. People are warm and welcoming. And in my experience at least, you can delve into arguments about society and politics like anywhere else, or even better because it doesn't end up with people mad at each other for having a different worldview like in the USA or in France (again, my experience).

I find strange this assumption I sometimes read here that having a sense of collective means losing your individuality.

Actually at this time, when Haussmann started its transformation of Paris, people though that the circulation of air was very important for health, and that was one of the reasons of widening the streets and limiting the height of buildings, but the main reason was for allowing traffic of goods and people, and to improve security and control of the population (revolts in Paris had made 3 different political regimes collapse in less than 70 years before that).

Today people still value seeing the sky and freedom of movement. I have not been everywhere in North America but usually I saw that big buildings mean wide streets around them.

Except if you plan to build an underground city, people still have to walk from/to the metro station to/from wherever they live or work. And people also still strangely favor having a bit of sunlight.

As a French living now in Canada, Paris streets are narrow in general, and especially the sidewalks are ridiculous, most of the space is for cars. One of the first thing to do would be to reclaim that street space for pedestrians and cyclists, which is an ongoing, slow and painful battle.

Not saying you are totally wrong but the federal income tax has been already existing for decades at this time and the max and min rates actually went down during the prohibition era (per wikipedia). It only went up in 1932 a year before its repeal following the start of the Great depression. If it was a goal of the prohibitionists to hike up that tax it was largely unsuccessful.

In France there is a "Labour court" (conseil de Prud'hommes) that handle disputes around employment contract, including termination of it. The court is independent of the company, it's a public institution. There is no jury, but four elected non-professional judges, two of them represent employers, the remaining two represent employees.

And if you're not happy with their decision, you can appeal to a higher administrative court, with professional judges.

But we don't have ranges. It's not like a physical measurement where we know that the actual value falls in a certain range with a Gaussian distribution. In history we have disparate sources, often contradicting each other when you have more than one and historians try to figure out which is the most reliable. So all you can say is that you have approximations. It's not "frivolous", they are figures that are interesting for themselves because you can still see trends (like which Empire was dominant, or how depopulation starts to creep down in the late Roman Empire), with the caveat that the figures are "to the best of our knowledge".

You can not sum like this the populations on the table, because it does not cover the same things all the time. A couple of problems for example:

- When a kingdom/empire spreads to Africa and Asia, the whole population of the country is counted even though only a part of is in Europe. You can observe that with Muslim caliphates who suddenly appear in the table like Umayyad Caliphate with 29 millions people in 711 when it was not in the table the year before. Between 392 and 484, the Roman Empire lost North Africa and the Middle East, that counts for million of peoples.

- Some populations on the map are not represented in the table when they should have a good amount of people, maybe because we don't have estimates of them? I am thinking of the Kingdom of Soissons and the Alemanni in 484. These places are in the ancient Gauls and were fairly populated.

On top of that, it was the time known as "Migration Period" where a lot of people moved around (some going out of Europe) and a lot of war happened (hence a lot of death). The population of Western Europe was going down already in the 4th century and it accelerated with the breakdown of the Empire and the rule of law, people started to leave cities and move to the countryside, trade plunged and food was scarce.

Both situations happened. Rich families had slave and non-slave educators who would teach to the family children and to the slave children. A lot of slaves in Antiquity were given the occupation of shopkeepers, clerks or even lawyers, so they needed to be educated.

Also the situation of slaves was quite fluid: you could be a slave by birth, but you could have been captured in war and conquest or you could have simply failed to pay your debts. Skilled slaves often had the possibility to earn some money and buy back their freedom.

On the other hand, there were also unskilled slaves, often worked to death in mines or fields.

While the article mentions Pattern Matching, it seems to be something for the distant future. I was referring changes of Java 11, which seems to me the focus of the article.

These are just syntactic sugar, not going to change much to the way Java programs are coded. I found these changes rather tame compared to historical ones. Java 8 (lambdas), Java 5 (generics, annotations) and Java 1.1 (inner/anonymous classes, reflection) were far more disruptive.

About the verbs used as nouns, I work with a team based in China, and they do that all the time (and sometimes they used nouns as verbs). I know nothing of Mandarin but maybe it's a thing common in this language that they do uncounsciously when they speak English.

Taxes don't pay the same thing in dense cities as in the suburbs. Public transport for example: in a dense city taxes pay for bus, subways, tramways, bike lanes, sometimes subsidized bike sharing. In a lot of suburbs none of this make sense because everyone has to have a car anyway, so people only pay for roads. In the end, what you pay for your car could very well be higher than the differential in taxes. That's how the dense city is more "efficient".

More over, people living in a suburb only pay for a part of the roads they use in their daily commute. My (dense) borough actually did a study that showed 80% of the traffic going through our streets were people who would not stop there, for example because they are commuting between a suburb and the city center nearby. So city dwellers pay for roads that are mostly used by other people. And since the traffic we get this way is quite intense, there's a good amount of road repair each year.