loafa's comments

Maybe, but for those of us who aren't experts on constitutional law, it's difficult to ascertain exactly who is in the right, we have to decide which self-proclaimed experts to believe.

For this reason it's helpful to understand the motives of those putting forth a particular argument.

I have a rule, and I think it's a good one. When I hear some political rhetoric I ask myself "if the parties were reversed would this person still be saying the same thing?" If the answer is no, I ignore that person. This cuts out about 97% of all political discussion and saves a lot of time.

Fair enough, but the EPA twitter account isn't exactly mission-critical for anyone, it can afford to not tweet for a little while.

Also I don't think it's particularly ironic that the President of the United States gets certain privileges which his subordinates don't.

Or more likely, if you're just a super-hater of Trump and/or Republicans and feel the need to claim that every single decision is terrible, disastrous, stupid etc. Let's face it, roughly 80% of political discourse comes down to this, from one side or another, and can safely be ignored.

What's with the "actually" in the title?

It seems to me that if a group of people did come across some new land and decide to vote on what to do with it, they'd immediately vote to subdivide it amongst themselves. Leave some bits as public land for roads and parks and other stuff, and subdivide the rest equally so that families can build their own houses and grow their own crops or whatever with confidence.

Of course within a few generations of inheritances and sales that equitable distribution of land will no longer look like that at all.

A wall one mile long to protect one guy from trespassers is reasonable but a wall two thousand miles long to protect 250 million people is ridiculous, according to Zuck.

"More teachers" is a naive solution too. It's what teachers' unions are always pushing for, but it's not well correlated with improved outcomes.

One thing that does work: segregating students by ability.

But the biggest cities in the world have problems with foot traffic and subway traffic.

I'm not sure that they still employ "pushers" in Tokyo but they very well might.

And that's with the benefit of Japanese culture where people are generally clean and polite. Japanese density plus American social problems sounds hellish.

If Parliament refuses to carry out the people's wishes, would this be a case in which the Queen would be justified in stepping in?

But an acre of land in the suburbs costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, whereas an acre of land in a normal agricultural area far from a city costs a few thousand dollars.

Well, it's not that equivalent a situation. I'd feel personally responsible for the particular set of individuals killed by the genie rather than some other set of individuals. That's too much responsibility for me, I didn't ask for this crap, I should know better than to trust random genie bargains.

I think you're making an error there somewhere, possibly mixing calorie yields per year with human requirements per day.

Divide that by 365 for a more realistic estimate. About 60 people per acre if you can maintain the world record yield, or about 15 with the mean US yield.

I'm a pretty big fan of realclearpolitics, which makes a point of alternating between links from opposite perspectives in its news section, often making for amusing juxtapositions.

Unfortunately most people aren't interested in breaking out of their filter bubbles --- after all, those people on the other side of politics are just so stupid, and wrong, and probably evil, so why listen to them?

The most land-efficient crop you can grow in the US is corn, at 15 million calories per acre. (In warmer climates sugar cane edges it out with about 17 million calories per acre). Your one-acre farm could feed about fifteen people, not one thousand, and that's if people could live on corn alone.

If you want to improve agricultural technology I'd suggest finding and talking to some farmers and finding out what they want, rather than starting from a clean sheet and an idea of what a science fictiony farm ought to look like.

Why wouldn't it just be genetically related like so many other diseases whose prevalence vary by race?

No it isn't, and if you believe it is then you've been watching fake news. Only the portion of PP's budget that comes from the Federal Govt is being cut.

More of a craft than an art. Sometimes it's more like woodworking, sometimes it's more like plumbing, but it's rarely anything like painting.

It's sad that the hysteria over the small number of deaths that may eventually be attributable to the Fukushima power plant tends to overshadow the other ten thousand people who died in that catastrophe from less media-friendly means.

You're not "forced" to work by other people though, you're forced to work by thermodynamics.

Our cousins the plants can photosynthesise, but we poor sods in Kingdom Animalia have to work for our food one way or another. While my hunter/gatherer and subsistence farmer ancestors had to work all day every day to get enough food to eat, I'm sure they'd be pretty envious of the fact that I could reliably eat for a week on the back of one hour's work in an air-conditioned office.

I know that things have changed since I was a kid in the 80s and suburban parents are no longer happy sending their kids outside to roam the streets unsupervised.

But surely even back in the day, parents wouldn't have sent young children to hang out unsupervised in Central Park?