MetaFilter

All washed down with a nice Tiglath Pilsner?
posted to MetaFilter by Devonian at 9:05 AM on January 5, 2016

Goes great with Rosetta Scones.
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 8:36 AM on January 5, 2016

The perfect dessert after a meal of Ashurbanipulled pork and Gilgamashed potatoes.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 8:31 AM on January 5, 2016

Drinking water, schminking water! We need cheap oil, amirite?
posted to MetaFilter by entropicamericana at 9:13 AM on January 4, 2016

I think the introvert/ extrovert discussion is a bizarre, victim-blamey derail, and I find it really distasteful. There is no reason to believe that ageism and sexism are caused by older women failing to behave the way you think they should.
posted to MetaFilter by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:50 PM on January 2, 2016

Well, that would be illegal age discrimination, too. Also gender.
posted by Mitrovarr at 1:10 PM on January 2

Ahhh, the majestic equality of the law.

What is the best way to establish this sort of collective of the excluded? What organizational tools are available to make sure the excluded maintain control over their organizations? Because law is rigged up to prefer insiders, insiders can set up... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:28 PM on January 2, 2016

It's about time we hammer the "not employees, contractors" dodge into the ground so hard that companies finally get the sense to accept from the get go that they are abusiness, not a clever rentier dodge.

One of the worst responses that we're now seeing to that dodge getting called out is "well, we need a middle road for these companies between employee and contractor."

No.

We... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by NoxAeternum at 8:41 AM on December 31, 2015

Okay, non-rhetorically, guys, how the fuck do we stop this from happening?

Man hands on misery to man; it deepens like the coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.
posted to MetaFilter by Daily Alice at 8:38 PM on August 5, 2015

Oh, and more on track: springlike conditions in midwinter with a cold snap possible before the actual spring is an agricultural disaster waiting to happen, isn't it?
posted to MetaFilter by Grangousier at 7:31 AM on December 24, 2015

the singularity won't save you

Oh the singularity's not going to save you. Far from it, it pretty much obviates this whole song.

The gestalt post-intelligence will probably humor-reflex at the notion it was the Industrial Revolution or some other hairless-ape social-historical event which made individuals into cogs in the machine or bricks in the wall. Won't Hank Green be surprised... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by XMLicious at 3:41 AM on December 23, 2015

So, this technology has been used by the feds for twenty years...
has society collapsed yet?! Or has it mostly just made it easier to catch felons like Rigmaiden, who thought they were untouchable?

I always keep thinking about how Elliot Spitzer who was willing to take on Wall Street and white collar crime was taken down in a prostitution bust by anti-terrorist financial surveillance right before the financial collapse.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by srboisvert at 6:34 AM on December 18, 2015

When will the idea that this is the way everything should work die out?

When all you have is a hammer MBA, everything looks like a nail business.
posted to MetaFilter by Kirth Gerson at 4:34 AM on December 17, 2015

"Run it like a business" should always be interpreted as "make sure somebody makes a shit ton of money while everyone else suffers."

"Run it like a business" is inherently inefficient. Business requires profit, which is a wasteful assignation of resources that running something like a charity, or public body, or anything but a damn business does not require. Whatever a business can do, you can do it better by doing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dysk at 2:53 AM on December 17, 2015

Oh and also, though, the Republican party is in a real weird place right now, and would be even if it weren't for the Trump gang. Ever since Obama's first election the Republicans have been sliding toward the right by a process wherein:

A schismatic group (typically Tea Party-identified) breaks to the right of the rest of the Republican electeds, daring them to followThe mainstream party makes noises about not following, but eventually breaks down and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:06 PM on December 15, 2015

I wish people would understand that for many of us complaining about these movies, it's not about fear of change and it's not because we can't enjoy bad movies or fun action-packed spectacles. It's because of the particular direction of this change, and the fact that there are hundreds of dumb action-packed spectacles already. Star Trek played a unique role in SF that has not been replaced by other narratives, much less augmented by reboots of other franchises that change them in the Star Trek... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by chortly at 4:54 PM on December 14, 2015

Peoria hasn't gentrified; it is still suburbanizing, and the chuckleheads on the city council continue to encourage a sprawly, car-centric, white-flight pattern of development that draws tax dollars off of the central business district and older neighborhoods, and pumps them out into economically inefficient suburban-style development on the far fringe of the city which cost far more in utility and road maintenance than they pay in property taxes, but they shriek bitterly that they pay more on... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Eyebrows McGee at 11:43 AM on December 10, 2015

John Roberts: “What ‘unique perspective’ does a minority student bring to a physics class?”

Zero.
Vedic mathematics.
Rocketry.


Lets not let our blinkers give us tunnel vision on what "minority" means in this context.
posted to MetaFilter by infini at 8:19 AM on December 10, 2015

I've been reading about this for years and I'm still stuck. Interactive anthropomorphism with robots sounds like the future we want but reality smacks us in the face. I think that robots with realistic faces in a physical form will take a back seat for a while. Instead, AI or VI robots will probably have a high definition screen about the size of an ipad with a 3D rendered face to be whatever appeals to the user.
posted to MetaFilter by Muncle at 7:27 PM on December 6, 2015

Jacqueline: here's one:

Gun insurance. Like car insurance, fire insurance, liability insurance. You have to pay a different policy for each gun you want to own. Different guns command different rates- an assault rifle will have higher premiums.

Like all insurance, your premiums will vary on your demographics. Isolated loners can expect higher premiums, due to their propensity for suicide/mass shootings.

We all have to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by LeRoienJaune at 12:59 AM on December 3, 2015

America's gun problem is completely unique: Why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change?

Nothing changes because guns are the means by which the right will regain control of the country if and when voter suppression, election fraud, Gerrymandering, and de facto control of the mainstream media are no longer enough -- and they are fully aware of that.
posted to MetaFilter by jamjam at 10:35 PM on December 2, 2015

I'm all for handing out tax breaks to lure businesses into a depressed area or build stadiums or what have you - but ONLY if the deal means the company pays for education. And not academies or charter schools, free public education. As in, "you pay half what you normally would in taxes, but all of that cash goes towards our local public school system. Every cent."

You realize that if they just paid their taxes like normal, they'd be funding... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zachlipton at 1:48 PM on December 2, 2015

It also doesn't apply to the hundreds if not thousands of contractors who actually work in Silicon Valley as essentially perma-lancers for Apple who aren't getting any RSUs.

This is something that really needs to be illegal. There are a lot of people who are absolutely full-time workers in every way that benefits management, but then the bosses call them "contractors" and it's like a magic wand was waved and now those workers have no rights,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by IAmUnaware at 4:37 AM on December 1, 2015

I'm self employed and when not procrastinating, I'm a goddamned slave driver. You don't need a "boss" to ruin your life.
posted to MetaFilter by bonobothegreat at 7:45 PM on November 30, 2015

I do taxes. What these things play on is how mind-bendingly scared people are of the IRS. We have to reassure them all the time that even when you owe back taxes and stuff, the IRS is one of the easiest creditors to deal with. The interest rates are not insane, and it's easy to get a reasonable payment plan, and even when you've done incredibly stupid stuff, they take forever and a half to get around to actually seizing anything. And we're talking there about things like failure to deposit... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Sequence at 6:08 PM on November 25, 2015

If I start a company and can talk someone into giving me $10,000 for 1% of the company, then I can pretend the company is worth $1 million, even if I could never convince 99 other people to do the same thing. This is ridiculous.
posted to MetaFilter by grouse at 2:07 PM on November 20, 2015

What the hell. A few people have asked, so here's some images regarding my fake tooth, and horrible natural dentition. If mods want to delete, that's fine.
posted to MetaFilter by yesster at 1:09 PM on November 18, 2015

Who would believe that this project would be delayed because 1900-year-old scrolls' "owners" are anxious to preserve their intellectual property rights in text that they cannot read and which might be truly unreadable?

Without strong copyright protections what incentive do ancient greeks have to produce more scrolls?
posted to MetaFilter by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:28 PM on November 17, 2015

Pwnguin, it isn't always that simple. One of the big problems is genes which are beneficial if heteryzygous but deadly when homozygous. The two best examples of that are the gene for cystic fibrosis and the one for sickle cell disease.

If you have one of the sickle cell genes but its mate is normal, then you have a high resistance to malaria.

If you have one cystic fibrosis gene and its mate is normal, then you are much more likely to survive... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Chocolate Pickle at 12:44 AM on November 16, 2015

Nous sommes tous Francais.
posted to MetaFilter by Ruki at 4:03 PM on November 13, 2015

In fairness, though, digging a few holes after traveling 230 million kilometers or so seems more on the level of a minor inconvenience, relatively speaking.

~400 days at low/micro gravity. You're not going to have much strength for a shovel. So, you're either carrying many power driven tools (which means you need that much more mass in orbit and that much more power on the surface, and the solar flux is lower....) or you're going to need to send robots... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by eriko at 8:03 AM on November 10, 2015

I'm in the process of moving into another too-small apartment with my family of four in a berserk housing market, and have yet to flip over a single car, so ...

That's because you're just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. (Me too, FWIW.)
posted to MetaFilter by LastOfHisKind at 6:23 AM on November 8, 2015

I mean, of course we need police. We've got laws, they've got to be enforced.

We need police? We got by for a good long while with laws and without police. Just because we've been police-ridden for the past two hundred years doesn't mean we always have to be.

I mean, this isn't entirely snark. I would propose interrogating that little sentence above, the one that goes "We've got laws,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:27 AM on November 1, 2015

They expect an unchanging America that will always look like their memories of growing up, when segregation was not only de facto but even de jure. They reflexively attribute the current ills of society to this change, while nostalgically suppressing the bad aspects of those bygone days. It is exactly this fear and nostalgia that Trump and the rest of the GOP are exploiting, either knowingly or because they share the same emotions.

Fighting the Good... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 3:00 AM on October 24, 2015

if they try to put you in a fucking debtor's prison you have every right to run to the hills and live under an assumed identity. No one should feel obligated to a system that's trying to kill or enslave them.

todo: set up a new underground railroad to get people safely away from the monsters who criminalize debt.
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:12 PM on October 22, 2015

The terrorists really did win.

Hijacking a couple of planes. That's all it takes to send a country into a decades-long spiral of fear and paranoia and ready surrender of liberties in exchange for imagined security.
posted to MetaFilter by escape from the potato planet at 5:00 AM on October 21, 2015

Never underestimate the average American's ability to give zero fucks until they're directly affected by a thing. Everyone's a rugged individualist until the exact moment they're not.
posted to MetaFilter by echocollate at 2:40 PM on October 18, 2015

It's ok, unions and labor movements are no longer needed. Our benevolent tycoons will figure it out for us!
posted to MetaFilter by blue_beetle at 2:09 PM on October 18, 2015

At least he wasn't a Moby dick.

Most American book: Moby Dick. A violent man has a confusing revenge fantasy against a cheap source of oil.
posted to MetaFilter by DreamerFi at 7:45 AM on October 14, 2015

The real debate over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries in America, like everywhere else, has been between socialism and fascism.Nevertheless, for various reasons this debate was masked for most of the latter half of the 20th century. What screened it off was a broad consensus within the viable electoral-political parties that we are all basically liberals. Republicans (and before them, Dixiecrats) were liberals who adopted fascist ideas about racial purity and fascist terror... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:41 PM on October 8, 2015

We can also thank SGC2C for introducing many to the music of Sonny Sharrock.
posted to MetaFilter by zchyrs at 5:19 AM on October 8, 2015

Just as long as we don't try to emulate Denmark. I mean it is almost impossible to become a billionaire over there. Who would want to give up that opportunity just to protect our lesser abled citizenry.
posted to MetaFilter by notreally at 4:16 PM on October 6, 2015

Different people are different, but speaking for myself, this wouldn't creep me out. The spread of risks and rewards I face as a man from uninvited female attention is different from the spread of risks and rewards faced by women getting uninvited male attention, and this has a big effect on what and where the lines of "creepy" get drawn.
Being a man isn't the only privilege protecting me, so my boundaries won't the same as those of others and YMMV, but as mentioned above,... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by anonymisc at 11:10 AM on September 30, 2015

A study says Germany's birth rate has slumped to the lowest in the world, prompting fears labour market shortages will damage the economy."

At risk of derail, if countries continue down this path of wanting to maintain population growth because no-one has developed an economic framework that works without growth, then our economics will destroy everyone, everything that people have worked for, and civilization itself.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by anonymisc at 6:10 PM on September 30, 2015

Avenger, I have a theory that we'll eventually end up with a "landed gentry" living off of investments and rent like Pre-Industrial Europe. We may be in a new Gilded Age now, but we're headed toward a new Victorian Era. Time's moving backward.
posted to MetaFilter by domo at 5:57 AM on September 25, 2015

The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that the night after he met the Pope, he sat down, thought a bit about his current life in Congress, then said out loud, "Ya know? Fuck this shit."

The more I think about it the more I think he saw the writing on the wall that he was going to have to beg and plead for every nickel for the next year and still get bounced by a more right wing opponent a la Cantor. He would end up in massive... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by any major dude at 7:23 AM on September 25, 2015

Christ, what an asshole.

Sure, but wouldn't you like to add him to your professional network on LinkedIn?
posted to MetaFilter by The Bellman at 9:14 AM on September 24, 2015

I thought he was the ONE TRUE CANDIDATE knighted by the Kochs to bring their destiny to fruition. Oh well.
posted to MetaFilter by Sophie1 at 1:50 PM on September 21, 2015

There's some incredible work going on in futurology. New methods from computational statistics that will make it more than 98% accurate are only about ten years away now.
posted to MetaFilter by Segundus at 4:30 AM on September 15, 2015

If you are poor, you're probably working weird hours, contract gigs, etc. You have to have a smartphone to get those jobs. If you don't have a smartphone, it is much, much harder to get to work.

Plus, why should poor people be unable to access news alerts, weather, etc? An unemployed person gets just as wet in a thunderstorm as a working person, and wants to hide from a tornado just as much, and if anything has particular interest in local political... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 6:10 AM on September 15, 2015

This reminds me of those people who say, when they hear someone is living in their car, that they can't be that poor because they have a car. To meet their imaginary standard of need, you have to be on the sidewalk with nothing but filthy rags to wear. And it's not like these people would help then, either.
posted to MetaFilter by George_Spiggott at 6:02 AM on September 15, 2015