Yeah, he had a son with Jane Wyman who’s a garden-variety deplorable.
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And I think of it every night, how I just could not get it right. Ohhh if we ever touch snouts again, I know what I’ll paint, baby.
Not sure how credible it is but I’ve seen lots of people saying they’re essentially tortured to learn how to paint.
Born Free explains that it is a “myth” that the elephant’s ability to paint is a result of their natural cleverness. Rather, directly refuting Maesa’s story about how their elephants learned to paint, “Elephants endure months of physical abuse to learn how to hold a paint brush, draw a straight line and paint flowers and leaves on trees.”
Like elephants used in the elephant trekking industry, young elephants used for painting must be broken and experience the pain of the phajaan process. Over this time baby elephants are starved, shackled, and beaten, until their spirit is completely broken and will submit to the will of their captors. Once young elephants have undergone this process they can being learning to paint.
Sounds like the pro democracy Hong Kong elections are going really well so far. Don’t know if it will matter much though.
The yellow squares are seats won by pan-dems / pro-democracy camp.
The red squares are seats won by pro-establishment / Beijing
Light grey have no results yet
Dark grey are independents
Yellow with red corner indicates that spot was flipped from pro-establishment to pro-democracy and vice versa.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/Steplor/status/1198706193964896256
Came across this… 
How did Alex Pareene get on that show
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Many questions, but the claim that the bureaucrats managing the research budgets are publicly accountable is an interesting one. Obviously they’re not elected. Unless they’re political appointees, they’re not even replaced by elected officials. I guess they follow policies laid down by the political heads of the applicable organization, but that’s not really accountability, it’s just having a boss who tells you what to do. More concretely, who got held accountable for wasting all those billions of dollars subsidizing corn ethanol?
It’s also a bit puzzling to call this a research question. The concept of heating things with mirrors dates to antiquity–the requirement is not to build bigger mirrors, it’s to develop business processes that allow the sun to displace fossil fuels in industrial processes. In that light, it’s pretty damn obvious why you’d want people in business developing new business process (even if they, gasp, dropped out of college like savages) rather than people who have no interest in, or knowledge of, how businesses work.
It’s all very High Modernist, this belief that climate change is just an unsolved technical problem, and the solution is to give lots of money to scientists (coincidentally, I believe you are a scientist yourself, right?). Then once the scientists find the answer, we just vague wave do it, you know? It doesn’t really work that way though.
Yeah Ron Reagan Jr was a liberal who regularly opposed his father’s policies.
He had an adoptive son , Michael Reagan who was pretty deplorable.
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That whole post deserves rainbow quotes, but this is my favorite bit. Do you remember how we solved the acid rain crisis, or the hole in the ozone layer? How we got unleaded gas? It wasn’t glorious Big Man billionaires like Bill Gates, we did that with the High Modernist approach of letting publicly-accountable bureaucrats with technical experience decide how to spend research dollars.
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Don’t blame me. I’m on Team AI.
We’ve got tons of non-native eucalyptus in California. It’s everywhere. They should bring koalas over here to munch on them.
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I thought that all three of those outcomes were mostly the result of regulation rather than some wizardry from a government lab. I could certainly be mistaken here, but I thought that the government just said “you need to get rid of leaded gas on this timeframe” and then industry figured out how to reformulate the product.
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Some good background on this from Wikipedia:
In 1980, the US Congress passed an Acid Deposition Act. This Act established an 18-year assessment and research program under the direction of the National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP). NAPAP looked at the entire problem from a scientific perspective. It enlarged a network of monitoring sites to determine how acidic the precipitation actually was, and to determine long-term trends, and established a network for dry deposition. It looked at the effects of acid rain and funded research on the effects of acid precipitation on freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems, historical buildings, monuments, and building materials. It also funded extensive studies on atmospheric processes and potential control programs.
Obviously scientific research was a huge part of that regulatory success story. I think that when the US had effective regulation on these matters there was a process of science being created, science being believed, and then regulation being implemented. Without the first two being supported by government, you get 2019-style non-regulation and cries of “socialism!” from people that don’t want to be regulated.
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People say they believe this shit, but I’m not sure that many actually do. Like say someone who claims to believe this is given an option: 1. prayer can affect the world or 2. prayer cannot affect the world. Pick the wrong one and your kid dies. I think we see WAY more picking 2. than we would guess from the way people talk. People WANT prayer to be real and there is a lot of peer pressure to claim that one thinks it’s real…but deep down, in the middle of the night, as we stare at the roof contemplating existence…most of us know we are alone.
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It would seem that for this hypothetical to make sense, it would have to be a paradox, as it would be a violation of the hypothetical to just have an atheist executioner summarily shoot all the kids of the theists.