The Sun had to begin. At one point it was just accreting gasses, then at some point gained enough mass to ignite. People also start at some point they begin as a daughter and grow eventually into a viable life. But also our galaxies had to form before our sun. So, yes there are beginnings to things. At one point they weren’t, at another point they were.
They’ll probably keep dispensing hydrocarbon fuels. But we may see fuel stations migrate or integrate into other destinations a bit. Mostly Costco these days, but as we transition to electrically powered vehicles, we’ll see more charging + hydrocarbon fuel stations colocated with other businesses with linty of parking that also draw people for a significant amount of time, enough to charge an e-vehicle to significant degree.
We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
That won't work because people breed dogs for a purpose, that's why we have breeds. We don't breed to have better hunting humans for example. We practice eugenics on dogs, but we don't practice it at scale on ourselves.
Cats are interesting, tabby cats are most like humans, because they are very "mixed" but not with a purpose, just at random and by convenience. Orange cats have specific behavioral traits, but they weren't bred on purpose either.
The "on purpose" part is important because in those cases, we keep breeding them until specific traits are exaggerated to the max. With human reproduction, if having a blonde hair is considered ideal in a specific part of a country over several hundred years, then yeah, you'll see blondes mate more than non-blondes and you'll have lots of blondes, but you'll still see blondes marry non-blondes so their great-grandchildren could have red or black hair just the same. Now instead of hair consider behavioral traits. Those are even more complicated because us humans don't operate on a purely instinctual directive like animals. if a person has a genetic propensity for violence for example, that doesn't mean much because they can still decide to act against their "genetics" (otherwise, it doesn't make sense to punish them). Even dogs bred for their violent nature can be trained out of it to a large extent.
We probably could - but people don't like it, and some huge percentage of everyone would be various "mutts".
But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
On the other hand, it could help people look beyond race and instead look at other traits like athleticism, math proficiency, wordsmithing, artistry, endurance, high altitude adaptation, seamanship, gift of the gab, etc…
If you're suggesting categorising according to genetics, then I don't think the scientific consensus is with you. Pet breeds have clear biological divisions that humans do not. See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882
> Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
There are lots of things people don’t like to be categorized by such as weight/mass, height, intelligence, income, medical history, criminality, etc. There’s no reason we can’t be categorized along the lines of breeds.
No, the other candidate was a terrible candidate who conspired to conceal the mental and physical decline of the then President. Don’t believe me? look at Tapper’s new tell-all; and apparently soon KJP is coming out with another tell-all.
Don’t blame voters, blame the pathetic political machine that could not help itself.
How about the concealment of drug use? Just now we're finding about the how Musk used so much Ketamine to get thru the nights at the White House that his urine turned bloody. Does anyone doubt that Trump snorts Adderall? That's just so he can sound coherent in public settings. That story has been repeated over & over by those who know but aren't able to survive the storm that Trump would levy in order to go public.
Not an American, so maybe I don’t have the same depth or insight into the candidates, but as bad as Kamala might have been, I think she would have been better than Trump. But then again I think a potato would make a better president than Trump.
It doesn't matter. A black woman is entirely unelectable in the United States.
Moderate and conservatives in the US are deeply sexist and racist. I know plenty of women who wouldn't vote for a female president and are very open about it.
Policies are irrelevant. Americans are still deeply sexist and racist.
I grew up conservative and know very well the quiet things they don't say to most people.
A woman, let alone a black woman, is not electable in the US right now.
It blows my mind how people seem to think Americans aren't still sexist/racist when there is so much evidence saying otherwise. It's important to get outside our social circles and talk to people with differing views.
>No, the other candidate was a terrible candidate who conspired to conceal the mental and physical decline of the then President.
Americans seem to be trying really hard to justify voting for Trump by making it seem as if they faced an intractable choice between two terrible options - and of course many like yourself are piling on some conspiracy theory to also make it seem as if the options were equally corrupt.
But no. At worst, Kamala Harris was a mainstream candidate, not even significantly leftist, certainly no less qualified than Trump, and not "terrible" in comparison to other alternatives. Americans just don't trust a non-white woman in a position of power. They would have voted for Hitler just to have a white dick and balls in the Oval Office.
And Biden's mental and physical health was a subject of memes before he was even elected, and the most popular Republican President in history prior to the current one probably had Alzheimer's in office. And the current one isn't exactly at his physical or mental prime.
Check out the young turks. They will tell you that the Dems undermined themselves by trying to gaslight people into voting for Kamala and to believe that Joe was dynamic and had more stamina than his staffers. Now you have the mainstream try to say that the party pulled the wool over their eyes and fooled them. A few will say that everyone knew he was senile —but somehow still thought it was cool to trot him out till the first debate when for most people, except msnbc and kin, saw the man behind the curtain. MSNBC tried to portray the first debate as a draw. Everyone else saw how pathetic the performance was. Then the machinations began and Joe endorsed Kamala despite Obama and the rest of the mainstream dems wanting an open primary. It was doomed with word salad Kamala who could not relate with regular folks. She was stilted and unauthentic.
How did they "gaslight" people into voting for Kamala?
They had an incumbent President who had already beaten Trump. He did badly during the debate, they panicked so they ran their VP.
That isn't a conspiracy, it's just political game theory. The Democrats would have been foolish not to field Biden, and the next best option after Biden was Kamala Harris. Their biggest mistake if anything wasn't setting up Harris earlier. Show me where the Trump Administration has ever said Trump is anything but masculine and virile, a brilliant and cunning orator, master statesman and strategist? This is just how political parties work.
And I mean... "word salad?" Can't relate to regular folks? Compared to the incompetent, barely coherent billionaire? Come on.
Biden ran in 2020 as a single term president. He did his job to prevent a second consecutive Trump term. At some point that changed, probably because Trump never gave up power.
Again, the democrats were foolish to not aggressively prosecute Trump. Merrill did nothing for far too long.
The democrats were foolish to make Harris the “border czar” since the republicans simply have them beat on immigration messaging. They handed her a huge weakness and played directly into the republicans strengths.
The democrats were foolish to not have a primary. Harris simply is not popular. She does not perform well in the primaries, so they just decided no primary and a weak candidate was their only option.
>Biden ran in 2020 as a single term president. He did his job to prevent a second consecutive Trump term. At some point that changed, probably because Trump never gave up power.
If your party has an encumbent President, you run the President. No other candidate would have the same amount of power, public awareness or power of the bully pulpit, especially not against Donald Trump. Barring that, you have the VP. Doing anything other than what they did would have been political suicide. Donald Trump barely even ran and he was still a factor.
>Again, the democrats were foolish to not aggressively prosecute Trump. Merrill did nothing for far too long.
I agree.
>The democrats were foolish to make Harris the “border czar” since the republicans simply have them beat on immigration messaging. They handed her a huge weakness and played directly into the republicans strengths.
The democrats seem to have this pernicious belief that they need to bring Republicans into the tent... I don't understand it. They absolutely could not read the room. Biden was a stopgap, and his stances on unions and Gaza were alienating the left, so the best thing Harris could have done was pivot further to the left and be the candidate the left wished Biden was.
>The democrats were foolish to not have a primary. Harris simply is not popular. She does not perform well in the primaries, so they just decided no primary and a weak candidate was their only option.
She was still more popular and a stronger candidate than any other Democrat would have been, except for Biden. It would have been a race between Donald Trump - ex President billionaire whose every word and deed gets constant media coverage - and someone no one ever heard of. A primary would only be a sign of weakness and threaten to fracture the party.
Trump didn't exactly win in a blowout, the margin between he and Harris was slim enough that a Harris victory could have been possible.
Maybe they were foolish to run Biden at all. But the die was kind of cast at that point.
> If your party has an encumbent President, you run the President. No other candidate would have the same amount of power
Of course both of us are speculating, but my view is that this is conventional wisdom in unconventional times
The democrats keep playing with a rule book that the other side threw away a decade ago. This is why they lose.
Republican voters are fed a steady diet of misinformation on everything the Democrats do. The hatred of Biden on the right boggles my mind, since he was such middle of the road guy, just keeping things status quo. Hillary also had decades of baggage from talk radio hosts and Fox News against her.
But of course Harris was weaker. It’s telling to me that despite her weakness, nominating her caused a panic on the right because it instantly nullified all of their canned attacks against Biden.
Imagine what would have happened if they’d fostered a new, young and unencumbered by Fox News propaganda presidential candidate.
Depends. Ancient Egyptian art didn’t evolve that much and it remained for millennia as current without the feeling that it ‘stagnated’. There is nothing that says things need to eternally evolve. There is some advantage in some systems in evolution, but not all systems and not for every species and not even for man.
The question about Egyptian art is more difficult than it seems. Almost all the artifacts are the ones that could survive 1,000s of years and is quite sophisticated. What we don't get a good sample of is woodworking which is much easier to manipulate. The difficulty of stone work has a built-in limiting factor.
I’m not sure your assertion regarding ancient Egyptians’ feelings on art trends of their time can be tested :P
People create with what is at hand — this includes ideas, not just physical media. In my opinion, suggesting there is society-wide progress (or lack of it) in art is silly, like suggesting the same for fashion or cooking.
Exploration, technical evolution, yes. And progress in ideas, in society? Of course!
Good idea in principle. In practice this could invite unscrupulous actors, or people who flake out at higher rates than close family -not that families can’t flake out, but I’d imagine it’d be a lower incidence.
People of Japanese ancestry top out at around 1% of all Brazilians. That’s not a lot or significant portion of the population. If you get to 5 or 7% we can talk about significance. On the other hand they tend to have outsized influence on the country, so you may be projecting that onto pop size.
I think that’s overstating it. There are pockets in the largest cities, but that’s about it. Very few Latin Americans would be like, hey let’s go get some Chinese food, outside of the largest cities. It’s not like Canada or the US where even in towns in the middle of nowhere you can find a Chinese joint.
Now, some do call nannies “Chinese”, so presumably, many decades ago, some very poor Chinese took a voyage across the sea to poor countries because China was even more desperately poor. Also some Chinese as well as Philippine folks were brought over to Mexico as slaves and they were all labeled ‘Chinese’ kind of like how chino fabric originated in the Philippines but is called ‘chinos.’
Ok but Asians or people with Asian ancestry don’t even add up to 1% of the Mexican population. It’s miniscule. There are probably more middle easterners than Asians living in Mexico.
You'd be surprised. And sure, in the 1930's about 80% of Asian immigrants got deported out of Mexico. But even before and after, their descendants became very well integrated and mixed with the rest of society. Also, they tend to not identify as Asians, just like Mexicans unless it is very obvious or 2nd generation
IP conventions were not formalized and nations were not signatories. Back in the early colonies Britain embargoes tech to prevent us from leapfrogging them, there was no IP protection framework, so I’m not sure what you’re on about.
It was more akin to intellectual property secrets.
No, IP law goes back much further than you imagine. The US started to grant patents in 1790 and the British even before that. What the US was doing was IP theft even in the law system that existed back then.
It wasn’t till the late 1700s that patents became form of intellectual property, before that it was a form of granting economic monopoly. Some of these “patents” were for already existing things, to give the grantee a monopoly over the sale of a particular common item. In addition, patents as we understand them today as a form of intellectual property didn’t coalesce till mid to late 1800s.
In some cases, but in most cases even well known bands that had been around had tickets that highschoolers could afford. Only a handful of bands were like triple the average and would have been the likes of Rolling Stones Springsteen and such, but aside from them, no, most well known bands were not selling tickets at ludicrous prices.
I might have given blink-182 as an extreme example but $80 for tickets is still selling for a lot more than the $7 cash at the door that I paid when I saw them in a tiny skate shop 10 years ago.
Many bands don’t make it all of course, but I can still pay $7 cash for shows today at that shop and some of them are going to be able to charge $80 in a few years.
