Viewing profile — pamqzl

I'm always extremely skeptical when someone suggests that oral traditions could possibly have survived for long periods of time. That's twelve hundred generations! Given what we kn…

To a large extent the causation is backwards: how much money depends on your genes. Smart parents have smart children and smart children make more money.

For them, obviously. For us ... well, it's no skin off my nose personally whether they live or die. But from their point of view... well, I'd be pissed off if it turned out I'd spe…

What's wrong with simply accepting a cap (either de facto or directly enforced) on populations of cities? Perhaps we should start thinking of living in certain popular cities as be…

I lost a five thousand dollar watch today, by never buying it.

Is the madness of crowds a genuine phenomenon? I mean, obviously, large groups of people certainly sometimes come to bad decisions, but is there evidence that they tend to come to …

And although now we've pushed literacy up from 80% to 90-something percent, I wonder whether literacy is actually lower than it was in the 1850s. More people are literate, but thos…

Unless the statistical distribution of alleles is exactly the same (unlikely) from one generation to the next then humans would have to be evolving, wouldn't they?

I dunno man, if you step away from the internet's constant drip-feed of doom and gloom articles and go for a walk outside, society seems to be doing fine.

They don't want fairness either, they want "fairness". The difference between fairness and "fairness" is that "fairness" works out a little better for people like yourself than fai…

You can always buy a house in an expensive area to work and then sell it to retire in a cheaper place. That's my plan (maybe).

You could also do the same in, say, Sacramento. Or Modesto.

What is the benefit of preserving rarely-spoken languages?

But my dogecoins are still headed for the moon, right?

Not that many internal combustion powered cars you can buy nowadays without touch screens and the like, either. Maybe not Tesla-level yet, but in five years I'd be surprised if mos…

Latino cultures already control all but two of the thirty-something nations of the Americas, do we really feel like they're under threat?

Only in a legal sense are they different cities. I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly. I realise there's histor…

Sure, as long as we can have a white Shaft. Seriously though, Britishness (in the genetic sense) is a fundamental part of James Bond's character. He isn't just British by citizensh…

So was Star Wars. But it turns out it's more profitable as the latter.

Indeed. If you could rule by promise, and those promises were binding on future administrations, then executive power would be practically unlimited.

The bizarre US insistence that places like San Francisco and Oakland are somehow separate cities baffles me. Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay…

But I could, for instance, buy advertisements in support of my favoured candidate? I guess not on US TV or US billboards since they're under the control of the US. But if I buy ads…

If you give money to a government official in return for a specific favour then you'll both wind up in prison. But there are certainly a helluva lot of ways of for this transaction…

No they're not, the second is just a clarification of the sense in which the first was meant. By comparison, take the statement "All men are not equal. Or at least, they're not equ…

> non-profit humanitarian organization Which just happens to pay the Clintons' bills every time they feel like travelling anywhere, and direct money to whoever the Clintons want to…