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Slow

michaelnotebook.com

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Re: Slow

#181

Post by CalRobert »

halper wrote: post #178
CalRobert wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a nice week-end! I fondly recall the days of my youth as a teen-ager. Though I still lament the loss of the subjunctive form. And diaeresis.

Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).

I like it too, and you're talking to someone who has been trying, mostly in vain, to teach his kids the difference between "I wish I was there" and "I wish I were there", or how you can get eggs from a coop or a coöp, and they're different things, but eventually the hyphenation dies out and the phrase remains.

Re: Slow

#183

Post by blackoil »

eru wrote: post #169
travisgriggs wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.

Why? It's very easy to get people to plant trees for you. Just give a gardener, even a very old one, some money and they'll do it for you.

No amount of money allows the gardener to plant it in the past. You can pay money now to plant tree now whose benefit will be reaped 100 years down the line. Also, tree is symbolic so no point in going in details of tree growth.

Re: Slow

#184

Post by WJW »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #125
WJW wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is part of the point for a cathedral to take several generations. If you can point to a building and say "that took 5 years to build and I was there for all of it!", then that's great, but the building is in some way "smaller" than you. If you can point to a partially constructed building and say "my grandfather worked on it, my father worked on it, I'm working on it and my children will work on it too", t…

There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or intentionally scoped the project too big. Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?

Sure, the same amount of stone could be used to construct several smaller churches. The US congress could also just rent a conference room at a nearby hotel if they chose. The Eiffel tower could supply iron for several kilometres of rail track, or maybe a small boat.

But building something extravagantly big has a signaling value all of its own: "see the glory of and how much resources they command". You don't build a cathedral because it's more practical than a normal church for holding services and stuff, you build a cathedral to express the power of your religion and impress it on others.

Re: Slow

#185

Post by blackoil »

simianparrot wrote: post #177
neumann wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as they are knowingly destroying the future instead of spending their obscene wealth to protect it.

Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars in the low chance Earth becomes uninhabitable, and he'll never live to see the Mars dream become a reality even if everything goes as planned. But I guess that doesn't fit the common narratives about a man that isn't a cartoon but a flawed human with strengths and weaknesses. This is why we don't hear of great men anymore: We only hear about them when they're long…

Goals and means. No matter what end goal is, if it requires eugenics (hyperbolic example) to reach there, people will resist.

Re: Slow

#186

Post by okr »

travisgriggs wrote: post #107
Avicebron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood

Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.

What a heinous posting. Judging about others shows true evil.

Re: Slow

#187

Post by teddyh »

I had to enable third-party JavaScript and resource loading to see a rendering of… “1.0 × 10⁻²¹”. Sometimes people use TeX math markup superfluously.
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