Earlier quoted context omitted.
Potemkin supermarkets.
The word you want is “pokazukha”
No, GP wanted to use potemkin referring to the villages allegedly built on the Dnieper for the Russian czarina (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village)
It’s an age of marvels
231–240 of 425 posts
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
this reminds me of that site linked here last year that explained and diagrammed the inner workings of a wristwatch. I used singlefile to save the page, as i do with any page that impresses me (or is noteworthy or newsworthy or needs to be saved as proof, etc)
Would that be this one? https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ I’d love to know that those pages are offline-archivable!
singlefile does not archive the animated parts, unfortunately. At least not by default.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's still a difference between the stores having meat on their shelves and the stores having every kind of meat on their shelves. And every kind of vegetable, every kind of drink, every kind of cheese as well.
> every kind of vegetable, .., every kind of cheese as well. That's not my experience of American supermarkets in North Carolina when visiting on business ten years ago. Even in supposedly upmarket supermarkets like Harris Teeter the fruit and veg was really not very good and the selection of cheeses (and other dairy products) was downright poor.
I was exaggerating a bit, but by the late 80's the food situation in the USSR had deteriorated to the stage where you would have a meat (if you were lucky), a cheese or a vegetable available at any given store. We would go to the kolkhoz market for vegetables and my parents had a literal backroom deal with a grocery store manager to get beef, but the shelves were conspicuously barren.
Going from this to a country where any random supermarket would have chicken, several cuts of beef, several cuts of pork, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, onions, several sorts of cheese and was not at risk of running out of any position would have been a shock.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments... Are there any private companies putting humans in space without huge government grants, launch facilities, or ex-gov talent?
The 'huge government grants' thing is doing a lot of (excuse the pun) heavy lifting, as are launch facilities and ex-gov talent. The government is a customer on Crew Dragon, it's a government 'grant' if you consider it a grant when the government pays money to a company for stationary specifically designed for the government (say, with the respective agency's logo on it). Similarly, the launch facilities are being le…
I'd still say that's not "completely independent". One might even say it's just outsourcing NASA's once many teams to different companies.
Also I doubt these companies would be as numerous or as big without the promise of fat government contracts looming on the horizon.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Potemkin supermarkets.
The word you want is “pokazukha”
Both are valid.
“Pokazukha” is more of a modern term (modern as in, i dont think it even hit the 80 year old mark) and is a bit more generic (refers to “showing off” or “for show” in general).
“Potemkin supermarket” is a reference to “potemkin village”[0], which has been around as a term since late 18th century, and it is a bit more specific (refers to a construction that provides a false facade to a situation, with the origin of it being an actual fake village constructed to impress the empress).
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#236“The future is going to be boring.” - J. G. Ballard
Writing to you from several decades into the future of my own past, I can confirm that this is definitely the case.
Is it the future that's boring or do we just lose our sense of wonder as we age and become jaded about the world?
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think the average American supermarket has every kind of meat, cheese, drink, and vegetable, you are in for a big surprise traveling the world. In many ways American markets have fallen behind relatively poorer countries in variety. Most of what is sold are monocultures and packaged foods. The selection of fresh produce (or any produce) is often disappointing.
Yep. For example, one staple dish of Cajuns is called "rice and gravy." Essentially, you sear thinly cut 7-steaks, remove them, cook down some trinity, then add the steaks back with some water or broth and seasonings. That's it. The steaks simmer in the broth for hours and create their own gravy. We serve it over rice, usually accompanied by some roux peas (tres petit pois cooked in a roux with onions and bacon) and…
As someone who’s not American, I’m unclear; is going to a butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the market by supermarkets?
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.
> It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political compla…
I was intentionally vague and not picking sides. Extremist violent rhetoric encompasses communists and fascists and anyone else willing to kill people to tear the system down.
If you think I'm talking about the Israel / Palestine thing. It was not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the US specifically but it also applies to other nations with strong personal freedoms, rule of law, and general economic prosperity. Advocating for revolution in such places is very dumb.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#239I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.
My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.
Hedonic adaptation. See even the other threads about ChatGPT where people are complaining that it's still not good enough, even though nothing like it were possible a mere few years ago. People will adapt to anything over time, and so like the other commenter, I too would not be shocked to not see much shock on their faces if you showed them such a miniature computer.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I use the term, extremists are people who advocate for tearing the system down via revolution and rebuilding from scratch. They have no idea what it takes to build this modern world, but they love the idea of guillotines.
Some people complain about taxation on tea or the lack thereof instead of appreciating how privileged they are to have access to Oriental tea.
Sometimes you actually do need to rewrite the whole project in a new language. FORTRAN just isn't the tool for the job anymore. But you'd still benefit a good deal from being highly suspicious that any person suggesting that course of action is naive to how much time and suffering it will entail.
Arguably, the American revolution wasn't even necessary. A lot of people died as a result. England would have potentially ended slavery decades earlier if the US was still a colony. Canada and Australia wound up in roughly the same spot without a revolution (though possibly as a second order effect of the American revolution).