This could be really useful in the future. NIST has been talking about retiring its radio-syncing signal, as there are better modern alternatives with satellites, the Internet, etc. But last time they suggested this there was an outcry, not just from the public with old radio-synced clocks and watches, but also industry with legacy equipment using it. This provides a solution.
The most common satellite-based time signal today is GPS and global navigation system signals are possible to spoof, but it is harder than "trivial" at least.
Sure, you can find new MP3 players on Temu and Alibaba, but they are almost invariably nearly unusable instant e-waste (like most things on those sites) And iTunes was great back in the day -- it only got awful when Apple made it support iPhones, Apple Music, etc. When it just did what it was supposed to (rip CDs and put the contents, neatly labeled and organized on your iPod) it was unsurpassed to this day.
Yeah, people hating iTunes seem to have no clue how bad all the "alternatives" were back then.
I'll be the first to shit on current Apple, but seriously, it was very successful for a reason.
As mentioned, the word "trope" dates back to ancient times, although generally meaning rhetorical devices like similes and metaphors rather than in the "reused plot" sense generally used today. But even the ancients still recognized those. Aristotle's Poetics deals with plays in addition to poems, and he discusses what sort of plots work in tragedies.
In general, in pre-industrial societies families built their own houses rather than "society" building them for them. Of course this was because 1) many tribal societies had no concept of land ownership so you could just build wherever someone else wasn't using, and often these were temporary for a season or two anyway 2) later feudal societies where there was land ownership had land mostly owned by a nobleman who allowed his serfs to build their cottages on his land.
I'm not sure "keeping out outsiders" is a bug. The US is experiencing what it is like to be governed by an outsider with no previous political experience and who thinks things like "laws" don't apply to him, and who thinks experts can't be trusted and puts unqualified people in charge of the military, science and health. Politicians need to develop -- they should start with a local position, and "graduate" to a national-level position before they even attempt to rule a nation.
Notably, we could do that while still abolishing first past the post. Requirements for holding a previous position could be added while simultaneously reforming the federal (and hopefully also state) systems to be compatible with multiple parties. I imagine it would be sufficient for each level to require a single term served at the previous level - city or county, state, and federal.
The downside is encouraging career politicians, but the upside is that if you can't win increasingly high stakes elections over a period of 10 years or so then you probably have no business being the president of a country this size.
I think this take highlights one of the core problems our democracy faces - winning elections and governing effectively are entirely different skill sets. These things may even be, in part, antithetical.
I merely intended it as a reasonably general proxy for relevant experience whose ruleset would be difficult to weaponize. I agree that in theory there almost certainly must be better methods than elections by which to select legislators, leaders, and other official positions. However I'm not aware of any in practice, particularly when the inevitability of bad faith attempts to abuse the system are taken into account.
And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)
> And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population
98% of the UK population can speak English, so I'm not sure where you got that idea. Clearly every part (maybe some small, uncelebrated village breaks the rule) of the UK has a language spoken by virtually the entire population of that region.
> (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)
If you are struggling to say that England is the only country in the UK that sees most of its population still speak the language of its ancestral roots, then I suppose that's true, but when English is the most commonly used natural language across the entire world I'm not sure that is much of a feat.
What does any of this have to do with the discussion at hand?
Wales/Welsh doesn’t jive under the conditions set. Perhaps you missed "non-trivial percentage"? Outer Hebrides is a part of the UK where ~50% of its residents speak Scottish, never mind England and its English dominance, so clearly ~30% is still considered within trivial range. Otherwise "the one part" doesn't work; seeing many parts of the UK fit the bill.
The thing is, they've purchased so many historic pubs, that if you refuse to drink at one that's a choice. I'm not saying that's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that bars you from an awful lot of pubs.
People should just be into slide-rules period. Particularly in the West. We are always so amazed when people in Asia beat people with calculators using their abacuses, but the West had its mechanical computing device too, and like the abacus it can beat a calculator if used well.
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