Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking of creating a non-revenue online guide to my new city, Lyon, France, but I've been concerned that I'd only be feeding the AI machine.
"the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."
After reading this one-sided article, I checked out the rest of the website. Sadly I did not find evidence to support their statement that they "have no allegiance to any political party or tradition." And this article is a prime example. Ever since the right discovered that Wikimedia makes donations to "social justice" groups, they've been gunning for it. This hit piece is one of many.
I have a potted miniature lime tree that spends 8 months of the year outdoors and the NYC winter indoors. It's easy to maintain and every year it produces more limes. This year I got at least 30. They taste unbelievable especially versus store purchased. Highly recommended.
For anyone in the northeast, i can recommend Three Days At The Fair [1], the longest duration of which is actually 6 days and the course is a 1 mile loop around a state fair ground in New Jersey. I did a mere 12 hour option on the final weekend, and the suffering of those competitors on their 5th/6th day is something i will never forget. Sideways leans, some quite pronounced, others moving backwards to alleviate pains developed moving forwards etc.
Why do they do it? Well, the camaraderie is incredible. Much of the course is lined where runners have pitched their tents/campers/chairs and the support, sharing of food, stories and beer make it a unique event. The shortest duration is 6 hours and you’re not obliged to run more than a single loop/mile if you don’t want to.
I have just finished reading Carmilla [1], a vampire novella by another Irishman, Sheridan LeFanu, which pre-dated Dracula by 25 years. I much preferred it to Stoker's book.
Not a comment on the term being discussed but i do have a problem with the charts used in the article: “vehicle deaths per million residents …” and “US death rate from motor vehicles per hundred million miles traveled”. Both graphs show a declining trend. But of course that’s how an unscrupulous writer could hide rising data, by charting against an even faster trend and not just showing data in the raw. i don’t know if that was a deliberate ploy here but it did annoy me that i had to go and find out whether deaths by cars are actually increasing or not. So i googled and discovered:
“Drivers Hit and Killed More Than 7,500 Pedestrians Last Year, Most Since 1981, New Projection Shows” [1]
And by that point i was just as bothered by the questionable use of data as i was by the questionable use of language.
I spend a lot of time near Manchester, VT where there are a handful of roundabouts including two in quick succession, one of which is as small as it is busy. The problem, based on my observations, is that many Americans have no idea how to use roundabout, nor how to signal through them. I feel unsafe every time I'm in the roundabout and have nearly been T-boned multiple times by people feeling they have the right to enter the roundabout regardless of existing motorists already being there. The Yield sign before the roundabout is ignored.
A guy i worked with called me over to try to help him figure out why his apple wireless mouse wasn’t working. I replace the batteries, restarted bluetooth, restarted the computer - i’d spent quite a bit of time working thru my mental checklist when the guy just started moving the mouse furiously, as if he expected that would re-animate it, and the cursor. It didn’t. But out of the corner of my eye i noticed the cursor moving on a screen two desks away, a desk whose occupant was out to lunch. I asked the inevitable question and the guy admitted that his mouse had stopped working, figured the batteries had run out (they had) and he was in a hurry so he grabbed somebody else’s mouse instead. To this day i don't know whether i’m more flabbergasted that he omitted to mention this when he first called me over, or that he thought the act of placing a mouse in front of his computer was all it took for the pair to communicate.
Hiding behind a throwaway account allows you to make false statements, unless you can substantiate the "most of the money" comment. Wikimedia Foundation breaks down its expenditure here:
Exactly. The "realignment" in the article heading is clickbait. The article describes a group of right-leaning tech leaders meeting over dinner at one of their houses.
Shrinking GDP, yes, likely to move from technical to actual recession, sure, but "in a deep recession" is factually incorrect [1]:
"Ireland officially fell into recession last year as multinational exports slumped in the face of weaker global demand but the domestic economy still managed to grow, aided by stronger-than-expected consumer spending. Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures published on Friday show the economy as a whole shrank by 3.2 per cent in GDP (gross domestic product) terms in 2023. The CSO noted that the more globalised sectors of the economy, including the multinational-dominated “Industry” sector, contracted for the first time since 2013. This was “driven largely by a fall of 4.8 per cent in exports,” the agency said. The figures show the economy was effectively in a technical recession for the entirety of 2023 with GDP contracting in all four quarters. The domestic economy as measured by modified domestic demand (MDD), a more reliable barometer of domestic activity, grew by 0.5 per cent on the back of a 3.1 per cent increase in consumer spending. Consumer spending was underpinned by strong employment growth with figures published last week showing a record 2.71 million people are now employed in the economy. Incomes also rose in real terms by 3.3 per cent, the CSO said. Worryingly, however, MDD contracted by 0.4 per cent in the final quarter of last year on the back of a fall-off in private-sector investment. Another quarterly contraction would turn Ireland’s technical recession into a real one."