TheVat

You misunderstood me. I am aware Europe has such racism, and the blacks-are-subhuman thing has many ugly forms. I was aware he intended nothing along those lines, and I was rather urging awareness that in places like the US his original subtitle would, due to our notably fraught history of race relations, offend some people. (and, unfortunately, derail the innocent joke he was making) I would love to live in an America where things have resolved themselves to where such jokes bounce off harmlessly. That would be wonderful. The America I love is one that supports human rights everywhere, not just select spots. I feel like our support of Jewish people would be more credible if it were matched by our support of other displaced people. Both Britain, back in the day, and the US, have shown callous disregard of Palestinian Arabs, and it is only ideology that can warp someone's perception to where they think that's okay. I live in a Native American area of my country, and have witnessed up close the effects of theft, brutality, and displacement, (and blaming the victims when they kick back) so I am aware of the "nuances," especially the ones that Zionists seem to conveniently ignore. Could we split these posts off for a separate thread?

I appreciated @John Cuthber 's gracious response and expression of regret for the unintended implications. I myself have often made the joke that we humans are "apes with cellphones." The video itself, without interpretive remarks, is not racist. Just absurd. I laughed when I first saw it a couple years ago. (and clearly fake, for the reasons already mentioned....plus who would keep holding the camera in that situation?)

You should apologize. Instead of a condescending nonapology which ducks the issue and focuses on an issue that no one has with your post. Yes, we are hominins, related closely to the great apes, yata yata yata. Your post, however, is a gross racist slur, in many areas of the world. However unintended. In my country, the Blacks = apes comparison has been the basis for massive brutality, suffering and death. And the "science" of the comparison has not been of much comfort to those on the receiving end, I can assure you.

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/the-disturbing-monkey-business-of-us-blackwhite-race-relations In the United States, the comparison of black people to apes or monkeys, is a horrible slur, one with a long and sad history. This is just one link I found on a quick Google search. Is this really not known in your corner of the globe?

Wow. Please please read your reply over in Jokes, explaining this delicate matter. This is embarrassing.

See post prior to yours. Hope it's helpful in your future interactions here, and especially with Americans. The DV is not from me. Again, must be something less understandable to folks in UK.

They seem to overlap. Apropos of this chat I just saw this posted over in Jokes... I suspect this was an innocent mistake, but I did point out the problem, especially for an American, with John's quip. And the DV he won is one I won't "neutralize." You Brits need to be aware, if you aren't already, of how terrible that slur sounds to a Yank. And profoundly UNfunny.

And here we were just discussing, over in political humor, what lines can be crossed in joking. I'm pretty sure you didn't intend the mindbendingly racist aspect of referring to black people as apes. In the United States, this particular slur has a long and terrible history, and a person of color visiting this thread (or anyone, really) might well decide this forum is not worth their time. I won't DV you, but respectfully request you be aware of why this post is offensive.

I especially liked this bit from Shadow's humorous list.... AN AMERICAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

Whoa. That is pretty dark. 7000+ people dying hideous crushing deaths doesn't seem to me like it's ever going to be great material for jokes. Of course, Mel Brooks and other brilliant comic writers/performers have made jokes about the Holocaust, so I guess there's something to be said for being able to laugh at horrific events. I would guess there's a fine line there to tread, where people want to laugh at something terrible so they aren't afraid of it or traumatized about it, where there's some kind of healthy emotional release from the awfulness, but at the same time not be callous and cruel as regards the victims of terrible events. I think we have to accept that treading the line will inevitably involve transgressions that are too far. The question may be one of intent. Did the joke makers just get carried away and thoughtless, or was there a real malign aspect? There's a saying in US standup comedy: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard."

While I agree that there are some reasonable bounds on jokes - like cruelty and racist attacks - I didn't really see attacking Israeli West Bank policies of razing farms and groves and grabbing land as in such a taboo category. Mac wasn't being anti-Semitic, just anti-RW regime. If you read Shadow's 2009 joke, Mac's makes way more sense in that context. (it's on page one)

AFAICT, the joke Mr Mack was trying for was playing off a 2009 post which also began with "you have two cows." Which I didn't backtrack to 2009 and read, but presume was some sort of political commentary on economic ideologies. Now y'all got me curious...

This was helpful, and clarifies more the dangers of shooting a balloon down over land, especially with the small holes method. The balloon certainly demonstrated the capacity of the Right Wing news bubble to take a rational, measured response and warp it into Biden dithering and being foolish. It's appalling to see what's in some of the RW feeds re the balloon.

Thanks, I clumsily expressed that in two sentences so left "transfer of" out of first one. Nor did I mean to imply energy transfer after temps have equalized. And this.... I guess that should be "lower average kinetic energy." Write in haste, repent at leisure. Ahh. Did not know that last bit. You've all sent me off to do some reading. Thanks. (And I can see the use with thermal solar, yes. Where your heat source is, by definition, external. And the setup is static.)

As a gawker, looking in here and haven't read the 15 pages, have to ask: what, besides expensive cogeneration, are Stirling engines good for? Using external heat, as opposed to IC, to pressurize a gas and turn that heat into work seems pretty inefficient. That's why we don't drive steam cars. If I have a car and it's winter, then my waste heat can go simply to heating the cabin via a simple diversion of coolant. But nobody is using that waste heat to power a Stirling. Also I don't understand "transferring heat" the way OP is saying it. Heat is kinetic energy. Energy is transferred. Higher kinetic energy molecules are transferring energy to lower kinetic energy molecules on the other side of a barrier. Entropy. A slow process, would seem like. The external heat needs lots of time for energy to transfer to the inside of the engine. Where would the wait be worthwhile??

Back there, page 1, pics were posted but not of actual boobs. Though said pics were posted by boobs. (yours truly among them) Now it all seems like a distant mammary.

Thanks for pointing this out. I was suggesting earlier that culture/nurture is likely to act as a magnifier of fairly small initial differences. Another problem is that sometimes researchers will "find" neurological differences that they are looking for, and which later prove unfounded. The notion of females having a functionally different corpus callosum, for example, became a sort of pop science myth which persisted after later research rejected it.... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9353793/ (it's handedness, actually, that makes more of a difference in thickness of those fiber bundles)

ChatGPT may really only be suitable for dull tasks like writing a State of the Union speech in the style of Shakespeare or Seinfeld. https://apnews.com/article/if-chatgpt-wrote-state-of-the-union-8b4dc4774acd0f4ba4ad2fb1ea768d47 Situations where fabrication or outright nonsense isn't a problem. And for the SOTU address it might be more niggardly, er, parsimonious with word count.

I was surprised there was no try for a more gradual descent, perhaps by shooting a small hole with a BB gun. (perhaps those are hard to mount on an F-22) Our next step is clear: obtain a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade float and release it from an allied nation that's upwind of China. Mickey Mouse would get my vote.

Yep you really dropped the ball on helping us get population down to a nice couple billion. 😀 The economist David Graeber argued for debt forgiveness by wealthy nations towards poor ones - pretty convincing I thought. That was so wildly optimistic I need to lie down for a moment to recover. I'm not sure that's right, but like Bearded Spock says to Good Kirk in the transporter room, I shall consider your words. It is impressive how liberal democracy has last this long and seems to have generated a lot of viral memes on this planet. There is a toughness under it's seeming fragility.

Just remember you'll need a Langstrom 16 centimeter ganglia wrench to reset the positron beams in the interociter. And never cross the beams! Ghostbusters has taught us all the importance of this.

But first you hogpatch the rheostat on the interociter, tuning the mandrills with a zygomatic bridge. I'm pretty sure of this.

An observation (aside from the obvious precocity of the girl): while hormones can play some role (on impulsivity, e.g.), I would think it's reasonable to ask if the difference in sweets strategies are more due to personality variations and not necessarily a function of the stubby Y vs the savvy X. Some solid research, across diverse cultures, would help here. Sorry to see things here turned a bit acrimonious after that. Hope we can get back to early learning research and see how all these notions of little boys and girls hold up. My own conjecture is that girls get more positive reinforcement for patience and emotional intelligence in some cultures, which then magnifies a relatively small initial difference. And other factors tend to blur any clear picture of "innate" personality. Birth order can make quite a difference what social strategies emerge. Total hours of contact with each parent, ditto. Parental behavior towards each other can also introduce modeling of certain tactics that we as parents may not even be aware we're modeling. (my own family btw, also boy and girl, does not provide an anecdote that supports the patient girls hypothesis - indeed, the girl was somewhat more impulsive and reckless, and LOUDER, for vast stretches of their childhoods and youth. )

Ok, cool. Possible I may have misunderstood the intent there. It is odd that it's a necropost in that it replies to a post that's 14 years old today. Also going to say I was unaware that cows came with guns. And that IS a joke. (Using my standard formula of taking ambiguous sentence structure the most obtuse way possible)

Social cognitive theory has had some success. Also Piagetian development theory. Behavioral economics seems to do better with large groups - not so well in predictions of individual behavior.