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Just what i needed to read today, thanks.


MS?


Definitely. I mean check out some of the recent winners of the US National Debate Championships.

https://youtu.be/fmO-ziHU_D8?t=34


Here's the American Debate Association's 2019 High School Championships:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqjHz9laqgU&t=368s

And debate between the Harvard Democrats and Republicans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYLcpQQCjLE&t=1655s

I've never seen or heard of a debate like the one in Peter Schiff's youtube channel there, and it is pretty obviously being shared on social media for emotional effect.


I agree; the video in the comment above yours was edited specifically to focus hate on a couple of high school students.

While I have to admit I'm not a fan of that debate style, if you want to know the context behind it, there's an episode of Radiolab on the topic: https://radiolab.org/episodes/debatable

The short version is that it seems to have been a response and rebellion to what was already an arguably ridiculous style of competitive "debating": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0


Yeah so it was essentially satire.

You'd think that in a community of "hackers" that should value actual skepticism and subversion that people wouldn't fall so easily for obvious propaganda.


Defending their performance by arguing that it was rebellion or satire is pretty much admitting that the debate style (fast debating, AKA spreading [1]) is ridiculous and deserves rebellion or satire.

And if this was an intentionally extreme example meant to demonstrate problems with the format, then sharing it and citing it here seems entirely appropriate and even expected.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreading_(debate)


You know that wasn't why it was shared here, and it was deliberately edited to push people towards a completely different conclusion.


You may be interested in this review of their arguments and the context for their style of debate, which was far more interesting after watching the video: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9...


I feel very old and very British watching that. I have no clue what they were saying.

We truly are two peoples separated by a common language.


So, this was clearly racist misinterpretation from the context, but I still didn't understand enough to know exactly why it was racist misinterpretation and was curious.

For anyone else curious, this is maybe a good read:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-to-speak-gibberi...

It starts with the knee-jerk conservative anti-woke reaction, which peaks here:

> A reader in the comments suggests that these students should listen to MLK’s oratory and take a lesson. Absolutely. King was a master of rhetoric. That is the way to change minds. The teachers who are instructing these kids in this sort of thing are guilty of intellectual abuse, as are the CEDA officials who reward it.

But the updates after that, explain what is really going on:

> Rod, this post needs a serious correction. While that debate was ridiculous, it is entirely typical of what college “cross examination” debating has been for decades. The trend has been for (mostly white) debaters to talk about nuclear war in a debate about education policy, the environment in a debate about military policy, post structuralism pretty much whenever they feel like it, etc. etc. It’s a ridiculous form of debate but it isn’t some weird black thing. The reason these black students are debating like this is that they are competing, in a league with teams from schools like Harvard and Yale, that rewards this style of debate.

And the author is slightly magnanimous in his apology:

> UPDATE.3: To be perfectly clear, I concede that I was wrong to say that this team broke the rules of debate by refusing to address the topic, instead choosing to rant about racism, and to say that the woman who looked as if she were having a psychotic break (which she does, to the untrained eye) was doing anything wrong. I learned from readers that the Towson team’s bizarre display is actually well within the rules and the custom of competitive debate. So, congratulations to them, I guess. I learned something new today: Competitive debate is a completely insane phenomenon.


Lol!!! Made my day:)


I do not think successive UK governments have had enough of a long term strategy to do this consciously (though I would love to find out it was a deliberate), but I think the Battersea / Nine Elms development is a fantastic way to exploit the surging demand into Western real estate.

Tens of thousands of flats have been built almost entirely funded by foreign investment. If/once the market collapses on whatever time frame, London now has significantly increased housing stock almost entirely on the back of foreign money (whilst providing income for local builders and suppliers). Already foreign owners are taking huge losses on their investment and I expect this to drop even further. If price drop to a reasonable level for your average Londoner, this will be a great win.

On a side note, that entire development is an architectural disgrace and as you note, for the time being a ghost town, parking dodgy money from abroad.


While using foreign money flowing into Western property to build public housing is a cool strategy, in reality it did result in some controversy: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/02/penthou...


Nine Elms is horrific, isn't it? Designed by supposedly some of the world's best architects. Where the votes were presumably cast by other architects and not the general public.

Also, that development, and others have "poor doors" around the side or back for the non-penthouse owning riff raff to use. Another thing that's completely wrong with these kinds of developments in London.


I used to work in a small hotel as a student. Most of my job was taking guests' luggage up 4 flights of extremely narrow stairs of the historic building. The only guest who ever tipped me (not common in my country) was Anthony Bourdain, who was very generous.


> Buying bananas has no relevance to climate

Can you explain why? All the bananas in my UK supermarket are flown from Africa.

> minimise use of cars and planes


Sorry, should have included the link and explanation: basically growing food is energy intensive, but transporting food by ship is actually very efficient.

This results in a paradox where locally grown food, if it needs additional lights, spraying, ploughing, etc. is worse for the environment than food grown in perfect climage and transported to you.

https://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-loca...


Some sources e.g. http://www.fao.org/world-banana-forum/projects/good-practice... assert that ~2/3 of banana GHG footprint is caused by transportation and storage, including things like refrigeration on ship.

It's probably still more efficient (both money-wise and GHG-wise) than growing bananas locally in UK; now that would need a lot of extra energy; but on the other hand it would be more efficient to eat food that normally grows locally in your climate instead of bananas.


Ofcourse that's true, but no-one is (or at least should be) eating multiple kilos of bananas, coffee and chocolate. They are not a staple food like meat and potatoes.

All I am trying to say is that in the total carbon footprint of a person, they account for a miniscule part of the whole, and that things like a well insulated house, transport, etc. will be vastly more important


X = 1 is not exponential growth


Sure it is: x = 1^t


Yes, it is. Since the population is shrinking over time, it is more often called "exponential decay", but mathematically there's no difference. It just means the value of the exponent is negative.


Some people pick the strangest hills to die on.

Per this argument, I would think that an exponential function is different to something experiencing exponential growth. One of them is a definition, the other is a description. They aren’t really interchangeable when it comes to communicating a point.


> wearing masks

not true at least in Stockholm


Maybe it is not particularly high crime because police get 28% of the budget.


Mountain View police took more action against drug abuse than against robbery, rape, aggravated assault, and homicide combined by over a factor of 2. [0] They only cleared 60% of those violent crimes.

Maybe they should redirect more of their budget to investigating violent crime. What's the evidence for your conclusion?

[0]: https://www.mountainview.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx...


> Is it fish caught in that same day like you can get in any Greek taverna in the Cyclades?

Yes

>Or frozen fish brought in from half a continent away?

You can get that too.

The negative response you are getting from users is because you are completely wrong about inability to get high quality, same day picked/slaughtered/fished food in London.

edit: in regard to frozen fish, I trust that the Japanese (who regularly freeze the absolutely highest grade Tuna during transit) know what they are doing.


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