clock_tower

I can't say that I'm a great coder, but I learned from ZZT and Megazeux back in the early-mid 1990s. No idea if something like that would work today, though, and both ZZT and Megazeux seem to be stagnant at present...

Experience is a good teacher. Dalrymple remarked on this in _Utopias Elsewhere_ -- how it sometimes seems that every society has to learn that Communism won't work the hard way.

> My observation about conservatives on this issue has been that they become defensive when they hear "conservatives have caused global warming with their capitalism, and the only solution is to repudiate the entire conservative world view".

Indeed. Things get particularly ludicrous when you hear people saying that Communism or something like it is the only way to avoid damaging the planet; there was no pollution like Communist pollution, and the Left was hostile to the first Earth Day -- it felt too much like Hitler.

I've heard the expression "watermelons" applied to a lot of this: people who are Green on the outside, Red on the inside.

> what we learned from the unrest that the U.S. faced during the Vietnam war era.

That the counterculture and the Communists were actively trying to make us lose a war? The author of this discusses real problems with the US -- situations like Guatemala, where we backed a feudal aristocracy, or Iran, where we set the country back considerably by helping overthrow Mossadeq -- and not just conspiracies carried out by our enemies.

Thinking about the meaning of "empire", I wonder if it would've been better for the US to have made various outright annexations after WWII. Not having to deal with an independent local government, or with self-interested local elites, makes things clearer and easier; the US's interventions in El Salvador or Guatemala would've been significantly less nasty if they had begun with annexation and the extension of domestic policies like EITC, Social Security, and property tax...

Microsoft's sponsoring Mono now, and they've always been pretty benevolent towards game companies, especially with how seriously they take backwards compatibility. I wouldn't worry too much, at least not at this point.

What I'm most surprised by is their straw-man alternative: "unalterable traits or unattainable pedigree," _in 2017_.

"I say, Langley, HBR is pure bosh. They've no respect at all for proper breeding, and their attitude towards Mr. Spencer's impeccable theories is shocking, really."

You'd think they'd disparage education, money, and connections, instead of inborn character and aristocratic bloodline... (Unless, of course, you _do_ need education, money, and connections, and they want some safer strawman to knock down.)

Speaking as a Catholic, I have no idea how people can break a treaty and think they're fighting for God. Isn't He traditionally called to witness that treaties will be kept sacrosanct?

Heil Hitler! /s

(Seriously, read Snyder's _Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning_ for how Hitler saw the US as a role model.)

Maybe in Wales? Modern England (and most of modern Scotland) is mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Romano-British.

I'd always heard "Europeans", not "European people"; if Google is just confused (and I wouldn't rule it out -- look up "Goofle Translate"), I think it's because "European people" is a pretty rare semantic construct.

From the grandparent's post:

> "The hottest part of the day usually starts at about the end of the prime solar hours."

More like how IBM held off Sun Microsystems.

> What does "backed by the full faith and credit of a stable entity" even mean? Why does it matter?

I understand it to meant that the country in question will be a currency-recipient of last resort: the country will always accept taxes paid in this currency, and will use this currency to charge for government services and pay its employees. This ensures that there's always a market for the currency -- something that you don't have a guarantee of otherwise, unless the mode of payment has non-financial uses (like rice, cloth, nails, or cows).

I'm not surprised that Westinghouse behaved idiotically; they've always struck me as the Ford of washing machines, and I can only imagine what they're like at utility scale...

It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020 election... if it happens at all, that is.