mustacheemperor

Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.

The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.

They are also wrong by absolute numbers.

That figure of 7m is not the total incarcerated population. It's the total correctional population, which includes parole and probation.

But a dumpster is a complete and functional item. I think that's a key distinction. This is an incomplete high rise blighting the landscape until it's taken down.

What if you like your job, your area, and a developer shows up one day and installs 2/3rds of a dumpster in the parking lot. There is a partially completed trash enclosure there, clearly unfinished, blighting the view from your office.

If someone drives past, they're not going to get a positive impression whether it's painted or not.

If someone paints the wreckage of the incomplete dumpster, how do you feel about it? It seems to me the disrespect here is really from the people who built a pile of garbage in your parking lot.

I actually essentially do that, I have a reusable bag that folds up into itself with a zipper into a package about the size of a wallet. Fits well in a purse or jacket pocket and is more pleasant to carry when full than a plastic bag anyhow.

So really, there’s not even a small sacrifice involved for me, just a little bit of planning, to avoid making that waste.

And isn’t this kind of ingenious gadget based solution much more in the hacker spirit than throwing up our hands and saying, give me back the old traditional way regardless of the flaws?

In particular because Appin Training Centers was only incorporated several months after being named the plaintiff in the lawsuit, and appears to exist in order to facilitate these suits.

One of my favorite aspects of pinball is finding and playing those odd machines tucked away here and there, thanks to some enthusiast at a local business, or because it’s always been there. Fond memories of an old laundromat in CNY that had a machine of similar vintage..and an equally old coke vending machine.

Worth noting the performance characterizations of an individual machine can depend on how it’s maintained and how the operator chooses to set it up - so this may not be a completely level playing field.

On the other hand, if you’ve figured out which Medieval Madness in your city you play best at, you can leverage that information to your advantage :)

I believe it was right here on HN that I read last week the pithy aphorism,

>to err is human. to screw up a million times a second, you need a computer.

This takes me back to my own first experiences 'hacking' and tinkering with the guts of a computer system, which put me on the path to a career in IT and engineering:

- Breaking the family computer with a trojan pirating Halo PC, which I then had to figure out how to fix before my dad got home

- Circumventing the NetNanny, etc parental controls my parents randomly decided to install on our personal computers several years after us kids had already been using the internet (edit: okay, there may have been a letter from Comcast re: the above sloppy piracy). Restoring my netbook to useful functionality without leaving a trace of modification introduced me to Linux Live CDs, and Linux!

Good to know tomorrow's hackers are still getting that education today!