It was not obvious from the summary what the heck was meant by "embedded programming". In TFA, in addition to the quoted paragraph, the word "embedded" is also used in "The ability to defer loading in a mobile app or an embedded app on Apple Watch will improve the perceived performance to the user.", "Swift provides the development community a direct way to influence a language that will be used to create apps, embedded systems (if Apple ever licenses an embedded framework and chip for third parties), and devices like the Apple Watch.", and "Ultimately, Swift is a more approachable full-featured programming language that will allow developers to not only build apps but also target embedded systems like the new lower-power Apple Watch for many years to come."

So if he's referring to the Apple Watch, maybe. If he's not, I'm not sure what the heck he's referring to; "embedded systems (if Apple ever licenses an embedded framework and chip for third parties)" sounds like hand-waving. Is he expecting Apple to be pushing Darwin into the *ahem* Internet of Things or some such?

OK, this presumably isn't the word you're thinking of, because 1) "the means of production, distribution, and exchange [being] owned or regulated by the community as a whole" doesn't necessarily mean that there will even be a minimum wage, or wages of any sort and 2) you don't have to have "the means of production, distribution, and exchange [being] owned or regulated by the community as a whole" in order to have a minimum wage with a given level.

So, either 1) the word in question doesn't (solely) mean what the OED entry in question says it means or 2) that word isn't the name you had in mind. Which is it?

Perhaps because, as the article you cite says:

However, that doesn't mean liberals necessarily like all of the ideas they see. Consistent liberals were the most likely group to block or unfriend someone because they disagreed with their political postings, with 44 percent saying they had "hidden, blocked, defriended, or stopped following someone" on Facebook due to their political postings. Only roughly one-third (31 percent) of consistent conservatives had done the same -- although this might be attributable to lower levels of ideological diversity in their online ecosystem.

And that conservative echochamber isn't limited to conservatives' online interactions: It's a reflection of the lack of ideological diversity in their real life relationships. Two-thirds of consistent conservatives told Pew that most of their close friends share their views on government and politics, compared to just over half, or 52 percent, of consistent liberals. For mostly conservatives, 42 percent of their close friends have the same views, while just 26 percent of mostly liberals respondents who said the same.

so maybe liberals have more conservative "friends" to de-"friend" than conservatives have liberal "friends" to de-"friend".

I've been to all three.

I mean "the only way "ZOMG NEW YORK CITY IS 400 YEARS OLD!!!!!111ONE!!!" would be a useful response to "New York City is the world's most wasteful megacity" would be if the other cities were shinier and newer."

I.e., I was being sarcastic.

Which may well be the case - but, again, that renders New York's age not a particularly relevant point, as the more efficient cities are older.

Hint: it's called "sarcasm".

What the paper says is

The megacities are essentially common commuter-sheds of more than 10 million people; most are contiguous urban regions, but a contiguous area is not a requirement; for example, the London megacity includes a ring of commuter towns outside the Greater London area. Megacities can spread across political borders. They include large tracts of suburban regions, which can have higher per capita resource flows than central areas.

Not that any of the authors of the paper are working at universities in the U.S.. The first author in the list of authors got his degrees from universities in the UK and Canada, so I'm guessing he's not a fellow Yank.

They didn't go quite that far - "Tokyo", the megacity, is

Constituent cities: Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama prefectures

For those who are curious, "London", the megacity, is

Constituent cities: Camden, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham Islington, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth, Westminster, Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Brent, Bromley, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Newham, Redbridge, Richmond upon Thames, Sutton, Waltham Forest, City of London

and "Paris", the megacity, is

Constituent cities: Paris, Seine-et-Marne, Yvelines, Essonne, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne, Val-d'Oise

.

See the paper's supplementary material for a full list.

The title of the article is "The World's Most Wasteful Megacity". Saying "ZOMG NEW YORK IS FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OLD!!!!!!111ONE!!" is not an interesting response to the claim that it's the world's most wasteful megacity, given that there are several more efficient megacities older than it. It might be a useful example as a response to claims that megacities are inefficient in general, as it applies to many of the megacities in question, especially the developed-world ones.

Well, given that they're older than New York, yeah, unless age makes cities more efficient, it's a function of something other than age.

In any case, they're actually comparing large metropolitan areas; as I noted in another post, "New York", for the purposes of their study, actually includes a hefty chunk of suburban New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, much of which was much more recently developed.

They do, although some of those might be multi-family homes (for what it's worth, Trulia claims that this house at the intersection of 109th Avenue and 164th Place is a single-family home).

But their definition of "New York" is the "megacity", which includes more than New York City; it includes:

Constituent cities: New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island); West Connecticut (Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties); North New Jersey (Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties), Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties); Mid-Hudson region (Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester counties)

which, I guess, means that, as a resident of Ocean Township, New Jersey, I grew up in "New York", and there were plenty of detached single-family homes where I grew up ("plenty" as in "all the homes in my neighborhood").

As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.

The PNAS paper to which the article attempts to refer (with a file: link, so the link is completely worthless) does mention LA, and, if you see Figure 1[1], LA is behind NY for total energy use, water use including line losses, and total solid waste production. The caption says "Values shown are for the megacity populations scaled on a per capita basis from recorded data for the study area population"; I don't know whether that means "we scaled the values based on the population sizes", so that they represent per capita consumption, or whether they represent total consumption.

[1]Yes, you did see what I did there. :-)

Here's the PNAS article, although it's behind a paywall.

The question that comes to mind is "how many ergs were wasted by people clicking the link to the paper that Brian Merchant, senior editor at Motherboard, put in his article, with a file: URL so that it was COMPLETELY FUCKING USELESS unless either 1) you were logged into his machine or 2) you happened to have downloaded the article and stored it in /Users/brianmerchant/Downloads/pnas201504315_7vpr25%20embargoed.pdf on your UN*X box.

Try the veal.

Kiril Yeskov wrote The Last Ring-Bearer from the premise that "history is written by the victors" and that, perhaps, Lord of the Rings was propaganda written by the victors of the War of the RIng.