One 180g apple is about 100 kcal, while 180g of donuts (3.5 Krispy Kremes) is seven times as much at about 700 kcal. One has fiber to moderate its gylcemic index, the other represents a sugar spike + crash and burn. Both can taste pretty good, but physiologically one will keep you satisfied for a big while the other one will have you reaching for more food in no time. Our natural food response cycle, the one that's so it's hard to fight against, wants to eat until we're full. If you chose to eat your fill of apples you'll be doing much better than your fill of donuts.

This clashes with my beliefs. I believe it is an equal decision to eat the donuts, to eating the apples. If I want it to be good, it's just as good.

There is no objective standard of "health." Now, I'm going to have this cigarette and eat this whole pack of pork rinds, and then we can talk about other subjective choices that are equal or should be to their "healthier" equivalents.

These 2.3 terrabytes of bit torrent downloads are not piracy.

They are performance art.

Some express themselves through defecating paint on canvas, or inserting nostalgic objects into their vaginas, or even collecting garbage in a room and calling it art.

My art is poetry formed of the sequence of downloads I am undertaking.

Now please stop troubling me with your talk about "piracy" and "illegality" because it's simply not true.

Also because I'm in the EU, can I get welfare benefits for heavy metal addiction?

That's what I'm downloading. Help me!

The process of civilization is self-destructive for two reasons.

First, any civilization develops rules and methods and eventually uses those to the exclusion of anything else.

Second, any civilization creates a "system" which must be manipulated by individuals to achieve success.

Both of these remove people from contact with raw reality.

Eventually, people recognize success only within what the civilization already recognizes as important, which excludes any ideas that are actually new.

Worse, the civilization produces its own form of "innovation" which consists of re-applying its principles in new combinations. These innovations take precedence because they are recognized by the audience, since they are based on previously approved ideas within both the system and the rules.

In other words, the problem of civilization is that it re-targets our goals from pure engineering (adapt to reality) toward social goals (adapt to civilization's expectations).

Social goals are expressed through the utilitarian mode of what most individuals approve of. This in turn is based on what the average person can expect based on past successes in the system, and what they can recognize as building on that past.

In short, everything that civilization does is against innovation and more importantly, independent leadership. Civilization forces self-referentiality on its citizens and thus constrains them to its current direction, which is like a kind of super-inertia.

It is for this reason that screwballs such as myself exist. We don't trust existing frameworks, and build our own from scratch. Not only does this mean ditching Ruby on Rails for Perl wildcoding, but also, wildcoding in philosophy and politics so that future generations don't have to suffer under the mistakes of the past.

You are depending on the people to vote intelligently.

I agree this is the fatal flaw of democracy.

Most people do not vote intelligently, because they do not act intelligently, and often it has nothing to do with their raw intelligence potential.

Mostly, people are narcissistic, distracted, neurotic, selfish, individualistic, and afloat in a world of desires, judgments, feelings and fears.

They aren't making decisions using their logical abilities, but their emotional reactions.

Where you live, the government looks out for its constituents, the people.

Here in the U.S., the government looks out for its constituents, the corporations.

But how can that be?

The people have the vote, freedom of speech and assembly, and their own media.

How is it that these bad outcomes can take place given all the safeguards we've put in, including giving power to the people?

Or is it that apathy, laziness, narcissism and general stupidity (that ugly bell curve of unequal human ability) won out?

If that's the case, democracy has failed.

What do you think?

The problem with the cell phone carrier market is that there are relatively few providers, and worse, consumers do not demonstrate loyalty to any one, but switch when better deals are offered on the others.

This means the only factor that matters is price and availability of features the market wants.

As a result, this news story will have zero effect. Every few months another atrocity comes out about some cellular carrier or another, but the audience just doesn't care.

See, the free market came through where government did not.

These are your new elites, America.

We got tired of upper middle class white kids. That's gauche.

Now, we have a multicultural empire of elites, who are selected for their obedience as much as anything else.

It seems they cheat a lot. When you prioritize obedience and detail-memorization above the ability to think, that's what you get: little robots that do anything to get the grades.

That's your future, America.

Now transferring my investments to Europe and Asia...

People work on problems that are (a) fun to solve and (b) will bring them acclaim.

Tiny, ugly, boring bugs don't do that and so in many software projects they get overlooked the longest.

The ][, ][+, //e and //c were great machines.

They were hacker's machines.

Easy to do basic stuff on, no barriers to entry, and yet also very friendly to either grandma or the weekend code warrior.

After that, Apple started wanting to go for the easy money. The Macintosh was marketed with the de facto notion that even if mental retardation struck you where you stood, you could still use one.

Now it's just a hipster machine.

Bring back the hacker days, when not everything came with "wipers" to make sure we didn't screw up.

Are you listening, Apple? After the iHype fades, you're going to need a new direction. What's like an Arduino, Raspberry Pi and new frontier all in one? A hacker's machine, of course.

I realize it's unpopular to like what we have in the West, and most people express this with fawning adoration for its opposites, but I beg to differ.

Communism sucks in every way.

It doesn't work politically, it sabotages the intellectual and moral will of the population, and it even fails economically, wherever it is tried.

I'm sure the VC are trying hard to cover up their failures with propaganda. It's what they always do. And yet, that means collapse is right around the corner.

It'll be interesting to see the USA granted a late victory in this war.

People often commit suicide out of a sense of revenge on the world.

If we blame the government for Aaron's actions, this encourages more people to commit suicide, so that whoever is antagonizing them gets blamed.

The best logic if we want to stop suicides is to frame it as what it always is: an individual choice. This allows us to emphasize the consequences of that choice on the individual and immediate family, discouraging that individual.

It's sort of an unwritten rule that the people who should kill themselves do not kill themselves, while the people who should not seem to succeed at an alarming rate.

Quoth the content:

You need to have the Adobe Flash Player to view this content.
Please click here to continue.

Is it still 1999? We haven't moved on from this buggy, horrible, shitty runtime (Flash) yet? Even though its origins are in early 1990s interface design software?