Is your Kindle e-ink?

The general issue with e-ink-based readers and scrolling is that e-ink is designed to be mostly static, with sporadic (preferably partial-page) refreshes; but scrolling needs to have a very high refresh rate that updates the whole page simultaneously if it’s going to be usable.

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community rather than the landlord, but the portion of the rent contributed solely by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.

I heard he was wearing a white and gold blue and black coat.

There are three distinct concepts I think you’re confusing:

• The idea of biological races. Yeah, any given culture’s definition of “race” is historically contingent and biologically incoherent. I think you get that and are assuming that’s all there is to it.

• Race as a correlative of ethnicity. There are some ethnicities whose members tend to have darker skin colors or other physical traits, and people conflate skin color and ethnicity. Ethnicity (as a set of cultural institutions) is meaningful to many people, and some of them interpret a disregard for “race” as a disregard for their ethnicity, or as an attempt to suppress ethnic identity.

• Race as a social construct. When the above ideas permeate a society, people with different skin colors experience systemically different treatment—even in the absence of actual biological or ethnic distinctions. So people with similar skin colors can be grouped on the basis of those shared experiences, and the different behaviors resulting from those experiences feed back into society’s conceptions of biological race and ethnicity. And it doesn’t suffice to counteract such social constructs by ignoring them—social behavior is taken for granted unless people make a conscious effort to reevaluate it.

What increased rates are you referring to? According to the National Cancer Institute, colorectal cancer rates in the past five years have declined by 1% for men and 0.7% for women.

Because we think of every life as a story, and every story needs narrative closure. So if someone’s life seems like an unfinished story we feel like there’s some kind of lingering agency trying to finish it.

When politicians refuse to talk about it.

Depends on whether you define a “free speech platform” as a platform that doesn’t impose its own constraints on speech, or a platform that enables speech without constraints. Because there are social pressures that also constrain speech, and hate speech can be a tool of those pressures.

A reverse clepsydra: an air-filled container that releases bubbles at a constant rate.

It depends on the joke: most are funny regardless, but for some jokes a straight/deadpan delivery is part of the humor.

the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience.

The same argument could have been used a century ago to claim that everyday people would never switch from trains to private cars, because the effort and cost of maintaining a car exceeds the skill and interest of most travelers. That may have been true at one point, and may be true again in the future—but it’s contingent on changing circumstances, not a categorical truth.

Yeah—I think the canonical usage is to hold up your fingers as you say “quote unquote”, then lower your hands when the quote is complete.

It’s a metric scale—just use centimoochies.

There’s glass that doesn’t block UV frequencies—like the glass used in tanning booths, UV lights, and UV cameras.

That’s true of any material that gets warmed by sunlight, though.

Infrared is the peak of the frequency range emitted by objects that are roughly body temperature—that doesn’t mean it’s the only frequency that makes objects warm.

In fact all light that isn’t perfectly transmitted or reflected makes things warmer.

I would think it would depend on whether the material the light hits inside the window reflects UV light, or absorbs it and re-emits it as heat.

When you say “by themselves”, you mean one person would still write the scripts manually, and AI would replace the grunt-work animation teams that shows like the Simpsons and South Park employ in East Asia?

• Support for slavery before the Civil War

• Carter’s airline deregulation

• Clinton’s welfare “reform” and NAFTA

• Obama’s finance sector bailout

• Biden blocking a national rail strike