Actually if you want to find the origin of bell bottoms, according to a museum exhibit on men's clothing I saw, it was the sans coulottes in the 1700s. They protested the aristocrats, who wore high-legged pants, and eventually led to the French revolution and the association of bell bottoms with revolutionary/countercultural things.
I did an image search for sans coulottes and I did not see any bell bottoms. They did appear to wear long pants to the ankles rather than breeches to the knees.
Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.
Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.
Its just a number game. You see say 15 patients per day, so maybe 3000 a year. Even if you have a tiny 1% chance of overlooking something, thats 30 cases a year, easily. In a career, that jumps to 1000 cases minimally.
Now a lot of folks come to doctors with very vague problems - ie 'chest pain' is probably the worst since it can be from nothing to killer (and it really often is). Also you need to keep constantly full mental model of all the other problems of patient (allergies, injuries, degenerative diseases of literally everything in the body), plus all their medication and how it interacts with those problems and whatever new treatment you are applying. Old folks are generally worst in sense that they are just breaking down altogether including their mind, so everything is potentially a problem, but then you sometimes have very little time to decide.
Its just not possible to not make mistakes, and its only matter of time before they become fatal. But doctors will never admit this to strangers, even close ones they often keep avoiding this topic. I grok them - idealists who want to save lives, but reality ain't some MSF hospital in middle of warzone where you save 50 lives a day and people celebrate you like a national hero, its small churning of all above, tons of bureaucracy and regulations and various financial pressures, so they do their best just like rest of us, and like rest of us mistakes (even if just misunderstandings with bad consequences) do happen.
grind saffron in a mortar and pestle, then add it to yogurt with some salt, pepper, and diced onions (maybe some thyme or coriander or other spices if you are feeling fancy). Basically get the yogurt to a nice color and flavor, slightly on the salty side. Then use the yogurt mixture to marinate the chicken, preferably overnight. Cook on a grill or bake and finish with broiling to brown it.
I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.
The article makes it seem like people discovered about the cult connections after the fact. I wish I had known more about it to ask more questions. If anyone has more insight about it, I'd be glad to learn more.
Ironically I was reading 1Q84 at the time, which is about a cult in Japan.
The cult connections weren't widely known by the public prior. His assassin opened up a giant can of worms with the Reunification Church still discussed on the nightly news to this day. Last I heard the government is getting ready to ban them like they did Aum Shinrikyo. The whole thing has tarnished Abe's legacy, that and his expensive state funeral which pissed off a good chunk of the public.
It is an ongoing issue and point of discussion/conflict with the public, with lots and lots of message management and incremental “progress”. There is some policy reform and push for more to be done. Doesn’t seem like much power has actually been purged of its accomplices tho kishida public support is very low I wouldn’t be surprised if it recovers whenever he’s replaced within his party
politics is a losing game when the public buys into its machinations and scheming against their interests
I feel like the public in Japan can get upset about the weirdest things though.
Everyone loses their minds over the princess leaving the imperial family getting a 1M departure gift, and a funeral for the single most significant PM of our time that cost ten million dollars.
Meanwhile, everything has gotten 10% more expensive over the past year or so, which is actually worth getting upset about, compared to the 0.01 yen that the Abe funeral cost each Japanese citizen.
Tangent, but I looked up the price since ¥0.01 sounded too low. It's ¥12 per person on Japan (which should be a good approximation for number of japanese citizens)
Apologies, I figured the same thing but I didn’t bother looking it up, because 0.01 or 12 yen is the same kind of irrelevant to everyone but a 5 year olds spending.
> He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.
Not really--Abe's approval ratings were well above water almost his entire tenure, and his approval was often over 50%. Trump's approval rating never hit 50% and his net approval was underwater almost his entire presidency.
It would be more like Reagan. A large minority of people really hated Regan. But he was relatively popular overall.
I’m presuming you held this conversation in English, which is correlated with a Japanese person who has more worldly experiences and views, and with that diverges from mainstream Japanese society.
Most of Japan is conservative and inward looking. Despite the second strong passport in the world, very low percentage of Japanese people have one. Japan also has the lowest TOEFL score out of all Asian countries.
Most gripes toward Abe was from economic frustration, especially during COVID. It does not make sense at all to make a Trump comparison because the American left/right Ideology does not map. Japanese people are mostly homogenous, and identity politics and immigration which are dividing issues in the west are not at the top here. Japan also has very low voter turnout because it’s continuity of conservatism whichever way.
Not getting into politics at all but I imagine it'd be utter chaos if anything similar were to happen to Trump, that's an interesting perspective to hear though.
This comment made me realize that when Trump passes there will 100% be a conspiracy about it, no matter the cause.
For the average American man who is Trump's age (77) the chance of dying in that same year is about 5%, according to the Social Security Administration's Actuarial Life Table.
This is a stat which only goes in one direction - up - over time. It's at 6.5% at 80, 18% at 90, and a sobering 38% at 100.
If Trump died, and in the aftermath it was revealed he had ties to a Chinese cult, his only remaining supporters would probably be the cult-like reality deniers.
"These people (the Trump voters) are sick and tired of being lied to by fake politicians and they just want to burn the whole system down -- Trump is their fire bomb." -- Michael Moore, prior to the 2016 election.
That's not wrong, we have an issue with politicians promising things that are impossible or at a minimum highly implausible - because the structure of our political system means they won't be thrown out on their ear for making promises they can't keep.
It's not that they promise things that they can't deliver.
It's that they pretend to be fighters for good, while instead using the system for cynical self gain.
I actually think it's that politicians have been unwilling to promise things that they feel are politically infeasible, and arguably make no sense, like building a wall to Mexico
It kind of makes sense on an intellectual level, but I don’t think it is very plausible. Trump promised a lot of things when he was elected, most of which are practically impossible. I think he just promised the right things for his audience, whereas most politicians are so far up their arses that they don’t know what actual people want or care about.
I don't think that's what GP meant: Voters just wanted to set the whole circus on fire. That the person they chose for the job also made impossible promises didn't matter.
This happens a lot on a smaller scale in other democracies that aren't a two party system - people vote for some nonsense radicals or weirdo upstart party to signal the establishment it needs to change. Sometimes this has quite funny outcomes: Pirate party, the Greens in Germany in 1983, etc. Other times it's scary nutjobs. Rarely the parties stick around for longer, slowly becoming the establishment.
Republicans and Democrats alike say whatever they need to win a primary and general election, democrats do that in smaller quantities - but it's still the same bullshit.
And before anyone says I'm "both sidesing" the green new deal (which was little more than a messaging bill with lots of words and little substance) was no more passable than building a southern border wall was, or repealing Obamacare (though this got close) for that matter.
> we have an issue with politicians promising things that are impossible or at a minimum highly implausible
That's every democracy. The issue we have is that we're in a period where trust in elites is at rock bottom. (Both sides' elites--Mitch McConnell isn't much more popular among Trump voters than Biden.) The normal function of elites keeping the unwashed masses grounded in reality isn't working.
Yes. This was part of an MSNBC discussion about Clinton's problem with union and working class white voters. The panel was having a hard time understanding why union members would vote Republican.
If you think about the attention mechanism in LLMs, it may not work the same way as the brain, but there should be some functionality of the brain that also deals with attention. And if you think about that, you might also think that attention has some role in consciousness: you need to pay attention to things to be aware of them, and you need awareness of the self for consciousness, etc...
Visiting the UK from the US in January and I was impressed by how far the dollars went. There was a burger and beer special at Wetherspoon for something like 6-7 pounds and a beer was under around 1-2 pounds. So my experience was different than the parent. Those prices are reasonable in the US under the old exchange rates but cheap now.
That being said, everyone was complaining about the costs so I agree that for people living there, the costs have gone up. My auntie kept her house very cold and taxi drivers complained a lot too about prices and the insurance system.
If you ignore the whole education thing, universities are organizations that aim to preserve their own existence (like religions) rather than return money to shareholders (like companies)
