I think you’re over generalizing. I understand you’re speaking from your personal experience, and I believe that’s what you encountered, but still, n=1.
There are, unfortunately, a huge range of people with widely varying beliefs who refer to themselves as “Christians.” Some of them are indeed not actually interested in theology, only in their own subcultural tradition.
But there are also Christians who are extremely interested in textual analysis, understanding the original languages of the texts, seeking out archaeological evidence to understand events better, etc. In my experience these are also the people who follow Jesus’ teaching to love their neighbor, not judge others, and to “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (ie. don’t be a political movement).
You will find no bible more dogeared and highlighted than from an American evangelical, who so strongly needs to justify the reasons for their superiority and hatred that they will beat a concordance to death. They aren't interested in facts, they're interested in their version of "truth," which are two completely disparate and antithetical concepts. Just look at their support for the idea of the Rapture, a concept which is found nowhere in the Bible, and whose very idea has been incredibly harmful given how religion informs voting decisions in the US.
I once heard a story of a family living abroad feeling quite bent about this extra taxation that they were paying no reason. But the story ends with the family being rescued by a USMC helicopter and airlifted to safety after a natural disaster, at which point they supposed they had been paying for something after all.
So the Author is based in Spain and writing about life in Spain. My experiences traveling in Europe have been that bathrooms are often hard to find there … but, as a tourist, I’ve definitely not seen enough of normal daily life to know.
Meanwhile many comments here seem to be reflexively decrying the situation in the US. That makes no sense to me. Every business has to have a bathroom, and in the overwhelming majority of the country these bathrooms are not locked and nobody minds if you come inside and use one.
There are two exceptions, that most of us aren’t visiting very often:
(1) some of our city centers where there are concentrated disorder and mental health problems
(2) the most crowded tourist destinations
These places tend to
keep bathrooms locked, but you can usually just ask and get the key or code. Many have signs saying you need to make a purchase but few try to enforce that.
These exceptions are indeed annoying, but I believe the solution is better mental health care and generally more effective community policing so that businesses in those locations could follow the norms of the rest of the country.
Hi, I'm the one that wrote this blog post! A lot of comments treat this project
as a joke or some form of satire, but we've spent 3 months writing this after
initially coming up with the idea because we thought nobody had created such
a general programming language before. It's good to get some feedback and
maybe we've been in our own heads for a little too long, but it's good that
someone gets it.
> we thought nobody had created such a general programming language before
How is this more general than a language like Binary Lambda Calculus, which can bootstrap into any other language, like Brainfuck in 112 bytes of bootstrap, or even into Cognition itself?
I read it as probably containing something deep that I should save for when I have time to go through the details. Maybe we syntaxlings need time to get comfortable.
If we want to prevent surveillance capitalism we’re going to need to establish a constitutional right to privacy in the US (and the legal equivalent in other countries).
It’s probably worse than that. Since Covid had relatively low mortality after the first wave, and got so politicized, I think if there were another more dangerous pandemic a lot of people would simply not believe it until they experienced it first hand.
It’s surprising how rare houses with >= 4 bedrooms are too. They definitely exist and are more common in outer suburbs, but in most central city areas built up through the 80s houses are almost all 3 bedroom or smaller.
There are a lot of things like this that consciously or subconsciously push people to have smaller families.
My kid’s afterschool care costs more than my monthly car payments + insurance (and I have a pricey new EV). If he was still in daycare, I would get creamed even harder. Thankfully this might end in a few years, but daycare costs are no joke, and then there are lots of activity costs.
I guess it depends on how often you buy a new car, some people get new cars every 3-4 years.
What this view is missing is how much of historical architecture was actually Craft. People didn’t go in a computer and design things to be built out of a bunch of commodity parts. Local humans knew how to make things by hand out of wood and masonry, according to certain traditional methods, and the humans experimented just a little bit with their methods on every building. This is the bread and butter of every vernacular architectural style. This has effectively gone extinct in the developed world, because we don’t do labor like this anymore.
People experiment far more on a computer, where you can try lots of different things, render them, see them in different light and weather, test structural integrity, etc.
I wonder when buildings were built as you describe; maybe the 19th century? Isn't the 'golden age' romantic fantasy obvious?
There are, unfortunately, a huge range of people with widely varying beliefs who refer to themselves as “Christians.” Some of them are indeed not actually interested in theology, only in their own subcultural tradition.
But there are also Christians who are extremely interested in textual analysis, understanding the original languages of the texts, seeking out archaeological evidence to understand events better, etc. In my experience these are also the people who follow Jesus’ teaching to love their neighbor, not judge others, and to “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (ie. don’t be a political movement).