American football is very different from rugby, though it shares common ancestry.

He’s the devil! He can throw the pie with a horseshoe bend into the face from the other side! Demonic powers FTW

We built a world far too complex for any of us to understand. But then, the natural world is like that as well, once you look closely. I don’t think cynicism will help, but you do you!

It wasn’t any kind of collective decision to reject human scale cities, it was a campaign by car manufacturers. First, they conspired to destroy public transit, then they capitalized on the teen angst of the boomer generation to create one of the most successful marketing ideas of all time: the car as a vehicle of freedom.

That’s it, that’s all it took. Teens everywhere started watching the calendars until their 16th birthday, dreaming of the freedom cars would bring them. An escape from the prison of adolescence.

I think if you include scraped/plagiarized SEO spam “content” then I totally believe it. The amount of that crap flooding the internet is staggering. Search is just becoming more and more useless every day.

Just dealing with this tonight!

I’m surprised no one has mentioned this: it’s a numbers game. It only takes a small number of cheaters to reach a critical mass where everyone is encountering them all the time. If only 1% of all players are cheaters and you play games against 10 people in one day, your chance of playing against at least one cheater is about 9.6% on that day. Play 10 players per day for a month (30 days) and your chance of meeting at least one cheater goes up to 95%.

Now consider the effects that cheaters have on the rest of the population: if people get frustrated by cheaters often enough they’re more likely to quit the game. Over time, this can cause the number of non-cheaters to go down, increasing the chances of everyone playing against cheaters. If cheaters are now up to 2% of the population then your chances of meeting at least one in a day (assuming 10 opponents again) rise to 18%.

Conclusion: Over a long enough time span the population of cheaters rises to 100%.

You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!

The key word you used is “betrayed.” Utopian ideologies can be betrayed. Capitalism is not utopian because it cannot be betrayed: it assumes competition by default and accepts that some ventures will survive while others will not.

This process began long before Reagan. I think it started with the automobile manufacturers, and General Motors in particular, in their war on public transit.

The death of the streetcar brought with it the death of streetcar suburbs and mixed-use zoning, which was the foundation upon which most third places rested (neighbourhood pubs, cafes, and barber shops).

Anyway, definitely watch that video if you have the time. Compare the vast landscapes full of roads and parking lots with the old-fashioned neighbourhood of Riverdale, with its narrow streets and cozy houses huddled together on small lots. It’s easy to see which one is more conducive to community, civic engagement, and good government. The car-dependent landscape looks like some dystopian nightmare by comparison.

That’s because the US is not only deeply polarized by party affiliation, it’s deeply segregated regionally by political stripe. Look at how few “swing states” there are and how all the rest are “solid red” or “solid blue.”

Increasingly, people know and have personal contact with fewer and fewer members of the other side. We’re witnessing the creation of the Morlocks and the Eloi, groups that neither interact with nor understand one another to the point of being separate species.

I switched from vim to emacs years ago. Then years later I switched back. Emacs is cool and all but it really killed my pinkie finger!