VitalSigns posted:

Oh boy we're going to plunge down the rabbit hole of solipsism to justify a claim that not believing in your religion is 'faith', I can't wait.

"But how do you know that telescope you're looking through even exists?.... Because you have faith?? " :smirks freshmanly:

Inferior Third Season posted:

I like how she is just admitting that the GOP is incapable of ever changing itself to the point that immigrant populations would ever consider voting for them.

Fojar38 posted:

I can't really blame them for thinking that because the media has been feeding everyone the "When China Rules the World" narrative for like a decade now despite it being false

fishmech posted:

Over a period of 500 years.

fishmech posted:

No, the industrial revolution didn't start in the 1500s. Please, take a remedial history class sometime.


By that standard there's never been a non-robotic car, so clearly robotic cars can't kill off jobs.

Boon posted:

Please expand on this, because I'm not sure I agree at all but can't be certain based on that.

fishmech posted:

No, dude, the reason that way less people work in agriculture over the past 200 years has far more to do with other forms of work becoming available. People were subsistence farmers not because it was necessary for society, but because there was nothing else they were qualified for and was available where they are. That's why the rural population in the US was able to drop sharply starting around 1840 - there were tons of people farming that didn't really need to be farming in the first place, and suddenly there were industrial (and to a limited extent as a result of urban migration, commercial jobs) for them to take instead of running a farmstead.

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture17a.html posted:

Historians are now agreed that beginning in the 17th century and continuing throughout the 18th century, England witnessed an agricultural revolution. English (and Dutch) farmers were the most productive farmers of the century and were continually adopting new methods of farming and experimenting with new types of vegetables and grains. They also learned a great deal about manure and other fertilizers. In other words, many English farmers were treating farming as a science, and all this interest eventually resulted in greater yields. Was the English farmer more enterprising than his French counterpart? Perhaps, but not by virtue of intelligence alone. English society was far more open than French -- there were no labor obligations to the lord. The English farmer could move about his locale or the country to sell his goods while the French farmer was bound by direct and indirect taxes, tariffs or other kinds of restrictions. In 1700, 80% of the population of England earned its income from the land. A century later, that figure had dropped to 40%.

The result of these developments taken together was a period of high productivity and low food prices. And this, in turn, meant that the typical English family did not have to spend almost everything it earned on bread (as was the case in France before 1789), and instead could purchase manufactured goods.

There are other assets that helped make England the "first industrial nation." Unlike France, England had an effective central bank and well-developed credit market. The English government allowed the domestic economy to function with few restrictions and encouraged both technological change and a free market. England also had a labor surplus which, thanks to the enclosure movement, meant that there was an adequate supply of workers for the burgeoning factory system.

England's agricultural revolution came as a result of increased attention to fertilizers, the adoption of new crops and farming technologies, and the enclosure movement. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) invented a horse-drawn hoe as well as a mechanical seeder which allowed seeds to be planted in orderly rows. A contemporary of Tull, Charles "Turnip" Townshend (1674-1738), stressed the value of turnips and other field crops in a rotation system of planting rather than letting the land lay fallow. Thomas William Coke (1754-1842) suggested the utilization of field grasses and new fertilizers as well as greater attention to estate management.

In order for these "high farmers" to make the most efficient use of the land, they had to manage the fields as they saw fit. This was, of course, impossible under the three field system which had dominated English and European agriculture for centuries. Since farmers, small and large, held their property in long strips, they had to follow the same rules of cultivation. The local parish or village determined what ought to be planted. In the end, the open-field system of crop rotation was an obstacle to increased agricultural productivity. The solution was to enclose the land, and this meant enclosing entire villages. Landlords knew that the peasants would not give up their land voluntarily, so they appealed by petition to Parliament, a difficult and costly adventure at best. The first enclosure act was passed in 1710 but was not enforced until the 1750s. In the ten years between 1750 and 1760, more than 150 acts were passed and between 1800 and 1810, Parliament passed more than 900 acts of enclosure. While enclosure ultimately contributed to an increased agricultural surplus, necessary to feed a population that would double in the 18th century, it also brought disaster to the countryside. Peasant formers were dispossessed of their land and were now forced to find work in the factories which began springing up in towns and cities.

England faced increasing pressure to produce more manufactured goods due to the 18th century population explosion -- England's population nearly doubled over the course of the century. And the industry most important in the rise of England as an industrial nation was cotton textiles. No other industry can be said to have advanced so far so quickly. Although the putting-out system (cottage industry) was fairly well-developed across the Continent, it was fully developed in England. A merchant would deliver raw cotton at a household. The cotton would be cleaned and then spun into yarn or thread. After a period of time, the merchant would return, pick up the yarn and drop off more raw cotton. The merchant would then take the spun yarn to another household where it was woven into cloth. The system worked fairly well except under the growing pressure of demand, the putting-out system could no longer keep up.

There was a constant shortage of thread so the industry began to focus on ways to improve the spinning of cotton. The first solution to this bottleneck appeared around 1765 when James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his cotton-spinning jenny. At almost the same time, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) invented another kind of spinning device, the water frame. Thanks to these two innovations, ten times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had been possible just twenty years earlier. Hargreaves' jenny was simple, inexpensive and hand-operated. The jenny had between six and twenty-four spindles mounted on a sliding carriage. The spinner (almost always a woman) moved the carriage back and forth with one hand and turned a wheel to supply power with the other. Of course, now that one bottleneck had been relieved, another appeared -- the weaver (usually a man) could no longer keep up with the supply of yarn. Arkwright's water frame was based on a different principle. It acquired a capacity of several hundred spindles and demanded more power -- water power. The water frame required large, specialized mills employing hundreds of workers. The first consequence of these developments was that cotton goods became much cheaper and were bought by all social classes. Cotton is the miracle fiber -- it is easy to clean, spin, weave and dye and is comfortable to wear. Now millions of people who had worn nothing under their coarse clothes could afford to wear cotton undergarments.

Although the spinning jenny and water frame managed to increase the productive capacity of the cotton industry, the real breakthrough came with developments in steam power. Developed in England by Thomas Savery (1698) and Thomas Newcomen (1705), these early steam engines were used to pump water from coal mines. In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736-1819) created an engine that could pump water three times as quickly as the Newcomen engine. In 1782, Watt developed a rotary engine that could turn a shaft and drive machinery to power the machines to spin and weave cotton cloth. Because Watt's engine was fired by coal and not water, spinning factories could be located virtually anywhere.

Steam power also promoted important changes in other industries. The use of steam-driven bellows in blast furnaces helped ironmakers switch over from charcoal (limited in quantity) to coke, which is made from coal, in the smelting of pig iron. In the 1780s, Henry Cort (1740-1800) developed the puddling furnace, which allowed pig iron to be refined in turn with coke. Skilled ironworkers ("puddlers") could "stir" molten pig iron in a large vat, raking off refined iron for further processing. Cort also developed steam-powered rolling mills, which were capable of producing finished iron in a variety of shapes and forms.

Aided by revolutions in agriculture, transportation, communications and technology, England was able to become the "first industrial nation." This is a fact that historians have long recognized. However, there were a few other less-tangible reasons which we must consider. These are perhaps cultural reasons. Although the industrial revolution was clearly an unplanned and spontaneous event, it never would have been "made" had there not been men who wanted such a thing to occur. There must have been men who saw opportunities not only for advances in technology, but also the profits those advances might create. Which brings us to one very crucial cultural attribute -- the English, like the Dutch of the same period, were a very commercial people. They saw little problem with making money, nor with taking their surplus and reinvesting it. Whether this attribute has something to do with their "Protestant work ethic," as Max Weber put it, or with a specifically English trait is debatable, but the fact remains that English entrepreneurs had a much wider scope of activities than did their Continental counterparts at the same time.

Epic High Five posted:

Have we considered that making expensive cars that kill the drivers is just a really effective plan to cull the top in the leadup to the glorious people's revolution?

fishmech posted:

Once again, most of that decline came from the viability of having a job that wasn't smallhold agriculture, as opposed to all that labor actually being needed on farms.

fishmech posted:

The really heavy-hitting labor saving and automation only comes in relatively recently - like since the 1930s or so. And as his chart shows, the agricultural employment had already dropped under 40% by 1900 and under 25% by 1925.

Plus it's really interesting how the rate of decline was very steady from 1800 to about 1965, and then suddenly slowed down hard, while improvements in agriculture weren't steady in the least during the same time period. If it tracked those we should see several parts where it suddenly drops a lot faster. What it really behaves like is something that declines from older farmers dying off without their kids bothering to continue the family business. Essentially, agricultural technology was already good enough to shed tons of workers compared to the amount that actually left, there was just no way to transition the economy away from agriculture.

fishmech posted:

It isn't though. The actual case is that showering isn't an issue for the vast majority of watches. Because hot water isn't some magic thing that's really hard to seal against.

Cry harder.

NippleFloss posted:

Out of 130 million miles so far it's gotten one person killed, which is better than normal humans do. And that one person knew the system pretty well given that he posted on YouTube about the limitations.

blue squares posted:

what kind of weird-rear end watch is also a snorkel?

quote:

100 meters/ 328 feet/ 10 bar: are often called divers watches and can be used for snorkeling, swimming, and other water sports, but not high board diving or sub aqua diving.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

I honestly wonder what I would do if I was in this position. Say I'm sitting in a restaurant eating lunch and suddenly Donald loving Trump walks in with his contingents of handlers, security, and media people. Would I have the courage to speak up and call him a disgusting racist to his face or would I just look down and pretend he wasn't there.

KiteAuraan posted:

The US really needs to shorten election cycles like a lot of the other Big Democratic Nations do. I love following this poo poo and even I am starting to get burnt out by this cycle. Mostly due to the realization that I've been following it since late 2014.

Lightning Knight posted:

My Canadian friend had his first experience with politics with that one, he was super excited for Trudeau because he hated the Harper government, and was convinced everything was going to be fine and dandy now and that he could just peace out once it was over.

I was like oh dude, you get to experience what it was like to elect Obama!

Shbobdb posted:

Shbobdb posted:

The city of New Reno has a thriving casino market with both normies and ghouls as patrons

Stretch Marx posted:

Only a lovely dog gets eaten by a hawk.

TheOneAndOnlyT posted:

I am still utterly stunned that it isn't getting more attention. It's basically tailor-made for Hillary to pounce on.

Luigi Thirty posted:

The bernouts on Woke Twitter are all flipping out about that stupid line costing Hillary the election lol

ohgodwhat posted:

Wow. I want a president for all of the people, not just 316 million out of 323.

The Glumslinger posted:

"basket of deployables"?

Iron Lung posted:

I know it's been mentioned a few times but the "WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THE GAT DARND PC LIBTARDS, WE WANNA SAY WHAT WE WANNA SAY *insert racial slurs*" crowd getting so furious over this is seriously so so so delicious. That quote from last page (edit: two pages ago, this thread is fast) from Olivia whoever was kinda taken out of context, she was comparing Hilldawg saying this about 7 million people vs Trump insulting 2 billion Mexicans.

FairGame posted:

Even if they are tied, like...what the gently caress are we supposed to do about it?

I've had him on ignore for at least a month, but I never really understood what CS wanted/wants with all his doomsaying.

Inferior Third Season posted:

Hillary didn't have a stock of remedies prepared, even though she wasn't equipped with ribbon to be immune to status effects. Can we really trust a newb like this to be President?

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Humanity wouldn't handle the artistic perfection of a complete Xenogears

It must exist in the flawed state of wabe so we might awe at what flawed men might achieve in their imperfections

NathanScottPhillips posted:

This is literally it. You are willing to take Trump's insane rambling at face value and take for granted that he can actually do any of those things without a massive legal fight, if he literally can do those things at all as a president (he probably can't), while at the same time literal conspiracies are being uncovered and the brazenness of these lifelong politicians is getting to cartoon levels in full public view but their actions require a full investigation and Supreme Court ruling before you can disavow your political football team.

NathanScottPhillips posted:

And then he is impeached.

NathanScottPhillips posted:

Because as people have said they have their man as VP and a huge part of the Republican electorate has gone back and forth with Trump already and have had to bite their tongue. I never accused Hillary of having a stroke, I accused her of having a traumatic brain injury, blood clot in her brain, multiple uncontrollable coughing fits on TV, and her recent loss of consciousness and diagnosis of pneumonia. I don't think I have been challenged on any of those points yet.

Ideally I would like my president to be active, healthy, and young especially. Gary Johnson is two of those things at least.

NathanScottPhillips posted:

I'm not going to vote for him nor do I want anyone to, but I'd rather him than Clinton, yes.

Harrow posted:

Pretty terrible. The only way I can interact with the world of the living is by posting on the Something Awful forums.

theflyingorc posted:

I only...partially blame Bernie himself. He hung on too long. But the people I see posting "BOTH OPTIONS ARE BAD" are inevitably Bernie supporters. His campaign made people real dumb, even if his run was a legitimate thing to do.