I'm not sure what you are experiencing, but I just returned to Hubski after an absence and it does not seem to have significantly changed. It's still one of the best places for intelligent conversation in a spirit of kindness that I have come across on the web. If it's never going to be a money maker, have you considered handing it off to someone else or open-sourcing it so a site with the same dynamic could be hosted elsewhere? It would be a shame to see you just shut it down. I am not aware of other sites that facilitate mostly intelligent and respectful discussion like Hubski does. I have always thought the site mechanics are largely responsible for that. In all my years of wandering the internet, Hubski stands out as one of the few best places. I get that it's not free to run, but don't underestimate what you have here, and know that some of us would be quite sad to see it go.However, in all honesty, I am not at a point where I can simply let things be as they are, and keep the will to see that the bugs are fixed, the https certificates are renewed, and the bills are paid.
If what we will have is what we do have, then I think I honestly am. There's plenty of places that accomplish that already.
Why would locking users' discussions (comments) into bubbles of those users they already follow address this? Wouldn't one expect it to make discussion more stale by introducing miniature echo chambers? I actually like the sharing aspect of Hubski - when I submit a post or click the wheely thing to share a post, I feel I'm curating something for others, and that it's my responsibility to share only what's worth their time. Those others, and that responsibility, feel real to me because they have actively chosen to follow me based on the quality of my past posts and shares. So I had better keep the quality up. I have to suspect this sense of responsibility contributes to the higher quality of both posts and debate on Hubski than on reddit. So both moves to me sound like a shift in an undesirable direction. Restricting comment visibility will cause echo chambers, while basing feeds on tags will remove that element of responsibility not to waste the time of users who have chosen to follow you. Please be careful - Hubski is the only general-purpose site I can think of where debate remains intelligent and polite after 10 years. To the users this is worth more than another site with a large userbase, and more than a torrent of mediocre content.The site has become stale, and in my opinion, I have found discussions more predictable and interactions less cool.
Sorry you're subject to his fuckery. I hope you find a way to register. It's terrible the way these Republicans are systematically gnawing away at all the supports of democracy, trying to get the whole system to fall permanently to them. There's nothing they won't stoop to. It drives me nuts just observing from outside the USA, but it must be so much worse to be directly on the receiving end. May all you decent Americans win your country back from these crooks, soon.
I feel a kinship with these worms.They wiggle forward. They wiggle backwards. And occasionally they fuck themselves. That’s it.
Yesterday Tillerson spoke out about Russia poisoning a spy in the UK, while the White House refused to blame Russia. Today Tillerson is fired. But that's OK, because the Republicans just shut down the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference. It turns out Russia is a great friend and did nothing wrong!
The fear is that when people are starving and competing for scarce resources, there isn't usually much question of remaining "civilized". The fight for survival could become all, and it could be brutal.
Sigh, I had posted this to Hubski hoping for a debate a cut above what was going on at Reddit. There is nothing "retarded" about the view that educators should not simply define away the whole question of moral realism versus antirealism. How ethical discourse and debate works is very much a live and open question, just as much as the ethical questions themselves. Whatever our ultimate stance on ethical realism versus antirealism (or all of the more subtle position that this crude dichotomy of options obscures) it is by no means obvious which is right. It is not dispiriting to see people taking a the view that "there are no moral facts". But it is dispiriting to see people treating this as obvious and anyone who disagrees as "retarded". This has been a live philosophical debate for as long as we have records of such things (excepting those times and places where people were too afraid to speak the questions aloud). I'm not aware of any great recent discovery that suddenly makes the answer obvious beyond debate. And yet quite a few people seem to think moral realism is just obviously wrong. To plenty of intelligent people it's not obvious. To me that just confirms that something has gone awry in our culture - people are not merely siding with moral antirealism and relativism (which could be fine), but they're not even aware that there's a debate to be had about this and if anyone proposes a debate they get written off as an idiot. And I don't know what you mean by "Plus those are the actual definitions" of fact and opinion. Whose definitions? Who's the authority on this? Maybe they're accepted definitions in US educational institutions, but the point of the article is to question them.Exactly, the author of the article is retarded.
Slightly tangentially: the conversation about Mars always seems to turn to colonization. And it makes me sad that humans fantasize about terraforming Mars when they can't even stop themselves de-terraforming Earth. This discovery is interesting in itself though.
That's a pretty succinct summary of the problem with US police these days. This attitude is the problem. How far gone do you have to be to say that and not notice what's wrong with it?Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
You seem to have the wrong link. Maybe you want this:
Hubski has a better mechanic than reddit: because it's sharers and followers I find it makes me think more about whether other people really need to see what I'm about to share or whether I'm wasting their time. And it's great to be able to remove someone from my feeds without censoring them for others. Then again, I felt similarly about reddit when I first used it back in 2008 or so. Reddit seemed like such a sensible site where people with expertise discussed serious topics, compared to the fluff on Digg. You would think twice before posting on reddit. Things change, and it's still an open question whether Hubski's more civilized culture would survive a huge influx of users. Especially if that growth put it on the radar of the various propaganda "influence" campaigns. But one thing Hubski certainly has going for it is the lack of corporate pressure for growth at all costs. This guy hits that nail right on the head.
Popular Science's explanation of why they shut off comments is worth reading: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-commentsA politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
None of those things are problems with poetry. They're problems with assholes who like to talk about poetry or play games with poetry. The trick is to ignore the assholes and enjoy poetry.
The Spectator is a relatively respectable and established conservative news magazine in the UK. Good to see that they will publish something like this that is somewhat critical of the present (horribly incompetent) Conservative government. But yes, the story about CA having the emails a month before Wikleaks needs more detail and independent corroboration before we can treat it as fact.
They simply need to put a hard, unsqueezable cartridge around the juice bag, equip the cartridge with DRM to make sure no-one uses third-party juice, build the squeezing mechanism into the cartridge instead of the main machine, add a chip that disables the cartridge if it's decoupled from the inner bag or the bag is refilled, and build in a small pouch of indelibly dyed bittering agent that gets injected into the juice if tampering is suspected. Explain that it's "for the safety and security of all our customers," so terrorists can't pass off dangerous terror-juice as the real thing. Then repurpose the main machine as an interface to the cartridge's various encryption and protection chips plus a big green "go" button. Of course this will put the price of the cartridges up, but you can sell the machine for half the price to get people hooked. Heck, you can even throw in a free half-filled starter bag of freedom juice. Fresh bagjuice for everyone, and happy venture capitalists too! Honestly, has this idiot never seen a printer? And if he wants to be really modern he can sell juice squeezing as a subscription service. Without a valid licence and an active internet connection your fancy juice cartridges become mere fruitbricks. Oh, and call it "Smart Juice". You're welcome.One of the investors said they were frustrated with how the company didn’t deliver on the original pitch and that their venture firm wouldn’t have met with Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware.
The fucking anal cleanliness of all pop music production these days. The need to have a Ph.D. in "sound design" to gain entry to the world of music. The need for all music to be so fucking locked down, produced to death, carefully sculpted to the tiniest microbeat and fraction of a kiloherz. The crushing humourless stylishness of it all. It feels so stifling and unspontaneous. That and Post fucking Malone.
I once got spotted by a bishop swigging communion wine out of the bottle in the vestry. I think it may have been consecrated. He didn't say anything but I saw he saw and he saw that I saw that he saw. So I hereby use Hubski to say: I'm sorry, I was a young idiot being idiotic. I don't believe in an eternity of damnation but I do believe in the eternal douchiness of me in that moment. Sorry, Bish.
Awww, spent a few days away from Hubski and missed this. Hope it went well! I still remember discovering Hubski way back then when looking for something more pleasant than reddit. Glad it's still here and still more pleasant than reddit. Well done mk and everyone! I'm a bit of a lurker but still an appreciator.
No, I mean that we are easily distracted into fantasy when we find the real problems before us overwhelming. And we tend to overestimate our abilities: the best proof that we could terraform Mars would, surely, be fixing the climate problems we're creating here on Earth.
Oh goody, a secret police and rendition force answering only to the Dear Leader, run by Erik Prince and Oliver North.
No one who might be able to break the spell of Trump seems willing to rip off the Band-Aid. It's revealing that the Republican Party acts around Trump the way people acted around Stalin or Hitler. No-one dares to be the bringer of bad news. Except with these men there was proven reason to be afraid. To behave this way around Donald Trump, of all people, just makes Republicans look pathetic.To sum up the current situation, the U.S. is experiencing a fake self-coup that requires the administration to do exactly the things a regime would do if it were attempting to stage an actual self-coup, with millions of people sincerely believing the stated justifications for the strongman’s consolidation of power and with the regime’s legislative allies playing along, under the apparent belief that eventually the courts, which are stocked with unqualified loyalists, will soon say the game is done.
Here are mine (album: http://imgur.com/a/FHikn): Through the eclipse glasses Through the clouds Eclipse glasses again Diaper box pinhole camera Leaf with holes in Peering into the pinhole camera
One of the interesting things about Hubski is how it uses a different mechanic from reddit and its clones - it's not a simple vote up/down and the most popular wins, there's a sideways sharing thing going on too. I feel like sharing something on Hubski is more of a commitment to stand behind it than upvoting something on reddit or a reddit clone. I wonder whether that simple difference has anything to do with the more civil tone of discussion on Hubski?
So do we have to admit, however reluctantly, that Trump takes some of the credit for making progress where others failed? What part did his combination of sanctions and the offer of talks play in bringing the two Korean leaders to the table?
From the article, there are other costs apart from the amount of water used:This practice requires two scarce resources: water and energy. More attention is given to the showers’ high water consumption, but energy use is just as problematic. Hot water production accounts for the second most significant use of energy in many homes (after heating), and much of it is used for showering. Water treatment and distribution also use lots of energy.
They weren't actually trapped though, were they? They just didn't, at any point during those 13 hours, think to try doing stuff with the door handle. Trapped by the limits of their own imagination, I guess.
Well, at least I'm not dreaming. Others can see it too.