Dimashq posted:

Anyone here read German and have cool reading suggestions for an intermediate learner? I thought it'd be cool to just pick up a volume of the collected works of Marx and Engels and just start reading and using a dictionary even if it takes forever, not sure if that's effective or not.

deutsche welle has good stuff for free like this http://www.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/das-sagt-man-so/s-32376 .

i would recommend against the dictionary approach because in my experience that gets really slow and frustrating. but it may work for you. germany is a land of many contrasts

cars posted:

reading about the Clock of the Long Now, a bourgeois project to determine how to keep looters from stripping something useless, for 10000 years

Given the spooky name and that it's funded by Dreadlord Jeff Bezos I can't help but be feareful of the stranyge deofuls that would be released upon building such a clock.

If they tried it IRL it would be stripped by raccoons and crows in like 3 weeks

Xi Jinping’s Leninist quest for a dynasty inspires congressional love-in

(Roderick MacFarquhar, a China expert at Harvard University) said Xi appeared to have built a position of enviable strength in his first stint as leader, even if China’s “sophisticates” considered his strongman tendencies a turnoff.

“Unless some politician or some angry general decides enough is enough and that Xi Jinping is making China a laughing stock by this one-man rule campaign … and has the contacts and the determination to do something, nothing is going to change.”

But Xi’s Leninist quest for authority and control also carried dangers: “The changes that he has brought about … are a form of strong Leninism, which China has not experienced since the early 50s. We don’t know to what extent the population will accept that.”

“This is a vast country, with hundreds of millions of people in different parts, whose exact thoughts about the situation … are very difficult to perceive. And the more Leninism there is, the more people are frightened, the less one is able to perceive it – until something happens.

“Things have happened in China. Things do go wrong in China,” MacFarquhar warned. “Even in the best ordered regimes, like Xi Jinping’s.”

"in conclusion, china is truly a land of contrasts" - harvard china expert roddy "tha RoDD"

Legislators of railroads had to walk a fine line that today’s telecommunications regulators find themselves dealing with today. Large private firms necessary for everyday commerce are dangerous to social welfare but are difficult to remove once their power is sufficiently entrenched. This is the general idea behind American anti-monopoly laws but this sentiment can be traced as far back as 960 A.D. where the Song Dynasty of China, recognizing that powerful merchants were essentially printing money in the form of bank notes, tried to ban the practice before issuing a few licenses in exchange for oversight. Railroad companies, like those first century Chinese merchants, were so deeply engrained in the daily economic functioning that some sort of governmental control was deemed necessary. Instead of seizing or breaking up the railroads, American lawmakers devised one of the most important legal innovations to come out of the Victorian Era: the designation of private firms as “common carriers.”
A common carrier is an entity that, due to its ubiquity and centrality to daily life, is forbidden from certain types of discrimination and price structuring. Trains were defined as common carriers in a piecemeal fashion, often state-by-state and line-by-line, until common carrier statutes were adopted by the federal government after the American Civil War... It is important to note that firms deemed common carriers were (and still are) generally granted exceptions to non-discrimination rules if discrimination served overall network health. For example, recent rulings to treat Internet service providers as common carriers carries with it a “reasonable network management exception.”

... and social effects...

The isolation and individuation in both networks at their respective times of early adoption also contributed to exaggerated fears of predation by murders, rapists, and thieves. Two high-profile suspected murders inside private train cars led to increased fear that trains were sites of particular vulnerability. Similarly the social action online, particularly when it comes to youth, is often viewed in mass media as shot through with predation and illicit activity.
Both technologies oddly enough, have also been cast as sites of misandry. Men reported avoiding sharing private cars with women they did not know, not because of decorum, but out of fear of unfounded accusations ranging from improper conversation topics to sexual assault. Whereas the train was a setting for such accusations, the Internet is a stage upon similar fears can not only be realized, but collected, curated, indexed and shared. The burgeoning “Men’s rights movement” has found a home in, and is mainly composed of “a loose but loud collection of Internet blogs sites, policy-oriented organizations,” frequented by “a legion of middle-class white men who feel badly done by individual women or by policies they believe have cheated them.”

... and a fine anecdote.

In Chicago, Charles Tyson Yerkes — through deft financial haggling, blackmail, and bribery of city and state officials — owned all but one line in the city. In less than a decade he oversaw the construction of the Chicago loop, the replacement of horse-drawn cars with electric ones, and the laying of 500 miles of track.
In 1897 Yerkes sought to extend his contract with the city for another 50 years, with promises of raising fares and reducing the quality of service. The city and state legislatures had been sufficiently bribed and were ready to approve the contract when, as historian Kenneth T. Jackson put it,

“a mob carrying guns and ropes surrounded City Hall and so menacingly threatened their representatives with bodily injury that the extension failed. Disappointed but undaunted, Yerkes promptly sold his Chicago holdings and moved to England, where he was in control of the London Underground at the time of his death in 1905.”

swampman posted:

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

why do all of these videos use the italo disco voice

tears posted:

Slicing Open double PREGNANT FROZEN ELSA w/ Spiderman vs Doctor Pink Spidergirl Funny superhero Fun!

all the weird filters and plugins i have in my browser prevented the videos from loading in that article and im okay with that

Petrol posted:

what may not occur to the casual observer is that there are occasions when a magic entertainment screen, which might not be allowed all the time, will be a godsend, like in public places when adults are doing adult stuff and kids have been dragged along and it's not fun for them and they're getting tired and hungry, and those occasions neatly coincide with the opportunity for strangers to notice the kid using the ipad or whatever and be all judgey about it.

Thats what people used to say about a rag dipped in whisky