I've had a little theory that post war American food is universally terrible due to everyone smoking and destroying their taste buds. Stuff starts getting better in the mid 90s when smoking rates start noticeably dropping.

Especially with coffee. People used percolators for years. You know how bad percolator coffee is? So bad that when Mr Coffee came out, it sold for about the same inflation adjusted price as a modern entry level espresso machine. It went into high end restaurants and people thought it was amazing.

I don't know if this fully works, though. Much of Western Europe had higher smoking rates for longer, and the food isn't so shit.

From what I heard, the guy actually did change to a CS major shortly after writing this.

From the best paper ever written by an undergrad

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/fittedHall.gif

They do care about rape, but not quite the way you're thinking. Those rules you mentioned about having to marry the rapist? That's what they care about. Basically, young unmarried women are property of their fathers. When they marry, they become property of their husbands. If you rape an unmarried young woman, you're stealing her father's property, and the marriage pact sets it right.

So it's actually much more fucked up then not having any problem with rape at all.

A 13 foot drop is still easily enough to kill you. People have died from only a 6 foot drop.

Speed matters more than mass when calculating kinetic energy. A 767 is much, much faster than a B-25.

Libertarians can't even agree among themselves if you should be allowed to sell meth to five year olds. That is to say, yes, they have a lot of diversity of opinions, but it's not in ways where they come out looking good.

Right--everyone in the world is just winging it. Some of them are winging it in ways that create dead children.

Consider that German and French gender basically everything. Your desk has a gender in those languages. English is almost genderless on comparison.

Would you say that the conversion of TV from broadcast/cable to streaming has resulted in a lot more nudity? If so, why hasn't Internet porn reduced it?

Here's the point I've been circling around: the availability of Internet porn does not adequately explain why depictions of sex and nudity in movies have gone down. It's the first idea that pops into peoples head, but it doesn't quite fit. What does is the rating system. Somewhat with the introduction of PG-13, and more dramatically so with NC-17. "This Movie Is Not Yet Rated" goes into this in more detail, but I'll lay out what it's getting at.

If you go back to the 1970s and '80s, you have PG movies with nudity. "Airplane", released 1980, had a quick flash of boobs along with an extended blowjob joke. "Superman", released 1978, had Superman as a kid climbing naked out of that pod. Expressly non-sexual, but nudity none the less. Today, Airplane would go straight to an R rating for that flash of boobs unless it's from a director like James Cameron, who gets to pull strings and do whatever they want. I don't think you could do the Superman bit at all.

You also have some R rated movies at the time showing extended closeups of the faces of women in sexual pleasure. This has almost entirely disappeared from all mainstream movies. Liv Taylor's character in "Jersey Girl" (PG-13) talks about masturbating, and that was scandalous.

Then PG-13 shows up in 1984 in response to movies like "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" pushing PG too far. When that happens, PG becomes the older kids movie rating, and PG-13 is supposedly for teenagers. Except, now you can't really do scenes like Temple of Doom did and still be PG-13, either. Too much blood. Plus, you can't have nudity except maybe the odd butt (usually male), again with the exception of being James Cameron.

Also, you get one F-bomb in PG-13 movies. It has to be stated in anger ("fuck you") and not in reference to sex ("Should we go home and fuck each others brains out"). This isn't an official rule anywhere, but even people outside the industry have picked up on it.

So now you can have James Bond shooting up tons of baddies as long as you don't show any blood. The same movie will also go to great lengths to carefully conceal the lead actresses' nipples at all times.

This gets much worse when NC-17 comes along. This was an attempt to rebrand the X rating, which tended to be associated with outright porn. "XXX" was never an MPAA rating; the porn industry adopted that for itself, but the association got stuck. So hey, surrender that idea to porn, change X to NC-17, and now we can make "serious" movies with lots of sex.

Showgirls then completely bombs.

What happens next is that NC-17 is used as a bludgeon by the ratings board. Do what we say, or else we'll rate you NC-17 and most of the theaters won't even show your movie. There's a bit of psychology going on here where the ratings board wants to feel like they have a say in the movie itself. This has sometimes resulted in directors deliberately putting in stuff they know will never pass, then it gets flagged by the ratings board, they drop it, and the ratings board gives it the OK.

You can't always do that, though. Directors won't bother shooting a scene at all when they think the ratings board will nix it. Nudity has become nearly absent from R rated movies altogether because of this, and it's a very brief flash if it's there at all. One exception being Wolf of Wallstreet. Directed by Martin Scorsese--another director who has enough pull to get whatever they want. Anybody less than an S-tier director doesn't get to do that. That movie is now 11 years old, and I'd challenge you to find another R rated movie with that much nudity and sex that's been produced since.

Violence in R rated movies hasn't gone the same way, because the ratings board members don't care as much. They're largely Americans (as far as we know; they were when "This Movie Is Not Yet Rated" was produced), and American culture is stuck in a mindset that violence is less bad than nudity. Also, Showgirls was known for sex, not violence, and that's the sack of bricks hanging over every R rated movie director.

So in a perverse way, the opening of PG-13 and NC-17 ratings have actually reduced artistic expression, not opened it up.

Streaming evolved in a totally different way, and isn't subject to the same incentives.

Uh, the graph in OP says otherwise. I guess it depends on your definition of "gratuitous".

Is James Bond shooting his way through badies--without a drop of blood being shown--gratuitous? How does that compare to a flash of boobs on screen in another movie?

If it's not as desirable, then why would it be so prevalent in movies?

You can get gratuitous violence on the internet, too. Far more than the most violent slasher film. Availability isn't the reason.

It's really difficult/expensive for a home user to do a 3-2-1 backup properly. Especially if you're pushing beyond a few TB.

My NAS uses a pair of SAS drives, and they make noises at boot up that would be concerning in a desktop. They're quite obnoxious. But I keep them in part of the house where they don't bother me.

When the cache isn't full, yes, that's true. Copy a file that's significantly bigger than cache and performance will drop part way through.

I'm guessing that only works if the file is smaller than the RAM cache of the drives. Transfer a file that's bigger than that, and it will go fast at first, but then fill the cache and the rate starts to drop closer to 100 MB/s.

My data hoarder drives are a pair of WD ultrastar 18TB SAS drives on RAID1, and that's how they tend to behave.

Been a while since I looked at this one, but the idea was that the inner ring would be rotating at faster than orbital velocity at that altitude. This would normally cause it to push itself out to a higher orbit, but the outer ring (or belt) would prevent that. That outer belt would be under a lot of tension, but not carbon nanotube level tension.

"Zombies". If you let them talk, it'll be pretty obvious that they're looking for a legal loophole to kill somebody. "Zombies" just means city people, which just means black people. They'll kill a white guy if that's what their lifelong dream comes to, but they'd feel bad about it later.

Right, I think the future isn't Intel v AMD, it's AMD v ARM v RISC-V. Might be hard to break into the desktop and laptop space, but Linux servers don't have the same backwards compatibility issues with x86. That's a huge market.