Anyone who needs to distinguish 20 shades of green would develop the ability to do so. That's more culture or experience than language. Having names for them just means they have some need to communicate that information. You could do the same in English by drawing words or codes from color lists like websafe, Pantone, etc.
An example where language forces our thinking and even actions instead of simply allowing us to express it easily is plurals. Plurals force us to include unneeded number information in a lot of our thinking and talking. We have to have at least 2 cars to say "I have some cars" when showing off, otherwise admit that we only have one. You can see it in writing that uses "I" or "we" too. It reveals how many people it represents. A 2-person company can look much bigger than a 1-person company because it can use "we", "our", etc. just the same as a 1000000 person company does.
A lot of disagreement on this but it's basically true. Homeowners want to protect their investment and their comfortable lifestyle so they make sure local government restricts others from diluting what they have. If more houses could be built on the same sized sections, then poorer people would move in because they'd be cheaper. Poor people tend to be more of a disturbance to their neighbors so that would make the incumbents lose what they paid for when they bought their high priced properties in peaceful suburbia. Same goes for hotels which attract transient people that the existing property owners want to keep away.
This happens on many scales. We don't want poor strangers living in our bedroom, on our lawn, in our suburb or in our country. So we have trespass laws, zoning and immigration restrictions to protect us from them.
For all the complaints, this sounds like a great deal for the Gtk developers. They don't have to plan ahead of time which version is going to be the stable one. If one ends up working well and they want to start on new ideas, they can just leave it unchanged, declare it to be the stable one and move on. Developers are people too and they would want a system that makes it easy for them.
Is it really a problem for application developers either? When you start your project, just pick the latest stable version and stay with that throughout. You can ignore all the subsequent updates and be sure that your stable version's API won't change.
The unstable versions are surely just for people who want to play with the new features early, not people who are worried about compatibility.
If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
I don't understand why there's such unanimous words of support for someone who directly contributed to the half million deaths in the Iraq war. I know it's unrelated to his case, but perhaps his prison sentence and current predicament can be seen as karmic retribution. I know that's not how justice works, but I don't think we'd see such enthusiastic support for a serial killer who had trouble supporting himself after getting released.
Maybe you will experience some "karmic retribution" for rationalizing an innocent man's wrongful imprisonment and equating Ray with a "serial killer."
Ray enlisted in the Army National Guard in the 90s when he was 17. Do you think that was morally reprehensible? If not, when did he lose your respect and sympathy?
He followed orders to deploy to Iraq once the United States had already invaded the country and deposed its government. The missions he carried out were intended to find bombmakers who were indiscriminately slaughtering civilians and soldiers with IEDs.
He never took the life of a single Iraqi. His main priority was ensuring that the young men under his command came back alive to their families in the United States. Was that not a task that justified his presence and his best efforts?
Individual soldiers are not in a position to judge the merits of foreign military interventions. They do not have access to the intelligence that political leaders rely on in order to make those decisions. A military can only function when soldiers fulfill their responsibility to carry out all lawful orders.
The responsibility for holding our political leaders accountable for improper military interventions falls on the PEOPLE of the United States, not the soldiers who have taken an oath to serve their commander in chief.
Equating an average American soldier serving in Iraq with a Nazi war criminal is not only disgusting but counterproductive. It erases the moral culpability of the latter for willfully carrying out genocide.
The Iraq war was a horrifying mistake. But our leaders' misjudgment doesn't entitle you to slander the names of the men and women who risked (and gave) their lives in that conflict.
The way society is presently arranged, military personnel are absolved of (a great deal of) their moral agency. They have surrendered it to a higher authority, to the state. You can see it experientially in the Milgram experiment. It's incredible more people don't find this troubling, it has me at a loss for words.
It seems to be that way. Weren't the Nuremberg trials supposed to have established the idea the soldiers, or at least officers passing orders along can be guilty even if they're following orders? I suppose those were for more clear cut war crimes and the Iraq soldiers were mostly quite removed from the actual killing they triggered.
I don't think most people mind killing that much. It's only murder that makes [most of] us uncomfortable.
And given that no society can afford great compensation for every soldier, extreme reverence is all we've got.
And in regards to other states it's pretty much a Prisoner's Dilemma.
The extent to which it cost human lives is a function of the arbitrary emission standards that governments have set. Those standards are obviously chosen as a trade-off between too many harmful consequences of pollution and being too expensive for car makers to comply with. So it's not as clear as "VW killed people" but more like "VW killed more people than we expected them to." The standards themselves still allow some harmful emissions to be released. If had more relaxed standards then all the extra harm caused by the VW cheating would simply evaporate.
But, we have the standards we have (which are already weaker than they need to be to avert a climate and air quality disaster going forward). If one company is permitted to fake results, it means all companies will have to fake results to compete.
My argument is that cheating our already lax air quality and environmental standards should be a tremendous deal. It shouldn't be something that can be swept under the rug or written off as a cost of doing business.
That's kind of like Godwin's law. It's worth comparing things to the Nazis to reveal how little we despise other bad actions. But we have unreasonably strong negative feelings about both Nazis and terrorism, so it's not really helpful.
That's a sadly America-centric view of the world. Shell's spills in the Niger Delta are just as bad or worse and nobody cares because it's some weird foreign country that doesn't appear in their news:
The total volume of oil spilt was on the same order of magnitude - about half that at Deep Water Horizon. But the environmental and health problems are perhaps worse. It's close to shore and there's hardly any cleanup work, compensation or health protection.
I agree that not listing every oil spill isn't required to make a view American centric. That's not the issue though, it's a straw man. What's American centric is to focus on America even when similar things exist elsewhere.
You misunderstand what Americentrism is. It is about the presumption of US morals and standards when judging other countries and cultures. Some would say that your use of the word "America" to describe the United States is itself Americentrism.
An example where language forces our thinking and even actions instead of simply allowing us to express it easily is plurals. Plurals force us to include unneeded number information in a lot of our thinking and talking. We have to have at least 2 cars to say "I have some cars" when showing off, otherwise admit that we only have one. You can see it in writing that uses "I" or "we" too. It reveals how many people it represents. A 2-person company can look much bigger than a 1-person company because it can use "we", "our", etc. just the same as a 1000000 person company does.