I think Twain is indulging himself. He's conflating trivial social conventions about dinner arrangements and clothes, with deeply-felt political positions, with social and financial farming of political influence.
There's evidence that far from being social conventions, political biases are partly neurological. Whether the biases are due to nature or nurture, brain function can't usefully be reduced to superficial observations about creative thinking or self interest.
Twain should at least have noticed that voters reliably support people who take away their bread/corn instead of supplying it.
In fact humans are quite incredibly bad at calculating genuine self interest. We seem to be programmed to equate effective leadership with a certain kind of strutting acquisitive self-indulgence and macho mammal posturing. Being a follower of same can often be a terrible way to meet your bread needs - but a very good way to be treated as a disposable resource.
Well, if you go to a collision specialist who's legally prohibited from turning away anyone with a bent frame regardless of their (current or future) ability to pay, it's not unreasonable that they'll charge you more than Jiffy Lube does when you can pay. That overhead has to be covered somehow.
How on Earth did this make the front page? I mean, it's not that I ever get tired of seeing Massachusetts Yankees and California carpetbaggers use a magazine named after my hometown to tell us Southrons what they demand that we be, but I am somewhat surprised to see it here, of all places. Perhaps I shouldn't be.
The author, while indeed born in Massachusetts, is by all accounts a Southerner. Check her bio -- she even got her M.A. at Mississippi.
I just came here to say what an excellent piece of writing this was. I won't even dignify the rest of your comment, and honestly having read it here saddens me.
Many of the comments you've been posting to Hacker News are bilious. Please don't do that—it poisons the discourse, and we're looking for good conversation.
You seem to suggest that a government which doesn't behave in accord with your wishes is illegitimate thereby. It's hardly unique these days, but one might hope nonetheless to see you stop short of treating it as something to be proud of.
Really? Weimar's human rights laws were second to none in the world for their time, and are considered exemplary even now. If what you say is true, how did the Nazi abuses occur?
The reasoning you present here is exactly equivalent to:
- You have a broken arm
- Somewhere else in the world, someone has stage IV pancreatic cancer
- Therefore your broken arm should be of no concern even to you
The flaw should be intuitively obvious, especially to anyone who's ever had a broken arm. But hey, you actually concede you're a robot in your HN profile, your hyperalloy combat chassis is no doubt proof against such mishaps, and why should anyone expect you to understand or care what humans feel?
Well, yes. When you decided what you wanted to do with your life, and made that decision stick over parental objections, that was in the nature of a declaration of adult independence. Good for you! Lots of people never make it that far. But, having done so, you can hardly expect to retract it eight years later. "Mommy, Daddy, I don't want to be a grownup any more!" With whom do you imagine this playing well? How would you react if your presumably notional kid tried to pull it on you?
If you want to go to the world's best school for mine engineering, Yale shouldn't be on your list to begin with. It's a sign-off for pedigreed elites, not a trade school.
Stanford also confers more degrees in social sciences and "interdisciplinary studies" (i.e. degrees in having graduated from Stanford) than in engineering and computer science, and has done for some years now. I don't doubt you can obtain an excellent education in those fields at Stanford, but it's been a long time since that was what Stanford was for.
Seems a bit more feature-complete than this one.