The thing people overlook is that, in ye olden days, there was indeed an amount of land that would enable you to live off it... and then there was the drought year or the flood year every five years or so and a major fraction of the population would starve to death. And then the REALLY bad drought or flood and a HUGE…

In overall stats, sure, but it generally averages out when talking about head-to-head results as in this case.

It’s easy to understand, it’s just plain wrong. Certain historical guns did not only fire when the trigger was pulled; some guns haven’t even had triggers. The purpose of a replica is to replicate; so if you ask someone to build a replica of a gun that can be fired without pulling the trigger, their replica is not…

While I think the case as a whole doesn’t look good for Gutierrez-Reed, I wouldn’t read too much into her behaviour in the aftermath. Being inconsistent in your memory and instinctively trying to protect youself are both common, ordinary reactions to traumatic confrontations (with police you suspect may want to put…

I’ve never seen anything like this. Police are normally really reluctant to even release summaries of an ongoing investigation - so releasing actual interview tapes seems... what the fuck? I’m just a layman, so maybe there’s some cunning legal way in which this makes sense, but you’d have thought that alongside the…

In that case, all guns are defective - after all, it would be perfectly possible to design one with no moving parts, in which nothing could ever cause a detonation, and this would be a lot safer. But of course we don’t consider the lethality of guns to be a defect in that sense, because that’s what they’re intended to…

Maybe it’s just my ignorance, but if Johnson is creating, writing and directing the show, in what way are the Zuckermans the showrunners? Are they just using ‘showrunner’ as a euphemism for ‘producer’? [or, given the power of a guy who’s creating, writing, directing, and is the biggest name in the project, is it just…

As long as Kristen Bell drops in for a crossover, I’m fine with that...

I’m confused, though - is Viola Davis an actor? I mean, I thought that she was - I could have sworn I’ve seen her in stuff - but apparently she’s actually a leader, and her job (and indeed duty) is to make bold choices (that are beyond criticism), not an actor whose job is to read out some words while pretending to be…

Editors are a form of critic, and therefore serve no purpose!

Oh, surely not - that would mean that there were people in the world other than Viola Davis!

Nobody wanted to be the one to ‘lean in’ and tell her, apparently...

Theoretically, I suppose... but are we sure this ‘Eternals’ film actually ever existed? I’ve never met anyone willing to admit having watched it, and I suspect we’d struggle to find anyone willing to admit to having been involved in creating it...

I don’t think that’s a third option, though, because the problem isn’t starting a company, it’s putting capital into the company. Tax breaks and subsidies can put a little bit of capital into a company - but that capital comes from the capitalists, so either you need to take it from them by force or you need to…

I don’t think those comparisons are really that meaningful - at least, not for Schumacher. Schumacher was paired with drivers who were not just second-rate, but contractually regarded as support drivers. Whole-career figures also obscure how winning percentages vary depending on the teammate: sure, Piquet dominated…

Why do capitalists receive a (large) portion of the proceeds of labour? Because they own capital, and production requires both labour and capital. Without capital, workers cannot produce anything. In order to persuade the owners of capital to co-operate with workers - and in particular with a particular set of…

Taxing the super-rich is conceptually easy, but politically difficult. Getting that money back into the economy to create jobs (particularly in high-crime areas), unfortunately, is an extremely difficult problem, which economists (let alone politicians) have not developed a clear, generalisable solution to.

There’s basically two ways of looking at the world (whether on the left or on the right): you can conclude that the world is very complicated, and this complexity is what makes change difficult (and thus that rushing into attempts at change without fully considering the ramifications and complexities is likely to be…

I’d say that the takeaway from The Wire is less about humans at all, and more about institutions. We think humans create institutions, and they do - but in a very real sense, institutions also create humans. And they create the humans who will not break the institution. The Wire is a show about individuals (on both…

“You fail to provide solutions to these problems!” is the rhetorical response of people who know that the ‘solutions’ they’re ‘providing’ are shit. Instead of having to improve their solutions or find new ones in the face of critique*, they can just accuse their critics of failing to provide any better solutions…