Lucille Bluth says she’s friends with her Hispanic servant, “even though she’s an illegal”.

There’s an argument we shouldn’t even be issuing $100 bills in the first place. Counterfeiters have to spend money to copy money. A $1 or $5 bill isn’t worth the cost. A $50 is getting there, but if you put extra anti-counterfeiting measures around it, then it’s pushed out of reach again.

Once you reach a $100 bill, though, it’s hard to have enough anti-counterfeiting measures while also being cheap enough to produce by the actual US Mint. Drop it entirely, and the problem goes away.

Partially. Not really. Page Rank instantly obsoleted every other search algorithm in existence. Nobody was able to get high quality results right at the top so consistently. The ad-free part was a bonus, at least for a while.

Thanks, Sam Harris.

I read “The Moral Landscape”. 90% of it is pretty good, but he’ll randomly drop “and that’s why we need to be worried about Islamic takeover of western Europe” into something completely unrelated. He spends a lot more time complaining about Islamic fundamentalist than he does the Christian fundamentalist who actually have political power in the US (and to a lesser degree, western Europe). Then you get to a chapter that’s all about religious influence on society, but it’s all about relatively relaxed Christians who have Ph.Ds in some field and show up at scientific conferences.

You might expect a word somewhere about the fundamentalist Christians who control roughly half of Congress, but no. It’s all Muslims and Christians who make it a more personal thing.

Here’s Orwell in “Homage to Catalonia”:

“There were perhaps a thousand men at the barracks, and a score or so of women, apart from the militiamen’s wives who did the cooking. There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing ready, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.”

This was in an overwhelmingly leftist camp. Orwell sees glimpses of an anarchist collective based on mutual aid popping up. Yet, sexisim clearly persisted after a period where it had been pushed aside.

These issues don’t go away just because people become class conscious.