>If you look at a lot of Western countries like Spain, France or Italy, you’ll easily realize that they are not doing very well: they are mostly lazy, complacent, nothing much going on there.
Such a simplistic and borderline racist analysis of the economical situation of these countries. This kind of narrative reminds me a lot of what was said on some media outlets during the recent Greece bailout episode.
Sure, on a normal computer that may be the case. But, products like the Kemper Profiling Amp (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0SmSl1aS1w) are on the same price range as high-end amps and have been able able to model _any_ amp with an incredible precision for years already. Still, it's easier to find a wide selection of analog amps in recording studios than one of those.
That said, I think it has a lot to do with the guitar player "fetish" of recording on a boutique valve head with a pair of 4x12 cabinets.
>Most references to the people on the American continents are to North Americans, Central Americans, or South Americans. Referring to the collective as 'Americans' is rare and virtually meaningless
The terms Latin/Anglo-Saxon America are just as used used exactly to highlight this aspect of the continent.
>given the total lack of shared culture, language, or ethnicity between say, Canadians and Brazilians, comparable to comparing Britons and Chinese.
This is not true. Apart from Canada and the US the rest of the Americas are actually quite close culturally.
Do you ever use the word "European" or the word "Asian"? If the founders of the USA were programmers they'd probably avoid that unnecessary namespace collision.
Great stuff! I happen to really like all recommendations that came in for me.
Some suggestions: this pure social graph approach could be vastly improved for music recommendation by aggregating tags, à la last.fm, or adding music-related features yielded by some waveform analysis.
For instance, I typed in Tame Impala and got these results in this order: Real Estate - Girls - Beach Fossils - Toro Y Moi - Washed Out - Wavves - James Blake.
The first three relate well to modern psych rock of Tame Impala, but then things get a little strange: two chillwave acts, one correctly similar psych/noise rock act and a dubstep/downtempo artist!
From my experience of meeting US citzens, even outside North America, it's fairly normal to get something like "Ohio", "Pensilvania" or "Wisconsin" when asking where they come from, as if I'd _of course_ know where those places are (I do).
As a brazilian that have lived in India for some time, I could tell you that the form democracy present in both countries today has a lot to do with incidents such as the reported on the post.
The historic distance between poverty and middle-class just grows as the public institutions can't provide basic (or with the minimium required quality) services to the poor: education, healthcare, housing, etc.
I don't agree with the _poor people have a different moral_ argument presented by 'gnufied, but there is an intense feeling of social tension on a daily basis on both countries, which is clearly related to the income gap and the almost tribal mindsets developed by those completely different realities.
Besides the economic factor, India also displays consequences from gender issues liked to its patriarcal society and sexual repression. Unsurprisingly, the lower part of the social pyramid is also the one that suffers more from a conflict between the exarcerbated sexuality pushed by media and the to be said moral values of society. The education system wouldn't reach that part of the population with the same quality as rich or middle-class people, which, as said on other comments, also suffers from that on a lesser degree.
I really want to understand about morphisms and category theory after reading this. Can anyone point out any good introduction to the category theory behind those catamorphisms?