Not if the argument is essentially about dictionary definitions. FWIW, if I had to imagine someone saying something is amazing without any context my understanding would tend towards the “old” meaning.
A common theme with residential (other types don't have these problems, like museums, public office spaces, hospitals, etc.) brutalist buildings is that they were built as low-cost social housing, and the problems are not with the exterior but with the interior, and I think not inherent to this type of architecture. Shoddy workmanship, cheapest materials, etc. The contrast between how stunning it looks (a matter of taste, granted) from the outside and how it's inside is stark — avantgarde, modern, and bespoke, combined with boring, gloomy and depressive apartment interiors.
A lot of commenters have mentioned New Belgrade municipality of Belgrade, and it is a great example of this. The exterior is very often quite well though out — lots of space, lots of trees and parks, playgrounds (looked at from the ground there's hardly any of the oppressive concrete feeling often associated with brutalism), general living affordances like schools, public services integrated into complexes... But on the inside, even ignoring long term issues of maintenance stemming from broader social issues, things are dysfunctional, ugly and generally of poor quality. It's a byproduct of cost cutting commonly associated with these types of projects. But just like with apartments in Soviet Brezhnevkas and even some Khrushchyovkas, when renovated with care and attention the apartments are just fine for what they are.
And it's not just a feature of Cold War socialist brutalism. In Trieste for example there is a somewhat (in)famous Rozzol Melara building[1][2]. As an idea it's great, the complex has everything for day to day living, a post office, a supermarket, an elementary school, a kindergarden, even a small medical facility, all connected with tunnel bridges or roofed passageways (except the small chapel) so you're never exposed to the elements when going somewhere inside the complex. But it seems as though the architects thought about how can we make this cheap but practical and then got the practical part completely wrong. For example, the passageways and tunnel floors are completely covered with anti-slip rubber matting, but the problem is these passageways are almost too practical and inviting so people end up using them to take their dogs out for walking, and so the result is rubber covered with sticky, dried dog piss (sometimes even poop) every 5 to 10 meters in all directions. You can imagine how this smells, encased in concrete and glass during the summer in a moist coastal city. The terrace views from higher apartments on the side overlooking the city and the sea are beautiful though, so you get some satisfaction if you live in one of those.
Might be helpful for people interested in this, an acquaintance of mine recently started working on a project for an online archive of socialist modernist concrete-based (so not only brutalism in strict sense) architecture (contains photos, info, publications, art projects inspired by the subject, etc.): https://belgradesocialmodernism.com/
* 15 inch XPS, i9, 16/512 GB, RTX 3050 Ti, maxed out screen (with Windows Home, heh) - 2849€, this computer is a joke compared to what we can expect from even the cheapest 14 MBP
* For a bit more fairer comparison, an XPS 17, i9 16/512 GB, RTX 3060, maxed screen (still with Windows Home) - 3549€, but even this probably can't hold a candle to the cheapest 14 MBP
For reference, an almost maxed out 16 MBP (4 TB disk, instead of 8) is 5559€, a maxed out 17 inch XPS 4999€. I think Apple has been more than fair with prices in this case. These machines are usually bought as tools, a business expense, it's not much in the grand scheme of things.
OK, European here, maybe it's just the title wording, but the article left me somewhat confused. For as long as I can remember ('80s child) I was convinced that the US car market (and consumer preferences) were almost exclusively automatic. Even popular culture reinforced this (I don't remember ever seeing a manual transmission car in American movies and TV shows). Now this article suggests that even recently there was an actual competition between the two, that America even had love, no less, for stick shift. I don't know what to believe anymore, is there a reality even...
The American car market as a whole are almost entirely automatic due to overall consumer preferences. However, there is also a minority of enthusiast drivers who greatly prefer manuals and are very vocal as such. Cars that are marketed more towards the enthusiast end of the market are those that you'll find stick shifts in more often, e.g. Miatas, Porsches, Corvettes, etc. These days though, even the enthusiast cars are selling many more automatics than manuals.
Who says he was using it to encrypt Gmail email (how would the key being on Google Drive even help with that)? The key may have just been in transit. For example, moving a subkey to smartphone in order to import it into a PGP app on the phone, and Drive just happened to be the most convenient way to do it. If the (sub)key is encrypted with a strong password, as it should be, it's fine.
How can there be a genetic difference between genetically invalid (badly defined as you say) concepts? I.e. the concept of race is completely social, there is nothing genetic about it (a person commenting on HN is well withing education threshold to be expected to know this). Yet you allow that someone who believes there might still be genetic factors "somewhere" in these differences is not a (closet) racist ... because they don't call for mass murder and insist the supposedly slightly inferior group should "not be discriminated" (just calling them genetically dumber is enough)?
> How can there be a genetic difference between genetically invalid (badly defined as you say) concepts? I.e. the concept of race is completely social, there is nothing genetic about it
Are you denying that there are differences in the genes controlling hair color between different racial groups? Or the frequency of something like lactose intolerance?
"Races" are badly defined, with shifting definitions and fuzzy borders and many different ways of grouping the same people. The idea of categorizing people into a handful of "races" rather than looking at hundreds of intersecting ancestries mixing together is dumb. But there is still a correlation between the two concepts. If you can find a gene that correlates with an ancestry (which you can do), then you've also found a gene that has a weaker correlation with "race".
And because there are thousands of genes that will correlate slightly with race, it's possible that one affects intelligence in some manner. It's not my problem if that's true. I'm confident there are no practically significant differences there. But that doesn't mean there isn't some .002% difference in median intelligence between groups that's caused by genes. It's bullheaded to ignore the possibility just because some awful racist will use it as "evidence" of their superiority. If they can't find out-of-context factoids to abuse they'll make things up anyway.
The space race was hardly a factor is the demise of USSR. Even the arms race wasn't that big of a factor by itself. Soviet Union's economy being incredibly wasteful was what done them in. They produced a tremendous amount of basically garbage goods to satisfy quotas in numbers, so it required a huge increase in base/heavy industries production to drive a tiny increase in consumer goods production. That's why USSR could build great rockets but not a decent car. The central issue is that Soviet economy was perpetually stuck between capitalism and socialism. The workers were expected to have their labour alienated, as in capitalism, but were safe in employment and the wage didn't mean all that much because of all the socialized services (which meant little for non-basic needs in life without a strong consumer goods economy, the issue for ordinary people wasn't that they had no money to buy stuff, they had, but there was usually nothing to buy). So they naturally sabotaged the system by not giving a shit about the quality of "their" products.
