I’ll be honest, a quick review of this thread did not clearly reveal who was downvoting who for what. My position, and this other person’s, is that downvoting opinions is bad manners and toxic to healthy discussion. If there was genuinely harmful advice there, then OK, downvote away.

(Obviously these days the word “harmful” is thrown around liberally so this probably just puts us back to square one.)

Freedom of speech as an absolute

Of course it’s not absolute, where did I say otherwise? Straw man.

paradox of tolerance

This just feels like a fancy reference deployed to back up intolerance.

Exactly my point. The virtual equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you happen not to agree with what they say.

Their original staff was a bunch of pretty serious journalists sourced from the BBC.

Similar to: chough

It’s a type of bird but good luck knowing how to pronounce it. Ahh, English.

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A few years ago I considered learning Greek. Abandoned the plan because Greek has the triple whammy:

• quite a hard language, with tricky grammar and different alphabet (phonetics easy tho)
• only spoken in one small country - not very useful (tho good for general culture - 6% of English lexicon comes from Greek)
• the locals all speak English (coz tourism) so you’ll have trouble getting a chance to progress

So: good luck.

Rigth - and downvotes fixes it? This is lunacy and detrimental to discussion/sharing.

Thank you. But anecdotally, it seems there are few of us who think this. I still don’t understand why.

Interesting anecdotes! There’s actually a bit of truth in the last one, I believe. Bodily fat is more evenly distributed in Inuits and even Europeans than it is in, say, west Africans.

Give it a couple of years and a few more heatwaves! This is the insidious problem with heatwaves, as I see it. Tolerance for heat and cold is in large part cultural - go to Portugal in winter to see how tolerant people can be of cold indoor temperatures. But with every new 3-day heatwave, Europeans are going to rush out to buy AC units to escape the immediate misery. Next thing we know the continent will be like the US, where it’s just unacceptable for indoor temperature to be outside the 19-23C range. And mass AC is just a climate disaster. That’s my worry.

Fair enough. Most of Japan is hotter in summer than northern Europe. Here it has been 35C for much of the last week and domestic AC penetration remains extremely low. There are also quite few fat people, and the two things are probably at least a little bit connected.

Offices in all countries have AC, the question is about homes. I doubt “practically every household” in Hokkaido has AC. Here in northern Europe, very few do.

Lose weight. I’m totally serious. Thin people have much higher natural tolerance for heat.

It’s no coincidence that so many developed countries have become addicted to AC. The fact is that most people there are now overweight and in many (USA most obviously) over 40% are literally obese. Conversely, AC is much less common in places like France and Japan, and it’s not just because they’re too cheap.

If you want to stay cool in a heatwave, it helps not to be wearing a blubber overcoat that you can’t remove.

Midnight Run (1988) but it was a VHS. Possibly the only movie I have watched more than twice, and I have watched a lot of movies. Very random.

I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.

Interesting. Years ago I moved from an 18in desktop setup to something like your eeePC. Unexpectedly, I also found it fine. These days I have a 14in and it feels unnecessarily big and heavy.

If you’re happy doing things one window at a time (i.e. monocle view, or basically as on mobile OSs), turns out the floor’s the limit!

Well, for my troubles I went back thru the thread to try to understand what it is exactly that’s bothering you. Seems maybe it’s a misunderstanding about my response to remon (“You’re not debating anything by simply repeatedly denying their view and restating” - you). That particular comment was not intended to argue anything, it was my mockery of remon’s condescending shtick (“But downvoting doesn’t mean that. At all. Not even sure how you got that idea.” etc - perhaps read it aloud to hear the drippingly patronizing tone, as if to a child who couldn’t possibly have a different idea of what exactly downvoting means - a question which is, after all, is a bit of a philosophical conundrum). That triggered me into disrespectful sarcasm - which, if you look, you will find I almost never do, I’m generally very civil.

I did get their substantive points (about algorithms, tweakable knobs etc, I know all the arguments by heart) but fundamentally I still believe that a blanket downvote button is analogous to slapping someone down or confiscating their mic - which are things people don’t do in person, they’re simply too rude (or coarse, as you put it). In person we have manners. I wish we did virtually too.

Yes yes, I take the point about the sorting-algo choices and karma absence and so on. I acknowledged it in another comment.

My fundamental point (which you are ignoring) concerns the motivations and incentives for downvoting. My contention is that downvoting thoughtful and well-expressed opinions is always (always) toxic and unhealthy. Others don’t see it that way. So be it.

It’s not the norm but it does happen quite a bit, especially in authoritarian countries at land borders where the officials are always looking for a way to justify their jobs. It happened to me last year and that was in China, although in that case leaving not entering.

PS: for info, that was in Xinjiang at possibly the highest security border in the world. I showed the official a bunch of my mundane tourist photos, which was enough to have me on my way. Not a pleasant experience though.

At this rate there’ll be more people who love America outside it than inside it!

I’m getting downvotes because people don’t like being told they’re behaving obnoxiously. That’s all. I didn’t downvote you or anyone else. I respect all of your opinions.