jwalgenbach

The treatment is for type 1, not type 2. Very different causes.

Campaign donations are not personal gifts, and regulated by election laws. This is a false equivalency and at best whataboutism.

This is not to say Citizen's United shouldn't be repealed and campaign contributions much more tightly regulated. But it ain't the same.

Cars don't run. And even if they did, or you tortured the definition to include rolling on fairly straight prepared paths as running, it is only better for specific definitions of better.

Cars are faster on reasonable traversable terrain. Are they more or less energy efficient? Under what circumstances? Do they self navigate the best path around obstacles? Better is really subjective.

And this applies to the large language models too. Just like calculators, they are going to do some things better, or maybe cheaper. But I've played with them trying to get them to write non-trivial programs, and they really do fail confidently. I suspect the amount of source code online means that any common problem has been included in the training data, and the LLM constitutes a program. So, at this point for programming, it's fancy Google. And that has value, but it is not intelligence.

I am not saying we (as a society) shouldn't be worried about these developments. Near as I can tell, they will mostly be used to further concentrate wealth among the few, and drive people apart because we already can't settle on a common set of (reasonably) objective facts about what is going on -- both problems are probably the same thing from different perspectives...

Except it is the speech of those pressuring the company that is free. I can tell a company that supports things I don't agree with that I won't be a customer. If enough of customers vote with their wallets, the company will change it's policies because it cares about profit.

No one is obligated to give either their money or attention to Elon Musk, or to third parties that are perceived to support Musk's companies.

I think it is the use of the term "landchad". I've never heard it before. Maybe it's a thing, but it sure sounds like a phrase from the incel world.

I'm sure he didn't care. It's not as though there is video of him...

Oh, right. There is.

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trump-i-will-be-appointing-pro...

The internet was meant to be used by people who knew how the internet worked. Herein lies the problem.

This might sound like gatekeeping, and maybe it is. When these systems were designed, they were not designed to be used by everyone. They were not designed to be commodities that are bought and sold, with the most valuable trinket available being the attention of the user. But this is where we are.

Few are capable of running their own _anything_ on the internet, and even fewer have the desire to do it, because if you run it well for yourself (as an individual), someone else will want you to do it for them because you are already doing it, so it's not that much more work, right? \s

Decentralization limits monetization of anything, so that is going to be a non-starter for investment of resources. Unless you are trying to have your infrastructure survive a nuclear war, no one is going to provide the means to build anything big unless you can sell it or the users of it.

The notion that anything really works on the internet with the assumptions that were made in the 70s and 80s, and the realization that what holds most of it together is the blood and sweat of ops, duck tape, and fever dreams consistently astonishes me. In the not so distant past, someone paid me to write them a custom FTP server. In the 21st century. It's like being asked to whittle an engine block out of a tree.

Why not use all of it? I opted out of micropayments and ads, installed the full bevy of ad blocking on Brave, and use pihole for DNS.

Wow. This article aged badly in the span of hours.

From the article, published this week:

"...bringing back social restrictions is pointless so long as there is no danger of hospitals being overwhelmed."

Also from this week (https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/13/us/dallas-county-no-pediatric...):

"Your child will wait for another child to die.' Amid Covid-19 surge, Dallas County has no pediatric ICU beds left, county judge says"

No. They're all bullshit.

There is not a direct relationship between Fox News and Fox 45. That is true.

But...

Fox 45 Baltimore is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and corporation with a definite pro-Trump bias, and a history of making editorial decisions pushing stories to the right.

So you can say that Fox News and Fox 45 don't have anything to do with each other in a corporate tree, but the are both pushing the far right narrative because they largely follow the same editorial dictates.

Unless Trump is challenging the terms of service that he had to agree to when getting his account, this is largely a non-issue. Trump _agreed_ that Facebook/Twitter could ban him whenever he crossed their usage policy, which they can alter at any time.

Essentially, Trump agreed that they had the right to ban him before he posted anything to their services.

So sure, the government may be able to force people to host things they don't want to, but I don't think the government will force anybody to break a contract that both parties agreed to in this case.

Or because sequels often add new characters. And the Trump Republicans made themselves ridiculously easy targets...see the Four Seasons Landscaping fiasco, paying off Playboy models and pornstars, suggesting publicly that people inject themselves with bleach or somehow use sunlight internally...

People mock them because they do stupid things. Those are called consequences.

That's actaully the problem. You can't change a fingerprint, but you can fake one.

No, we downvote things that are crap.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/03/31/fac...

That is a definition of God that is so amorphous that it is completely useless. God is whatever you want it to be in that particular moment. So much so, that there is nothing concrete there.

You are simply living from moment to moment, with no grounding connecting your beliefs aside from your personal desires for them.

The Church is composed of the people in it. And should be judged by the actions of those that comprise it, otherwise you are abandoning all agency, and it may as well be dismantled as it could not be responsible for anything it does.

Also, no evidence of any god exists, but that is another argument. Let's stick with arguments that postulates the existence of a God in the Catholic tradition.

First, according to the Bible, papal infallibility has whatever the Church does held as law in Heaven. Stupid rule, but there you are. Therefore, if we judge that covering up and enabling child abuse is immoral, then the Church is by its own rule, immoral. Well, that doesn't work out so well for the Church. So let's leave that aside.

The Catholic Church (and other denominations) tries explain evil (and thus side step the "All Good, All Power, and All Knowing -- pick two problem of God), but claiming that it is all part of God's greater plan. The difficulty here is that it doesn't side step the problem, but tried to solve it by adding a layer of abstraction to it. What you end up with is that God's plan has to be definitionally immoral because it came from the mind of God.

The answer is, of course, who can know the mind of God? It sort of kicks the can down the road much the way the Millerites (now Seventh Day Adventists) do on the end of the world and QAnon does with Trump coming back (was it January 20th? Or March 6th? Or March 20th?). Evil exists because God's plan demands it, but somehow removes the responsibility of God's plan from God.

So, the children were abused by the men acting in God's name because God's plan demanded their suffering, but God owns none of the responsibility because you can't possibly understand the reason that God required the suffering of those children. Nice work, if you can get it.

Free will (in the Catholic tradition) allows the ability to see the harm that actions do upon others, but somehow we are supposed to turn a blind eye to that done under the protection of God. Because those children were clearly not under the protection of God.

Divine Physician, indeed. Physician, heal thyself.

And no one is claiming that there aren't sinners in the Church, and no one is outraged that there are. The problem is that the "hospital" was moving abusers around from floor to floor to avoid responsibility.

Heck, if the Church defrocked the abusers (those in need of its "cures") when they were reported, and took actions to keep them from abusing and answer for their crimes to the legal authorities, no one would have this (particular) problem. But the Church didn't, because it was protecting itself. The Church is more important to the Church than the victims of those crimes.

Hence, the Church exists to ensure the existent of itself, and all it's actions are in service of that singular goal.

Frankly, moral outrage at child sexual abuse and the systematic cover up of the abuse and protection of the abusers is justified. If the Bible is written in such a way that such moral outrage is a sickness, then it is truly awful foundation to base your morality upon.

But thank _you_ for minimizing the responsibility of those covering up the crimes and ensuring that they could continue.

Religion is just a tool too. It's just not wielded by the flock, but rather by someone that wants to control the actions of the flock.

Spirituality can be something else altogether, but usually just boils down to magical thinking.

"Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly."

This again? The existence of others committing the same crimes does not indemnify the Church.

Love the "Society has changed" argument. Clearly, recognizing that pedophilia is wrong by the Church is a product of changing times...not like they moved clergy from parish to parish to avoid them being caught.

So the Church, an organization that sets itself up as the moral arbiter between God and man, doesn't have more of a moral responsibility than school districts across the country?

And there is plenty of moral outrage for coverups, no matter the source.

Please. People hate the Church because it says it is one thing and is another. The media is critical of the Church because the Church has tried to make itself the authority on people's behavior, yet itself behaves in a reprehensible manner. Maybe it should just go back to being the Mafia's bank and just obliquely supporting drug cartels and human rights abuses via loans?

Your whole comment is just whataboutism. You've an opportunity to refute the assertion that the Church knowingly covered up abuse of children, and you've decided that if others have done it, it can't be that bad.

There's a lot of conceit in this notion that just because _you_ can't understand or explain something means that it goes beyond understanding and explanation.

Religion exists because of that conceit, that notion that either something is immediately explainable or that it is supernatural. Science exists because the idea that something isn't understood now doesn't mean that we (as a species) won't ever understand it.

We stand on the shoulders who have come before us, and not one of them was a god.

"There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be."

Oh, that's crap. There are more than 100 victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy where the Church itself covered up the crime. You can play with definitions however you want, but that is not a misperception of the Church, but a realistic view of the actions of the Church.

I've been Catholic, and the Church exists to extend the existence of the Church. Any other action is in service to that goal.

Actually, yes. This is entirely reasonable. Hosting companies decided they didn't want 4chan or Stormfront or other hives of white supremacy and that's okay. Publishers are allowed to not publish a book. Fox News and CNN get to decide what guests are on their talking heads shows.

Facebook is not a public utility. It is not a dot gov. They can allow whatever content they want so long as it doesn't break the law.

Except it wasn't. Carnivore was a thing that people knew about, and the US government backed away from it when it was publicized. Total Information Awareness was a thing that was known and not a conspiracy theory. The Patriot Act was a thing that took a lot of steps towards a surveillance society.

Snowden's information was just a confirmation that the US government was pursuing these things in secret when doing them in the open failed. It's not a lizard people/flat earth/q-anon level thing. There was plenty of "prior art" for the Snowden revelations.

There are conspiracies. I have never seen or heard of one that turns the world upside down. They seem to be all continuations and expansions of bad behavior that is currently accepted as fact.

Really? Your answer to Apple restricting information posted by people protesting elections is to ask how people would feel about restricting information from white supremacist terrorists. At the very least, this is a whataboutism argument, trying to shift the discussion away.

This is a false equivalency. One is a group objecting to rigged elections and another is a group that advocates for violence against others based on ethnicity.

Those are very different things, and it is necessary to differentiate between the two.

There is a segment of the Apple consumer-base that appear to think that Apple can do no wrong. It's a cult of personality just like any other, and pointing out the hypocrisy is satisfying for some, if ultimately futile.

Kroger buys wholesale, and sets the prices in it's store independent of what it paid (presumably they want a profit, but it could also be a loss leader). And there is no lock-in for a grocery store (i.e. I can buy the identical product elsewhere). This is a false equivalency.

Fair enough.

a) As I stated in the argument about the difference between discrimination against protected classes versus hosting content on a private server, I'd say that legally, these are not equivalent.

b) Ethically is an interesting question. Since the ethics of denying someone service based on their sexual orientation is largely viewed as reprehensible, maybe a better question would be whether or not (freed from questions of protected class) the baker would decorate a Nazi themed cake versus allowing federated apps that are largely used for the dissemination of white supremacist ideology to be hosted?

c) In principle, I'd say they are not equivalent for the following reason: selling and decorating a cake is a business transaction between two entities. The cake (decorated or not) ownership moves from producer to consumer. The consumer is purchasing a physical cake. If the cake is ever made public, it is at the behest of the purchasers of the cake, and any consequences of that public display will be suffered by the purchaser. Essentially, the baker's name is not on the cake, and no one needs to know.

Hosting apps or other contents affects the reputation of the hosting company, and damages to their business reputation fall on it. Think about Facebook being recognized as a conduit for foreign interference in U.S. elections, or whether or not the New York Times will accept ad content from an adult video company. The name on the masthead is the entity that suffers the damage first.