nyokodo

do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid

I wish I could easily donate my tiny settlements to a good cause. It might make it worth the time to register for the class.

And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist.

Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.

1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...

make large percentages of a student's grade come from in person tests

One possible solution is to remove technology but then you’ll need to detect smart glasses and other hidden devices. Another possible solution is to expect the use of AI and design assessments that are so hard that you have to work in tandem with AI otherwise you can’t get a good grade.

You’re always welcome to come back.

Or for some industries back channel checks in network

Even in small-world industries, assuming they occasionally accept outsiders, they will still encounter some form of this problem.

Or, we can just start doing interviews in person again.

In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".

This isn’t accurate except for perhaps certain parts of Protestantism. To Catholics, Orthodox, probably portions of the Church of England etc, ie a majority of Christianity church buildings are holy and specially blessed. They hold the Eucharist in the Tabernacle which these Churches believe is the body and blood of Jesus under the guise of bread which is the most holy thing for them. In order for these buildings to be used for any other purpose all the holy things would need to be removed and the building specifically deconsecrated.

It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.

Although eventually a rather obscure form of evidence as it'll gradually become a melted blob of constituent materials from cosmic rays.

I think it’s Eurocentric to imply that China is morally inferior to the US.

Apart from the genocide of the Uighur, the brutal oppression of Tibet, the complete lack of even the pretense of democratic rights, the total lack of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and on and on. Last I checked not wanting your ethnicity eliminated or brutally repressed isn’t just a European thing.

Have to be more productive, more efficient

Most people on their deathbed would counsel you to focus on relationships rather than productivity.

the mines are going to be in China anyway, right

If you had read the article you’d know they have their own mine: “Hardly any firms, even in China, do what MP is attempting: produce finished magnets starting with ore that the company mines itself” Mostly China doesn’t mine materials but has concentrated the refining capacity in China for many commodities. Thankfully, we do have backup capacity so we won’t be totally screwed if China cuts us off, and the refining technology is well understood and in a conflict we or our allies can cut them off from many raw materials so their refining advantage isn’t a checkmate.

to crash the economy

The quote is “markets will tumble” by which he clarifies that it will be a temporary market overreaction not “crash the economy” like it’s 1929. Those are qualitatively different things.

It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies

I see absolutely no evidence that the DOGE crowd wants to crash the economy and while they do have a utopian ideology so does the left.

Additionally, the DOGE crowd would say they’re trying to dismantle an unaccountable deep state conspiracy that threatens the American economy through an accelerating accumulation of government debt and regulations and has been trying to transform society globally for decades through political, social, economic, and military intervention all to serve the progressive elites.

I think both of your views are lacking in charity and perspective, although the DOGE view in so far as I’ve accurately described it has vastly more evidence backing it up.

massive cuts of workers

That is what Trump is doing via DOGE so the burn-it-down camp seems pretty well served, more than anytime since the post-war demobilization anyway. The impasse, if it occurs, is more likely to be with those in Congress that don’t want to reduce the size of government.

Not in my lifetime

Were you alive in the mid to late 90s? A string of balanced budgets and surpluses. There are new problems and no dot com bubble right now but most Americans were alive the last time we had balanced budgets. It is quite possible.

or whether it's a backtrack after the 'bad optics' after the Washington, DC, crash.

Either way you have a plan that wasn’t well thought through or thoughtfully executed. Having said that, at least they’re not (ultimately) directly tempting understaffed critical workers to quit although one wonders which functions haven’t had a plane crash moment.

the current administration is asking them to resign en masse, not hiring more

While they did initially receive the resignation memo the Office of Personnel Management clarified that Air Traffic Controllers aren’t eligible for the resignation offer nor subject to the hiring freeze. [1]

1. https://apnews.com/article/jet-helicopter-crash-air-traffic-...

this is the perfect excuse for evil in humanity to continue to govern

Historical facts, like the Church and her teaching being invincible to the attacks against her over the millennia, has no relation to what ought to happen. Facts are facts not excuses and attempting to bring in that into the issue is a non-sequitur.

the answer to which is an emphatic, "No." Which is why Protestantism exists in the first place.

Early Church scholarship makes it impossible to maintain the Protestant contention that the teachings have changed in their essence, obviously vocabulary has changed. Some recommended reading on the topic that is a mix of popular and scholarly works:

* The Fathers Know Best by Jimmy Akin

* Upon This Rock by Steve Ray

* Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett

* The Faith of the Early Fathers Volumes 1 to 3 by William Jurgens

* The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 by Adrian Fortescue

Because evidence (schisms, actual errors from the Church institution throughout time, not the least sex scandals we are not done with yet) shows that if God was actively directing the Church in the past and today, oh boy…

Except all the scandals and anti-Popes are empirical evidence of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church. Despite all that the teachings of the Church are fundamentally unchanged. I can read St Justin Martyr and recognize the teaching of the Eucharist from the second century that itself is in continuity with John 6. Go through all Catholic teachings and you’ll find continuity from the beginning despite all the forces that wanted to change it for thousands of years.

The religion founded by the man betrayed by His own Apostle and then disowned or abandoned by the rest, executed brutally and sadistically by the Romans, that religion went on to conquer the Roman world within a few centuries and then make its way through the whole world for thousands of years. Why? Because Jesus rose from the dead and against His Church the gates of hell won’t prevail.

why should I accept what one specific council of European priests 600 years ago or whatever decided is to be considered holy canon?

Well, firstly the canon doesn't just come from the decisions of Europeans and bringing race into it is a non-sequitur. The canon of Scripture comes from the Sacred Tradition, preserved by the Church and lead by the Pope and the Bishops (who FWIW weren't and aren't just white guys), and then sealed by the authority given by Christ to the Pope and the Bishops on issues of faith and morals. The Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Pope and Bishops comes from Christ, so why should you trust the canon of Scripture? Because Jesus Christ is God and you should believe in Him and be apart of His Church because the canon comes from the Church which comes from Christ. If you don't believe in Jesus Christ or that He was God then worrying about the canon of Scripture and trying to criticize medieval ecumenical council decisions is just foolishness.

But the core dogma of "believe specific claims of fact because they were written down in one text and not another" is bad epistemology

This is closer to Protestant dogma which tends to assert that the Church and all our beliefs come from Scripture. To slightly rephrase and expand on what I already said above, Catholic dogma is that the canon of Scripture comes from the Church not the other way around, that is to say Christ gave us the Sacred Tradition and the Apostles and their successors are what determined the canon of Scripture.

So now I've distilled a vague distrust you have in medieval and ancient sources down to a historical and empirical question. Did Jesus Christ die and rise again, and did He found a Church that has kept his Tradition alive through the centuries and alive fundamentally unchanged. These questions have been ignored and then ridiculed by empiricists but I've noticed more and more people starting to take them seriously, I suggest you do too.

How could they know?

I can’t speak for any religious leader but in terms of Catholic leadership: because in many matters God spoke through the Prophets and then He came down and told us directly which is preserved in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:15-17), and the Holy Spirit guides the Church (John 14:26) and does so through the prime ministerial office of the Pope the successor of Peter (Mathew 16:13-19) and through the Bishops the successors of the Apostles (Acts 1:12-26)(Acts 15)

this how all those useless executives operate

Being visible in a positive way to the right people is 100% necessary for career advancement inside companies. The fact that this is abused by otherwise incompetent people is unfortunate, but good people need to understand and use this knowledge to advance also.

I have done this and received no confirmation or anything after more than 6 months

Sue them, make it a class action.

Well, Musk hypocrisy aside and assuming the scale of this intervention is the same on X as pre-acquisition and assuming it’s as egregious and petty as then, he won’t have the infrastructure to force his views across all social networks like the Biden administration did.

Also, crucially, this was an operational test by BO whereas Starship and Super Heavy are still in developmental testing. New Glenn will now start launching commercial payloads assuming the outcome doesn’t reveal any problems with the overall launch.

They’re roughly 25 years old, they now have the largest operational orbital rocket ever built even if it’s likely SpaceX soon blows them out of the water with Starship and Super Heavy. They’ve taken a long time to get to orbit and haven’t quite cracked partial reusability but they’re now an active player and reaching orbit on their first try is impressive. The iterative error tolerant development philosophy of SpaceX has resulted in far faster innovation and Blue Origin has benefited from SpaceX being a major forcing function to move the US Space program primarily to private launch/space craft providers and proving orbital booster reuse was possible in the first place. Finally Blue Origin doesn’t have an operational orbital crew capsule or cargo spacecraft. Losing SpaceX would mean the US would at least temporarily lose its crew launch capability entirely and some of its ISS resupply capabilities, launch cadence would fall off a cliff, and overall industry innovation would suffer.

I don't think I've ever seen a rocket build up its speed so slowly.

New-Glenn has a low thrust to weight ratio vs other rockets and lower engine chamber pressure than some other engines to put less stress on the rocket and engines for greater reusability.

I recently spent some time in the ER in a criminally underfunded and understaffed public healthcare system. People in quite severe pain were languishing waiting their turn but the nurses went out of their way to show a semblance of care and humanity to the patients and even apologize to them when they didn't have to and weren't expected to. Maybe that overall situation shows that key people in the society or government don't care but clearly the frontline people still care. I choose to focus on them and do my little bit to make things around me a little bit better when maybe no one expects me to either.

that seems worth it to me

How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light.

1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not... 2. https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-r...