object-a

Americas Homer would be a film director. Maybe Coppola?

Edit: Someone below mentioned Ford, also a good pick

1. The tax is not pegged at the sale price. What prop 13 actually does is limit the amount of appreciation the state can recognize for tax purposes.

2. There are lots of states/cities in the US that do not cap the appreciation of your house for tax purposes, and I don’t think it destroys millions of families. In fact the California cap is generally seen as a terrible policy because it distorts the housing market

I mean, people already do pay property taxes on homes? So this isn’t a very good retort.

Do you have kids? Did you let them grow up the same way?

How big of a challenge are hardware faults and radiation for orbital data centers? It seems like you’d eat a lot of capacity if you need 4x redundancy for everything

Ad tech doesn't need this feature to know roughly how old you are.

https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en Google's policy is that under 13 you can have a supervised Gmail account. I think that's fairly standard for major providers

Setting your age 8-12 probably bans you from using Gmail and other online services

Yeah the most likely thing (for the California law, at least) is that compliant OS's expose a form at account creation where you input a birthdate or age, and have either a CLI/file/setting where you can change the birthdate or age with admin permissions. No verification is needed

Yeah if you have admin access to your device and know what you’re doing it’s basically a non-issue. I’m guessing a savvy high schooler can change their age bracket easily.

If you want to give a young child a laptop or computer though, it maybe helps keep them away from objectionable content.

The law says the user provides the birthdate or age and the bracket is derived from it

The brackets are a few years wide, so it could take a bit of waiting. But yeah I’d consider setting a slightly different day/month for a child if I was paranoid.

I guess you could also make the bracket selectable instead of requiring the age

You’d need some script that updates the age category based on the user’s provided birthday (which is not shared with the applications) but otherwise yeah

I believe the California law (which has passed) requires operating systems to collect the DoB or Age of the user when setting up a user account, and then expose an API that shares the users age range (not their actual age or birthdate) when requested by an application.

It does not require the OS to actually verify the age, collect government IDs, or any other data.

The intention, I think, is to put the responsibility for communicating the users age on the OS, instead of having each application or service do their own age verification (by scanning IDs, requesting user data, etc). Since it’s set on the machine, a parent can set it once for their kid when setting up the device.

https://www.sauron.systems/

Evidence for lab leak is extremely weak, zoonosis is the most likely origin:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...

It would be nice if the site cited the regulations and costs that make the different facilites impossible — are they outright banned? Are there environmental regulations that don’t exist elsewhere? Is it a long process for permitting with tons of inspections?

I am talking about at the founding. Their mission has obviously shifted from then.

I mean, I’m even more skeptical that Palantir or its customers were concerned about killing former members or supporters of the Soviet Union prior to 2009. The focus was probably the War on Terror and related crimes.

Alex Karp was calling himself a self-described socialist as recently as 2018.

I'm a little skeptical that Palantir pre-2009 (when Joe was there) focused on communists at all

Thank you for answering the question

For anyone who has tried cars from both automakers, how does BYD compare to Tesla on similar trim vehicles?

Paramount announced early that the current offer wasn’t their best and final, so why would WB accept? They already know that Paramount is willing to make a higher offer

The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards.

Usefulness in proofs _is_ an epistemological standard. Axioms are evaluated based on how they impact mathematical proofs and their compatibility with other axioms, and mathematical disagreements with the Axiom of Choice also follow similar epistemological standards and procedures. We take Banach-Tarski seriously because it meets the standards.

If you wanted to make an argument that "The Axiom of Choice is nonsense" and be taken seriously, you would be expected to show how it is incompatible with other axioms, or how it generates a paradox. You wouldn't be arrested or silenced if you went around denouncing the axiom of choice without following these standards, but you would (rightfully) not be taken seriously.

Similarly, the article isn't saying CK should have been silenced or had his speech stifled, but it is objecting to the notion that what he did was real debate or real intellectual discourse. I don't think that argument equates to stifling speech.

This is basically what I'm saying -- you need consensus on the standards of evidence and the procedures for accepting evidence. Not just "argue whatever with no standards and see what sticks". The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.

It's fair to critique arguments or debate formats that do not establish those standards, or which throw out agreed upon standards with no basis, as not really participating in a marketplace of ideas.

If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.

If we define truth as something real, and something that we determine based on evidence and correspondence with reality, then you absolutely need some shared epistemological standards for what constitutes evidence and correspondence. I'm not sure if you need peer review for everything, but building expertise in those epistemological standards and approaches _is_ a requirement for well functioning marketplace of ideas, especially if our goal is to develop and understand the truth.

This is distinct from free speech -- I wouldn't want to impose restrictions on one's ability to speak, but that's not the same as saying all speech is equally valid in the pursuit of truth.

Proposal: we can suspend all air and water pollution regulations, provided we pass the following:

All owners and major investors of factories, refineries, and data centers must live within 1 mile of their dirtiest site.

But what about the 99% of people who commute into or around NYC every day, many of whom live outside Manhattan? Most of these people can’t afford to live in Manhattan even if they wanted to

Do 99% of the people who commute to NYC do so in cars? I'd be surprised if even close to half the working class commuters into/through the congestion zone do so with a personal car vs transit.

If you’re truly passionate about protecting the environment, focus on actions that make a real impact.

This is an experiment that if scaled up could have a real impact, and it's much simpler and directly effective for an American to do than "protesting a coal mine in China".

You can make sub-optimal combinations, but D&D is a team game. If you build a Barbarian that can't deal damage, or a Wizard who's spells never land, you're letting the rest of your team down.

The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.

The new rules give you _more_ freedom to choose a suboptimal build. You can even play a Gnome with low intelligence under the new rules, something that was impossible before.

An experienced DM can of course let their players create whatever character they want, but a less experienced DM might be concerned about balance/fairness/implications of bending the rules. By creating an alternative, flexible rule for ability scores, a table can feel confident that the characters they build are still balanced.

The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.

As you said above, the DM and table can agree to whatever constraints they want for the game, including using the old ability scores.