pfannkuchen

Was this definitely not accounting trickery? Like even the way money is created is intentionally convoluted and approximately 1% of the population even attempts to understand it. Can we really trust the accounting of bank bailouts which stood to be unpopular when the accounting produced a convenient outcome? Has anyone plausible analyzed this to a convincing level of detail?

I’m also an atheist, but just looking at the huge amount of anthropological information we have, from hunter gatherer bands to large scale civilizations, I am quite sure that a perception of god-like and spirit-like entities is built into the hardware layer in humans. That doesn’t make them “real”, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not they are real, and deleting them from life because they aren’t literally real is an ongoing experiment.

N = 1 though.

With money borrowed from his boss

Genius in field works for wealthy man in field, gets special treatment at a young age. News at 11.

Google search keeps switching me to Spanish. One day recently I went on Reddit and it said “null” after every username. Google Sheets had a weird rendering bug that was worse then I’ve ever seen in google’s office clone products. Anecdotally it does seem like more bugs. Can’t imagine why!

Ah I had assumed you presented yourself as a convert and what you were faking was honest belief in the stories.

If you were faking already being a Christian, I can see how that could end with you having a bad time.

I’m curious why you didn’t present yourself as a convert? I think Christians are typically very friendly to converts.

Sorry to hear about part of your family being slaughtered in the past, that sucks.

Don’t tell them?

I’m pretty sure quite a few people who bring children to church don’t literally believe in the stuff themselves and just think the social elements and the morality are good for their children.

Were you trying to meet friends or trying to date though? If the latter I think it would feel a lot weirder.

Also if it bothers you to lie by omission I think one could come up with an explanation that wasn’t simply “I’m faking” and is more along the lines of “my grandparents were Christian and I think we lost something culturally when a lot of people stopped doing this” or something like that, assuming those are true for you. God is a metaphor, etc etc.

What happens when there’s an outage though? Just hope the LLM can fix it? Who is on the hook if it can’t?

Do you have people frantically trying to reverse engineer a basically unfamiliar-to-them code base at 2am while bleeding cash?

I can’t tell if you are serious. Are you serious?

SF housing dropped relative to other high demand locales during COVID. I wonder if this is just a recovery after Austin et al didn’t pan out as alternatives?

It might help to not have much in the way of environmental, safety or labor regulations.

Whether or not you feel like those are good overall (I do), they do actually also slow things down.

Okay let’s be clear on what we’re talking about.

I have seen lots of discussions about headlines along the lines of “<state or local government> bans <book X>”. Or just referring to book X as “a banned book in <state or local jurisdiction>”. This has the problem I described, and this is where I see arguments happening that don’t really make sense to me. It isn’t doublespeak to say what I said about this.

If what we’re talking about is actually the more detailed headline “<state or local government> bans <book x> FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES”, or “book X which is banned FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES in <state or local jurisdiction>” then that is accurate and fine. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this, have you?

We can’t pretend the two are the same thing, they aren’t the same thing.

This kind of thing happens commonly with language development over time. If a word or phrase picks up a strong connotation, then the word or phrase stops being used generically. This used to happen so slowly that nobody really noticed it happening to individual words or phrases, I think.

As an example, starting a fire could be called “firing”. If you say you’re going to “fire the stove”, that isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant. If you call your friend group a “squad”, again, this isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant.

If your friend group goes camping and works together to light a fire, you could say that you’re part of a “firing squad”. But, that already has such a strong connotation that it would be confusing and you would have to constantly explain what you actually mean because “firing squad” as a phrase is already taken.

That is of course a synthetic example but I think it illustrates the point. When we say “banned books”, that has a certain connotation. If what we mean is more like “curated books”, because they aren’t actually banned for sale anywhere, even at the local level, then saying “banned books” is confusing in the same way and it carries an undue emotional charge from the typical usage of that phrase.

If that undue emotional charge seems to be getting weaponized, then using it and acting innocent about it is going to ruffle some feathers.

*gene level

It’s such a tiny hop from there to “has a friend at Google who used it once as a favor”. I hadn’t even considered that people would do such a thing!

everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow

Sure, but only because banks are legally allowed to lie to customers about how much money they have.

not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons

“Bad societal consequences” is entirely subjective, though. This is the crux of the issue.

By that definition everywhere throughout all time is authoritarian.

Everywhere throughout all time is obviously not authoritarian, so the definition fails. Sorry, you are wrong.

Whenever the topic of “banned books” comes up, a bunch of people argue about whether they should be called “banned”.

What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.

In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.

So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.

The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).

So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.

My entire point in this thread has been that nobody actually cares about birthright citizenship itself and it is a vector to oppose demographic change, which itself is not an allowed discussion topic.

So, for me to hold the views of an American in 1910 on this topic, I would be opposed to non-Europeans becoming a majority in America. Where is the lie? I never said anything about being anti birthright citizenship. You sir are morally triggered and cannot think clearly in this area.

Sure of course, I was too vague. I’m not referring to our descendants having different values from us or myself. We do have some control over that, but not complete control, and exerting whatever control is available in the modern day risks future blowback. We are in agreement here.

I’m referring to the value of not persecuting based on ethnic or cultural background.

Not everyone in the world holds this value, and relocating to different land is not what makes a person hold one value or another.

So if groups who don’t hold this value grow numerically to the point where the lack of this value becomes dominant, we are putting our own group at risk of being subjected to it in the future, which seems rather unwise.

Is it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).

Hmm I suppose that’s fair. Another commenter did seem to understand what I’m saying, but he may have a more similar background to myself.

Coming out sideways is a common phrase in psychology land, or at least this is my impression. It refers to when a feeling cannot be expressed directly due to repression, and so the feeling comes out a different way. For example instead of feeling crushing shame about being wrong (due to past experiences of being shamed when wrong), a person gets angry at the person suggesting they are wrong, even though they are actually wrong and it wouldn’t be a big deal at that time to just admit it.

Moral programming I thought was self explanatory. Where do you think morality comes from? Different groups in space and time have had different moralities, and children have whatever morality they are consistently exposed to growing up. It does get complicated if they are exposed to multiple moralities simultaneously, they are still programmed but it is more of an RNG in that case (e.g. Christianity at home but progressivism at school, the apparently socially dominant flavor typically wins but not always). Our current moral programming includes a lot of aspects about race and nationalism, and so people have difficulty thinking clearly in this area and sometimes when they internally disagree with the morality they are still unable to express that disagreement directly and so it comes out sideways as awkwardly critiquing some specific language in the constitution or whatever is happening this week about it.

Okay but if other groups aren’t doing it, the planet is still doomed and now your group is worse off. Congratulations, you have accomplished nothing!

Make usury illegal again?

(I mean the classical definition not the watered down modern one)

Has tech really gotten more top heavy?

I feel more like people kept flooding into the middle and bottom, and companies that used to focus on top talent got watered down with those middle and bottom types.

A lot of the people getting laid off from Google and Meta would not have been hired at all in those places 15 years ago, for example.

Do these actions strike anyone else as theater?

“Average”, son. Was the average American a fascist in the early 1900s?

The fascist party in the early 1900s was a fringe party. It existed and was considered a legitimate opinion, fine, but don’t act like the average American was anywhere near fascist.

What in gods name would blood and soil even mean when you’ve got Italians living next to Irish living next to Poles living next to English? You haven’t got any blood to fascism about!

My point is that I don't think anyone would be focusing on this particular constitutional text if the underlying reason they are focused on it were allowed to be discussed in the open. It sounds like you don't disagree with that? Do you logically agree but you feel like it must be wrong somehow? Moral programming do be like that.

Why are you being so rude? Please don't put words in my mouth, that is nothing like what I believe.

My views are something like what the average American believed in 1910. Were they literally Hitler also?

“Look there’s an X, what is he doing here, get him!”