viridian

I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.

This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.

side note: the flynn effect is reversing in most developed countries, and started doing so between 1991-1997.

Impossible is almost always a colloquialism, almost everything is possible is you accept a low enough probability of success. We are talking about something less likely than almost anything else ever called impossible.

It's possible in the same way its possible that you will spontaneously phase through the floor due to a particular outcome of atomic resonance. Possible, but so unlikely it almost certainly has not, nor ever will happen.

Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.

Society is doomed because we stopped silencing disinformation peddlers. We know what happens when Nazis are allowed to spread propaganda freely - because that happened one time in Germany, and we saw the results.

That one time in Germany, actually an 80 year long ongoing event in central Europe. Hitler didn't wake up one day with a novel idea about the Jews and the place of the German people, these were foundational ideas in the culture at least as far back as Wagner.

If anything, this pro-censorship argument is self defeating, because the "disinformation" peddlers that were silenced in the second reich were generally those of the liberal, anglo, and francophilic variety, those who would seek to decenter the goal of a collective German destiny.

Censorship is only ever a good if you find yourself a part of the group that would be doing the censoring.

The US is a major outlier in sentencing for violent crimes and sex crimes. It's not the absolute peak in terms of sentencing, but its somewhere between the Latin American mean and the Middle Eastern mean, which is unexpected given its other human development indicators.

The main rifles I've seen depicted in this conflict are AK pattern rifles, with the rare ancient armalite pattern rifle scattered among them, and a singular SCAR.

Based on where most modern AK manufacturing has moved to (China, like manufacturing writ large), you should instead be asking the Chinese populous to protest. That said, I wouldn't hold my breath on China forming a mass protest culture any time soon, Tiananmen Square is in most people's living memory.

As a heads up, flagging is rarely done by mods, and overwhelmingly done by normal users with sufficient karma to do so, so it probably wasn't Dan or Scott. For example, the comment header for the comment I am currently replying to looks as follows:

richardfeynman 15 hours ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Israels top military lawyer arrested after she adm...

I fail to see how that conclusion is even possible. He's not advocating for anything, he's just taking the opportunity to dunk on Israel.

His actual cloaked argument, insofar as it exists, is that Israel does not uphold these standards you value. You clearly disagree, and of course the sarcasm is unproductive, but he's not advocating barbarity (but levying an accusation of it).

Honestly, thinking it through, there's no way I'd engage the public at all on something like that except possibly a singular utterance that no, it didn't happen, ever, not even close, it's a bold faced lie.

Trying to contextualize or talk about fake news or doing anything else feels very shady to me in that context. You do often see this sort of hemming and hawing from people online during these cancellation campaigns, and I cannot even fathom what inspires them to do anything other than directly and aggressively defend themselves.

Look, I also find sarcasm extremely annoying, it's an anathema to meaningful discussion.

However... your non-sarcastic interpretation is clearly in bad faith, and ratchets up the hostility even further.

Why post this jeering reply?

Recently, any time I see someone railing against about one-sided coverage, it sets off alarm bells for where the person themselves is coming from.

To explain, there was a study of partisan bias I once read, wherein a mixed audience is shown some factually neutral piece of media, then asked to rate the bias of the piece along with some other questions. Naturally, the strongest partisans felt it was the most biased against them (something we've seen replicated in dozens of studies), but the more interesting outcome was that they teased out why the partisans felt the media was so biased. The overwhelming argument from both sides was that the media in question lacked additional context that would specifically justify the actions of their own side, even though that was not the focus of the video.

My big take away from this is that if a person is demanding additional, one-directional contextualization, especially if said context seems like it stretches/moves the topic of conversation, I'm probably reading polemic disguised as truth seeking.

FWIW in my experience is less the monster energy / black rifle coffee audience, it's actually the red bull / white claw audience.

It still feels wrong to me, but that's how it is.

Whatever your own feelings on the matter are, condescending to people with terms like "fee-fees" only engenders more conflict and outrage.

It's a fraction of a drop in an ocean of online hostility and malevolence, but is still a contributor nonetheless.

I think people view it more as an irreparable shattering of the social contract. Society exists, but the rules just don't matter. Many people have become strict conflict theorists, to borrow a term from sociology.

The person might not intend to be trivializing the problem, but that is the common outcome. This was very observable in the wake of the Snowden leaks, where "is anyone actually surprised?" was a key prong in the narrative that argued that you shouldn't actually care about what the NSA was getting up to.

There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is actually significantly better for the user than just straight up preventing the use of non matching proprietary drives.

US military doctrine does often play out like this in the field. We prefer maneuver warfare strategies and tactics to positional and attrition ones as a general rule, and a key element of maneuver warfare is the units doing the work having the unilateral ability to maneuver or retreat regardless of some greater plan.

The battlefield is not a democracy, nor a top down dictatorship. In proper combined arms maneuver warfare its more akin to a network of syndicates working towards a common goal.

Speaking of vibe checks, the vibes in this post are worse than what you've replied to. "something something", "I'll meet you at your level", "Do you see?", "you got it 200% wrong.", are all very dismissive and hostile.

There are better ways to get your message across.

I still do it, for emphasis. Never had anyone complain thus far.

Academia certainly does, although, humorously, we also have professors making the same proclamation you do, while while en or em dashes in their syllabi.

My observations largely match your own, and also applies more generally to non-technical interactions online. I help manage a group that runs a local LAN, and have run into both the general language issues, and people making long, incomprehensible requests that have major LLM smells.

I don't think it's just availability bias however, I think it's mostly a case of divergent linguistic evolution. In terms of the amount of people who speak English at an A level, India has the largest English speaking population in the world. With that, and a host of other native languages, came a rapid divergence from British English as various speech patterns, idioms, etc, are subsumed, merged, selectively rejected, and so on.

The main reason you don't see divergence to the same extent in other former colonies, even older colonies like Canada and the US, is that the vast majority of the colonists spoke English as a primary language.

You dropped your conjunction.

As an American, the answers to these questions are yes, no (subject to draft), and yes. Iran considers us to be "the great Satan", to give an example.

By this measure, the Armenians were also not the subject of a genocide. Which of course, is the common opinion in Turkey, and almost no where else.

In my understanding Israel, in the eyes of the US, is a convenient "wedge" in the Arab space that allows for easier power projection in the area

This doesn't get talked about enough but yes, this was Kissinger's geopolitical view of the near and middle east which we still largely operate on today. The goal being to use the oppressed state of Palestine as a way to separate America's greatest threat (an ascent multi-national Ba'athist movement) from the rest of the middle east by creating a situation that is impossible for the Ba'athists to ignore.

The only correction I'd make is that Israel isn't particularly important as an end in this strategy, they are just the means to achieve the goal of Palestinian subjugation. There's a reason the US also pours money into Egypt to enforce their border.

Oh we absolutely are, and it's not even close. I'd almost take pride in it were it not so ruinous for everyone.

We've gone from philosophers like DeBord and Baudrillard painting a somewhat manic vision of the future, to actually living in this hyper-real mirror of some actual society that no longer exists, mostly courtesy of a global American cultural hegemony. People are willing to risk being fatally shot, to engage in anti-social behavior, or to martyr themselves all in the name of some form of second order "engagement".

The current state of propaganda is such that even the more modern concepts taught in a polisci class on ideology & propaganda, such as banal nationalism, are completely outdated, and are about as quaint as a lot of soviet era concepts. Propaganda is now able to be delivered in the form of hyper-personalized content, where the content itself not even need be propaganda, control of the recommendation engine selecting what a person sees and doesn't see is more than enough.

This is like saying there are no good guys or bad guys in the mafia, because the good guys all got taken out early on.

What you are then left with are bad guys.

I must not understand this analogy, because it seems to only draw the conclusion that we are to be the objects of a totalitarian state in all cases. Taking the first fundamental right from the US constitution, the right to life, is not a given on a desert island. Any number of things, including venomous snakes and scorpions, could be your end almost immediately.

Does this mean that any given state is also justified in arbitrarily killing people on the whims of its controller?

1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.

That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.