Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.

    Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.

    Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don’t produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.

    The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn’t get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn’t print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.

    The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it’s not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.

    So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It’s Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn’t just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It’s splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn’t pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.



  • I think there is data on it. Back in school I remember looking at the population pyramid. It’s a visualization of the number of men and women (x-axis, going both left and right) per birthyear (y-axis). In ye olden days, that formed a triangle. Many babies at the bottom, fewer olds at the top. You could tell a lot from the shape this took. You’d get dents on the male side that will correspond with armed conflicts, like the world wars. And then in the 1960s the pyramid with war chips in it massively narrows. At least in countries where the pill became readily available. It turned the pyramid into a tree with a big head at the top and a wide but thinner stem growing under it. I suspect now 80 years later we’re at a much narrower elongated triangle shape again. So you can probably count the shift in numbers there and put a number on “prevented accidents.” But you would have to account for other factors as well, improvements in medicine, vaccinations, etc.

    Were all births accidental? That’s a question you could only ask in hindsight. Humans have always looked for ways you prevent conception because we like to party but without reliable success. It’s only in the second half of the last century that we have come up with measures that the Catholic church really doesn’t approve of. Before that, children weren’t really planned in today’s sense. They just happened. They were expected to happen. And with most women being relegated to raising them and running the household, there wasn’t much else they could do. The concept that a wife could be raped by her husband is sadly fairly new. The patriarchy was strong. Abortion was a gamble and many women died from bad jobs of them. Most of the time, if she got pregnant, the decision was made, end of story. If you weren’t married yet, shotgun wedding. That’s how it went until we developed contraception that actually works. I wouldn’t call any kids before that accidental.

    Sure, you could remain abstinent. But we like to party.


  • You read the story. They said he died of exhaustion. It’s the Daily Mail. It doesn’t have to be true what they say.

    I think if your mind is sufficiently obsessive you can override all the natural countermeasures your body uses to get you to r&r. You pass a point of no return and you fall asleep but that’s the end. Not allowing people to sleep is a form of torture that can kill. Much like starving someone.

    This guy allegedly also smoked and drank like an idiot. That couldn’t have been helpful under the circumstances.


  • Did he really do them though? The reason why this is within the scope of belief is the fact that there’s no conclusive evidence that removes reasonable doubt by contemporary standards.

    Let’s say it’s all exactly as it says in the four different versions that are somehow considered canon and none of it is a millennia old game of telephone: did he choose to do them? Did his dad force him? Could he maybe not have had free will in this regard? Do we know about all the miracles? Maybe there were more! Would it be fair for us today to judge him based on incomplete records?



  • Perp walks. Teachers in school in front of class. Other kids in school being mean. Public dress downs at work. I’m sure there are more. Not all perps walked reoffend. Kids get their shit together because they don’t want to be made to look silly in front of their peers. I think for some employees this works similarily.

    Shaming only works if the shamed feels any. The doublers-down are often the ones who don’t feel shame. So it was the wrong tool for the job. Won’t work on 47 if you know what I mean.

    Just to clarify: I would personally put this tool in the “break glass in case of last resort” section of the tool box. But I’ve worked with bosses who didn’t put these restrictions on themselves and it can work.

    You could question their leadership qualities if you wanted to. That’s a benefit of arm chairing this stuff in an internet forum.


  • Just by origin of the word polyglot means you have many tongues. Tongues is of course well established as a stand-in for languages. If you can speak more than one, you fall under the definition.

    I think people have attached more to the term than just that though. I’m thinking of well traveled and culturally sensitive as well. Somebody who would be alright no matter where you dropped them.

    How many languages can your better half say good morning in? She might just be trying to pay you a compliment and you with your humilis gloriatio are not having it. In any case, I wouldn’t recommend going back to her with arguments obtained from a random group of internet users to settle your interpersonal disagreement.



  • So I wonder what “you” you, and from here on that means you personally unless otherwise stated, are referring to. Are you ascribing idiot-shouting behavior to me personally? Or are you referring to the neutral “you,” which can be replaced with “one?” The reason I’m wondering is that I have given no indication that I shout at idiots but your reply could be incorrectly construed in such a way that I do. Which then doesn’t make the motive warning any clearer also. Because it could be a interpreted as meaning I like to be “dominance-humping” and I ought to reflect on that. Or that my reasoning is too Darwinistic. Or that I shouldn’t judge tight calls by small statistical margins. Or that I like correcting people? Etc. It just isn’t clear.

    If this was pointed at my personally then you in particular and one in general should keep in mind that the person answering a binary question of the calibre “Which is worse, the plague or cholera?” doesn’t necessarily need to be suffering from either disease to make an assessment. So looping back to your OG query: I would say it’s better not to shout at anyone in general. But I’m also sure you and I after careful deliberation could agree on some exceptions relating to your query that aren’t monkey business. E.g. the idiot could be in danger, the idiot could be a racist abusing the marginalized, the idiot could be hard of hearing, etc. This sort of longer discussion isn’t encouraged by a binary prompt.





  • If you enter into starting a family, adding kids through whatever means, and you think this should not alter the relationship, you have another think coming. Kids are hard work. First your focus is to keep them alive and out of trouble. And over time this gradually shifts towards them not becoming a-holes. This takes energy and time, a lot of it. And that’s the most common reason why some couples have much less bedroom fun. They’re exhausted. They’re stressed. People behave differently when they’re exhausted and stressed. Raising kids is a marathon, not a sprint. Ideally, it’s a series of never ending gut wrenching crises until they move out. And truth is it doesn’t even end there. Some relationships handle this better, some don’t. None stay the same. If you think that your current childless relationship is any indication of how this would work with children, and you measure it by loving attention and how much sex you’re having you’re looking at the sky to measure the sea level. Get your head out of the clouds. You have to look at how you handle problems under pressure together. How you can support each other and not look at it as transactional. If that works, you stand a chance of a less bumpy transition into a functional family life.

    Of course, every relationship is different. There are many other factors that will play a part and make shit even more complicated. I’m fairly confident though that I’m more right than wrong here with my generalizations.

    You couldn’t survive such a radical personality change? Yours changed too. You will probably not win any argument on the assumption that your partner changed into a version is their folks while you stayed the exact same. You’re just the frog in the pot who didn’t notice it got hotter.

    I’m a still married father of two.





  • Can you back this up with anything but personal observation? There is nary a country in Europe that is under threat of a Russian invasion as much as Poland, now that they’re already in Ukraine. Right wingers all over Europe are very pro-Russian - except in Poland. History looms large in a country whose neighbors split it 3 times. It’s obviously possible that Polish younglings, unburdened with things like history, like the culture. You are well within you rights to separate the culture from its people’s history or what the current government is like. But I have a hard time imagining this as more as a passing fluke at best, or propaganda at worst.



  • I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don’t - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.

    We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it’s constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don’t often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.

    You could of course counter that by saying that’s what you believe. It’s paradoxes all the way down.