Is this US specific?

Oh, so that’s why! Here I thought y’all were shufflin

The best thing about abbreviations is that they are entirely contextual, which means that if it isn’t obvious what’s meant, you can make up your own meaning and wonder/ask why the other person is using it so very wrong.

There’s even an abbreviation for it: TLB, which in this context means Three Letter Bullshit.

As real as math

Several teams actually

But you could also do a mean time analysis on specific tasks and have it cut off at a standard deviation or two (90-98% of task times covered), and have a checkbox or something for when the user expects longer times.

You could probably even make this adaptive, with a cutoff at 2x the standard time, and updating the median estimate after each run.

By that standard the only countries not monstrous are those too feeble to ally with.

Plenty of countries on all continents have sided with oppressive regimes, and conveniently ignored atrocities as long as they’re aimed at someone else. In anything from the Korea or Pakistani wars, to genocides in Central America, to slave trading within the African continent.

The West is due some criticism, but this approach is useless.

You are right that things would still look like we’re accelerating away from us, even if we were actually contracting.

Interesting hypothesis! How do we investigate?

What could we expect from a large central gravitational point? We should have other signs of the gravity well:

We would expect a point that we contract towards (and that seems ill fitting, as we see the expansion moves as the observer (including earth) moves), we would expect some kind of mass or similar effect, which would also have a size to fit it in (we know that gravity works different when you’re inside the mass, and we would be able to see it, much like black holes or dark matter), we would expect things to orbit the gravity well (which we know that at least our galaxy doesn’t orbit us).

You might want to actually check on these things to make sure they apply and are true, but at least at first glance it seems the expansion is better explained without a central gravity.

A programmer might, as trained/conditioned by the limits of programming languages.

A human would intuitively not, these are meaningless and/or convoluted concepts to the untrained human.

A common problem (before learning it is impossible/fraught with danger) is categorisation, like sorting of strings.

Say you have a text, and need to count words of different lengths.

One intuitive approach is to pass through it once and add each word to a list for the corresponding length, as well as making lists as needed. No 7 letter words, no 7-letter-word-list, even though there are longer words.

As humans we’re good at sorting things into an unknown number of categories, and we have to unlearn that for programming

But the question is not what is simplest for the company. Arguably it would be even simpler for the company not to pay Bob, or anyone for that matter, they could also simplify a lot with not bothering with doing anything beside extracting money from people, slavery and robbery are very simple.

If we change the viewpoint from people living to serve companies, we might arrive at different conclusions, and maybe even a society better suited for humans, rather than companies.

Why? Bob has higher costs and longer preparation time for work.

In economic theory, the job is worth less to Bob, and he should be compensated more for taking it.

Is it fair that Bob should subsidise the company’s labor costs?

Bob’s labor also incurs greater costs on the communal infrastructure (roads, pollution, gas, etc), why should the company not also have a higher burden (higher tax) to compensate the commons for that?

But in several countries it is legally abuse to withhold emotional safety from a dependant, including withholding the right to privacy.

I know, as I teach this to youth organisations who have a reporting duty against that law.

As for the health benefits, I’d urge you to read a basic textbook on child developmental psychology. The keywords used in most models are autonomy, privacy and keeping secrets, as important parts of social (and cognitive) development from about the second year, and only get more important with age.

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Does the sun rotate with the disc, and faster?

Wouldn’t sunwise and turnwise be in opposite directions otherwise?

Of course, all the economic rationeles are valid.

They are also not very compelling. If slaver Europe fucked over Africa for a century, should we compensate them only for stolen labor? How about stolen resources? Caused suffering? Lost progress? Lost standing? Lost lives?

How about all the exploitation that has happened since, due to slaver Europe having the upper hand? African labor and resources are still valued lower than in richer countries as local working conditions are still poor and exploitative.

Also, could paying reparations as a lump sum ever measure up to the slow development of infrastructure, knowledge, culture and national pride/trust/stability that comes with building your own wealth?

We have plenty of experience with aid getting stolen by warlords, and grants commonly get lost to corruption, cronies and other misappropriation, even without the warlords.

For the fiscal compensation to make sense, we’re talking orders of magnitude larger sums, and they would have to be given together with labor, knowledge, supportive relations, etc. over decades. And also with much fewer strings than our current economic system allows.

I find that there is no satisfying way to fiscally compensate for a century of exploitation, suffering and oppression, and have found that the sums and arguments are more compelling as an absolution. It’s about the slavers wanting to clear their conscience more than making it right.

It’s not the most noble reason for it, but it seems do do more for that than for the exploited people. Either change what we’re talking about, or face that your reasons are about you, not them.

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Why not organise some politically challenging demonstrations and raise the terror threat level?

That usually dampens tourism and housing market for a while, especially if there’s an actual attack.