It was a typo. I meant to say that the Democratic leadership seems to have put their and their parties interests above those of the people but I wanted to avoid editing my post too much.

I’ve been called many names, including “tankie”, so I’ll take a stab at responding.

I’m not mad about the debate at all. I expected something fairly similar. I’m mad that Biden and the Democratic leadership seems to have put their own interests above the interest of the party people (edit: Ugh. Terrible typo).

If Biden had gracefully stepped aside and given just about any other Democrat his full support, we’d be in a much better position now. Instead we have a candidate with a ton of baggage and who presents an easy target for Trump’s style of argument. Many mainstream Democrats, including the NYT, are finally starting to realize this. Unfortunately it’s probably a year too late. At this point it would just make it look like Demoratic kingmakers forced him out.

If I went by the modern definition of “tankie” as, an anti-american authoritarian communist. I probably wouldn’t be mad at any of this. I’d be cackling with glee because either of the current nominees will be terrible for the US. Neither of them has a serious long term plan. Neither of them can articulate a policy position. Both of them will continue to erode the power and moral authority of the United States.

Like it or not. Trump is likely to be the next president https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/. At this point it’s probably wise to start thinking about how to limit his impact and how to start cleaning up the mess afterwards.

The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.

The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.

That’s the sister. Anon sounds like he has limited means. No need to make fun of them for being poor.

Lindt is pretty good as packaged chocolate goes. You can always find some fancy artisanal chocolatier if you can afford to spend a few bucks per chocolate but for a HS student Lindt is pretty high tier.

It’s one thing to refrain from commenting but supporting Israel makes it clear that Germany learned nothing.

I’m guessing this argument has been going on longer than either of us can remember.

There was a long time when guns were considered interesting toys but not something a sane person would take onto the battlefield; especially not without some sort of backup. Hell, the “three musketeers” were more known for their fencing than their firearms skill.

I’m sure back in the day some chucklehead complained that papyrus was cute but anything important had to be carved in stone tablet.

Bill has made some famously bad predictions in the past. Here’s a small sample https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/the-worst-things-bill-gates-ever-said-a6990046.html

It’s possible that the current $100 billion market size of AI and all the AI job openings are completely misplaced but that’s indication that a lot of people have pretty high expectations that AI will continue to grow.

Every time I see posts like this I remember a frequent argument I had in the early 2000’s.

Every time I talked with photography students (I worked at an art school) or a general photography enthusiast, I got the same smug predictions about digital photography. The resolution sucked, the color sucked, the artist doesn’t have enough control, etc. They all assured me that digital photography might be nice for casual vacation photos and maybe a few specialty applications but no way, no how, not even when hell freezes over would any serious photographer ever consider digital.

At the time I would think back to my annoying grade school discussions with teachers who assured me that (dot matrix) printers just sucked. Serious writing was done by hand and if you didn’t know cursive you might as well be illiterate.

For some reasons people keep forgetting that technology marches on. The dumb glitches that are so easy to make fun of now, will get addressed. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI development. Every major company and country is developing them. The pay rates for AI developer jobs attract huge amounts of people to solve those problems.

The FCC has a lot of regulations on it. From what I remember active jamming within the home is still wildly illegal. Depending on the size of your house/room, a far as at cage wouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you did it during construction. If you’re on a budget and don’t mind looking crazy you can line a closet with tinfoil and connect it to ground.

I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.

The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.

Thanks. Not the answer I was hoping for, but I appreciate the response.

They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.

Any mod (packs)?

I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.

He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It’s very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.

The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!

But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:

1. It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they’ll define those freedoms differently.
2. It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it’s almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.

It’s a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.

Primarily because it’s really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is “better”, by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.

Didn’t know it had a name.
That once stopped me from registering a video game title.

I was feeling silly so I figured I’d go for a nonsensical contrast. “Evil Grape” got rejected. After several failed attempts it eventually dawned on me that some dumb algorithm thought it was a reference to sexual violence.

It kind of annoyed me but I just picked an other fruit. It wasn’t until later that I considered that “Evil Banana” was probably more sexually evocative but it was too late by then.

So if you’re ever playing a video game and shoot (or get shot by) “Evil Banana”, know that, if it weren’t for the Scunthorpe Problem, it could have been “Evil Grape,” but either way, it wasn’t intended as a sexual reference at all.

I could see that as fair as long as everyone agrees that a small symbol on their neck is an appropriate expression of their religion.

If I were to think of a Muslim country that officially embraces secularism in government what would that look like? What if they said that everyone can wear a discreet head covering. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Daoists, Jains, etc are also allowed to wear small headscarves appropriate to their religion.

The problem is that headscarves just aren’t generally meaningful to those other religions.

I’m even more suspicious of the intent of the French law since they apparently went out of their way to create an exemption for non-Muslim head scarves. The law seems to be constructed and interpreted as, “If we can tell that its related to Islam, it’s out.” The case where a girl was sent home for wearing a skirt that was too long really just looks like they want to make Muslims (and Muslim girls, in particular) more uncomfortable.

I want to be very careful around judging the intentions of people who live 5000 miles away and speak a language I don’t understand. There’s a lot of room to misunderstand people’s intentions.

But from what I can see, it’s looking like there’s an intentional bias.

I read up on it a bit more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools

It seems like regulations on religious attire are selectively applied. Small crosses and stars of David, some variations of Sikh turbans, Fatima’s hands are acceptable and the final decision is left up to school headmasters.

It also sounds like the legislators who created it specifically intended to target Muslim headdress.

It’s one thing to keep religion out of education. It seems that they’re disproportionately concerned about suprsesssing Islam in their schools.