nednobbins

@nednobbins@lemm.ee
1 Post – 113 Comments
Joined 11 months ago

The former richest man in the world gave away much of his fortune and continues to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Wealth_and_philanthropy

Bruce Wayne is not like that at all though. He's in a position where he could actually do something about the problems of Gotham City and decides to go LARPing instead.

To be fair, he beats up a bunch of rich criminals too but he whole thing is really more about his ego than about doing good.

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.

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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.

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.

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tl;dr I was wrong.

I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.

Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn't think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.

The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.

But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn't think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I'd go once a week and if I ever found a date I'd impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn't like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).

Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.

We decided there's no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.

Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn't recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren't a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(

“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.

“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”

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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.

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When "they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia" it wasn't in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.

That's still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren't saying that you shouldn't use it at all. They're telling you not to stop there. That's exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.

If you're researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you've ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn't trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren't primary sources. In egregious cases the "sources" are just opinion pieces.

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They could have left out, "for LGBTQ+ people" and it would have been just as accurate.

I honestly never understood the attraction to Seinfeld.

There were a few good jokes in there but the whole show was about them being assholes and proud of it.

They're selfish, judgemental and entitled. They're constantly mocking and bullying other people and each other. The final episode even lays it out explicitly.

Shows like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", "Married... With Children" or "Breaking Bad" have various unsavory characters but we're invited to reject these flaws or at least identify with them as flaws.

Seinfeld is shameless about being an asshole and pretends the rest of us are just too dumb to understand his genius.

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There are many subcultures around food. It's not like the world is split between vegans and junk food addicts.

The Cheeto and McDonalds eating crowd may have crappy nutrition but they're an extreme. The other extreme is meal-preppers. They know exactly how much chicken, rice and broccoli they're eating.

There are huge communities of people who are very health conscious. Some of them focus their consciousness on science, some of them on other methods. Some of those people are vegans. Some aren't.

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I'd really like to believe that but the cynic in me expects that as soon as Israel gets done with their genocide campaign they'll pretend that they've turned a new leaf and all funding and military assistance will resume as though nothing had happened. There will be no lasting consequences for Israel's actions so they will, correctly, assume that there is nothing to stop them from doing it again.

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My wife and I regularly joke that one day we'll harass our kids to help us with our neural interfaces but I don't think that sort of thing will happen any time soon.

When I was a kid in the 80's a lot of people could already afford computers. They weren't so cheap that everyone had them but they were affordable to a fair number of people if they really wanted one. A C64 cost $595 at launch, that's under $2,000 in today's dollars.

The biggest barrier to computers were that they weren't "user friendly". If you wanted to play a simple video game you needed to know some basic command line instructions. When I wanted to set up my first mouse for my 8086 it involved installing drivers and editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. You couldn't really do anything with a computer those days unless you were willing to nerd out.

At the same time, nerding out on a computer could easily get you deep into the guts of your computer in a functional way. I learned that the only way I could play video games at night was if I opened up the computer and disconnected the speaker wire so it wouldn't alert my parents. I also learned that I could "hack" Bards Tale by opening up the main file with debug and editing it so that the store would sell an infinite number of "Crystal Swords".

Today there are 2 cell phones for every human on earth. Kids walk around with supercomputers in their pockets. But they've become so "user friendly" that you barely even need to be literate to operate one. That's generally a good thing but it removes an incentive to figuring out how the stuff works. Most people only bother with that if they're having some trouble getting it working in the first place.

At the same time it's gotten much harder to make changes to your computer. The first Apple was a pile of circuits you needed to solder together. You can't even remove the battery on a modern one (without jumping through a lot of hoops). If you edit some of your games it's more likely to trigger some piracy or cheat protection than to let you actually change it.

There are still large communities of computer nerds but your average person today basically treats computers like magic boxes.

I'd expect that kind of gap in other areas. I'd take 3d printing as an example. You can get one now for a few hundred bucks. They're already used in industry but, at this point, they're still very fiddly. The people who have them at home are comfortable doing stuff like troubleshooting, flashing ROMs, wading through bad documentation and even printing custom upgrades for their printer.

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The girls themselves are mostly "all for it" when it's people roughly their age. There are exceptions but most girls that age see 30+ year olds as lame old dudes. Most 30+ year olds aren't going after high school girls either. That's why we all cringed at David Woodson's line in "Dazed and Confused".

The people who don't want them to "exert this right" are the responsible parents, friends and community who know that a 30+ year old dating a teenager is creepy AF.

The few people who actually support this are mostly rationalizing.

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Why is everything all Biden’s fault

Because he's the boss. The president is always considered the leader of their party while they're in office. That's why Truman said, "The buck stops here."

If an organization does something, the leader of that organization needs to accept responsibility or admit they're an ineffective leader.

It's true. Hamas is posting rookie numbers. They've got to up their death count by around 10x before they can be in Israel's league.

It's also possible for someone to be a shitty person and a shitty author. There are tons of discussions on just how badly written HP is and that would be true even if she suddenly stopped being a horrible person.

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What happens if he violates the conditions of the bond and the bail is in danger of being seized by the court?

Could Foster Bail Bonds LLC legally send a bounty hunter "bail recovery agent" after him? Would they?

If they're in it for the ratings I can't imagine better footage than having Duane Chapman kick in the door of a former president. OTOH if they go that route they'd be signing up for one hell of a wild ride with no way off. They either become the most famous bail bond company ever or they get completely crushed and the owners go to jail or worse.

It's a fluff piece. They briefly describe some of the circumstances but don't explore any reasons behind them.

The one conjecture they do make, "some supermarket leaders may perceive low-income urban areas — particularly those inhabited by people of color— as higher-risk due to concerns about crime, vandalism or social instability" is contradicted later in the article. They cite 2 cases where supermarkets opened stores in these neighborhoods and operated them (one of them for 5 years). They would have had no need to guess. They had the balance sheets, income statements and cashflow statements so they would have known the answers down to all these questions down to the penny.

That said, the answer is fairly obvious. Companies want money. Companies close stores when those stores aren't making them enough money. As the article states, these companies regularly open stores in poor neighborhoods, they just close them quickly. That strongly suggests that they think they might be able to make money and when they try the are unable to figure out how.

If they actually did this correctly, it would be great. Whether or not it's possible, or even desirable to eliminate all hate speech, it should be possible to minimize the harms.

When somebody mutters some hateful comment to themselves, do we care? Not really. We care that the hateful comment gets repeated and amplified. We care that someone might take that hateful comment. We care that someone might take harmful actions based on the comment.

If those algorithms successfully let these comments die in ignominy they've done their job. My fear is that they won't really do this though. Instead they'll mostly hide these comments and "accidentally" let them slip out when the company thinks they need an "engagement" boost.

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The funny thing is that your elders said exactly the same thing to their elders. It was a member of the "silent generation" (pre-boomer) who coined the phrase, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Even when those elders told them that their elders (great elders?) told them the same thing your elders didn't believe their elders either.

The flip side is that many of your elders, who realized that their elders didn't have all the answers now think that they have all the answers.

Smart money says that your generation will do exactly what all the other generations did; Do a lot of youthful rebellion against the obviously stupid stuff from previous generations, mix in rebellion against a bunch of stuff that's actually not stupid, discover nuance, strive for a system that combines the best elements of the past with the best ideas of the present, fail, get jaded, forget about nuance, assume that you have all the answers, get frustrated that your kids are making obvious mistakes that you've told them how to avoid.

6th graders generally don't fight fair. They don't generally fight well at all.

The typical fight between 6th grade boys is every bit as much of a slap fest as the typical fight between 6th grade girls.

6th grade boys haven't hit puberty yet. Given that these girls are kicking their butts at basket ball I'll assume they slap harder than the boys do.

Laughs in Austrian.

The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.

eg:
3:15 -> "viertel vier" = "quarter four"
3:30 -> "halb vier" ("hoiba viere" in dialekt) = "half four"
3:45 -> "dreiviertel vier" = "three quarters four"

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

Didn't the IDF already kill the 1,500 or so terrorists who did this?

What reason do we have to believe that the thousands of people who are currently getting bombed had anything to do with this at all, beyond having the misfortune of living in Gaza?

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Any mod (packs)?

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There's not much to discuss. The vast majority of the time it's creepy grooming and we all know it. It's technically legal and there may be cases when it's genuinely a case of consent and mutual attraction but those are the exceptions.

Attempts to find the exact line are futile. "Half your age plus seven" is a rule of thumb, not a clear border.

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The problem is that we never bothered to create a system where free education would actually work.

Producers always like to sell their goods for as much as they can get. Normally, a consumer looks at a product, decides if it's worth the price and then either buys it or doesn't. If prices are too high, producers are forced to lower them to stay in business.

The current system essentially created a 3 way business transaction that guarantees runaway education costs.

The universities provide a service. It's really hard to determine the value of that service since there isn't a liquid market for "an education" or "a Harvard degree" that you can easily look up.

The government then says they'll cover a percentage of that cost. This is a bit tricky. A normal subsidy is effectively a paying a fraction of the cost. Once you introduce loan forgiveness, either as a frequent or guaranteed event, that fraction effectively goes to 100%.

The student is getting a degree of unknown value but since they don't have to pay (at least not the whole thing) they'll just agree to the purchase, even if they don't personally think the good is worth as much as the provider is charging. There's no reason to if someone is picking up the bill.

The universities see that their price elasticity of demand (how much their sales suffer when they overcharge) is essentially 0. That means they can raise them with impunity. The end result is that Universities can essentially help themselves to large government grants without any requirement to show the public how we benefit from those grants.

If we consider education to be a public good then we should treat it as such. That would mean that we cancel the student loan program, get rid of tax subsidies for educational institutions and just have the federal government create a competing educational system. Take the money we're spending on outsourcing education to the private sector and add to it. For the system to work it would need to attract top tier professors and that means good research facilities and salaries. It's not a complicated idea but it would be a massive undertaking.

As a bonus we'd get some great initialisms. The federal universities would obviously be the FU system. State campuses might have names like FUNY and FUCA.

And yes, the point of such a system is that it would be paid entirely by taxes and would be free to students.

You pick your OS based on vibes?

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You can check out https://soberbarsnearme.com

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What was the lie on Sunday? When I searched for "mccarthy lie sunday" I get a bunch of stuff about Gaetz but nothing about what the lie was.

My jaw hit the floor when I saw this news though. As near as I can tell McCarthy took a huge political risk in giving the finger to the hardliners and working with the Democrats to get the budget through.

As it stands I expect 3 consequences:

  1. Republicans will double down on never working with Democrats.
  2. The hardliners will gain significant power within the Republican party
  3. The Republicans are going to replace him with someone much more hard line

Every Republican will look at today's events and decide that it's political suicide to work with the Democrats. They've just seen that doing so will draw the ire of hardliners and gain no benefit from Democrats and even the leader of the party can get booted for doing so. Very few people will want to risk their careers on reaching across the isle.

Gaetz challenged McCarthy. McCarthy said, "Bring it on." Gaetz brought it and won. So now Gaetz is going to run a few victory laps and every interaction he has with his party will carry an implicit, "Don't fsck with me unless you want to get McCarthied."

Given that Gaetz went after him specifically for working with the Democrats I expect that the Republicans will look for someone who is far less inclined to collaborate.

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Why is that better? It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.

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What was the post?

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.

As much skill as a 9 year old and a 16 year old can muster?

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

The reports I've read claim that around 1,000 Hamas terrorist entered Israel. The IDF claims to have recovered the bodies of about 1,500 terrorists inside Israel. Given that this is an active conflict, it's not surprising that the numbers don't line up but they're of the same order of magnitude.

Since Hamas has hostages it's clear that at least some of those terrorists made it back to Gaza. It's also clear that the IDF has, by now, killed the vast majority of the terrorists who carried out these acts.

So who is currently being targeted by IDF ordinance?

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This is a claim regularly made by the IDF. It seems fairly likely and I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.

I'm not sure how different that is from deliberately putting civilian settlements in a hotly contested buffer zone though.

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A lot of the art that is currently in museums was once donated by a private collector. Many private collectors will also lend their art to museums for special exhibitions.

Some art in private collections stays private but once it's been destroyed there's no chance it will ever get to the public.

Time for some wild conjecture!

Bytedance and the CPC both know how unlikely it is that TikTok will be allowed to continue operating in the US. Despite what they're saying, I don't think they actually believe they have any chance at winning that lawsuit.

They tried to stop the law from passing but now that it's been signed they're shifting strategies. They're going to go all in on using TikTok to paint the US as authoritarian and hypocritical. Their primary targets will be young people outside the US.

Looking around the world I expect this will have a lot of traction in developing countries. If you look at wonky foreign policy publication you'll see that the diplomacy nerds have spent the last decade or so worrying about developing nations realigning with China. That will probably accelerate.

They'll probably also have some success with younger Americans. Older American's will probably be unconvinced.

It obviously won't have any affect on China's ability to buy data on US citizens from any number of data brokers. I wouldn't be totally surprised if China has at least some access to data from Five Eyes.

Chinas ability to influence opinion probably won't change much either. We used to call that sort of tactic "information warfare" or "psychological warfare". Sending messages to an opponent, adversary or rival in order to confuse or demoralize them has been going on for millennia. Nations constantly work to develop new methods to do so. Tiktok isn't the first or last of such tools and any large nation has a host of other such options at their disposal.

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Hidden? That's literally the main argument when anyone surfaces a complaint about Biden. It's always some variation of, "If we let Trump into the White House again our democracy is over."

The hangup isn't awareness, it's acceptance. People aren't questioning that he'd try to be dictator for life, they doubt his ability to succeed. Once you've seen someone try something and fail it's reasonable to think they're just too incompetent to succeed.

Whenever I see people ask for support for the claim they're typically met with a hail of downvotes and name calling. That may feel righteous but it does absolutely nothing to recruit that person. Instead they'll walk away with even stronger convictions.

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