Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?
From Severance to "sentient" AI...
What have you seen, heard or read recently that meant you had to have a lay down and contemplate existence?
What have you seen, heard or read recently that meant you had to have a lay down and contemplate existence?
Guys, it's not rocket science, just ask your employees what's bothering them. If people are leaving by the numbers, then you have some serious issues that need to be fixed, otherwise the churn will never stop. You'll hire new people, they'll see it's a shit show, and leave as soon as their relocation bonus expires.
This brings me no joy either. I'd much rather stay on one place for long, rather than go through various interview hazing rituals every couple of years just to escape the madness and get a decent inflation adjustment.
2) Western governments quadrupling the amount of money in circulation in the last two years, EU governments ignoring sane energy independence policies for decades, then blaming all the rampant inflation and soaring energy and real estate prices solely on the war in Ukraine, and telling the working class to tighten their belts and turn down the heating, while the upper class has never seen better days as their assets appreciated to new heights.
And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board, passing policies that work against the people's intersts.
"Exhales"
I just had a recruitment consultant tell me that my perspective might be wrong for not wanting to do it. He had 70 people in his pipeline for 25 jobs. So I do half a days worth of work for free and I have approx 2 - 1 chance that I don't get the job.
I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and you could have at least glanced at it. Or at the very least lied to me.
It sucks that they requested work from you that was not necessary, but would you really prefer that they lied about it?
I'd say they mismanaged the situation, but at least were honest about it.
Having me do two days of work and immediately throwing it in the trash without even glancing at it is the far worse insult.
After the phone interview, somebody needs to write it up, a hiring committee needs to look at it, and then they can decide whether to move forward or not. If they give you the challenge after that it's easily another week.
Frankly I am surprised they gave you a full response on Monday after a phone interview Friday, that's actually quite fast given all the steps and people involved.
Given that the job was supposed to be west coast based, I have to imagine they’d made their decision on Friday.
Another time it was as if some junior developer was circle jerking. Whining about the most trivial things (a couple of whitespace errors in Pylint, not returning JSON when they had requested a "page without styling", Not adding a setup.py, when they didn't ask for it. )
This is why coding challenges are an immediate dealbreaker for me these days. If I’m going to do a project to showcase my skills, you can be sure I’m going to put my all into it. Getting ghosted after that is insulting beyond words.
Put me in an interview setting and I at least know that it’s time-boxed and the interviewer is losing just as much time as I am.
A little hustle pays dividends long term. It's much worse in other industries.
Only if you're lucky too. Hustle by itself means nothing.
Point is that reaching upper middle class and higher is totally feasible no matter your walk of life as long as you keep the hustle going. Success could only happen in one's late 30s though.
(There are of course overriding factors like having an abusive childhood or something like that. Systematic discrimination plays a big part too. But that's outside the scope of this particular thread)
It's also unlikely, even just looking at it statistically.
I much prefer an hour of whiteboarding grilling than wasting an entire week on open ended problems full of fluff.
That being said, I've never had coding tests for more than a few hours.
Hardest nut to swallow if you are interested in politics. To a large degree it is due to a dysfunctional media. I have no better ideas how to create and fund a better press that is still independent though. Politicians need to get on board of the circus because it is their only chance to publicity. That said, I wouldn't want to replace the current misery with people popular on tiktok either.
edit: My colloquial English is a bit weak, but I think it would be more apt to say "hardest pill to swallow" as nuts can have an unfortunate double meaning. So better to swallow pills and to crack nuts and better not mix that up too much...
That requires confrontation, which many executives (and even low-level managers) don't want to deal with.
Every Intel CPU since 2008 includes an autonomous computer called the Intel Management Engine that runs Minix, completely circumvents your own OS, has full access to memory, has network access, and cannot be turned off by the owner of the hardware (you).
We also don’t know what it does because it’s extremely difficult to reverse engineer due to obfuscation and because Minix 3 is published under a BSD license so Intel is not obligated to publish the source code.
So why would they network-enable it? I would suggest that this is for the declared purpose - if you need to upgrade the microcode, the normal OS (Windows etc.) has to communicate with the IME, and IP is a good way to do that.
We don't _really_ know this. It could of course wait for a signal (say, in a certain memory region, depending on the host OS) and be activated only by remote control in collaboration with other vectors, for special use against, say, heads of state, or the rare meaningful dissidents against whoever it is who has access.
This got me instantly banned from a community I had professional interest and participation in, which made me realize the damaging effects of culture wars that are about to get worse for major corporations.
Without accountability checks, people can and will use the positions of power to police the companies, communities and whatever they can to further their own agenda regardless if it hurts everyone else involved in the process.
It's important we start valuing maturity and ability to exercise nuance in thought process lest it will all go south.
A follow-up comment in the response above addresses your question. It's a situation online, not in a workplace.
However, it is similar to what I tend to notice at work more and more, with a small number of employees having major negative impact while the majority stays silent and does nothing.
Humans are good at dealing with crisis when it's apparent and happens quickly as it triggers our fight or flight response. This crisis I think is slow, which we are notoriously bad at mitigating (case in point: climate change). This means that we could expect seeing major resistance once the situation becomes intolerable even to otherwise agreeable people. My fear is when this happens, irreversible damage to fundamental freedoms will already be done and we'll be back to the cycle of bad times -> struggle -> good times.
The second point is that, in an unjust society, not accounting for the effects of that injustice on people (say candidates for a job position) compounds that injustice. So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff.
After all, what is the difference between people who use "all lives matter" as a thinly veiled excuse for discrimination and people who use "it's a pride month and you're homophobic" as an excuse to attack you when asked to stay on technical topic?
Addendum: I believe "affirmative action" is a major step towards dismantling freedom of speech.
It is until after I got better at English and started immerse into the Western medium of discourse, that it became apparent that my beliefs of equality by judging people upon their virtues/vices are considered wrong by many who prefer to insist on categorizing people only by their superficial features and use that as a basis of the debate.
Don't confuse mostly American language and culture with "Western". The UK sometimes follows some of these things, but not always, and the rest usually don't. For instance in France It's forbidden for government entities to categorise people by how they look. There are no quotas or statistics per skin colour. There's still racism here and there of course - be it in some police actions/accidents, or political parties, or whatever. There are poor neighborhoods (which tend to be prevalently with immigrants or close descendants of immigrants, be they from Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe), and there are efforts to help the people living there ( improve schools, provide jobs, etc.), not "people from Arabian/Western African descent living there".
She's drastically less neo-Nazi than her father, just an empty far-right populist. But yeah, not great.
> It's also got a hijab ban, which puts it in the company of places like Russia, or Xinjiang in China, not noted bastions of tolerance and diversity
It's more complicated than that. The hijab ban isn't coming from intolerance or to force conformity. France has a long and proud history of laïcité, separation of church and state and irreligiousness in public life ( you don't get politicians doing photo ops with bibles or praising Jesus, thank god). Outright religious symbols, especially ones that are a symbol of religious subjugation for many ( many women, especially the young ones, are pressured/forced by family/husbands to be "modest"; plenty of others do it for themselves) have no place in irreligious public places. Religion is a private matter you practice however you please as long as you harm noone. And the ban isn't for hijabs, it's for face coverings, so a Catholic nun is also included; and it only covers public places like post office, town hall, schools ( not sure about that one).
But the gist of it is - religion has no place in public life, especially its (often) intolerant parts.
I think the chinese make this argument in Xinjiang much more convincingly, after all, unlike the french, they do not have large, bell-ringing churches and cathedrals in the centers of literally every settlement, all of which are blazoned with symbols of the faith.
It's also the argument they make in Germany, where you're not allowed to have religious symbols in public offices, but they still manage to have a crucifix behind every blade of grass, public or otherwise, in Bavaria.
The other problem with the hijab ban is that modesty (which is what hijab means) makes no sense in private. So it ends up making women choose between their religious self-expression, and taking part of public life. I'm sure that some muslim women are oppressed by some muslim men, but I can say for certain that every muslim woman, whether they wear the headscarf or not, is oppressed by having this choice taken out of their hands.
I love the french universalist tradition, but it feels like mobilizing that in order to restrict the freedoms of a relatively poor and disenfranchised minority is a shameful betrayal. I would find it credible if there was also a general crucifix ban, and the French state, as the soviets did, was turning churches into community centers or tearing them down. Since no such idea is even proposed, it just seems like yet another classic of the european tradition: abstract equality, concrete discrimination.
Game theory is complicated. Sometimes having a choice taken away from you is good for you... for example if it is a choice you never really wanted to take, but your environment would punish you for avoiding it voluntarily. When the choice is taken away, the punishment would not make sense.
Children do not choose their religion; it is chosen for them, and sometimes the punishment for breaking the rules or trying to leave the religion is death. I am pretty sure there are girls born in muslim families, who are happy for the opportunity to feel the fresh air.
Yes, it is oppressive and stressful, but the stakes are dramatically different, and so is the reason -- intrasexual competition.
In case of covering your face for religious reasons, the penalty for disobeying, in worst case, is death. Specifically, a murder, usually by your relatives, for reasons that are typically translated to English as "honor", although the meaning clearly is not the same.
A white woman who refuses to use make-up, will miss some opportunities in her life. Another woman will take the partner she wanted, or the promotion she deserved. She may get bullied by other women, especially at high school. Those all are impacts that reduce her quality of life.
But how is it related to domestic violence? I have never heard a serious suggestion that the real cause of domestic violence is lack of being presentable.
Similarly, what are the public spaces that exclude insufficiently presentable white women: streets? parks? cinemas? universities? trains? Okay, I am sure there are some parties where only the pretty girls are invited, but those probably exclude most men, too.
Anyway, I think that "you may be skipped for a promotion" and "someone quite likely will slit your throat" are not the same category of threat. Both can feel oppressive and stressful, but I am sure way more women would trade their problems in one direction than in the other.
The point is, both muslim and non-muslim women face that in most countries around the world, because most countries are systematically patriarchal and domestic violence is largely normalized. In every country in europe, domestic violence makes up the vast majority of violent crime, and murders are most likely, especially for women, to be committed by family members.
So by focusing on the hijab and the makeup thing, you're missing my broader point: that muslim women face oppression as women, and not as muslims, except insofar as they are the targets of racial discrimination. The mechanisms that allow partners to coerce muslim women are the same as those that allow partners to exercise coercive power over white women.
How do you know this? Do you associate with racists? Or did somebody tell you that racists profess basic unitarian universalist values? If so, why were they telling you?
The tactic to weave in the threads of logical statements or irrefutable facts together with person's/organization's agenda is used by everyone from radical individuals to sects to popular political parties.
However, you cannot turn this argument on its head by saying that a reasonable statement shared by "bad" people makes it bad or invalid by association.
Also, did you know hitler too would agree that sky is likely blue?
By the way, Godwin’s law[0]: “Godwin’s law is the proposition that the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler.”
There are no magic words, no sudo "be a kinder person" command, no entreaties, no begging, no threats, no guile that can convince someone on the internet who has decided to take a confrontational stance to stand down, or reconsider.
If you act racist on the internet then you are racist. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
It is a safe assumption that they are here to try to rile people up and make people upset and have no interest in speaking fairly or changing their position under any circumstances.
I am no more interested in the feelings of either racist people or the people who choose to act like them than I am with the quality of your coworker's friend's pet's bowel movements.
If you enjoy making people upset on the internet by spewing racist rhetoric then I hope your conversations constantly get derailed.
Things get more difficult if an online mob compiles a database of thousand different sounds that ducks allegedly make, and says "if it makes one of the sounds in this database, it's a duck".
The _only_ reason the phrase "All Lives Matter" has any remotely political juice to it is because of the riots that occurred in America two years ago; the phrase itself is entirely innocuous and is really something most reasonable people can get behind.
It bothers me to no end when people imply that the rest of the English speaking world should try to update their lexicon and tread carefully around certain words simply to appease a tiny minority of Americans.
If it's the first one, yeah I agree w/you. If it's the second, well...
> If it's the second, well...
I'm Canadian but was living in Seattle at the time. Businesses were burned, cars were flipped, statues torn down. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of what was being protested, but to pretend it was a peaceful demonstration is laughable. Riot is a perfectly reasonable word to describe it.
This is a pointed question led with dishonesty. It's important to ask oneself what was the motivation behind trying to manipulate other readers' perception instead of just dropping the "I'm pretty ignorant of this, but..." part in the first place.
I really do not know, that's why I asked
"So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff."
I think we're so far removed from that, that it isn't straightforward anymore. We're seeing discrimination against certain minority groups simply because they're overrepresented in some areas (look at the recent issue/cases regarding Asians and education). It's one thing if we're making exceptions for disadvantaged people (ethnicity alone is not an indicator for this) that corrects and injustice, but it's something completely different when we are using blanket policies that aren't actually fixing anything and might actually cause more issues in the future.
The "magic words" used to silence critics and shut down discussion.
The problem with this is that this is applying a fix in the wrong place, making the effects of original injustice exist in a different form for a vastly longer period of time. In your example, the society can pay for the livehood, training and education of such ex-slaves, and help them fit back.
But blindly giving them positions that require experience and skill is going to sound nice, but ultimately your whole society is going broke. And people will once again start associating low quality and untrustworthiness with the very same people you wanted to uplift in the first place..
Unfortunately Reddit is ruled by moronic mods who can perma-ban your account, and admins can't be bothered. If your opinion is not in line, your IP is going to get blacklisted, so either you are extremely left wing, or you are out.
and it is sad, because I really liked the forums, discussions and occasional memes here and there, now they are just pushing ideas that can't be discussed, which is propaganda.
It's funny that while discussing the incident, some other people would get agitated when you mention that unjust bans are by all means should be evaded.
Never understood people who ready to jump on anyone disobeying the law in letter but could never care less about actually following it in spirit.
This is easily circumvented by resetting your router and starting fresh with an account. Who cares about "karma" anyway?
> so either you are extremely left wing, or you are out.
Or don't participate in political/culture war subreddits that encourage idiots on two sides to sling text feces at each other all day.
Until you can't post in your favorite subreddit because it has a minimum threshold.
Iirc it's more common in large subreddits, or really anything that has a decent amount of traffic and a somewhat organized moderation approach.
It get's weirder than that, one of the top subs actually asks for your... SKIN COLOR https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-peop... otherwise bot removes your comment instantly.
It's important to not stay silent thinking conflict is pointless because it means that tolerance to things you consider harmful only invites more of that in the future.
Naturally, pick your battles and all, but voicing your opinion encourages other people agreeing with you to do the same. And, in the end, you are no longer alone in your protest.
It's terrifying.
Of course stay aware of your health, but allow some wiggle room for that when it comes to social concerns
In any case, no, I have teens. I've been wondering if maybe I caught covid without knowing it (asymptomatic) and this is brain fog.
But as a last resort, I'd check these papers and search for a doctor or an acquaintance who could help you make sense of the current cutting-edge research and possibly apply it for your case:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4221920/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13296
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0372-9
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22370-2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235239641...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/med.21702
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728830
https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/7/5/905/4616724
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/07/chronic-neurovas...
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2018/09/an-inflammatory-...
https://forum.age-reversal.net/t/h4b2b5/a-spreadsheet-for-ca...
Do not go gentle into that good night.
I appreciate those links; thank you so much for that. I'll read them, and I'll see a doctor.
My wish is to finish my projects allowing my relatives to live ramen-comfortable life without me. Maybe I manage to retire and enjoy the life by myself for a while. I became very materialistic growing up in poverty.
Goodonya. Caring for the dying changes you in so many ways and can be an ultimately positive milestone of maturity. It can really take it out of you too, so make sure to get enough help to be a help.
Currently trying to introspect on this one myself. I'm really not sure how to "get over it".
You just turned 40, I just turned 71. I celebrated by taking a challenging part time job for a company that I feel confident that I can help.
But watching elderly relatives as their minds melt into dementia and delirium has certainly been more cataclysmic. No matter how much you know about the possibility in theory, the qualitative experience of it in intimate practice is quite another thing. As I've heard from several social workers in the past few years and felt myself, grief wells up for the person who is still in front of you as you keep recognizing the loss of different parts of them or of your relationship to them.
The hardest part may be contemplating the limits of caregiving. I have newfound respect and awe for doctors, nurses, et. al who have to face this throughout their career. You have to acknowledge many limits in yourself and in the patient, including inevitable suffering which you cannot prevent no matter how much clever planning nor deep understanding you can muster.
I'm also closing in on 40 and have been thinking about the fact that I don't have any strong meaningful relationships in my life. I'm curious whether you've built a family or are planning to?
Okay seriously this blew my mind.
The realization that the majority of the rules/regulations/laws/policies that we have in place are directly connected to the suffering of a human being.
Our society is reactionary. We enact new rules in response to negative outcomes. Any time we try to pre-empt a bad outcome, people claim conspiracy and/or believe that the problem is being over dramatized. It takes a negative real world event (often several) before we collectively agree that it's a problem and do something about it.
So then... all of humanity's progress is built upon the pain of other humans. That really sucks.
However what's got my mind going is that loads of wealth holders are also leaving the UK. What's this all about? Perhaps post Brexit jitters?
I mean, it doesn't really make me contemplate existence, but I guess I just didn't expect my lifetime to include a UK that's incapable of holding on to its wealthy citizens. (Maybe I'm overlooking an obvious explanation?)
Edit: a kind person in this thread found the image~ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/migration-of-millionaires-w...
I mean the Portugal number are clearly due to it's Golden Visa which is for retired people.
Having $1M in assets (house included) isn't that rare at retirement.
I suppose another answer might be that it's easier to track HNWI leaving countries than it is to track them entering other countries?
Both are "rich" but I would probably only classify the former group as "wealthy" as they're sitting on huge assets.
I assume liquid assets doesn't account for Real-Estate?
Someone gets rich in some crappy-to-live locale with bad human rights, etc. often by exploiting weak governance, regulations, exploitation protections. And then they take all that wealth and move to Canada or wherever, that's a delight to live and raise a family in. They get their cake and eat it too.
The confrontational and accusatory tone when I state my desired range and say that I got paid similar with companies in my own country (when questioned about it) when comparing apples to apples (contracting), the gaslighting and excuses of why I should get paid less than I have got with local and international companies in the past. The reasons for such aggression normally is the frustration since they have a GOOD monetary incentive to seal the deal, but does not excuse the behavior for sure. Even telemarketers are nicer than recruiters at this point.
I do attribute this to the rise in remote work. I used to rarely get contracted by a recruiter before C19 and when in the rare occasion when it happened it had a good chance of getting something out of it, now it is companies looking for super cheap labor instead of just trying to find talent.
They're entirely preying on the "talking about money is taboo" that exists in our culture and it only ever benefits them. We have to all collectively (or through the passage of laws like in CO, WA, CA) draw a hard line and the sand and not give any recruiter 15 minutes or even 1.5 minutes before they provide a salary range.
It saves them time so they can move on to the next target who may be more likely to give up a full time 6 figure salaried position with PTO and healthcare to take a contract job that requires a BS degree and 5 years of experience but only pays 150% of minimum wage, no PTO and no healthcare.
I get past the introductions and then say straight up, if this position doesn't consider mid 6 figures +/- $20,000 as its pay range then I probably won't be a good fit for it, and add $20,000 to that if it's not a direct hire.
They typically respond with, "We were hoping to pay more like $40,000" every time. I'm sure you were, but you need someone with an AA degree for that. With a BS they can make more, hell with a HS diploma they can make $40,000 a year working at a gas station. That's not even $20/hr. This is IT. You don't get to hire under $25/hr in a major city without either exploiting the newbies or tripping over the desperate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNvj7ku5pY
Is my job safe from GPT-3?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_EF42H2ZC0
Probably, AI is an energy hog just like Crypto ;)
https://kk.org/thetechnium/alloception-i-saw-someone-in-ther...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApUl4_QgaeU
https://twitter.com/weirddalle/status/1537094117729218563
https://www.reddit.com/r/weirddalle/
edited formatting
> "But eventually, I believe, someone will be right, and there will be someone in there. It will be a True Alloception. And many others will also see it. But not everyone."
I guess it will be determined by the size and skills of the set of people who see it.
To clarify, I support the problems trying to be solved but a lot of the ideas are just the wrong way to go about it. I've thought of weighing in, but the way some other dissenting commenters get beaten down means I self censor and move on to other threads.
I suppose I'm a supporter of the "right to repair" and curious. Do you have something (more on the general side) that one has to be aware about this topic when discussing?
A lot of this I knew before, but didn't grasp how many things changed, how dramatically, and how recently. It kind of is like living through the onset of the dawn of agriculture or something, but compressed into 150-200 years.
I think people (myself included) aren't aware of how much uncertainty we're facing as a civilization.
I don't actually mean that positively or negatively, just blew my mind.
Which by the way is a reason why you can never reach the speed of light; because it would mean reaching (from your own perspective) an infinite speed, and you can't do that by burning a finite amount of fuel.
"You can’t go faster than the speed of light, because you can’t go slower than the speed of light. You are always going the speed of light through spacetime. If you use some of your speed to go through space then there is less speed through time." Lewis Carroll Epstein
I've always been proud of being European, but this event is exposing how shambolic the EU can be in some situations. Fuck, I just saw the headline "Germany says it can send rocket launchers in August"...
Many parallels with this current war. Describing the EU (and UN) as "shambolic" is not the word I'd use... :-/
Surrounded by invading Serbian forces (which taken over the assets of the 5th largest army in Europe), shelled mercilessly - the worst destruction since WW2. Then the defeat, and massacres - and mass rapes.
And an arms embargo on Croatia! Which effectively prevented any sort of defense.
Europe has conveniently forgotten...
It took me a while to realize the first part was true, but the second part was an assertion that I strongly disagree with.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/31/the-civil-war-t...
https://nypost.com/2022/06/14/squad-rep-bowman-warns-of-civi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War
I don't agree with the cold civil war thing, but seemingly many people believe the civil war has already started. Glad I have no intention of going to the USA. I would agree with that it seems inevitable. So there's your lay down and contemplate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/14/democra...
I believe I read that polling shows republicans are at 80 year highs and an expectation of close to or super majority in house and senate.
What's the contemplation on that?
That said, if people actually looked at the numbers, the military help provided by US to Ukraine is spare change compared to the cost of economic and political consequences of not providing it.
This, and the positive view of being a hardliner lead to insane statements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135#RC-135E_Lisa_Ann...
From more negative things, the realities of war. See pictures from Mariupol for example, or listen to the intercepted phone calls from that region ...
Sounds pretty cool.
It was a ridiculous system, though.
But young people presumably enter the clergy driven by a deep commitment to faith. Yet something along the way seems to convince them that God isn't real at all. I wonder what that is.
In what sense they don't have a choice? Catholic church won't kill you if you quit.
First, you can leave the religion entirely, then they have no power over you. Second, you can quit your job while staying in the church (as Pope Benedict did), and I think you probably can quit priesthood... but if even you couldn't, quitting the religion is always the Plan B.
So I suspect that the main reason for staying is that getting paid for talking BS is just too convenient. Not believing in God, but preaching to people who believe in God and believe that you are the speaker of the God.
But I don't imagine it as straight forward (easy) as you describe it.
> quitting the religion is always the Plan B
No. Quitting the religion is 'quitting Plan A'.'Quitting Plan A' is not plan B - it's having no plan at all.
They put their life (probably decades) into a highly ideological field. Leaving that is not easy, I suppose. It's more than giving up convenience
I'd be interested in reading that. Have a link?
Although it might be difficult to prove if those sites are legit...
The Fed clearly deciding that it is time to crash the economy into the wall rather than allow workers to get raises... And everyone thinking this is clearly the appropriate policy action and very much past due.
Wealthy people in power only care about other wealthy people.
Many UK citizens migrated to Portugal upon retirement. They have one of the best regimes re tax etc. for HMWI. Meanwhile, UK has inheritance taxes, high tax on pensions over £1m, etc.
Immigration rules play a major role, with certain countries offering HNWI accelerated routes to resettle.
I'd love to know if that's a longer term trend for Brazil or if their wealthy are spooked by something.
I know that I know nothing. - Socrates
In an absolute sense, one can be argued not to "know" anything, except for the existence of one's own thoughts, as 17th-century philosopher John Locke pointed out. Even earlier, Descartes addressed when saying cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). While Descartes was attempting to "prove" logically that the world exists, his legacy in doing so is to have shown that one cannot have such proof, because all of one's perceptions could be false (such as under the evil demon or simulated reality hypotheses). But one at least has proof of one's own thoughts existing, and strong evidence that the world exists, enough to be considered "proof" by practical standards, though always indirect and impossible to objectively confirm.
Every time I cross a busy road, I bet my life on my certainty that I know where the cars are, when I must walk to avoid them etc. There are many other things like that in life.
Also see Moore's "Here is one hand" argument.
Was he? I thought he wanted to prove that god exists. Pretty early in his meditations he gets the physical world out of the way.
Are you able to describe more without undue distress?
It stemmed from seeing comments here about a book called 'The Body Keeps the Score' reading the book and subsequently self identifying as suffering from trauma.
So I sought out an EMDR qualified psychologist in the city and started seeing them. It's been just over a year now.
Benefits so far have included an increase in self esteem and of quality in my relationships with my partner and my child, a promotion at work(due to increase in ability to be present without zoning out due to anxiety) - along with increased social awareness.
Am basically now less inclined to withdraw and hide from life.
The mind melter is how absent I've been for basically my whole life - and not for lack of trying either. It would be terrifying - all those years - basically a lifetime lost, but I am so glad to have some semblance of a life now. I didn't think it was possible TBH.
Happy to hear that your life has improved so much
1) People can do stupid things, because they are mentally incapacitated, either permanently (e.g. mental retardation) or temporarily (e.g. drunkness, tiredness). There is nothing they can do about it, so it is morally neutral. In case of drunkness, the moral failure could be getting drunk, especially if you know it will result in you doing stupid things.
2) Willful (and often joyful) irrationality. This is the kind that Bonhoeffer points to, I think. I agree that it is a moral failure, but for many people "morality" simply means "what my friends approve of"; so if they get irrational together with their friends and in the same way, they see no moral problem in doing so, and their friends would agree.
3) People can also do stupid things simply because they are misinformed, either by mistake, or by being manipulated. That again is morally neutral. If it was a mistake, and they get feedback that they are wrong, now they have a moral choice: either start thinking and stop doing stupid things, or double down (which now makes it willful irrationality).
Yes, from this perspective, many people are immoral. Note that even a group that seems "homogenously stupid" from outside can still contain all three kinds of members; some members are willfully irrational, others only made the mistake of trusting the former.
She is definitely stoking nationalist ideology, but she is absolutely not towing the neo liberal playbook. Scotland is consistently pushing in the opposite direciton of the England in the areas that would come under the neo liberal agenda. She's also not taking the same plays as the UK government by doing things like trying to leave the ECHR to ship 1000 migrants to rwanda, and she's not taken the Trump play of "if I have enough scandals, none of them will stick".
> Which reminds me - how is independence for Scotland a meaningful pursuit if you'll immediately attempt to join the EU?
The Scottish government have published a document [0] which explains it, but the key point is this (from the linked document)
But the point is this: in an independent Scotland, crucial decision-making power will rest with the people who live here – not with Westminster governments that do not command the support of people in Scotland, and which pursue policies, for example, Brexit, that are deeply damaging to Scotland's interests.
The argument for Scotland leaving the UK isn't "we want to join the EU", it's "we don't agree with the direction the rest of the union is going in, we're still open to working together but we want to work with you, not for you".
[0] https://www.gov.scot/publications/independence-modern-world-...
[1] https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-w...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_el...
Unlike the US, even the police departments don't escape cutbacks...
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-r...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/06/labour-repo...
[3]: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/leaked-dossier-sh...
Andrew Tang demonstrating there is still hope for humanity: taking down Stockfish in Ultrabullet Chess (for the uninitiated, each player has to play all their moves in 15 seconds):
Japanese metal/punk at it's very finest.
Saving in bitcoins from January 2021 till now was worst than save Argentinian pesos
Yes we are a shit but not as shit like that :v
Now, I'm not claiming that global warming due to our CO2 emissions is real. (that's up for a debate that I won't get involved in). But our temperatures are raising every year (at lease across the Mediterranean) and consistently. I'm afraid they are getting a bit too high for stability and if the trend doesn't somehow reverse; there will be real tragic consequences.
And math. I was astounded how long it took me to do basic math as I haven't touched any equations or performed any non-trivial calculations for a few years. 8(
Highly recommend both installments
In .Net, the first repeated byte in Random(0) is 00.
Trying to look positively, the leap forward in vaccines and mRNA really restored my good feeling about some areas of technology. Many great things like HIV vaccines can, and are emerging. It melts by brain that humans are capable of solving extremely challenging scenarios when we work together, but have to wait until things reach a crisis point before doing so.
This is countered by the very negative descent into technofascism, but I remain hopeful because medical advances cannot be "undone", whereas technological authoritarianism is at least a treatable and reversible condition.
While I share your optimism I do not agree with this particular argument for two reasons: the preventable disaster that is US healthcare shows how structural issues can undo whatever benefits expert knowledge might otherwise have given us (look at insulin price hikes, for example), and the fragility of said expert knowledge.
Need: Front-end developer to build basic components and style them with CSS.
Interview: Check if a given array can represent preorder traversal of binary search tree