drewrv

You should go ask people at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

There is more to life than a left/right spectrum.

The harms of a tobacco company are mostly limited to their users, especially since smoking bans have been implemented in restaurants and bars.

The harms of an oil company literally effect every human on earth. There is nothing I can do and nowhere I can go to avoid their harms. I'd consider Exxon among the worst of the worst, since they knew about climate change since the 70's and denied/buried the science.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

I'm a fan of hers but I think many of her criticisms of string theory, multiverse stuff, etc, apply equally well to superdeterminisim.

That being said, in her latest book she has a pretty strong argument against free will that does not require superdeterminisim so if that sounds interesting check it out.

I agree that Democrats should focus on rural areas more. You have to win by the rules not complain about the game.

But you’re missing my point by ignoring coalitions to focus on parties.

Imagine a religion that is a mix of democrats and republicans. Imagine Saturday is a holy day for them where they try not to engage with the modern world as much.

If elections were only held on Saturday this would hurt their community.

This is why farm subsidies are plentiful for example, neither party wants to claw those back and face the consequences.

It’s also why social security is “the third rail of American politics”. Republican or democrat, no senior wants their checks messed with. And having elections on a Tuesday in November is a fine time for seniors and retirees to vote even if it sucks for other people.

If a political system disadvantages a group of people then their needs will always take less precedence.

“Why doesn’t the urban coalition simply win rural votes?” is a silly question. They would win rural votes by prioritizing different issues and then the issues important to urban citizens would be less likely to get addressed.

Other comments mention that it's more visible in cities, but I'd like to add that "abject inequity and poverty" are national problems that cities cannot solve individually. Rural areas are given disproportionate political power in our national elections while cities go underrepresented. So national problems that affect cities go ignored.

This assumes there is no margin of error baked into the 51 day rule, which surprises me.

I would hope there's a margin of error baked in and stuff doesn't break on day 52 exactly.

Yes I agree that it's accurate to say "the new FDA boosters weren't tested on humans"!

My point is that if you leave out "the new FDA boosters" then you're being misleading. It's important context.

How about we actually try democracy first before we rule it out.

The big reason is to make it available before the fall, when people spend more time indoors and spread it more. Also you don't really need to test it, it's known to be safer than the disease.

If your claim is that "the vaccine" was only tested on mice and you don't clarify that you're only talking about the updated variant, not the original, then you're being purposefully misleading.

I think this is an important angle to the story: if the students are "customers" spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars there's an incentive to try to make them happy.

I also think wish someone would report on whether the claims of the students are true. This NY Post article brushes the claims aside because they're bad journalists. The only slightly better Guardian article includes this gem:

> An NYU spokesperson defended the firing, emphasizing high student withdrawals and bad course evaluations. The statement said the decision was also based on complaints about dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and lack of transparency about grading.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/06/nyu-professo...

I don't necessarily believe NYU, but I think a good journalist could investigate if this guy was actually just a bad teacher rather than parroting the complaints of second or third hand accounts. Are people dropping the class and failing at a higher than expected rate?

I also think there's a "labor rights" issue here. The students did not call for the professor to be fired, but NYU did because it was the easy way out. There was no union or tenure to protect him, he was a "contract" teacher.

On its face, any claim that "kids today are lazy" deserves serious scrutiny because old people have made that claim since antiquity. There are lots of serious and interesting issues at play here beyond that lazy trope.

How does dispute resolution work with blockchain?

Well maybe a trusted third party can make crypto accessible for the masses /s

I'm really skeptical of comparing crime rates across borders. Slight variations in enforcement, reporting, different processes for conviction, etc can really mess up the data.

Even local crime statistics are a mess to interpret, extrapolating to the whole world feel suspect.

I don't think that's a satisfactory answer for a layperson. Infinity is a size/quantity, for most people that usually means "number". The reason it's not a number is because it doesn't exist on the real number line, but again I don't think the helps people intuitively understand what's happening.

These takes are all over social media so if they’re supposed to be banned then the real crime is how bad social media giants are at tracking down this nonsense.

What mostly gets banned at big social media sites is spam and bots. The political speech that does get banned is overwhelmingly violent.

The right gets banned more because there is no liberal equivalent of the Christchurch shooter, the Buffalo shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Charleston shooter, the Tree of Life shooter.

The last president got kicked from Twitter because he tried to violently overthrow our government.

Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.

The right wing in the US has a violence problem. Culture war junk and social media moderation policies pale in comparison to this problem.

It would be refreshing to hear this take for once :)

I yearn for the day we can defeat bad faith losers and get back to discussing what really matters: tabs vs spaces.

The number of people here who claim to hate moderation blows my mind.

If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take.

Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.

Sufficiently advanced fanboys are indistinguishable from bots.

Why are you insisting they're inventing harms? Do you have evidence to support this? Are you just opposed to the idea of ethics?

I'm not a huge fan of his but I got some free tickets to see him live and I was blown away. His enthusiasm for silly songs is infectious and he's actually a talented musician, not just a comedian. Definitely one of the better concerts I've ever attended.

I've seen some epic flame wars over the peanut restrictions in schools. They tend to catch my eye since one of my kids has a peanut allergy. People assume that these rules are created by pearl clutching "concerned parents".

I've never seen parents advocate for peanut bans in real life. It has probably happened but it seems like the "preachy vegan", more of a myth than a reality.

I suspect the real reason many schools have put restrictions in place on peanuts is that it simply makes their job easier. When you have to deal with hundreds of unruly kids it's hard to keep an eye on individuals. Sending kids to the ER is a bad look. Dealing with insurance stuff or lawsuits is a pain. Eliminating a source of headaches and shoving the inconvenience onto the parents is a no-brainer.

Having good fitness really is amazing. If a pill or supplement gave one the benefits of exercise I wouldn't believe it: it would come across as a "too good to be true" scam. It really does improve cardiac health, mood, energy, the immune system, etc.

But "being fit" does not mean being skinny (unless we're using the british slang definition of "fit"). There are people heavier than me that are more athletic, and there are skinny people who are wasting away.

Feminists have been critical of the human rights record of Saudia Arabia for my entire lifetime. We should have listened to them decades ago.

I think it's reasonable to believe that public information should be accessible, and also be upset that things you expect to be private were made public.

Absolutely. Train wrecks should get studied to find out what went wrong.