greenwich26

>Edit: Come to think of it, also there were also a few Roman Emperors from North Africa!

North Africa, like most of the Mediterranean, was white in Roman times. North Africa is only swarthy today in the aftermath of Arab conquest in the 7th and 8th centuries.

> What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?

It means that the second image, showing Roman senators played by a few dozen white Italian extras, is a perfectly likely depiction, and the caption about how real Roman senators were much more swarthy ("like modern Italians", he claims) is nonsense.

(Of course, the HBO show was filmed in Italy, and almost all the extras and background characters were Italians.)

Even if I am wrong, he is wrong too.

I was responding to his lengthy diversion on the commutabality of British and Italian actors, which seems to be rooted in the delusional American notion (dating back to the late 19th century, recently revived by lefties who deny the existence of white native European nations) that Italians aren't "white". In reality, Italian and British phenotype variation overlaps significantly.

According to the 2020 figures, national defense was 11% of federal spending. Discretionary vs. mandatory seems irrelevant here. We might as well say military spending is 100% of military spending. It's just dividing it by something to make it sound higher, usually for propaganda purposes.

Nevertheless I totally agree some part of that 11% will benefit business and commerce. But it is still a terrible deal. In any other context no one would ever buy something with a 90% "commission".

US federal spending 2020: $7 trillion

The entire budget of #1 is about 3% of that, and #2 and #3 around 1%.

What a terrible deal.

These sort of administrative and bureaucratic activities are less than 1% of federal spending though. So your argument makes no sense.

Various levels of local governments provide many services and benefits for my physical property located in their jurisdictions, so I do not oppose a reasonable property tax. But the federal government provides no services or benefits to the securities in my vault, so a general federal wealth tax on them is altogether different, and I oppose it.

Sounds pretty authoritarian.

> Except the uber wealthy who can afford to lose money to pay taxes for the infrastructure that has enabled their explosive asset growth.

Federal income tax almost never gets used for infrastructure. Infrastructure is mostly built by state and local governments, which receive most of their income from sales tax and property tax, and other taxes, which are already almost entirely paid by businesses. So, they are already paying for the infrastructure that enabled their growth.

Not an argument.

Food stamp recipients are usually obese

They can't "rise up" from the couch, do you really think they are going to "rise up" and start a revolution?

$900 million = 5 days of federal food stamps spending

$3-4 billion = 3 weeks of federal food stamps spending

I know which I think is the better government expenditure

Cicero was a conservative in some ways. But I don't think he was particularly prejudiced or classist, for the time. Remember that he was technically a plebeian himself, although obviously a privileged and successful one.

Countries competing with each other to offer attractive business environments with the lowest taxes is a race to the top, not the bottom.

You are right, of course. But Rousseau made it quite clear that the sovereignty of a government is discretionary. This sort of thinking isn't convincing on an ideological or theoretical level to anyone but a medieval peasant, and it only increases my indignation.

On the contrary, those countries are extremely popular places to base your business activities or start a company or manage your finances from. Ever been to Bermuda? Or the Virgin Islands? You can't move for wealthy industrious Western expats and their business ventures. And also to a lesser extent Ireland, the Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, etc. These are all some of the most popular countries to move to in the world.

But now the United States and Canada and whoever else is the G7 are trying to shut them down and force everyone to follow their hellish tax laws.

Why are governments allowed to collude like this? Isn't this the same idea as price fixing? Exploiting their monopoly (governments' monopoly on the right to do commerce) to unfairly raise prices (taxes)?

The world needs at least somewhere where you can opt-out from Western neoliberalism and socialism.

Don't be silly. Obviously the bans were not perfectly enforced and you could still find hushed conversations in the corners. This was true on all platforms. What, exactly, is your argument? Or your point? Are you really going to try to claim that the lab leak hypothesis was not widely censored in social media? "We have always been at war with Eastasia"...

The website looks really beautiful on my screen. Probably a question of screen resolution? It is true that many serif typefaces degrade quickly on lower resolution displays.

No. I'm just not convinced at all by his comment about the author's publication history.

>This paper is not peer-reviewed. It should end there.

So you think scientists aren't allowed to communicate with one another and the public except through peer reviewed articles? 'Tis absurd. Anyway, peer review means very little nowadays. I publish 3-5 papers per year in top journals in my field, and many of the referee reports I see are hilariously insignificant, effortless, and/or just totally off the point.

...what? Attacking the past of the person making an argument, rather than his argument itself, is the textbook example of ad hominem.

According to Google Scholar, he has dozens of papers, 10000 citations, and an h-index of 37. What do you have?

And if you follow through, at least a couple of the four retractions mentioned on Wikipedia appear to be nothing but some acknowledgment/funding related trivia.

I understand the macroeconomic argument, but I still think that the fact that inflation will totally destroy an uninvested, normal middle-class-sized savings account in less than a generation is a huge obstacle for normal people building wealth. That is the inherently bad thing about it.

I primarily attribute the growing "wealth gap"---the growth in the net wealth owned by the top 0.1% of people, from a 5% share in 1970 to a 20% share in 2020---to the end of Bretton-Woods and the gold standard (1971).

> Advertising must be clear that the value of investments, unless guaranteed, could go down as well as up, ASA rules stipulate.

One thing you can guarantee is that the value of GBP could only go down with these fools in power. Maybe we should have some rules stipulating that must be clear during political campaigning.

The real spike proteins are insoluble and stick to certain membranes, like in your lungs. The mutant ones are shorter and more soluble, so they can more easily accumulate elsewhere, e.g. the blood vessels in your brain: hence the vaccine-induced brain blood clots.

It's not just mods, reddit itself is at fault. They banned my IP. Now, every time I create a new account, it gets suspended within 24 hours, with a PM from the admins saying "ban evasion". Even if the new account doesn't post anything. This has lasted for around six months, apparently it is permanent.

Obviously I can get around it with a VPN, but it seems most VPN IPs are shadowbanned by default, so you have to wait for every comment to be approved by mods.

The "crime" which earned this sanctioning? Spam, advertising, racism? Nope, I never posted anything like that. It was a sensible and very highly upvoted comment last year in support of the lab leak theory. The initial suspension PM from the admins openly linked to that comment as the reason for the ban.

Is your behaviour in this thread a coping mechanism intended to relieve your own anxieties and make you feel good about yourself? Or is it a genuine attempt to convince vaccine skeptics by shaming and scorning them with appeals to emotion and ad hominem attacks?

In any case, your arguments, if they can be called that, are very doubtful, in light of emerging evidence about the risks of the vaccine (see OP), and the diminishing infection rates in many countries.

Evidently they don't, since I live in the EU and I was able to bypass their retarded IP-block in one click.

I don't dispute that the researchers were dishonest and broke the trust of the kernel maintainers. So they can be a bit peeved off at UMN. But is this sort of thing not the reality of their operation? That liars exist in the world? I don't really see what the volunteer part has to do with it. If anything it means they have less to complain about. I mean...most soldiers are volunteers, which would make it even more absurd, if someone signed up to be a soldier, and then whined and complained when enemy soldiers shot at him. It seems equally obvious to me, that an open network should be assumed to have malicious actors on it, as that a battlefield should be assumed to have enemies on it. Obviously you don't have to like the enemies.

I just don't understand why open source software can continue with the assumption that every single contributor is honest. Imagine if this philosophy was applied to, say, cryptography or network security. What would be the state of encryption algorithms and key exchange protocols and so on, if their developers had a meltdown at the mere suggestion of there existing a liar?

Since the Linux kernel is installed on many millions of computers, it is obviously pretty important that it doesn't have bugs in it. Certainly not malicious bugs. And if all it takes is a couple grad students and an assistant prof to get them in...well, that reflects very poorly on the state of kernel maintenance, to me. Which seems far more important and deserving of attention, than endlessly arraigning three clueless guys at some university.

I'm not in a position to be more specific about what should be fixed. But, what would your answer be to your query? Apparently, do nothing, and assume that everyone in the world is honest, while writing self-indulgent "public letters" about it? How is that going to help when the CCP tries to insert surveillance into the kernel? Or when Russian hackers try to get exploits and ransomware in there?

The guilt by association here is now approaching Biblical scales. Like the guy in the comments who wants to close down the entire Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at UMN, which probably employ/educate the best part of a thousand people. Ha!

In general, the fury and seethe which this experiment inspired is amazing. IMO the real disgrace is not the experiment itself, but the response. The kernel developers need to stop being martyrs and playing blame games. They need to be rational and take responsibility for improving their own procedures. Because, if they didn't already have them, governments now have entire departments studying how to use deliberate vulnerabilities in open source projects, for military intelligence and other purposes. And they will not be deterred by the continued public flogging of the University of Minnesota.