jmts

The moment you wake up in the morning, you have some idea whether you're going to have an 'easy day' or a 'difficult day'. From that point on, it's a constant battle against your own mind, trying to avoid letting things become a 'bad day'. If you stub your toe on the door frame leaving your bedroom, your day is now a 'bad day' and you have 12 hours of mental struggle to look forward to. You haven't even had the opportunity to find out the clothes you wanted to wear aren't clean, that you're out of milk so you have to have toast for breakfast. You haven't had a chance to drop your spoon on the floor, or accidentally slam the cupboard too loudly. You haven't made it to work or school yet where you'll have to deal with all your least favourite people. And every one of these things makes your day harder, and harder, until you can't hold it back, and all of a sudden you're being held hostage by your own mind. Shit is already hard before you get to social media. Sure, social media probably contributes, but so many things contribute, you cannot eliminate them all.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539155

If we weren't watching them, they would potentially go to war, some of them would likely die, and there is a chance that more would die of disease. But we would be none the wiser.

But since we are watching, we perceive a risk that they don't, and we now feel an obligation to mitigate that risk through intervention. We want them to be independent but they are our dependents. We want them to be free but we must restrict their movements. We want them to be untouched by disease but must expose them to it in order to minimise exposure. We take pride in the fact they are untouched yet we must touch them in order to maximise their untouchedness. It is weird.

That's what I said.

The question is if they have (or should have) a monopoly on violence [2] in their own territory and/or are self-governing in other aspects of life.

That's up to their nation to decide.

We would still have to listen, however.

You assume that these people have no 'law' of their own. Though I cannot say either, it is entirely possible that distinguish between the ways a person is killed and they are punished accordingly. Simply because it is not your law doesn't mean they don't have their own.

The article states these tribes are rivals. They may consider themselves at war. Soldiers are not tried for killing other soldiers (within reason) in wartime, so why should rival tribesmen be tried for killing other tribesmen when they are at war?

"Hey guys, uh, you know, we were pretty happy to just let you do whatever, but we've been watching you for a while and you've started taking risks. We're not real fond of risks. Would you prefer not taking risks for us please? It would make us feel much better about letting you do whatever you like if you didn't take any risks."

Or you enable more strict build settings and BAM! You have to go back and deal with all the places your code allows you to write off the end of a buffer because you just didn't give a damn before.

You are okay with a close friend touching you on the shoulder or asking personal questions because your relationship has evolved to a point where your boundaries permit it. It is not okay for a person you dislike to do those things because your relationship is such that your boundaries forbid it.

My apologies for this post being a little tangential.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwalk_Empire#Cast_and_char...

The references beyond that are quite interesting as well. I always felt that the character Nelson Van Alden (also George Mueller) was a reference to Baby Face Nelson, who was known also as George Nelson.

To flip that question on its head however, perhaps we should ask "could religion discover gravitational waves independently of a scientific context?". I would be very hard pressed to answer anything other than an emphatic "no". Indeed only a few hundred years ago you were probably likely to be imprisoned or killed for suggesting much less.

In terms of how long it took science to find meditation worthwhile - not long at all. Science is new. It wasn't until recently that we had the tools to be able to study the brain and study meditation. Any delay in attention toward meditation from then on may well be due to a bias against religion among scientists - but then so much of religion can be explained away leaving the signal to noise ratio so low it's unlikely to be of any interest to many scientists anyway. You don't go shopping for motorcycles in the grocery store. No doubt western religion itself would have contributed to delays though anti-eastern religious bias as well.

Of the people that are interested in religion - psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, historians - I have no doubt that they are already interested in it for all the reasons mentioned in the article. It's not as if religion is such a small part of our lives and we need to go digging to uncover it's secrets.

I very much doubt that there is any scientist out there whose area of expertise abuts religion that is inclined to disregard the entirety of religion as irrelevant. Richard Dawkins himself - quoted in the article - recommends that everybody should read the King James version of the Bible as a piece of literature and an important text culturally [1]. There just happens to be very little reason to bring along the hocus pocus with it.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/may/19/richard-dawk...

https://uktech.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/dawkins-on-theology/

To paraphrase, he's arguing that very little beyond the obvious has come from religious teachings, and much of the rest can be proved false with science.

The article posted suggests that science may have more to learn from religion, given that science has shown there is some benefit to practices like meditation and ritual. This reads a little bit like a justification for all of religion after science was able to pick some of the interesting parts out and show they have use beyond a religious context. I'm not sure I buy the argument. A seized engine doesn't become workable simply by showing the bolts are still in good condition.

When I started university, it was clear that I had much more experience programming than the other students, but I had to do certain introductory classes anyway because there was no way to receive credit for half a decade of self learning. On one assignment my lecturer went looking for things to mark me down on that were outside the scope of the assignment because "it would look suspicious if you got a perfect grade".

Some people are just capable of more than is expected of that class for whatever reason, not because they intend to demoralise everyone else and break the system.

If we shift toward paying for content, is there not going to be a market for subscriptions to fake news as well as subscriptions to real news? Paying for content alone doesn't solve the problem of fake news. How does Joe Average even know which subscriptions are the right subscriptions? Please don't let an algorithm decide for them.

In terms of payment itself, I feel the going rate is a big issue. Checking the NY Times just now, they're asking $5 per week of me for a basic subscription. Let's make the math easy and call that $250 per year, and assume four subscriptions are needed to be sure we have a well rounded intake, giving a $1000 per year news budget. For a person with a net income of $100k+ per year, maybe this is not a big spend. But for people on lower incomes - who I would argue are likely the people most susceptible to fake news - this becomes a much greater expense and will discourage them from subscribing to anything. Compared to freely available news, it would be putting disadvantaged people at a even greater disadvantage, and let's face it - in a democratic society, I'd rather everybody have access to the same information, than know half the population is making decisions based on garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.

In terms of what the new model should be, I don't think I have any answers. I just know that I have a budget for news and it is not in the order of a thousand dollars a year for a well rounded intake, however I also want everybody to have access to the same news, so I don't think paywalls are a good idea.

I assume you're suggesting it is impossible to do it regularly, which I'd agree with. The definition of 'work' also broadens profoundly. You will also pay for it by sleeping away more of your free time than you already donated to your work for free.

Most hotel laundry services I've encountered seem to be priced for one or two critical items. Cleaning a week's worth of items would be prohibitively expensive for most people, and I would be surprised if big productions would be interested in burning several hundred, if not thousands of dollars a week per person just for laundry.

On the flip side, it would be rather amusing to see the entire support cast for Madonna or U2 huddled about grumpily in a coin laundry waiting for other people to finish.

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In this case, the advice about baldness is a joke based on a negative stereotype for baldness, and not genuine advice at all. The default response in this post appears to be along the lines of preventing or reversing hair loss, showing support for the stereotype, and that people are taking the content at least a little bit seriously. I'm just here to say this particular piece of 'advice' is misleading at best and harmful at worst. Baldness will only affect your happiness if you let it.