pmdulaney

Shitthropocene. Shittification.

Just say no to neologisms that incorporate the word shit.

I like RFK Jr -- to express a contrarian view here. He has some quirky views (substitute your adjective, if you like), but he seems to be more flexible than his boss, and he is quite committed to transparency. He also has a genuine concern for the health of the American people, especially children.

I think what we're seeing here is some micromanagement and a desire to present a unified front to the public.

It's not a trick at all, though it might seem so if you're not familiar with the concept of conditional probabilities. And it's hard to imagine a more suitable audience than Hacker News.

But it sounds to me like, for you, the unfettered freedom to use recreational drugs is an inherent good, and that you don't think it should be discouraged even if can be shown to lead to increased homelessness.

It does surprise me that our President, the great deal maker, shut down the semaglutide knockoffs like Hims.com without negotiating a deal on the namebrand version for the American people.

That sounds like a cocktail you might order in Avalon!

Upvote for the Bartleby reference.

To say it is 100% useless would be to say that the moral training of children is useless. You're not really that cynical, are you?

Well, let A be the conditional probability that one becomes homeless given that he uses recreational drugs. Let B be the conditional probability that one becomes homeless if he doesn't use recreational drugs. If A does not turn out to be significantly larger than B, then my understanding is incorrect.

No, I think the poster's notion of cognitive dissonance is more correct than yours. Cognitive dissonance refers to the anxiety caused by attempting to embrace two different convictions or beliefs that are incompatible with each other.

Perhaps it is time for K-12 education to include modules on how to avoid homelessness in your future. Western democracies tend to be rather laissez-faire about drug use, for example, but surely there is a strong correlation between drug use and future homelessness. In California, where I live, the state spends large sums of money to discourage smoking, but little is done to discourage the use of recreational drugs.

This is enlightening. Thank you.

Thanks - I didn't know that was possible.

When I saw the name Tov I figured this was the Hebrew Bible only.

I used to take a baby aspirin a day, then the recommendation for older folks like myself who have not had a heart attack changed to no aspirin. Now perhaps the next recommendation will be a baby aspirin a day to protect against cancer.

There are some bison on Catalina Island. Maybe they should swap some animals.

I truly think one will miss out on best health practices if he waits for proof. What does your own experience teach you? Besides, flossing is about more than teeth and gum health:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/19/inflam...

It would be nice to see some high speed video, like the kind they use to show a bullet going through an apple.

An important post. The author is making the point that the original generation of contributors is getting long of tooth, and that due to the lack of documentation, it is difficult for newcomers to come on board.

He further asserts that corporate entities that benefit greatly from the cost-free availability of OSM are not motivated to provide funding for documentation to be written. That is short-sighted, and amounts to starving to death the goose that continues to lay golden eggs.

Ms Cooperman has disdain for the "inverted pyramid" in the context of journalism -- which is fine -- but I sure wish more people would keep it in mind when they are engaged in back-and-forth conversation. Nothing screams arrogance more than making your interlocutors suffer through a long preamble before finally revealing what your point is.

The best response!

And here I thought I disliked tattoos just because I'm an old fuddy-duddy.

Can you say 666?

I think if Trump asked Musk to donate SpaceX's profit on this project to reduce the national debt, he'd say yes.

Nobody ever got anywhere by being overly modest!

P.S. DEK himself would disagree with you!

Whether you are liberal or conservative, Christian or otherwise, this is a phenomenon we should all be aware of. As a conservative, both theologically and politically, it saddens me to see the rapid growth of lunacy on the right. The left's lunacy still prevails in academia and the media, but it is starting to fade. On the other hand, the right's lunacy is growing and getting stronger. It's unfortunate that when the cultural pendulum swings back towards normal that it invariably overshoots in the other direction.

The real fear should be that certain crafts will disappear: the craft of programming, the craft of technical writing, the craft of formulating and maintaining a budget for a large organization. Instead of being a programmer, you'll be someone that runs sanity checks on AI-generated code and occasionally pokes around strange-looking code when things seem not quite right.

Imagine you were a clockmaker at the time the first electric clocks (e.g., General Electric's Telechron) were introduced. Suddenly the skills you worked so hard to acquire and which gave you such satisfaction were obsolete.

White color jobs won't go away, but they will become progressively less satisfying and less lucrative.

From a sociological perspective, the interesting thing about this to me is that it is reflective of a major sea change. The era WW2 to ~2010 was characterized by an adulation of science, and in the collective mentality science was associated with atheism. But atheism is an outlier in world (and esp American) history. As a conservative Christian I think that Thiel's theology is deeply flawed, as are the theologies of many, many others. But there is no longer, it seems, a taboo against spirituality, broadly understood. One of science's heroes is Isaac Newton, but he was into all sorts of occult spirituality. I say: If you've decided to become open to the idea of God actually existing, read the Gospel of John, and perhaps listen to Alistair Begg's 1990 sermons on 1 John.

By the way, people gave Donald Trump a hard time for saying "Two Corinthians" during his first run for the presidency. I think it is actually just a British (or Scottish) thing! You'll hear Begg say "One John".

I did not enjoy Stoner. I read it like 5 years ago and don't remember a lot of the details, but it was set at a college. More Downer than Stoner.

I grew up in a household with two loving but alcoholic parents. I have resisted the temptation of treating that as determinative of my own psyche, but it did set me up to some extent to view myself as someone who was without agency.

I have not sought counselling about it, but two mind hacks have been helpful to me.

First, are the notions of the inner child and inner adult. The idea is that when you are feeling passive and powerless and indecisive, you are reverting to how you felt as a child. Making a conscious effort to imagine your situation from an adult perspective (and even contrasting in your mind how your adult persona and your child persona view the situation at hand) can be very helpful.

The second hack is to imagine that a good friend is asking for your help in dealing with his or her own sense that they lack agency. What would you say to that friend? The power of this technique is that we all tend to rise to the occasion when called upon to help a friend. We will want to convey confidence that our friend can indeed get the better of this debilitating attitude.