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But the words 'meant to' suggest that it is designed or intended to be read piecemeal over a lifetime, when in fact the history of what we call 'The Bible' makes it clear that this is not true.

Your final sentence is simply not true. Many religions have central texts which are short, unified in style and content, written over one person's lifetime, and intended to be completely read and understood by followers with limited time and educational resources. For example, the Qu'ran.

> Is something you're meant to read through out your life, not in one sitting.

Meant by whom? The original authors of the Torah? The various prophets and Kings? The original authors of the New Testament? The Jewish scholars who compiled the Tanakh? The Christian scholars who combined the Septuagint and the New Testament into a single work? Pope Innocent I who ratified the choice of Gospels?

You are describing people mumbling through long and repetitive narratives about the history of the Jewish people without understanding or taking much in, because they believe it makes them closer to God, or simply reading the parts which feature well-known 'Bible stories' while ignoring most of the rest, thinking that they are reading 'The Bible'.

This does not invalidate what the GP said: [paraphrasing] that the Bible is difficult to understand and mostly of questionable value to a modern reader.

I don't think that this is really correct. For around 1500 years, most philosophical, political and religious thought in Europe had to be justified by referring back to the Bible. Therefore the arguments that equality, liberalism, democracy, and so on have their roots in the Bible are well rehearsed but they are not falsifiable nor, for the most part, true.

The political philosophy underpinning the stories in Genesis (much older than the Torah), is very different from that of the Babylon era when the Pentateuch was compiled. The Second Temple Era is very different from both of these. The historical context, and the political content of Christianity in Christ's era (or in the era of the early Gospels) is yet again different, and the context of the later, Pauline Christian books yet again another thing. Modern (post-Lutheran) scholarship sees each of these eras as a development or a refinement moving towards a better fulfilment of God's word, however the contemporary view was that many of these developments were revolutionary, iconoclastic, or heretical.

The Bible is undoubtedly an extremely rich historical document. However, the work of understanding its meaning and its legacy on some modern cultural and ethnic groups is not straightforward. Someone who reads widely through the Bible from the Pentateuch to the New Testament and believes to discern a single unifying philosophical theme or a coherent message to humanity either has not really understood most of it, or is schizophrenic. (Note that reading the Book of Genesis and the New Testament is a very different thing to reading the entire Bible. Many people who think they are able to comment on 'The Bible' really only know the Gospels + Genesis + Exodus, or some other subset such as the Gideon 'Bible'.)

Of course, 'Western Civilization' is somewhat synonymous with a culture that takes the Bible seriously and attributes a sort of mystical energy to it, while not necessarily honouring the stated precepts of Christianity (or Judaism). This makes the fact that the Bible is widely read and referred to something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sometimes combined with jingoistic innuendo that people without a Christian-inspired culture are not capable of democracy, or tolerance or creative thought, or some other shiboleth of 'Western Civilization'.

There are much less obscure texts, roughly contemporary with the Bible, which discuss humanistic values such as might be associated with 'Western Civilization'. Some of these have been treated as holy by various religious groups including Early Christians, or as of a quasi-religious importance in the organization of society and its institutions. Many of these were widely read throughout the Christian era and are much easier to see as having influenced 'Enlightenment' and 'Modern Secular' values. For example, Plato's Republic. Any suggestion that the Bible is more important than that or similar works to gain "an understanding of the process of how Western Civilization is formed as it is today" just seems to me to be a hangover from Christian apologetics and bigotry.

tl;dr Placing an importance on the Bible because it's a founding text of 'equality of all man and inherent dignity of human' is no different than condemning it as a founding text of the transatlantic slave trade, or of Nazism.

I would take a lot of the unevidenced narrative in 'Sapiens' with a huge pinch of salt.

Both the book and the author have been criticized, rightly in my opinion, the former for elevating the theories of a very specific and ideological branch of anthropology to facts, and the latter for being a grifter who does not know much about anthropology.

You spent some of this comment arguing that points and velocity are not upstream of nothing, and the rest explaining that it's ok if they are upstream of nothing, because the work spent on them justifies itself. This is exactly the refusal to acknowledge reality that I objected to.

Which is it?

What upset me about story point estimation was that we never ever used it to influence decisions.

Every single sprint planning meeting and every single retro around half the time was spent talking about points, discussing estimates and commenting on our velocity had changed.

But we never had even one conversation where we put any of the 'data' we had about how many points we could do in a week to use to decide what we should focus on or when we should promise something by. The whole system was upstream of nothing.

Of course, this was a tacit recognition that it was worthless, and if we had used it, it would have been worse than nothing. But why didn't this acknowledged uselessness allow us to drop it?

There are plenty of accounts of drunk Victorian men letting their horses lead themselves home.

Buybacks are not alchemy; buying back stock just uses the same money that you saved when you issued stock instead of paying in cash.

Of course, the stock price might have gone down, but also it might not. Companies don't usually time buybacks right to buy stock cheaply.

Because there is never a point at which everyone knows that Netflix is going to jump 20% a year for 5 years.

That's my point. There are times at which people think this is what it's going to do, and after it's done it lots of people believe it to have been clear in hindsight. But the situation where people know in advance for sure that there will be huge excess returns never occurs.

Netflix is a great example. Would you have been keen to take a large amount of income deferred and in stock at the point when streaming was just a weird perk bundled with the DVD mailing subscription?

This is foolish.

When public companies give stock to their employees, they dilute the stock as much as if they issued stock and sold it. So the cost of that compensation is the same as if it were in cash.

If everyone knows that say, Netflix's stock price is guaranteed to go up 20% a year for the next 5 years, then the market price of that stock would suddenly jump up to the point where it no longer makes excess returns. So the market price of the stock reflects the company's (risk-adjusted) growth potential already. This also applies to non-public companies with any amount of maturity - the marginal investor has a good sense of what the company is worth and does not want to lose out by issuing stock below that.

Put these two together and giving employees stock is economically not very different to giving them money and they choosing to invest it in mutual funds. The main difference is that you make your employees' lives slightly harder - with taxation and with the fact that they need to sell stock to get cash for what they want to buy or invest in.

The reason that stock options are preferred, especially for private companies, are none of them very good. Firstly employees have an inflated perception of what their company will be worth in the future. They assume that it's going to be AirBnB, not WeWork, not Palantir, and not the failed start-up that you've never heard of. Secondly employees also don't correctly discount uncertainty. Would you rather have the cash to buy your dream home/pay off your mortgage, or take a 10% chance of 10 times that amount of money? To most of us the second option is worth considerably less. Thirdly companies sometimes feel better about giving out pieces of paper that they have an unlimited supply of than giving out their own cash, even though it's a wash financially. And lastly there used to be some tax advantages to firms paying with stock options - those were loopholes which have largely been closed.

Making your employees into investors (by giving them stock options) only made economic sense when venture capital money was scarce and expensive. This has not been the case for a long time.

Why do you think there will be a long vesting period?

Vesting periods are quite common in employee incentives but not at all common in mergers and acquisitions.

You are technically correct about the origin of 'concentration camp'. But this point in relation to the Holocaust is so pedantic as to border on denial.

Most people who died in the Holocaust did not die in 'concentration camps'. About a quarter of them were killed in mass shootings and buried in mass graves. Another quarter were sent to something better described as 'extermination facilities'. There was no camp and no concentration - all victims were gassed to death on arrival. The most famous concentration camp - Auschwitz - also had a facility like this where around a million people died immediately on arrival. While Auschwitz did have the standard features of concentration camps - imprisonment, starvation, forced labor, and brutal punishment and torture, most people who died in Auschwitz never experienced any of this - they were simply executed on arrival.

So, while the 'concentration camps' were of course unimaginably terrible - and not to excuse other crimes against humanity such as the Boer camps, the gulags, etc - to compare other atrocities to the Nazi Holocaust simply because of the presence of concentration camps erases and minimizes the true extent of Nazi crimes against Jews and Roma.

This is simply untrue.

Mass executions of (certain subsets of) the middle and upper classes, alongside electrification and land reform for the rural poor and trade unions and healthcare for the urban poor, meant an extremely significant improvement in the average quality of life for the Russian population.

> it was sparse at the beginning (1941) and a lot of people declared themselve as "résistant" after the D day

This isn't the refutation you think it is. Communists and fellow travelers were much more prevalent in the resistance earlier on (but after Operation Barbarossa!). There are a considerable number of French communist martyrs commemorated in French towns and public places. Most of these died during 1942 and 1943, when resistance was against overwhelming odds. Towards the end of the war, there were fewer actions against the Nazi occupation and more towards collaborators. This is however because in many parts of France, the occupation simply was unable to exercise more than a show of control, because of the success of the resistance.

I am very surprised that as an old French person you aren't aware of the significant role played by French communists in the resistance. Have you heard of Vercors? Colonel Fabien? France d'abord?

Whatever you may think of communism in general these are established historical facts. The mainstreaming of the PCF after the war, in contrast to other places in Europe, is specifically related to recognition of their heroism against the occupation. (The same could be said about the mainstream position of freemasonry in French society.) In fact, the strength and popularity of the communist controlled organizations and the risk of a Tito-style regime was a main reason that the UK and US (reluctantly) gave their full backing to de Gaulle towards the end of the war.

Do you know much about France? Almost all large enterprises in France are partly state owned (Total being the notable exception). Although they also have private ownership, it would be extremely hard for say Air France or Orange or Credit Agricole to pursue a course of action in direct opposition to what the government, the civil service, and other large interests wanted.

This may not be text-book socialism but it is quite different from capitalism as practiced in the United States.

lol

The problem with this theory is: what is the part of a geometric proof which cannot be described or validated using a classical, discrete computer? There is no such step. All parts of mathematics which mathematicians are able to agree on can be so described. There is no scope for our brains taking in an analog measurement, doing an analog measurement step on it, and using it to confirm the truth of a mathematical statement.

Of course, this is not an argument that our brains are absolutely finite and classical. Perhaps analog computations is required for an appreciation of beauty, or quantum physics is necessary for us to fall in love. But we seem to be able to check math proofs without them.

My sister is a vet. She works in a normal vet practice in our city dealing with mainly cats and dogs. Once I asked her why she doesn't work as a vet in the zoo, an extremely prestigious and wealthy institution with zoological research, wide variety of animals, etc. She just said that all young vets want to be a vet in the zoo. So they have much worse pay and conditions than other vet jobs.

Video game developers don't have terrible conditions and relatively low pay because of some anomalous lack of bargaining power which can be fixed by unionization. They have lots of bargaining power, most of which they use to choose the industry they work in. There are lots of young men who want to work in games, and far fewer who want to work in financial software. So pay and conditions are far worse in games, to the point where supply meets demand in each type of development work.

Perhaps you are making the fallacy of comparing early 20th century communist regimes with today's capitalist society. If you compared them with early 20th century capitalism or colonialism they start to look much more benign.

Bonn was always a temporary capital, and East Berlin was the capital of East Germany.

Not in the school of architecture to which Niemeyer belongs. The internal concrete structure and non-load-bearing walls was key to Le Corbusier's tower blocks. You can see this by the fact that the walls often don't extend to the ground, where the building is supported on open pillars, as in the building in TFA. Modern skyscrapers are just a development of the same principle.

You would have been much luckier if your worldview had allowed you to sell at $60k and buy back at $20k.

That's not the whole story. When Bitcoin started it was used more as a currency than it is now. Firstly by evangelists who tried to establish a BTC economy, and secondly in the illicit economy.

Bitcoin miners and devs took the project in a specific direction a few years later, optimizing it for use as digital gold, while making it much harder and more expensive to use as a currency.

But your brain is, presumably, doing finitely many cognitive steps, so it seems that a proof you can understand can also be expressed finitely?

The Goldbach conjecture is of very little interest to mathematicians, unlike either Fermat's Last Theorem or the Riemann Hypothesis. Statistically it is clearly true, in the sense that there are way more prime numbers than you would need for it to be true. Finding a counterexample would be interesting in the sense that it would be very surprising (but not mathematically interesting).

It is fated to be proved as a trivial corollary to some more important mathematics; a corollary that no one would have bothered with if not for the historical importance.

The unsolved Twin Prime Conjecture, of roughly the same age, is expected to lead to much more interesting mathematics if it is proved.

This is the best example - before it was shown that the Continuum Hypothesis was unprovable, many people believed, like the GP, that only uninteresting and artificial statements could be shown to be unprovable.

The CH is undoubtedly meaningful, natural, and of huge interest to (a subset of) mathematicians.

Without necessarily agreeing with your characterisation, it can be true that achieving equality and plurality is difficult.

However, there is a big difference between a government which is trying to resolve social problems and lead the population towards a better settlement, and one which takes advantage of divisions to create fear and appeal to the worse sentiments of the majority.

The point is not that they should be thrown out of the EU, but that the EU is now much more reluctant to allow another country with similar social and political problems to join.