The former richest man in the world gave away much of his fortune and continues to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Wealth_and_philanthropy

Bruce Wayne is not like that at all though. He’s in a position where he could actually do something about the problems of Gotham City and decides to go LARPing instead.

To be fair, he beats up a bunch of rich criminals too but he whole thing is really more about his ego than about doing good.

It was a typo. I meant to say that the Democratic leadership seems to have put their and their parties interests above those of the people but I wanted to avoid editing my post too much.

I’ve been called many names, including “tankie”, so I’ll take a stab at responding.

I’m not mad about the debate at all. I expected something fairly similar. I’m mad that Biden and the Democratic leadership seems to have put their own interests above the interest of the party people (edit: Ugh. Terrible typo).

If Biden had gracefully stepped aside and given just about any other Democrat his full support, we’d be in a much better position now. Instead we have a candidate with a ton of baggage and who presents an easy target for Trump’s style of argument. Many mainstream Democrats, including the NYT, are finally starting to realize this. Unfortunately it’s probably a year too late. At this point it would just make it look like Demoratic kingmakers forced him out.

If I went by the modern definition of “tankie” as, an anti-american authoritarian communist. I probably wouldn’t be mad at any of this. I’d be cackling with glee because either of the current nominees will be terrible for the US. Neither of them has a serious long term plan. Neither of them can articulate a policy position. Both of them will continue to erode the power and moral authority of the United States.

Like it or not. Trump is likely to be the next president https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/. At this point it’s probably wise to start thinking about how to limit his impact and how to start cleaning up the mess afterwards.

The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.

The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.

FOIA requests generally don’t involve hackers or leaks. The act exists because citizens insisted that government provides visibility into its inner workings.

What is the equivalent for Google, or any other private company?

It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.

What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.

Why is that better? It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.

They could have left out, “for LGBTQ+ people” and it would have been just as accurate.

Hidden? That’s literally the main argument when anyone surfaces a complaint about Biden. It’s always some variation of, “If we let Trump into the White House again our democracy is over.”

The hangup isn’t awareness, it’s acceptance. People aren’t questioning that he’d try to be dictator for life, they doubt his ability to succeed. Once you’ve seen someone try something and fail it’s reasonable to think they’re just too incompetent to succeed.

Whenever I see people ask for support for the claim they’re typically met with a hail of downvotes and name calling. That may feel righteous but it does absolutely nothing to recruit that person. Instead they’ll walk away with even stronger convictions.

It’s true. Hamas is posting rookie numbers. They’ve got to up their death count by around 10x before they can be in Israel’s league.

That’s the sister. Anon sounds like he has limited means. No need to make fun of them for being poor.

Lindt is pretty good as packaged chocolate goes. You can always find some fancy artisanal chocolatier if you can afford to spend a few bucks per chocolate but for a HS student Lindt is pretty high tier.

Thank you! I can finally fill the void that vibeless OSes have left in my soul.

All joking aside, it does raise a good point.

There are many things that can be objectively analyzed and it might not be a good idea to choose them based off of vibes. When you’re designing those things it’s still a good idea to take vibes into account because people will ignore all that and put googly eyes on their 3-D printer.

You pick your OS based on vibes?

Only a little.

Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.

The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.

This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.

Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.

Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.

There are many subcultures around food. It’s not like the world is split between vegans and junk food addicts.

The Cheeto and McDonalds eating crowd may have crappy nutrition but they’re an extreme. The other extreme is meal-preppers. They know exactly how much chicken, rice and broccoli they’re eating.

There are huge communities of people who are very health conscious. Some of them focus their consciousness on science, some of them on other methods. Some of those people are vegans. Some aren’t.

The obvious counterdemonstration would be for me to start calling you names and yelling at you to change your mind.

I won’t bother with that since it’s fairly clear to me that such tactics would be entirely wasted.

Am I wrong? Do you actually believe in this tactic enough to claim that it would also work on you? If not, why do you think it works in one case but not the other?

Peer pressure is certainly effective but it’s not clear this is the same thing.

Do you think they consider you their peer?
Do you consider them your peers?

In cases where you’ve actually seen peer pressure work, was it actually because you were able to bully your peers into some behavior?

So you think that telling someone that they’re stupid and should feel stupid is a good way to change their mind?

Has that ever worked for you?