EntropyIsAHoax

I normally agree that western athiests over-focus on rejecting a monotheistic abrahamic god, but how do you see this particular article being different if the author had a more global worldview?

For instance the analogy could easily be adjusted with Buddhists instead of Jews. The company offers a vegetarian option for Buddhists at some meal, and the athiest author takes the vegetarian option because he just happens to be a vegetarian. I don't think this observation is overly western

I work on the Platform team at my company, and so we do a lot of internal tech support. It's a daily struggle to get people to ask good questions, provide details, provide links when possible, etc...

Sometimes it's really hard not to get incredibly frustrated with it. The questions can be as vague as "hey we're having trouble authenticating to the artifactory, how do we fix it?" A few people really shine in explaining themselves clearly, giving the context, copy-pasting the error message, etc, and I truly treasure those people. The proper context can really turn an hour of debugging into 5 minutes debugging

Could you elaborate about your experience more? I'm looking for a new laptop in the next few months and I'm basically debating between the Librem 14 and Framework. My criteria would be

- Repairability/longevity

- Privacy and security

- Usability

> You can just do atypical things. And it doesn't make you more or less female or male or transitioning or anything like that.

...yes

That's why I said cis tomboys are still girls and cis femboys are still boys (not sure what the enlightenment or democracy have to do with this discussion)

> I don't believe that wearing specific clothes and demanding she/her pronouns from other people makes me less male than i happened to be. Or more female. Nor do i believe this applies for other people or gender roles swapped.

I can see this discussion won't go anywhere if you're not willing to justify your beliefs, and if you're going to continue insisting that trans people are a monolith. And at the same time imply the tired and untrue claim that trans people deny biology (no one thinks swapping clothes changes your sex characteristics). When we say socially transitioning, we just mean performing gender in a different way, it's just being contrarion to say it's "not a thing", this is probably one of the few objectively true things about trans people.

And it's contradictory to claim that gender performativity is correct, and then later also claim that your performance of gender does not change your gender. Pick a side

I assume you mean medical transition, since socially transitioning--such as by changing your name and pronouns--would generally be considered performing a gender even if that doesn't involve changing things like clothing and behaviours (e.g. cis tomboys and femboys exist and are performing the gender they were assigned at birth, just not in a typical way)

A short answer is impossible here, I think. But if you're genuinely interested I highly recommend this essay about medical transition: https://transwrites.world/have-we-got-it-wrong-on-dysphoria-...

Don't know where you get that idea, honestly. A lot of trans people certainly think that, but there is definitely no consensus within the trans community about the definition of gender. Personally I even subscribe more to performativity (mostly as described by Judith Butler) than any other theory. But also I don't care that much about gender philosophy.

My "transgenderism ideology" is quite simple: other people's gender or presentation is none of my business and everyone deserves the same basic human rights. If that's dogma, okay I guess

So how do we decide what to study, and who funds what studies? How will the results be communicated to people who lack scientific literacy? What will we do with the results and how will they be published? With or without a paywall? In studies that are impossible to double-blind, how do we make sure that the researchers and participants are not allowing their biases to get into the research?

You can do your best, but you can never completely remove bias from the scientific process

If you don't want philosophy of science, don't comment on an article about the philosophy of science? This isn't some fringe topic for "woke" people, philosophy is fundamental to science and has been from the beginning. It's questions from everything like "what even counts as science" to scientific ethics, to "what is the purpose of science". It's not always about ethics, in fact the 20th century philosophy of science debates were dominated by more practical topics like realism vs instrumentalism.

You cannot just dismiss something you've never heard of and have no idea about

Well words like "transgenderism" don't even mean anything and are just far-right buzzwords to scare people like you, so consider first looking into what's informing your worldview. It's certainly not anything approaching objectivity

In Germany I see this as basically an infrastructure problem. Most of the bike lanes are just a painted red strip on the sidewalk. This is dangerous because it puts cyclists so close to pedestrians--who often move unpredictably into the bike lane--and it's easy as a pedestrian to accidentally wander into the bike lane. Especially at night when the red is hard to see (they should have chosen a brighter color like neon green) or near bus stops when pedestrians getting off the bus are almost forced to immediately cross the bike lane.

This is not to mention on some streets the bike lane just randomly ends and you find yourself on a sidewalk with no separate lane and you have to choose whether to stay on the sidewalk and risk hitting a pedestrian, or dangerously swerve into the street and risk getting hit by a car.

If they just built proper separated bike lanes protected from car traffic, and clearly separated from pedestrians this simply wouldn't be an issue at all. Copenhagen has it right where the bike lanes are painted bright blue and are on a physically raised level from both the street and sidewalk, in addition to prioritizing bikes and pedestrians at many intersections without stoplights. It's a joy to cycle around Copenhagen because of this.

> I do have to manage my attention to avoid ... ahem ... drawing unwanted attention

> I [. . .] never ever made anybody feel uncomfortable for sure

Really doubt both of these things are true. It's very obvious if someone has to intentionally avoid looking around a place naturally. The people around you will notice and they will know why, and that will make them uncomfortable.

I really don't understand this impulse either. As someone who has frequently hung out with friends of my age naked, and I consider many of them very attractive, I just do not get aroused in this situation. If it's clear that it's not a sexual situation what is there to get excited about? Are you so sexually repressed that any attractive person in the nude causes such an involuntary reaction?

As a "DevOps Engineer" I strongly agree we need to stop using the term, at least as a job title. Where I work, I help automate our infrastructure management and develop tools that make it easier for product engineers to do DevOps, such as making monitoring solutions easier, injecting deployment credentials into CI/CD pipelines, abstracting certain common but complex architectures, etc...

But at least half of the recruitors who contact me clearly expect me to be a glorified sysadmin who codes maybe one day a month. It's bad enough that I changed my job title on LinkedIn to "Software Engineer (DevOps)" which seems to have helped a little bit.

> The abortion debate doesn’t exist in Europe

That's simply not true.

In Germany's last election, a major issue was about removing a clause disallowing "advertising" abortions. It remains controversial that people seeking abortions have to get extensive psychological counseling from an extremely limited number of therapists before getting an abortion.

In Poland abortion is banned entirely and they are about to start keeping a pregnancy register.

Ireland and Spain also have ongoing debates about the particulars of their laws, with Ireland having just legalized it all in 2018!

Yeah and abortion is also practically illegal in Germany :(

I don't really understand the legal framework for it but definitely a lot of abortions that are performed here are technically illegal, it's just not enforced.

And France has a lot of problems with right-wing ideologies. All but the furthest left parties in France are violently islamaphobic, for instance. In their recent elections they almost elected Le Pen (again) who wants to leave the EU, has close ties to Russia, is extremely LGBTQ-phobic, etc...

Europe has a rising alt-right problem in every country that I have any knowledge of their politics. Of course some of it is not new either, like Poland has never had legal abortions, many (if not most countries) still make changing your legal name and gender very difficult and/or humiliating, and many countries still don't even have same-sex marriage. Far from the liberal paradise I see US republicans online make it out to be

Sorry I should specify that I live in Germany and 19 per 100k is almost 3 times the maternal mortality rate here, and we're already a little high compared to most of the EU. Sure if you compare it to countries with barely any medical infrastructure it's very low, but for a rich nation it's terrifyingly high.

Even with your child you're not obligated to donate blood or organs, which is more analogous than giving food since giving someone food doesn't impact your health or body in any direct way. In some places in the US you don't even have to provide a child with health care if it goes against your religion, I don't see why you should be forced to give up your body for 9 months and then also possibly suffer various conditions afterwards or death.

what the fuck

> some of them like organ donation in particular carry some risk of death for the donor

Just like carrying a pregnancy to term. Especially in the US which has a very high maternal mortality rate.

> if they are, then abortion is murder, right?

If I'm giving someone a blood transfusion because their kidneys are failing and they'll die within minutes/hours if I stop, is it murder to disconnect us? Maybe so but I should still have the right to choose. I can only recommend this video which makes the point much better than I ever could https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU

> Abortion definitely takes away any possibility of living from another person.

This seems to contradict your idea that a fetus is already living in the first place? And if it is already living than just like organ donation, carrying the pregnancy to term "_might_ give another person a chance at living longer" just like organ donation. Remember miscarriages are common, stillbirths are common, dying in infancy is common. Organ/blood donation is extremely comparable to being pregnant if a fetus is alive: they are alive at the grace of and only because of your body.

I don't really care whether fetuses are people are not. The fact is that bodily autonomy is never restricted so much, even when lives are at stake. I'm not forced to donate organs, to donate blood, or even to do something so simple as get a vaccine. Why is my bodily autonomy no longer important when the "life" at stake is inside my body?

That's the crux of the debate, whether pregnant people have as much bodily autonomy as everyone else. If anti-choice people were to also concede that people should be forced to give up bodily autonomy in other areas like the ones I listed above, I would take them more seriously and we could discuss whether a fetus is a person. Until then it doesn't matter, it's just about restricting rights of others and almost always based in religious arguments and sexism.

You might be interested in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Digikey is based there and one of the largest electronic retailers in the world, but the town itself is relatively small (few thousand people)

Afaik they're the only company to work for so it's a bit limited. But I have a friend who lives there and is one of their many developers and she loves it. I understood from her that they're staying permanently remote even after the pandemic, but they might give you preferential treatment if you're willing to move anyways. And I know she still has the possibility of going into the office whenever she wants and has great relationships with her coworkers.

Some of their problems are very interesting too, as much of the software is to run their highly optimized warehouse. Their whole schtick is that they can get your product out of the warehouse in just an hour or two, so if you can pay for fast shipping it will get to you however fast you want. And this ends up being a very interesting optimization problem with human and machine components as well.

Yes, but the first assignment was something silly so everyone could do it. I could also see giving everyone 3 cookies to start with as an initial buffer

My "senior seminar" for my undergraduate degree had the most ingenious grading system I've ever encountered, called the "cookie system". While working on your paper throughout the semester you had to meet certain milestones. Each milestone was due at 6pm and there were the following grading rules:

- if you reach the milestone before 6pm you gain one "cookie" - if you reach it after 6pm but before midnight, no cookie - you lose 1 cookie for each day it's late, starting at midnight the day after it was due - if you at any point during the semester reach a negative amount of cookies, you instantly fail the class - the final paper is graded pass/fail

This has the advantage that it keeps students on track, but the final grade is just a result of their actual knowledge and the final paper. The first few milestones were trivial to meet so you get a little buffer if you're late for some reason. In my year not a single person failed due to lack of cookies either

That's really a narrow-minded view on the scientific method. While it's true that the process of carrying out an experiment should (at least in theory) be free of human biases, the reality is that bias pervades science just as much as any human endeavour.

Even if you manage to completely get rid of biases in the actual experiment, what we choose to study, how the study is structured, and how we interpret the results will be subject to our biases. Science doesn't "care if you're black, white, trans, bi, or toxically masculine" because it doesn't "care" about anything. It's the fallible humans carrying out science that choose what to care about and investigate.