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You're reaching to suggest that lack of sales tax was a reason that customers used Amazon. Like the sibling comment mentions, every other e-commerce site or platform had the same advantage.

The reason customers used Amazon was because it was easy and fast, not because you didn't have to pay sales tax. I used it extensively even back then, and sales tax was literally never a factor.

His point was that Westerners aren't necessarily going to be fooled, with the example of the AP (Western) viewing his declaration of martial law unsympathetically.

Because you are lowering the discourse here.

I agree, although it is a "real" enemy in the sense that their ascension is a threat to US hegemony or the idea of the USA as the preeminent world superpower.

I don't see it as rational, but there is definitely an argument that the USA ought to remain positioned as number one, having the ability to dictate global politics. I don't think we deserve it, but it's certainly 'better' for us in the sense that it gives us an advantage and thus might improve our quality of life (cheaper imports, blah blah blah). I view that argument as entitled and promoting the status quo.

The Chinese people have worked hard. Actually, people all over the world work hard, although the Chinese have gone past industrialization and have a massive and capable population. The idea that they wouldn't have more power and would need to somehow remain under the US's thumb, where we get to say how they treat Taiwan or what currency they can trade in with other countries, just seems absurd. People come up with bullshit reasons for why the US ought to retain some control over their politics or how the rest of the world engages with the Chinese (and we don't just get to do that anyway), e.g., the Chinese are mean to the Uyghurs, as if anyone ever gave a fuck about the Uyghurs or whoever twenty years ago.

In all that sense, China is certainly a real threat. But the level of entitlement behind that argument is so blatant that I can't take it seriously.

Yes.

> "If you don't believe the lab leak theory, you're the enemy," he said. "It really is viewed as a truism, that it has been definitively established that the lab leak is the source and if you believe otherwise you're just simply wrong."

(He is saying this in the voice of someone he disagrees with... 'this is what they think.') What an insane load of horseshit. It was hammered over and over again that the lab leak theory was racist and bad, and it was "definitively established" many times over that the lab leak theory was simply too racist and bad to possibly be true.

Further, statements like this...

> He says the lab leak theory is being used to create distrust in scientific institutions more broadly.

are pure narcissism. The lab leak theory is there because it's an obvious one, and people (on 'both sides') prefer to believe the truth is on their side. Distrust of scientific institutions is a secondary consequence. The primary fight is over who is 'correct' or what the 'truth' is. But Caulfield prefers to insist that the entire reason someone would promote the lab leak theory is because they just heckin hate him and people like him so much, rather than it's simply the conclusion they find most obvious.

They (CNN, etc.) brand a large group (roughly half the electorate) as Nazis / fascists or Nazi-and-fascist-adjacent without any real scrutiny. Generally, this doesn't target any specific person except maybe Trump.

The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about.

An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison.

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment...

> HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said.

> Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election?

> RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with.

Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?

> Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them.

Lol, you know that isn't what's happening.

So I think we all understand that the headline is inaccurate, that the only thing that has been discredited is its diagnosis or use as evidence of child abuse.

It should bother people to read crappy arguments like the one contained directly in the first sentence of an article like this. As a staunch advocate against the death penalty, that sort of intentional deception weakens the case.

Then I find [the first sentence of] the title obnoxious.

Yeah but the language has the F word in it, teehee. It's so funny. :D

Le bacon narwhals at midnight my friend. Here's an updoot for your service.

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Chess is a superficial pursuit, especially today, because it became a meme due to a Netflix television show.

Not that I care. People can pursue whatever they want superficially. And I have plenty of my own superficial pursuits.

I don't know that much about literacy rates and social competition in ancient Greece, but I suspect it may have been in Plato's personal interests that others remain illiterate.

Right, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people.

Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.

If an "artist" or "thinker" stops because of this, I question their motivations and those labels in the first place.

You pretend this is some obvious fact, but obtaining a search warrant against a person or property that were uninvolved in the crime but may have only been 'witness' to it is not obvious or clear to me.

I get tired of the constant deferral to socioeconomics as an excuse. It's pretty simple, we don't allow people to be born with zero documentation in the US. This would be a massive fuckup, and it doesn't matter if the kid is poor, they still need a birth certificate to get a social security number. They've had a long time to put whatever systems in place prevent that from getting missed, even in the poorest zip codes.

And as far as safety, it's not always legal liability. I'm sure a good portion is, but we're talking about newborn babies right now. Most people don't want to have any part in a newborn being harmed, so it's trivially easy to get employees to take that stuff seriously.

Not exactly unscrupulous if he wasn't charging insane rents to himself. His business would have to pay rent or mortgage for office space in any case. And the income his other business would get from the rent is taxable as well. At a certain point, he either has to break a law in an egregious manner and hope he does not get caught, or he has to pay taxes. That's the system we put in place when we start setting up income and corporate taxes to prop up a massive federal government.

I don't understand the name Posthog. Seems like it is prompting users to upload photos of their penis.

Some may have listened to it and just have such a poor opinion of OpenAI that they allow it to cloud their judgment. Both voices sound like white women in a similar age group, must be Scarlett Johansson.

> Lady Miss Kier's catch phrase

Not to over-analyze your use of language, but using the possessive here makes it seem like she personally owned that phrase or its use was associated with her. First, I don't know if that's true. Did she say, "Ooh la la," constantly, or is it just something she said at the beginning of the music video (and possibly studio recording) of the one hit from Deee-Lite, Groove Is In The Heart? Moreover, that phrase is a fairly well-known and widely-used one, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooh_La_La. It certainly was not original to her nor would its use indicate an association to her. To your point, its use plus the aesthetic of the character does seem like a reference to Lady Miss Kier's appearance in that music video (if not also her style and appearance more generally, I don't know if that is how she always looks). But she didn't sue everyone else on this list for the use of her supposed catch phrase, ooh la la.

I hate to say one person's fame is so great that they get special or different treatment in court, but I think "Lady Miss Kier" was punching above her weight in trying to sue over use of her image. Her fame was a flash-in-the-pan one-hit-wonder in the early 90s, no offense to any Deee-Lite fans. It was certainly a great song (with some help from Herbie Hancock, Bootsy Collins, and Q-Tip).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg

So shitty neighbors can be slightly less loud. :)

In high school, I bought a used copy of a similar book for 50 cents at a book fair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Slang_and_Unco...

It was fun to just thumb through it and find bizarre old phrases like "cat's pyjamas."

Cool to see an open and digitized version of something similar, especially something better than urbandictionary, which can be useful, but also has a lot of repeat entries and a stupid ability to downvote correct entries.

It was 'cute' the first time it was posted (in this form: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu...), but I find pointless musing like this to be counterproductive sometimes. While I understand the tendency to fixate on 'nerdy' topics like, "How can I take <thing> people think about as <X> and shove it into math or computer science idea <Y>?" this (a) doesn't introduce any substantive ideas (in this particular instance) and (b) would completely fuck up your bookkeeping and result in you failing an audit if you completely ditched double-entry bookkeeping in place of a directed graph.

Use the appropriate structure for the data. A graph is not appropriate as you lose information about time, which is important to the ledger. No, you can't add time as a value on your edges. If you did, you'd either have several dozen graphs, or they would look absurd.

I agree. However, I think there's something to be said about how people don't understand what kind of protections are afforded to them by regulation.

A lot of these people were likely acting in some level of good faith, assuming that a company so big it could afford a Super Bowl commercial starring Larry David would never scam them. I know, it's stupid, but people don't understand where the guardrails are, what FDIC insurance really is, what sort of insurance exists on retail brokerage accounts, etc. And they didn't just lose money off of crypto losing value, they lost beyond that amount off of this business co-mingling funds when they were not supposed to.

But I do not feel that badly for anyone whose life was 'ruined' over this for one big reason: they were trying to get rich quick. That's the fact that underpins so much investment in crypto. BTC to the moon! SHTC to the moon! ETCC to the moon! These people were hoping for their 'investments' (speculative gamblings) to explode in value. And they weren't planning on sharing any of it with you or me, not beyond what they're legally required to through taxes (and sometimes, not even that, like you say as well).

> Conspiracy has a meaning…

Yeah, and “conspiracy theory” has a meaning, which, in bad faith, currently encapsulates, “Things I disagree with broadly, which can be linked to and invalidated by the existence of other people online who are either trolls or extremely stupid.” That way I can say that anyone who engages in wrongthink—perhaps, that a healthy 30-year-old might be allowed the choice to take a vaccine or allow natural immunity to take effect, without being threatened with loss of employment for choosing the latter—is lumped in with idiots or trolls who think that they’re making vaccines with microchips in them. Now they’re all “conspiracy theorists.”

I don’t believe even 5% of the people using the term are doing so in good faith.

There's a certain irony in the point being made by that person because they think it means organized labor is good, and lack of it is cheap and bad.

Those workers could get the job done just the same without the overhead of labor unions, and this person still thinks that the 'cheapness' means that organized labor is magically better.

You won't get an earnest answer though. Perhaps some nonsense about how these workers would be even better off with organized labor (until their jobs move to the next, cheaper bidder, of course).

The people who flagged this comment must believe that someone working at McDonald's for low wages is the same as someone being held as property, their family members terrorized, raped, beaten, whipped, murdered, etc. at the whim of their legal owners.

> The engines of capitalism only look 1 quarter ahead.

As opposed to what, something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign?

> Step 1) Obtain high quality paper, ink, printing equipment, and other supplies needed to accurately replicate real currency.

It is interesting they were able to bypass its protection/censors, but this is not what I would call harmful. These are generic steps. Most of us could produce the same ideas with 15 minutes to think about the problem but no time for researching the equipment.