gameman144

I don't think this is an unreasonable view, but it does seem to me that the declining Christianity rates aren't super useful on their own for determining actions from a systems thinking perspective.

Maybe rates are declining because the religion is legitimately not appealing, in which case your action is right. An opponent would say that it's declining because it's culturally discouraged (since even religious pockets are exposed to the national zeitgeist), in which case ignoring it would be the exact opposite of what we'd want to do.

I actually have long disagreed with this sentiment -- I know people who don't want and never want kids, and they seem to totally comprehend the kind of love I have for my children. I also remember being a teenager and always kind of understanding the depth of the love my parents had for me (as in knowing "they love me implicitly, and they'd die for me, and they wish me so much happiness", and all the other trappings that I'd use to describe it with my own kids).

Being able to feel that love directly is, of course, a different story that's probably indeed pretty unique.

I don't see any editorializing, mostly just reports that China is actually competing well.

Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.

> You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.

You totally can, though. In the real world if I can't remember something, I might look it up in a textbook. Closed-book tests have historically been a totally accepted practice, though, and getting caught bringing notecards with textbook info secretly into a closed-book test would absolutely bring about disciplinary action.

Given that we support megafauna today, could you explain why? Legitimately asking, since I don't see a reason they couldn't adapt just as well.

It would, yes. There's large worker/union pressure in many of these fields to not take away overtime by reducing hours, though, since it is such a huge part of total compensation.

Government physical mail has the benefit that substantial tampering is way harder to do at scale.

It's the same vein as criminals using cash vs Bitcoin; both can hide crime, but one is way easier to scale up.

It's also wild just how cost-effective interventions like this can be. You can pay a thousand here and there, or a few hundred thousand incarcerating these people when they turn to crime out of desperation.

I don't think the parent is even saying that, their point is pretty reasonable: having some objective measure for before and after in any study is more reliable than self-reporting, especially when the subject might be incentivized to lie.

The self reports might be totally true, but the study isn't as good as it might be.

Could you elaborate? The project structure looks extremely normal to me, but I don't know if I'm overlooking red flags all over the place.

This seems to have the positive effect that patching applications on your own device (a la Revanced patching Spotify) appears blessed, since government prosecution would need to demonstrate a public interest case, if I'm reading this correctly.

This metric disincentivizes carpooling -- everyone should drive a light single-seater to minimize their tax.

(I agree with the spirit, just calling out that there are going to be edge cases galore with a scenario like this)

In the world we could assess this completely and with perfect accuracy, you're spot on that that'd be all that we need!

In the current world, though, due process exists because there are sometimes messy and fuzzy details that need evaluation. For instance, the date of an immigration court hearing might be delayed, or an applicant may be granted an extension. An immigrant may have received incorrect information and missed the proper steps through no fault of their own. If immigration enforcement skips due process but is working on even slightly outdated information, we're trashing the rights of people who may be following the process properly.

In the cases where an immigrant is clearly here illegally and there are no extenuating circumstances, deportation is already the thing that the current due-process does.

> Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?

Criminal court is only one type of use-case for the legal system, there are loads of other ones. The phrase "Civil court" refers to scenarios where no one has committed a crime and no one is accused of a crime, and these represent the majority of court cases.

I don't think the author was arguing at all that these things should be illegal, more just that there should be more consideration of other people's preferences where possible.

It's also legal to play an annoying song on repeat all day on a quiet hiking trail, but people (rightfully) recognize that as improper socially.

> I concur (fancy word for believe which I wanted to share lol) you are talking about america.

Just a heads up but concur means "agree", not "believe"

> but it is common for people attending the Church to pay donations for absolution

This is not at all common and hasn't been for a few hundred years.

(That said, your point about wealthy people making big donations as a PR move is definitely as prevalent as it ever was)

I saw one of those word-substition browser plugins a few years back that swapped "dependency" for "liability", and it was basically never wrong.

(Big fan of version pinning in basically every context, too)

It isn't feasible to audit every line of every dependency, just as it's not possible to audit the full behavior of every employee that works at your company.

In both cases, the solution is similar: try to restrict access to vital systems only to those you trust,so that you have less need to audit their every move.

Your system administrators can access the server room, but the on-site barista can't. Your HTTP server is trusted enough to run in prod, but a color-formatting library isn't.

> It's not feasible for me to audit every single one of my dependencies, and every one of my dependencies' dependencies

I think this is a good argument for reducing your dependency count as much as possible, and keeping them to well-known and trustworthy (security-wise) creators.

"Not-invented-here" syndrome is counterproductive if you can trust all authors, but in an uncontrolled or unaudited ecosystem it's actually pretty sensible.

Safety and utility can often be at odds. Sometimes safety concerns outweigh utility, sometimes they don't.

For instance, car accidents are an incredibly prevalent cause of death, and even though we had methods of transport before (and in many places, better methods even today), the convenience and ease that cars bring is largely deemed to outweigh the risks in most places (though note that there has been a constant drive toward reducing those risks, without giving up cars altogether).

A meaningful downside to something is an important perspective, but arguments about upsides are also always worth considering.

For the pans in particular, consider that alternative cooking methods may have required much more manual effort to perform or clean, or that they were more difficult to exercise well. There are tradeoffs around people cooking at home less if cooking is less convenient, up against the risks of harm from the things that make cooking convenient.

Not saying one side or the other is right, but the arguments are basically always worth at least considering, even in the face of really strong counter-arguments.

Legitimately not trying to be coy, but would you consider a game like Fortnite to be an instance of "lock-in" for teenagers? For instance, a teenager might say:

1. Fortnite doesn't have an iPhone app, so if I switch to iOS I can't play with my friends

2. My friends only play Fortnite, so I can't play with them unless I play Fortnite.

3. My skins can't be used on Roblox.

4. I lose access to all my custom worlds

5. Other game engines don't work for building Fortnite custom worlds, I have to use Unreal.

It feels like a certain amount of lock-in is expected just from network effects of products, no?

I think the above things are commonly considered theft. Totally fair to contend that the definition is wrong (and IMO that's a reasonable-minded contention), but I don't it's particularly double-think to bucket these digital "thefts" in the same category as physical thefts, either.

This is interesting, I definitely use "theft" colloquially for all these things.

For the digital assets, I mentally bucket copyright infringement and theft differently. For instance, if I copy someone's photography and sell it, that's copyright infringement (not theft). However, if I hacked into someones Google photos and sold the contents, I'd consider that theft (since there was no intent for the material to be available)

Granted, it's fair to disagree here, so I'm not adamantly against the definition that requires removing access or anything.

Does it? There are loads of types of theft that don't remove the good or asset from the owner:

Identity theft, IP theft, theft of private digital assets (e.g. photos, writings, music)

I think one difference is that for most investments, you get some say in what you invest in.

For public schools, you have school districts. For infrastructure you have utility districts. For libraries and parks and amenities, you have municipal government.

For student loans, though, the individual students are the ones making the decisions. The taxpayer is subsidizing students pursuing highly employable careers like engineering or medical science, but is equally subsidizing students pursuing unemployable degrees like cultural studies or literature.

And to be clear, these areas do have value, but it also seems reasonable for taxpayers to call out the fact that these are terrible ROI investments, money-wise.

I mean, if there really was a book that was too harmful to allow at all and it was successfully banned, we likely wouldn't know about it at this point.

I am extremely against book banning, but the possibility of some time in history where they really needed to disallow access to a book seems at least _possible_.

I'm not even in favor of banning/heavily-regulating AI developments, but I think this position here is a little reductive; you could boil anything down to the point of absurdity.

The point of nuclear weapons bans, for instance, isn't to control "evil atoms from touching", it's to prevent the higher-order effects that those atoms touching can cause.

I think there's a justifiable fear/dread when things that used to demonstrate virtues no longer do so.

For instance, being in shape used to (usually) demonstrate discipline. Art or music used to demonstrate attention to craft and practice. Knowledge demonstrated time devoted to study.

This isn't to say that the world is worse with these advances (I'd be hopeless without search engines, and I am grateful that people get to live longer and healthier with semaglutide), but I think a little bit of mourning is understandable: what used to be the fruits of hard work are now a dime-a-dozen commodity.

> Your answer to this question determines whether you believe in ideology or data.

I mean, you're technically right, but that doesn't invalidate anything the parent commenter said.

I could equally ask "What if it turned out that turpentine was actually _healthier_ than water?".

Like, yeah, if that assertion turned out to be the case and you rejected the new data, you'd be following dogma rather than data. That doesn't mean that the assertion is likely to actually be true though.

As an analogy:

Your ability to make calls on a cell phone is not a right.

Nothing is stopping you from setting up a cell tower, but it's quite possible AT&T does not want their brand tied with your calls.