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I vaguely remember from John Mearsheimer's talk that AIPAC doesn't use any funds from Israel. Instead, AIPAC funds come from American citizens, that makes them evade FARA.

From Wiki: 'FARA requires those who receive funds or act on behalf of a foreign government to register as a foreign agent. However, AIPAC states that the organization is a registered American lobbying group, funded by private donations, and maintains it receives "no financial assistance" from Israel or any other foreign group'

It is good for the world in three different ways when the world doesn't depend on oil-producing kingdoms: (a) environment (b) economy (c) politics.

Well, it is pra-ni-dhAna. Of course, people can say it is humility. ni-dhAna is just deliberation, holding, slowing down. Even the root word dhA/धा is about holding, keeping, etc.

It doesn't matter how you call it, whether "Ancient thought" or "blah blah", what matters is that what is being referred to. It is about how people thought about human actions before Christianity took over.

What's that sanskrit word for humility in Yoga Sutra? Don't cite 'vinaya', as it means modesty.

Well, humility is inverse of pride; pride is one of virtues in Aristotle's principia nicomachea.

'Christianity (to some extent Judaism), presented an idea, unknown to the world in which it grew, namely the Pagan world of Rome. The idea was that human beings are creatures of God and that they belonged to His domain. He was the dominus or the Lord of the domain. As a result, human beings should not be arrogant, but must be humble instead. (As the ‘Book of Job’ in the Old Testament makes it clear, there is a very heavy price to be paid for arrogance.) Here, it belonged to the opposite spectrum in Ancient thought, which saw arrogance as a moral virtue and humility as a despicable vice. Protestant Christianity, especially Luther and Calvin, very forcefully propagated this idea: Man was a sinner, worse than the lowest worm, because of which God’s Grace becomes unfathomable and ungraspable.' [1]

https://www.hipkapi.com/2017/01/13/humility-is-a-vice/

'Knowing it required a special code priority to delivery' itself is a signal for stealing, and replacing it with junk. Drivers can do it; even people at distribution centers do it [1]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-workers-steal-140k-goods-dep...

This article touches on humility. Today, we see humility as a virtue, thanks to Christianity, and secularization of Christianity. That's why we see so many people say "in my humble opinion". To the pagans of Antiquity, humility was a vice, and pride was a virtue. And there is a difference between modesty and humility. Modesty doesn't involve dissimulation. When it comes to humility, there is some kind of hiding--that's dissimulation.

Read this interesting article 'How Christian humility upended the world': https://www.abc.net.au/religion/how-christian-humility-upend...

Thanks for sharing your experience. USPS says 'Registered Mail is kept highly secured and is processed manually, which naturally slows the speed at which it travels.Registered Mail is not recommended if speed of delivery is important.'

So, UPS/Fedex overnight is better.

Only when they want to investigate your case. Most of the time, postal investigators don't care. Maybe, they care if the package is insured/priority/express mail.

I agree with you here. One time, I didn't receive a check for $8k for two months for work I did. I complained to the sender, who sent me the image of the cashed check. So, I filed a complaint with USPS about stolen mail, and that too was supposed to be delivered to a PO Box. No response whatsoever from USPS postal inspectors, who are busy with priorities of their political masters. So, it took another three months to sort out this mess through alternative means. At least, USPS should have contacted me about my complaint; no, they didn't care.

USPS is considered safer, because of federal charges. Some wise people suggested to use priority/express mail, along with insurance, if one wants it more secure in the USPS system.

Well, who is responsible for the theft? Whoever handled this piece stole it. So many hands from shipping to delivery. It is my hunch that either the driver or some folks in the local distribution center stole it. A secret code doesn't solve the problem, unless the receiver opens the box in front of the delivery driver.

Three years ago, a friend of a friend told me that he knows people inside UPS/Fedex/etc who steal expensive items, and sell them to fencers. Now it is time to pick up your expensive stuff from local stores, even if you place orders online.

Historically, wherever Islam is in majority or has political power, they have problems with non-muslims, unless the latter become muslims. In fact, Christians have had problems with Jews too. One core element of anti-semitism stems from Christianity as a religion: for more, read James Carroll's Constantine's Sword:The Church and the Jews, A History

The issue boils down to double standards. When certain opinions are 'reasonable' to those in power, it doesn't "cross the line of what is acceptable in a University environment". Whenever one says "double standard", use that cudgel of whataboutism.

Redhat provides kpatches for 6 months, that's all. If you are running a year old kernel, no kpatches are provided for that kernel. Definitely, one needs to recycle hosts every six months.

“we’re looking for somebody more technical” = Yes, they are looking for that savior to solve all problems—-problems that hiring manager/hiring group/hiring company want to solve. Yes, where is that person? where is he/she?

For every amendment, there are 'loopholes': third-party doctrine [1] is a legally sanctioned loophole around 4A.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Many banks don't allow Google Voice numbers for SMS-based 2FA. That's a disadvantage.

In some actions, yes, he wants to appear as successful multi millionaires. In some other actions, he sounds like a billionaire. That's why he is seen as a weird multi-millionaire. He is not cheap either, but doesn't trust anyone: he feeds you information, to see whether you share that with other people; he says, he trusts you, later he can send a private detective to see what you are up to.

I think, the root cause is this: just as FAANG engineers's social circle is fellow people working from FAANG, it is the same for wealthy, super, uber wealthy. You don't see a FAANG guy living in a mobile home surrounded by people who work in the blue collar folks.

Some folks don't want to involve in many social activities of the class they belong to, but want to be part of the lower classes. That's what I mean by 'pass themselves off as'.

Yes, there is a psychological difference. Super wealthy have hard time trusting people including their family, friends, etc. Some of them even suffer from paranoia. Just a couple of bad experiences are enough for them to become like that. For ordinary mortals like us, we just write off our bad experiences with other people as natural, not some extraordinary. Being lied to, being backstabbed, lying, backstabbing, colluding, etc are all part of human existence: either one directly experience it or heard through others' experience. That is a cost to pay to live among people.

In other words, the experience of one whose wealth is $2B is not same as the experience of one whose wealthy is $50M plus $1.955B. What one experiences in the world depends on how much weight one puts on everything one is involved in. Poor people give different weightage than rich people. Same event doesn't give the same experience to everyone.

Feds don't prosecute the stuff their own tribe is involved in. Once retired, federal bureaucrats become honorary professors, chairs, fellows at 'X school of international studies/government', 'Y school of comparative law', 'Z school of efficient administration'. All such schools are hotbeds for govt spies, other folks. Where and how do these schools get money from? They use the same techniques that this neuroscientist uses. Once they open a front, charging academic fraud in the name of wire fraud charge, etc, if they succeed in doing that, expect the next round to be after these sinecure schools and their fundings, when power structures change.

There are more secret billionaires, who don't appear on the billionaires list. I know of two such billionaires. One is super, super secretive, who passes off as a multi millionaire.

There are special trusts that billionaires make use of. Treat a trust like a corporation, with its own independent existence. Such trusts can be set up for multiple generations: these trusts (corporations) are run by professionals, while the offspring gets monthly paychecks (that's why they are called trust fund babies).

We are often taught that the working class revolts against the elite--that's how revolutions happen. Not exactly right: usually, elites split, then one group joins the popular revolt. Same thing in companies too: Even though people at the bottom are not happy about the managerial class, they can't openly revolt; however, when there is a split among c-level, that's how the winning c-group garners the support of the unhappy underlings.

Since Musk has FU money, and a dominant segment of normal population supports Musk's view point that advertisers 'blackmail'. Whether one agrees with Musk or not, at least we know how elites set what to say, what to say, what is permitted, what is forbidden, what one obligatorily has to say.

You may find these interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=%22theor...

There is no such thing as "scientific method". Only school boy conception of science espouses such a view that there is a scientific method. What we have are a set of heuristics learned from the history of natural sciences. These heuristics function as guard rails: for instance, a theory that is postulated to explain already-collected facts is ad hoc; a theory should solve new problems; a theory should solve predict novel 'facts'; do not increase theoretical entities unnecessarily; do not try to explain away by postulating various sub-entities; do not confuse a description with a phenomenon; save the phenomena; etc.

When you or I drive/walk, what do we experience: flat earth, of course. In other words, both flat-earthers and spherical-earthers experience the same. Further, flat-earthers reason that if the earth were to be round, one would fall off of the surface of the earth on a sea/land travel. Since such an incident never occured, flat-earthers reason that the earth can't be spherical. Flat-earthers reasoning is not spurious, they are entirely reasonable.

How to help them, you have to make them pilots and fly at 50000 feet, and they can experience the sphericalness of the earth directly. In other words, you can't transfer knowledge via authority. That's why there are disputes about what sciences are? Are sciences reduced to a set of theories, or just experiments, both theories and experiments? What happens when one theory gets supplanted by another, better theory? These are deeper questions about knowledge.

When I am sick, I trust some or doctor about his knowledge to diagnose. In some cases, even patients start doing research on their own (you can find many stories on this forum) to figure out when the doctors are not helpful. No one creates chaos, if one is genuinely seek knowledge. Instead of seeking knowledge, one seeks fame, followers, etc. Or as the other commenter said 'when so much energy is spent trying to undermine one's opponent'. That's a different story.

We have to be careful about psuedo-winning against those who create chaos. Here is an interesting piece by Late Prof. Larry Laudan: "Science at the Bar--Causes for Concern" [1], originally appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 (41):16-19 (1982)

[1] https://faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/Laudan.pdf

In philosophy of sciences, it is known that every fact is a fact of some or another theory. That's what "theory-laden" facts are. When some or another claim is not under dispute, such a theoretical claim is accepted as a fact. We accept many theories, whose theoretical claims have attained the status of facts. Same thing happens when it comes to newspapers, journalists: whatever they present as facts are facts of a certain of way of describing an event/process/slice of the world. As long as such descriptions are accepted, facts of those descriptions(theories) reach the status of facts: when someone disputes these descriptions, he is branded as extremist/conspiracy theorist/right wing/labels that many find abhorrent.

well, then go for constitutional amendment.

In some respects, uber wealthy and street/cyber savvy criminals act same: use intermediaries, use cash, use trusts incorporated in states/places, where it is hard to trace beneficiaries, burner phones bought with cash, by intermediaries, frequent change of phones, no trace of their names on data brokers, consultants who help get rid of any trace in data brokers, etc.