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nednobbins @lemm.ee
Posts 1
Comments 341
Do you actually care about your friend's new baby, vacation abroad or similar life events or are you just being nice?
  • Do you consider yourself these people's friend?
    If you're completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

    But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it's not zero.

  • Horrors We've Unleashed
  • I get the feeling of discomfort but it's basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

    There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It's unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

    At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can't even comprehend. A dog has no idea you're doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they're being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

    The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

  • Biden-Harris Administration Takes New Actions to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate.
  • I just read that list. As near as I can tell they put a lot of words in that don't actually promise anything helpful. Maybe I'm wrong.

    Let's make it as easy as possible to show this plan in a good light. Instead of finding one bad bullet point in that list and tearing it up, let's see if we can find one good one.

    Out of that entire list, which bullet point do you think has the best chance to actually "counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate?"

    edit: grammar

  • Biden-Harris Administration Takes New Actions to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate.
  • I'm also offended by Israeli war crimes but I don't think that's an accurate assessment.

    As far as I can tell, the Israeli military is very good at violence. They're extremely well equipped, they have superb training, and their military personnel tend to be dedicated to their cause.

    The main problem isn't their ability to kill and destroy, it's their indiscriminate use of that ability.

  • Biden-Harris Administration Takes New Actions to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate.
  • It's a valid question and I'm sure the Harris campaign has spent considerable resources trying to get a good estimate of that number.

    It's pretty insane that the Democratic party officials have to say, "We'd love to stop funding a genocide but our members won't vote for us if we do that."

  • Donald Trump is the Tyrant George Washington Feared
  • There's quite a lot of disagreements between historians on why there's an electoral college https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5hv2m/what_was_the_founders_purpose_in_creating_the/

    We have a lot of laws that protect people from government. The complement to such a policy is that we reduce the amount of protection government has from people.

    If you assume that your government is bad or that it will inevitably become bad then this is a great policy to reduce bad government. The flip side is that if we expect government to protect us from individual bad citizens who have gained a lot of power it's harder.

    edit: grammar

  • Donald Trump is the Tyrant George Washington Feared
  • That seems unlikely, since the constitution doesn't really include safeguards against someone like Trump.

    The founding fathers were afraid of a King (at least some of them were). They put all kinds of limits on the power of the executive but they assumed people would follow those rules. They never really considered the possibility of a private citizens gaining so much power that they can ignore government.

  • Video From 2040 Begs This Question of Gaza Genocide in 2024: 'What Did You Do to Stop It?'
  • The glaring difference between the two is our level of active involvement.

    Solidarity is one thing. Actually doing something about Sudan would require some sort of deliberate intervention.

    In the case of Gaza we could likely make a huge difference if we just stopped arming the aggressors.

    We don't send arms to Sudan. We don't send arms to Putin. We don't send arms to the Sri Lankan military. We don't send arms to Boko Haram. We don't send arms to Myanmar.

  • GEICO is Terminating Insurance Coverage of Tesla Cybertrucks, Says “This Type of Vehicle Doesn't Meet Our Underwriting Guidelines”
  • Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

    The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor's will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that's the people who need it the most.

    Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It's a considerable amount of money but it's a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can't be spent to enrich himself.

    Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

  • Video From 2040 Begs This Question of Gaza Genocide in 2024: 'What Did You Do to Stop It?'
  • I've been thinking about this exact question recently.

    My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn't realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn't really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn't much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

    None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn't have been held accountable.

    History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
    The world is watching.

  • GEICO is Terminating Insurance Coverage of Tesla Cybertrucks, Says “This Type of Vehicle Doesn't Meet Our Underwriting Guidelines”
  • There's an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, "nepo baby".

    Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather's grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

    Elon's father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn't get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

    They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

  • This AI Startup "Copied" an Open-Source Project and Got Half a Million Dollar Funding by Y Combinator
  • Maybe.

    There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

    When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn't understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

    No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
    The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn't fool modern audiences either.
    Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

    I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we'll reach an equilibrium where most people won't fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.

  • If Gaza is the largest open air prison in the world, it makes sense that they would have the biggest prison gang in the world.

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