Well yeah but also no. I feel like Sam from Wendover went over this quite well recently: https://youtu.be/XK8hpxR_r2Y

I think they mean the destruction of Carthage 😉

Wikipedia in Video Form is a great line! I feel much the same way, but I think that’s not the entire picture. Wikipedia is a lot of declarative knowledge (i.e. what things are and Al’s maybe why they are), but YouTube is a lot of procedural knowledge for me. That is how to X. My GF and I finally found an apartment. I don’t know how to replace broken light switches, but in five minutes YouTube taught me how.

I didn’t know how to replace a faucet - now I do. I did not know how to insert a metal screw fitting into the furniture I was constructing - now I do. I wanted to measure our energy consumption, figuring there had to be a way to it it smart/connected and Open Source. YT content creators showed me how.

The list goes oooonnnnnn

You are in the wrong side of this.Theres a German doc shedding some light on this issue:

https://youtu.be/vogs4NzqI3Q (money quote around 7:07), basically “half the perpetrators of child sexual abuse do not feel an attraction to kids. On the other hand, half the people who do feel attracted to kids do not become perpetrators.”

Basically, half the people abusing kids don’t do so because they’re attracted to kids but presumably because they’re easier victims whereas half the people getting attracted to life feel disgusted by themselves.

It’s, for all that we know, as congenital as being straight or queer. Now, with queer and straight preference, you don’t necessarily run into consent problems. Imagine you notice yourself being attracted to, idk, 15-year-olds. You’re otherwise a reasonably well adjusted human being. That’s gotta be devastating. You can’t help it, you were born this way. There’s no redemption arc here, the only thing you can do is just never ever give in to this feeling.

yo, Just wanted to give you props for remaining far calmer in this discussion than I would’ve been able to.

nope, that’s called due process under the rule of law. Innocent until proven guilty. His guilt doesn’t seem to have been established beyond reasonable doubt, if I understand correctly.

Now, if the police had turned up damning evidence, he would not have been sent home, but sentenced. And hopefully been put in jail for a very long time.

France has a very active craft beer scene, they’re available Even in small towns. But yeah, Cronenbourg etc is just meh

“Out of nowhere” he says while her albums have consistently reached peak charting positions globally for the past ten years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_albums_discography?wprov=sfla1

I clap really loudly. I cup the fingers off my right hand and bang them into the palm of my left hand. Sometimes people are annoyed by my choosing because it’s so loud. But we’re clapping? It’s supposed to be loud?

I mean, you’re going back a to true/false dichotomy.

How did you jump from a discussion about opposing perspectives on a single, unknowable truth to “one must be right and everything else a lie”?

Very much this. I was an exchange student in the US in 2005 and my US history teacher (yes, their history classes are commonly split between us and “rest of the world”) exclusively worked with excerpts from Zinn.

I understood once I leafed through the official textbook. It was about as bad as you can imagine.

So yes, Zinn is far from “objective” or “neutral”. It’s a deliberate choice because

a) it’s supposed to counterbalance the terribly whitewashed school books and b) there’s a case to be made that no text, not even scientific ones, is ever truly objective or neutral because reality is a construct.

The latter is a more philosophical debate, but nonetheless an important one. Since there is no single objective truth, you’ll usually dare better by considering varying interpretations of “truth” before making your mind up.

In other words: you’ll never get the full picture, but if you assemble enough puzzle pieces you increase your chances of understanding the bigger picture, and, more importantly, you’ll gain a sense for when somebody is just off their rocker.

Kefir is a fermented dairy drink. It’s kinda viscous but also fluffy and very white, so yeah. Fitting name.

I can’t help but feel like your sampling might be skewed.

Vollautomaten (I. E. Fully automated coffee machines that brew espressos and cappuccinos etc) tend to make worse coffee, I agree. That’s why I don’t use the one in the office.

Having an experienced barista grind you an exactly measured dose fresh for your coffee at a good Café is quite nice, on the other hand.

But that’s nothing to do with Germany or Australia.

If you’d read the linked sources, you’d know that it’s not just speculation. Regardless of Telegram’s user base, it cooperates with Russian authorities. That remains true whether or not Ukranians use it to communicate. I’m not blaming Telegram for cooperating with Russian authorities as it’s well known that not doing so leads to drastic authoritarian measures.

But don’t take my word for it: Wikipedia: Blocking of Telegram in Russia

Sure, WhatsApp exposes you to US jurisdiction and Meta bullshit. At the same time, Telegram is very friendly with the Kremlin and associated intelligence services. So it basically comes down to whether you want to be spied on by Russian or US entities.

Source: Wired cover story

Wired story from a year ago about the FSB using Telegram to track down political activists.

translating animal languages

“How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth With ecosystems in crisis, engineers and scientists are teaming up to decipher what animals are saying. Their hope: By truly listening to nature, humans will decide to protect it.”

Wired Magazine August 2023

It’s already been taxed, yes, but it’s also passively generating income by investing it. You tax that income with a capital gains tax.

You can further impose a let’s say 1-2% tax on wealth above let’s say 5 million, so you only have to pay 1% on 2M if you are worth 7M.

That should be easily covered by your investing gains if you play at that level. So, in essence, no harm done to personal wealth. You just get richer less fast while urgent social and infrastructure projects receive better funding.

I think part of it is that movies are edited differently now. We’ve become used to much faster pacing, much denser storytelling and sweeping drone shots of everything, so older movies generally feel a bit lame now

You might want to look into Loqseq and Appflowy. I hear the cool kids today are using notion and obsidian and these two are FOSS alternatives to those.