Oh, hey… don’t get me wrong. I’m pro-drug, or anti-war-on-drugs, or whatever. Drugging people without their consent is fucked up. Doing anything to people without their consent is fucked up.

I just think the phrasing implying some scientific method is funny.

“Tested a variety of drugs.”

That’s a hoot of an interpretation. I tested a variety of drugs on myself, when I was younger, too. “No, officer; I’m not on drugs. I’m testing some.”

Timothy Leary, god love him, was a wonderful soul and the patron saint of acid heads. His scientific method was… questionable.

This will be nice, if it makes it to market.

It’ll be a moot point, once the polar icecaps are melted.

I think there may also be some medical consequences. I really don’t know of there’s long-term effects, but being in water constantly dehydrates you. It’s the reason your skin gets wrinkly when you’ve been in the bath a while: your body thinks you’re over-hydrated and tries to expel water through your skin.

Take that with a grain of salt; I read it somewhere years ago, and really have no idea of it’s accurate, true, or whether it’d make a difference health-wise in any case.

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Absolutely. The German term equivalent to writing “Sincerely,” at the end of letters is “Mitt freundlichen grußen,” and it was (is?) often written as “M.f.G.” There’s even a song by the German pop/rock band Die Fantastischen Vier titled “M.f.G.” The lyrics are almost entirely various abbreviations (here’s a version of the song with the lyrics, but not the video).

Oh, yeah; that’s a good one. I’ve read sci-fi books that are almost this, but less obvious about it; Libertarian wet dreams. I mean, fair enough, there’s plenty of communist fiction. But sometimes it gets a bit absurd.

One of my favorite all-time sci-fi trilogies is The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright. And it’s a sort of libertarian fantasy: übermensch against the forces of evil (which aren’t socialists; it’s not that kind of libertarian fantasy) who triumphs mainly by force of sheer will. Great books, and I think the ending is about the best I could imagine, because it inverts the entire libertarian message. The libertarian ideal society exists because The Gods allow it to. It’s kind of like Anarchy Park in whichever Larry Niven book that was: anything goes, except violation of other’s freedom, all enforced by all-mighty AI cops. It’s such a funny caveat.

Incidentally, I didn’t know about that Prisoners Dilemma strategy; thanks! I learned something new today.

I believe this is the article that kicked off support for the idea. Thankfully it’s not a Medium-requires-an-account article

Thank you, that’s one I’m going to read.

“Toxic masculinity,” for instance, a lot of people misunderstand to mean that masculinity is toxic.

Whatt‽‽ ϞϞ(๑⚈ ○ ⚈๑) I thought I was practicing the non toxic version of masculinity!

But I don’t know if this challenge to them is the same as a challenge to Popper.

Well, thanks for the link, in any case. My reading comprehension and analytic skills aren’t completely undeveloped, and while I’ve been known to fall for brief periods for clever sounding schemes*, I’m generally skeptical enough to read between the lines.

I think I have to admit I don’t actually know what Popper has to say on the matter. Though, I get the impression these two authors might agree, at least broadly, and are simply viewing the same problem through different lenses.

He wasn’t the first, but he was the first to really coin the term that stuck. It’s hard to read, if for no other reason than it’s philosophy and my eyes tend to glaze over.

That is, resolving the paradox might be interesting to someone if paradoxes bother them

Yeah, I think it’s a paradox only to absolutists, and I distrust absolutists. There are physical laws of nature that are absolute, and even then we find exceptions; but trying to hold to philosophical absolutes leads to people like Ayn Rand, and Libertarians. So, to paraphrase possibly the best scene in any movie ever, “the code is more what you call guidelines, than actual rules”.

• I once thought flat tax was a great idea, believing it’d get us closer to European-style “finally I don’t have to sorry about this shit for two while months every year” taxes; before a friend pointed out the disproportionate impact a flat tax has on different economic stratuses. Stratusi? Whatever.

I don’t disagree. In fact, I think a strength of US culture is the diversity in embraces. I do feel sorry that this came at the cost of indigenous cultures, but the end result has been a wonderful melting pot, ruined only by Laissez-Faire economics and some badly wrong turns in how we do Capitalism. Plus the inherent bigotry that hypocrite descendants of immigrants are unable to recognize. Or, worse maybe, an attitude of “we stole this land fair and square, and now it’s our’s and everyone else fuck off!”

All I’m saying is that my personal preference would be that this not happen to the entire world. I’d like to visit Germany and see a historic Germany, not another version of America with different preserved buildings. I’d love to visit the Basque region and immerse myself in Basque culture, not some mashup globalized culture selling Basque trinkets, which no-one uses at home anymore, to tourists. It’s selfish, I know.

Edit 2024-07-04 relevant comic

Is there a source for that response? It sounds good, and I’d like to read a reasoned argument for the paraphrase.

That’s a decent solution. I was referring to The Paradox of Tolerance. You can disagree with Popper, but it’ll take more that a couple of sentences in Lemme to convince me.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

The Paradox of Tolerance says intolerance must not be tolerated.

Crush them. Brutally, if necessary.

Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”

The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.

It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.

Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.

I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.

What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.

Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.

If there was a stick beauty contest, this would for sure be a winner.

Such symmetry!
Such character!
Such versatility!

Truly, a stick among sticks.

I know, right? Like, people are always saying “parallel” when they mean “concurrent!” “Hard drive” when it’s clearly an SSD. Dummies.

Wells Fargo (and Boeing) largely illustrate Goodhart’s Law; they don’t use metrics correctly. But more than anything else, those companies are demonstrations of the risk of having only one metric that supersedes all others: short-term profit.

The fact that a company uses metrics doesn’t prove they’re doing the right thing. They have to use good metrics well, have good practices and processes around metrics, understand them, and not using them as targets. Wells Fargo’s troubles mainly stemmed from violating Goodhart’s Law.

Holy shit, I couldn’t have said it better.

“Butts in seats” is a hold-over from the industrial revolution, when productivity was measured by how many times a day you pulled the lever that made the widget. It’s a stupid metric for most white-collar jobs.

A good manager will have measurable metrics for performance that they’ve approved with their leaders. If an employee is meeting those objective metrics, they’re doing their job. If they’re meeting those objectives while climbing Half Dome, who the fuck cares? If they’re meeting those objectives by running everything through ChatGPT, well, maybe you need to re-evaluate whether you need those employees or if those jobs could be done by an LLM.

The idea that how many hours an employee works is a useful measure of success, of productivity, is inane and thoughtless, and any leader who thinks it is is unqualified for their job.

Fuck, if a burger-flipper figures out how to flip the number of burgers with the right quality without standing at the grill, it is absurd, irresponsible, and downright idiotic to insist that part of the job is physically standing in front of the grill. Likely, said employee has just put an entire workforce out of jobs and not benefited themselves, but the point stands.

Keyboard loggers, mouse movement trackers, web cam monitors: they’re all tools of incompetent managers who should be fired, all the way up the chain to the person who approved their use. Learn how to measure success, you fuckwits.

I admit, I made that assumption when I read “gluten”, too.

Thing is, back in oelden days, people with these sorts of allergies wouldn’t survive long enough to procreate. We’re breeding a species of increasingly fragile people - but that’s what is best about us, IMO: we take care of our weak. With any luck, gene editing will get to the point that it doesn’t matter what genetic defect you were born with; we’ll just tailor a cure, and everyone will have a chance.

It surprises me there’s a non-cyliac gluten allergy; gluten is what allowed us to create agricultural societies - I thought that’d been bred out long ago.

“Bred.” Ah-ha. Ah-ha.