Sentrovasi

The other person is saying that devaluing the US dollar would make it easier for others to buy American products.

I assumed you thought they were talking about strengthening the US dollar, so I pointed out that the original post (yours, I realise now) was talking about devaluation. Not sure why you think devaluation would give greater buying power.

The original post was asking about why devaluing the dollar would be good for Americans.

Some of those are answered. Some of those are also answered in the piece they linked that talks about the zoning issues. And some of those don’t have an answer beyond the obvious. I think the root of your unhappiness may lie with the few points that fit into that last category, but that’s hardly the fault of an article that I wouldn’t consider clickbait.

I’m not sure if we’re reading the same article or some parts didn’t load for you, but it seems full of whys:

Why the supermarkets left at the start
Why it’s harder for them to come back
Why certain urban areas have made it more difficult for them to come back (things like zoning)
Why supermarkets themselves may not want to come back (interview with rep and speculation on violence)

Do these not help answer the question?

It can work if the politicians are willing to change to listen to their voter base. Both war parties aren’t single-issue parties. If parties want to win the democratic mandate to enact other policies, they need to play ball with their electorate. That’s the entire point of a democracy - that the electorate gets to be heard. It seems ridiculous that one side is enacting policies that are almost across-the-board unattractive to their demographic, and they’re getting away with it because it can’t be helped, we can’t vote for the other guy, after all. (Obviously the other side is worse, but presumably their side loves their evil policies.)

Your argument basically amounts to “because our political parties will never listen to the people”, which to me is pretty damning, and ensures that the DNC can continue to never listen to their voters. Do I want Trump to win? Absolutely not, even as someone not in the US. But the DNC can’t be allowed to keep looking at these numbers, shrug, and say people will vote for them anyway.

Edit: My main point is that if Biden loses this because people aren’t willing to vote for him, maybe some of the blame should go to the DNC and not just the “stupid voters”?

I think the biggest bugbear for me is always why blame voters voting their conscience and not blame the politicians who refuse to listen to their voter base?

I think the biggest bugbear for me is always why blame voters voting their conscience and not blame the politicians who refuse to listen to their voter base?

Between Biden originally saying that he wasn’t sure if he would run for a second term (in 2019, to be fair), and comments from 2023 that he’s only running because he doesn’t think anyone else can beat Trump, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to think that he would not run just because he’s “the incumbent president”.

I do also buy the argument that people who would vote for Biden wouldn’t suddenly vote for Trump if another Democratic candidate won the primary. In fact, I feel like from discourse on this platform it seems like the opposite is true: some people would vote for Trump simply because the DNC continues to push Biden.

Not sure if I’m not getting something or you’re not getting something, but it doesn’t seem like a non-sequitur. The idea is that if the DNC chooses its candidates, it can force Biden to step down by pressuring him, forcing him to take the route of “heroically stepping down” (publicly) return2ozma predicts will happen.

Now I don’t think it’s likely because Biden seems as establishment as it gets, but saying that the DNC chooses who wins the primary is not a non-sequitur in that scenario.

I don’t know much about how it works, but will Elon “switch it off” the same way that he prevented Starlink from being used by Ukraine in Crimea? If he has the capability to do so but does not choose to do so, that seems a red flag.

Again, you’re assuming the people criticising Biden for being old are Trump supporters.

The blind polarisation in American politics is getting really bad.

I don’t think Trump supporters have a monopoly on being critical of Biden…

It’s unfortunate that you’ve chosen to focus on a semantic nitpick as the only thing to reply to rather than all the other more interesting talking points.

It’s also unfortunate that you’ve chosen to condescend throughout all the posts you’ve written, which really makes me want to not rely to you.

That said, you’ve already shown a brutal contradiction:

Wikipedia:
‘to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments’

Tutors:
‘contribute to an axiomatic system’

Wolfram:
‘a proposition regarded as self-evidently true without proof. The word “axiom” is a slightly archaic synonym for postulate.’

What these definitions all say that I think you’re wilfully choosing to ignore (or just not reading carefully enough) is that these are all assumptions meant to make a system internally logical.

It’s also amazing how you can say

‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 serves as foundation for further deductive reasoning […] is generic, imprecise, and worthless’

when that is literally what half of your definitions also say.

‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 is Axiomatic is like saying Oxygen is an axiom or axiomatic. To further build the periodic table. No, Oxygen just is, a fundamental piece of reality which is also true!’

You’re still not getting it, which means you’re not reading anything I’ve said at all about human-centric perception (which is a shame given how much time I’ve had to spend trying to parse your poor semantics.)

There’s a difference between the element and atoms of Oxygen that do exist in our world and the name and observed properties of Oxygen that we have derived and given to Oxygen. The strange thing is that I think while everyone else agrees that the testing, observing, and ascribing of properties to something is science, you think that the existence of oxygen itself is science (and therefore science is truth?)

To bring it back to your original equivalences, 1 is true in most languages and systems because along the way, humans decided to use 1 to notate a truth value. If we had wanted (and some systems do), 0 could have been used as the truth value, or even a letter. We’ve then decided to build entire lines of logic from that number, and obviously from within the observational parameters of this framework, 1 must be true for any of our observations to be internally consistent. But two things:

1. These are our observations, not reality per se.
2. 1 is still an abstraction. Is the concept behind 1 an absolute truth? For all we know 0.99 (recurring) is a much more accurate abstraction for the 1s of the universe. 1 is our human attempt to bring some order to a confusing world.

Fundamentally your dogmatic clinging to axioms as somehow underpinning some universal truth when they are meant to be convenient frameworks to build upon shows a very shallow understanding of the building blocks with which humans have built our understanding of the world. I highly recommend you take the scientific method to heart and try posting these “deep” thoughts in other places to see if anyone else agrees that they’re deep. If they don’t, I invite you to revise your hypothesis and reassess whether what’s “true” to you really is true to the mathematicians and scientists of the world.

Edit: Just want to add that I won’t be replying to you anymore as it’s taking a lot of more time and the worse thing is I don’t think you’re even trying to understand what others have to say despite your talk about “no shallow thinking” (lol). There’s no point in talking to a brick wall, especially a condescending one, and I’m sure we both have better things to do with our lives.

We can take your axiom, 1+1 = 2, and break it down into where fundamentally one of your biggest misunderstandings is.

We came up with the equivalence of 1+1=2, and deemed it true. Someone else in this comment section already brought up the idea of axioms, and while 1+1=2 is a theorem rather than an axiom, it is built on axioms that have been defined as fact for the rest of the framework to stand.

Science (and Math) is a purely anthropic system or framework. 1+1=2 isn’t a universal constant if we look at the fusion of two Hydrogen atoms into one Helium atom (with extra energy being released!) The very idea of what 1 is can change depending on your reference point and may not stay the same between observers. While 1+1 may stay the same in the world of pure Mathematics (and a very robust world it is we have created!) it is much harder to apply them to real life (does this make Mathematics “true-er” than reality?)

This is really strange in two ways.

One, you’re not describing science but existence. Science is nothing if not a framework of knowledge based on the scientific method. To somehow come up with a definition of science that separates it from the scientific method actually removes all qualities of knowledge from science (do you think religious people also don’t define their knowledge as “what is”?) On the whole, basing your definition of “Science” as how laymen define science seems to be a strange way to try to make a supposedly mathematical argument - from imprecision and abstraction?

Two, to conflate Science with existence essentially is concocting a truism - like when someone asks you to solve for x you’ve chosen to define x as whatever you want then solve it. Science as the sum of empirical human knowledge is an approximation of x, and as a mathematician I’m sure you understand the significance of how an approximation of something is a world apart from the thing itself. You cannot say that science is truth, therefore science is true - that is a pointless statement that completely drops all the reasons why science is more truthful than religious knowledge or any other form of knowledge.

“If the story of Adam and Eve wasn’t true and correct, then there wouldn’t be any humans.”

You have a very binary understanding of what is necessary for something to be true that is almost dogmatic.

The rules of chemistry need not be true and correct for formulas to succeed. People were doing correct things for the wrong reasons, even scientifically, for centuries, if not millennia. Think about things like surgeons not washing hands, inefficient gunpowder, bloodletting, or the attempts at a unified theory of Physics - we know that not everything is correct, yet the formulas don’t fail at small enough scales/slow enough scales/within certain observational parameters.

You’re right that science aims for truth, but that doesn’t mean it can attain anything more than our closest approximation of the truth (limited by human perspectives and resources). We believe in it because it is what works, for now. And the beauty of this is that if one day some incontrovertible proof for a higher being does come up, we will recalibrate all our theories to account for it (presumably after very, very stringent checks.)

Now if your whole point is Science has done very many good things all around us, that is 100% true! But that says nothing about the truth value of Science, beyond that there is a lot of evidence of it working that one time (which is not what you seem to be claiming when you say it exists regardless of belief).

If all it takes to make science truth is to provide quotes of famous people calling it truth, then religion is probably truth a thousand times over.

A lot of the arguments and evidence you bring to the table are circular and only true from the reference point of whatever internal logic you’ve decided to assemble for yourself. Does this mean you’re surrounded by Chinese shills? Probably not, but that is also apparently the truth you’ve decided to believe in, evidence be damned.

What people are trying to make you see is that epistemologically, absolute truth is a ridiculous bar that, if you set as the hurdle for science to meet, is only going to disappoint you time and again.

Scientific knowledge does not have any special status or truth value conferred on it beyond the very educated guesswork of scientists and the time and effort and money that goes into verification. It’s an endeavour that relies entirely on empiricism and the flaws that come with having limited human perceptions.

Does this mean that science is exactly the same as religion when it comes to reliability? Of course not, because the things that you choose to believe in when you believe in science are different, more accurate and reproducible.

To claim that science has some ineffable attribute that puts it above any other belief, on the other hand, is discounting and discrediting the effort and very nature of scientific knowledge, and ascribing to it the kind of mystic quality that is exactly what makes religious knowledge so ridiculous.