I would argue otherwise.

Wikipedia is incomprehensibly large. Perhaps the largest database of vetted human knowledge ever.

I know for a fact you can find inaccuracies and biased information if you look for it. But it’s rare relative to the amount of information that exists there.

Yeah, RDO is pretty much garbage. Blatant cash grab.

Did you beat the game?

I agree with this guy that it may be the best Western ever written.

I don’t worry that she will end democracy.

She will do a bunch of dumb Republican stuff and make America objectively worse for a lot of people. But the Republic will survive her presidency at least.

Trump, not so much.

I really love that you said test hamster instead of guinea pig.

I’m using this from now on.

One big difference I think.

Nazi Germany lost in outright combat against an enemy they had always said they could beat. They were decimated and many of their sycophants were killed in battle.

Unless Trump and his followers start an actual armed rebellion and get put down, I don’t see how they end up ashamed.

Beating Trump in court, while it needs to be done, allows all of his followers to keep saying, “See? We told you the deep state was out to get him.”

I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s not a super common occurrence.

And even if it is, locking down the entire internet and monitoring people in an Orwellian fashion isn’t the government’s job.

What happened back in the day when kids walked in on their parents doing the deed? What did the parents do when their child snuck a passage of Shakespeare and read all the filthy jokes he wrote?

Oh, they spoke to the kids and guided them through a normal part of life?

I have a son. I would like for him to not see graphic images on the Internet. But when he does, I will explain to him that human beings have sex (which is why he exists). I will tell him that sometimes people like to watch videos about it because it feels good to them. I will explain to him that it’s fake, just like the action movies and violence he sees on TV. I will tell him it’s nothing like that in reality and I will explain to him that he’s not ready to see that material yet.

Fascists always gain control by offering “safety.” Ironically, they’re more dangerous than the thing they claim to protect you from.

Yeah, making a government list of porn watchers with their watch history available is 100% going to be abused. It will not turn out well.

I think what a lot of people are missing in this thread is that not everyone has access to convenient physical stores and many people do have good reasons to want faster shipping.

For example, young families who don’t live near a Walmart. When you realize you need a few things for the kid, it can be pretty tough to pack them up and drive however far to the store that may or may not have what you need. If they do have it, you aren’t going to get reviews or many options.

My recent prime purchases have included bottle brushes, a crib mattress protector, a replacement remote for our sound bar (dog ate it), and a cheap car camera to check the baby since he started daycare last week and I’m completely paranoid about my ADHD brain leaving him in a hot car and killing him.

Did any of these need to be prime purchases? I guess not but you can see how I would want them sooner rather than later.

Walmart near me didn’t have any good car cameras in my price range.

The sound bar remote was online only and was required for us to watch TV since our TV speaker doesn’t work.

The bottle brushes were just convenient.

The mattress protector could have waited but would have been a gamble on ruining our very expensive crib mattress. This could have been a a Walmart purchase for sure though.

I’m not saying these were life or death purchases. They weren’t and people got by just fine before Amazon. But does the convenience and reliability outweigh the monthly prime cost? For us, yes. And I admit we have become pretty dependent on it.

If this were the norm, every country would be split into a million pieces over every petty squabble. Each update to the tax code would fracture another shrinking state.

Think too of the power you wield when your Trump card is, “Okay, we’ll just leave and you can have a potentially hostile country on your border. By the way, we’re taking all of our natural resources and exports with us.”

The gridlock in politics is bad enough. How little would get done if every small town in Alabama could hold the country hostage by threatening to create their own country?

We fought a war over this already and the secessionists lost. The courts also ruled that they cannot just leave. There is no legal mechanism to do so. They can try to pass an amendment but that won’t happen because the rest of the country wouldn’t agree to it.

If they don’t want to be Americans anymore they’re free to try and immigrate somewhere. That’d be hilariously ironic.

As a Trump-hating liberal Democrat, I wish there were more evidence against him for this. Not the defamation - he quite obviously did that - but the sexual assault.

It’s such a touchy subject because many people don’t come forward for years or decades after it’s happened. But your ability to mount a defense against an accuser diminishes over time, which is why we have statutes of limitations.

What were you doing 30 years ago today? Prove it.

Carroll didn’t seem to have a lot of great evidence. My understanding is that alleges that she told two friends and that’s it. Seems unethical to say he did it for sure without a bit more proof. That’s all I’m saying.

I’d like to get Trump on things he’s definitely done. He’s done plenty of horrible shit. Every time we get him on something that toes the line or isn’t proven, he’s going to get a boost in the polls.

He would just call them Democrats.

The parties did a flip flop. Democrats used to be the conservative party.

Actually a really good point on the language of it.

I agree in principle because I think the universe is absurd and complex, but I disagree in practice because most humans form a consensus on the basics of reality far more than we might think.

It’s reasonable to doubt reality from a philosophical point of view. Even though you might be able to make a very well-reasoned case about how humans lack free will using quantum physics and the debate about determinism, we don’t see people escaping murder charges this way.

If you have a murderer who was caught on camera and arrested on the scene, one who left a manifesto and confesses to the crime, I think we could use “beyond any doubt” pretty safely here.

My bigger concern is that people would still abuse this though. They’d say they had no doubt about cases where there weren’t any witnesses, the accused is denying it, etc. They’d be giving the death penalty to innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time because they had absolutely no doubt the person did it.

So yeah, there are cases where beyond any doubt would make perfect sense but I’m still against capital punishment because I’ve seen what one crooked police officer or racist judge can do to a person’s whole life.

But even that is ridiculous. You can love your wife and find other people highly attractive. You can even fantasize about them. You can even have little crushes.

We’re human beings and evolution is a powerful thing. Sex is in our DNA - it’s probably the strongest urge we have after our basic survival needs are met.

The difference is that most healthy adults know that you can be turned on by someone and not take it any further than that. You are free to make your own choices. You and your significant other decide what kind of relationship you want and agree to respect whatever boundaries you do or don’t set.

I see gorgeous women with great personalities all the time. They’re very attractive but I love my wife so I stay faithful to her. It’s not difficult.

I imagine your priorities become different.

You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.

Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.

Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”

I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.

Got a fantastic response when asking it nonsense questions just now. This is actually incredibly impressive.

https://g.co/bard/share/da6c452bbbeb

I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.

You’re only covered by it when you practice it.

You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.

Tiny Scanner for Android

The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.

As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.

But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.

You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.

Prime example. Atomic bombs are dangerous and they seem like a bad thing. But then you realize that, counter to our intuition, nuclear weapons have created peace and security in the world.

No country with nukes has been invaded. No world wars have happened since the invention of nukes. Countries with nukes don’t fight each other directly.

Ukraine had nukes, gave them up, promptly invaded by Russia.

Things that seem dangerous aren’t always dangerous. Things that seem safe aren’t always safe. More often though, technology has good sides and bad sides. AI does and will continue to have pros and cons.