Just wait until they start serving ads for things that don’t exist and then throwing manufacturing together to make them on demand.

No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that’s how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.

If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you’ve fed them, and if you’re a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.

If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I’m right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that’s where we part ways.

Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.

But currently, we’re in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they’re Bad People doesn’t help solve the problem.

None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.

Women are you doing the same thing for me

1. Escape temporarily with a group
2. Find scrolls of modify memory
3. Remove memories from all but one escapee
4. Rest of the group returns home with no memory of escape or the person left behind
5. Escapee on the outside learns the spell modify memory and/or finds more scrolls
6. Returns to orchestrate resistance
7. The resistance operates in cells which have no memory of being part of the resistance
8. “Handlers” are rotated frequently and are responsible for providing memories and stockpiled weapons
9. Cell members are given memories, perform missions, and then return home with no memory
10. Cells that are compromised are abandoned immediately and their members are never activated again.
11. Handlers are personally recruited and serve for short periods of time before being wiped by the next handler.

Seems like a pain, but possible. It would make a good story.

Now we’ve reached the point where you have a faction of the internet believing Vance actually had sectional relations…

Lol

Me showing a friend the number of downloads for an open source library that I published.

Honestly, the SC ruling on homelessness is at least #3 on the list of things they should be ashamed of. Below making bribing judges and presidential criminality legal.

I disagree both with your characterization of my position as well as your assertion that it is “grotesque”.

Skin color and sex can be used as indicators for hidden, hard to ascertain traits. It may be racist to assume that the indicator perfectly predicts those traits, or that skin color and sex predict hidden traits when they do not, or to assume that sex and race cause the traits to occur when they don’t. But it’s not racist or sexist to make assumptions based on race or sex if there is a real correlation.

Sickle cell anemia is much more prevalent in blacks than in whites. It’s not racist to suggest that blacks should be tested at higher rates than other communities.

Women experience more sexual assault than men do, and the vast majority of the perpetrators are men. It’s not sexist to assume that a woman who is assaulted was likely assaulted by a man.

If we created some sort of viral genetically engineered cure for SCD tomorrow, race would stop being a predictor of that particular trait. If we found a way to bring male sexual assault down to the same rate as female sexual assault, continuing to assume the sex of a predator would be incorrect.

And obviously, in legal or scientific contexts, we need hard evidence of the underlying traits themselves rather than assumptions based on sex or race.

Assumptions of this sort can be racist or sexist when the person making them is motivated to come to a particular conclusion, but making assumptions is not inherently bigoted.

In the original scenario, the assumption is that a group of people of various sexes and races have had different life experiences. There are relatively few downsides to this assumption. If you’re wrong, then you’ve mistakenly formed a group that is slightly less “diverse” than you hoped for. The upside is that you don’t need a full biography from everyone involved in the group in order to promote diversity of experience and opinions.

To be clear, I find most manufactured diversity to be asinine, and I think that it can certainly be taken too far. That doesn’t mean that the actual assumption is incorrect.

Yes, of course many people are virtue signaling. But measuring true diversity of opinion and experience is difficult and time consuming, so people use race and sex as a proxy because it often does lead to diversity of opinion and experience.

Red lights don’t reflect the true state of an intersection, but when the light is red it is a bad idea to drive. Similarly, a group of men and women of several races may have all been raised in the same neighborhood, but it’s unlikely.

Thanks for the reply.

I didn’t intend to fully disprove their claim so much as point out that diversity of appearance is being used as a proxy for diversity of experience and views. Unless I’m missing something, I think you essentially re-stated and elaborated on what I was driving at.

Thank you. I’m not an expert on how accelerometers work, I’ve generally just used them in robotic and mobile applications.

The most basic way to measure movement is with an accelerometer. It’s a little component inside your phone that has a small weight with a known mass connected to springs. When the phone moves or rotates, the weight moves, and the tension on the springs changes. The tension is either constant (you rotated your phone and are now holding it in the new position) or temporary (you moved in a direction and stopped). There are other ways this can be done, but this is the most conceptually simple.

Steps, length of step, distance moved, and heart rate can be estimated from analyzing the movement in various ways.

For example, to detect a step, your phone might see movement slightly up and forward, then down, then a jarring impact. Heart rate can be estimated based on your entered weight in an app, your speed of movement, how long you’ve been moving, and averages for people of your weight moving in those ways. This is a very inaccurate way to measure your heart rate, however. A better way would be by a sensor located on your wrist, arm, or chest, which is what smart watches often do.

Movement measured by an accelerometer can quickly become inaccurate, because small errors add up over time, so for movement over longer distances, phones generally use GPS (communication with a satellite positioning system) which is accurate to within about 5 meters.

If GPS isn’t available, but the phone is connected to multiple cell phone towers, then it’s possible to triangulate the position of the phone given the tower locations. If we know the distance and direction to the towers, and the position of the towers, then we can find the location of the phone by basically adding an offset to one of the tower locations.

There are other, more niche ways to measure positions without triangulation or GPS, but they’re generally used for autonomous robotics - laser positioning with reflectors, ultra-wide-band positioning with special sensors, or visual positioning with cameras surrounding the region in which the robot will be working.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Difference in origin, sex, and culture lead to differences in experience and views. An all-male group trying to make decisions that affect women is going to do a worse job compared to a mixed sex group because they lack insight into issues facing women. Same for race.

There are situations in which diversity of sex or race can lead to worse decision-making than a seemingly more homogeneous group that has diverse political and ideological views, as you say, but favoring the former isn’t a bad way to increase effectiveness. The alternative is likely an intrusive and difficult investigation to determine individual opinions and experience.

When I deconverted, I found it to be really hard to get past the fear. The thing that finally did it for me was the idea that a truly benevolent God wouldn’t have an issue with inquiry, and a malevolent God wasn’t one I wanted to follow. Fear is definitely a factor that keeps people in the church.

There was a time when I thought that the arrival of easy global communication and information would lead to the decline of religion, but I don’t anymore. Christianity may have declined to some extent, but a lot of the people leaving the church(s) have just replaced it with vague spirituality, homebrew beliefs, or other looser faiths.

These days I’m much more inclined to take seriously the idea that supernatural belief is instinctual. Materialist atheism will, unfortunately, probably remain a fringe belief.

Many religious people do argue that there is an instinct toward religious belief - the “God shaped hole”, if you’ve heard the expression. There are stories of people feeling an intense sense that there must be some higher power, or something more than their daily life, although obviously they won’t fixate on Christianity without prior exposure.

I doubt that a potential future reward is going to allow a person to hold up under torture in the now. I think some Christians probably refuse to recant under torture because their sense of self is rooted in their religion, rather than because they expect a reward. Of course, paradise is part of those religious beliefs, so it’s hard to tell.

Religious people have been tortured horribly and killed for their religion while refusing to recant their beliefs, and religion is very much a choice. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that this argument isn’t great.

I have near-zero hope this happens, but I hope it does. At least someone is worried about presidents with immunity- even leftist commentators seem to be just shrugging it off.