It honestly feels like we somehow have to take back the (very loaded) word "antisemitism", as Israel and its supporters seem intent on making it mean "anything the Israeli government disagrees with".

I'm not an antisemite, and have no hate whatsoever for anyone because of theirs religious beliefs or where they come from. My views are antizionist and antigenocide. Which are strictly political views, not tied to any specific demographic of people.

There's always some place that's worse. What you're arguing for here is a race to the bottom, where everyone tries to be worse than their neighbours in order to get the undesirables to go there instead.

In essentially "the tragedy of the commons" but in an opposite sense. If everyone gets worse in an attempt to get rid of "undesirables", you just end up with everywhere being worse, and the "undesirables" still being around. What we need is for everyone to build safety nets together. That might actually improve the situation.

This take just baffles me.. you can disapprove of a war, and still respect people willing to put their life on the line for something they believe is right. Even in war, opposing sides have a long history of showing their enemy a certain amount of personal respect, even though they clearly disagree about something to the point of killing each other over it.

Your take is just condescending and unempathetic. You can respect someone for sacrificing themselves without agreeing with them about what they're sacrificing themselves for. Regardless, it shouldn't be hard to see how someone fighting to depose an infamously brutal dictator (Iraq) or a fundamentalist regime that stones women for wanting a divorce (Afghanistan) can believe that they are doing something good.

If you're "tired of fighting" it still costs you little to nothing to support those fighting, or at least not speak condescendingly about the fight they are fighting. Something about your comment tells me you weren't fighting much in the first place.

I believe there's a quote by "Taco" in"Better call Saul" along the lines of "I love robbing criminals, because they never go to the cops"

I'm not getting over how beautiful it is to see how powerful unions can be when they really need to. I've read articles with union leaders explicitly saying that they can and will tighten the screw on Tesla until they fold. I believe a major aluminium extrusion plant recently decided to stop production of profiles for Tesla.

Recently in Norway, one of the major unions were asked if they were going to stop unloading teslas at Norwegian harbours, and simply said "we're talking to our Swedish counterparts, they'll let us know if they need us. If Tesla tries to import vehicles to Sweden via Norwegian harbours, which they are not currently, we won't touch the cars."

I can imagine this spreading if Tesla doesn't fold, and it would be a sight to see a bunch of international Scandinavian / European Union organisations collectively decide to fuck up Tesla.

Very dense, yes, but stuff can be very dense and have low viscosity at the same time. Lava has a viscosity similar to peanut butter is what I've heard. You can push stuff down into it, it just requires some force to prevent the stuff from floating back to the top.

You could in principle walk on lava, either by moving quickly enough that you stay on top, or by protecting your legs enough that you could sink in maybe around knee deep where you would float.

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

I want to respond to your edit:

wait for consensus before you publish, don't publish anything that isn't peer reviewed and replicated multiple times.

You need to understand that publishing is the way scientists communicate among each other. Of course, all reputable journals conduct peer review before publishing, but peer review is just that: Review. The peer review process is meant to uncover obviously bad, or poorly communicated, research.

Replication happens when other scientists read the paper and decide to replicate. In fact, by far most replication is likely never published, because it is done as a part of model/rig verification and testing. For example: If I implement a model or build an experimental rig and want to make sure I did it right, I'll go replicate some work to test it. If I successfully replicate I'm probably not going to spend time publishing that, because I built the rig/implemented to model to do my own research. If I'm unable to replicate, I'll first assume something is wrong with my rig/implementation. If I can rule that out (maybe by replicating something else) I might publish the new results on the stuff I couldn't replicate.

Consensus is built when a lot of publications agree on something, to the point where, if you aren't able to replicate it, you can feel quite positive it's because you're doing something wrong.

Basically: The idea of waiting for consensus before publishing can't work, because consensus is formed by a bunch of people publishing. Once solid consensus is established, you'll have a hard time getting a journal to accept an article further confirming the consensus.

This story is hilarious, I want to believe it.

Exactly: I am antizionist because Jews getting a place of their own implicitly means that some other group, which currently has that place, must be displaced.

Saying that Jews should have a place of their own is not comparable to saying that Italians should have a place of their own, because being Italian is tied to having hereditary ties to the place that is Italy, whereas being a Jew has no tie to a specific piece of land. It is rather comparable to saying that Christians, Muslims, the Amish, or some other group of people that are dispersed and unified by beliefs not tied to a place should have their own place, and that if such a place does not exist it is legitimate to displace others to establish it.

I firmly believe that Israel should never have been created. As do many Jews (often ultra orthodox ones). However, I recognise the reality on the ground, that the state now exists and that many of those that moved there have now lived there for up to several generations. I do not believe that two wrongs make a right, and as such, I'm not a proponent of dissolving the state of Israel and displacing the Jews that now live there to make room for those displaced following 1948. However, I do believe that the displaced Palestinians should be allowed to return and have equal rights within the now existing state of Israel.

You act like there would be less of a reaction if people ripped up, walked on, or in other ways desecrated the Quran. This isn't about book burning, this is about a group of people not tolerating that on of their symbols is desecrated.

Imagine if we prosecuted people for burning flags or signs with slogans... but maybe you think that should be illegal as well?

I think you should congratulate yourself a bit: You didn't make it due to dumb luck, but because you were smart enough to have several redundant safety measures in place, so that even though two of them failed (cutting the wrong way, with lock engaged) the last one (face shield) saved you. It wasn't luck, but routine and skill that made sure you were fine, even though your brain was completely turned off that day :)

This actually makes for a great sci-fi writing prompt! TLDR: I started writing cause I was bored, and stuff got out of hand.

Long ago, humanity discovered the element Obscurium with the innate ability of capturing and holding lightning. Ancient sculptors discovered a series of runes that, when carved into slabs of the element, allowed them to manipulate the lightning. Cults of Wizards developed, focused on creating ever more complex spells with the runes. Different cults saw beauty in different classes of spells: The Sages developed practices to imbue the stones with memory, and developed complex architectures to store and retrieve any information at a whim, giving them the power of shaping humanities collective memory. The battle hardened Order of Warlocks trained for years to become proficient in manipulating enormous amounts of data, creating spells that could solve any practical problem in seconds. It is said that some warlocks even claimed capable of imbuing the stones with an artificial soul. The more proletarian Order of Sorcerers believed the magic of the stones should be available to all, and created interactive artworks that allowed the non-initiated to communicate with the stones, and feel some of their power.

While these cults gained much power, they remained beholden to two small groupings. One was a group of Hermit scroll compilers, who dedicated their lives to the discovery of new runes, and the creation of translation scrolls that translated wizards' spells into the language of the runes. These were loosely organised in the Order of Scrolls. The other was the Order of Sculpting Monks, whose monasteries were the only places where lightning could be harvested, and runes could be carved into the stones with the required precision.

For many years after the discovery of Obscurium, humanity prospered. The conflict beholden "Nation States" of old gradually dissolved as the global Orders gained power and kept each other in balance. The first major conflict occurred when a monastery of the Sculpting Monks broke with established doctrine. For years, the Monks had worked to carve ever more complex and specialised runes into their slabs, but the monastery of the far eastern island of Taketomi had begun simplifying their slabs, creating dense meshes of simple runes. These dense meshes gave the slabs fascinating Azure-Red-Magenta colour patterns, giving them the name ARM's.

The global head of the Order of Sculptors, seated at the Monastery of Intelaken called this out as heresy, and claimed "These Simpleton slabs will be forgotten in the archives of the Sages". However, soon some of the Hermit scroll Compilers had written translation scrolls for the new ARM's, and even promoted them to the wizard cults as GNU's (Genuinely Necessary Utilities). The wizards discovered that the new, simplified slabs required far less energy, allowing them to perform more powerful spells before reaching exhaustion.

Seeing this, the Intelaken Monastery proclaimed the Monks of Taketomi as excommunicated. They used their vast monetary funds, and were capable of the nigh impossible task of bribing a few of the Hermits of the Order of Scrolls to write scrolls dedicated only to their slabs, and only providing the scrolls to paying wizards, thereby breaking their oath to provide humanity with Free, Outstanding Scroll Stuff.

With tensions rising, the Wizarding cults began to fracture, unable to decide who to support. Some wizards saw the magic of the stones as their birthright, and supported the provision of scrolls to only a select few. Others, especially many members of the Order of Sorcerers, fought to make the power of Obscurium available to all. However, the Order of Sorcerers knew that their true power was in creating intuitive and beautiful structures that made it possible to use the spells developed by the Warlocks and Sages, and that alone, their power was fleeting. They also knew that laymen were largely unaware of this, and as tensions were rising they began to seek allies among the laymen to support them in the conflict they saw on the horizon.

What the Sorcerers didn't anticipate was that in the fracturing power-base of the global Orders, some of the "Nation States" of old, ruled by laymen, which had long since been replaced by the global Orders of Wizards, Hermits and Monks, began to re-emerge. With tensions at a peak, the re-emergent Nation State of Miklagarðr on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean launched a surprise attack on the Monastery of Taketomi. They had recruited a break-out band of Warlocks to infiltrate the archives of the Sages on Taketomi. The Warlocks attempted to extract the secret to the ARM's, but were countered by powerful shuffling spells, making the archives unreadable to them. However, in the final moments before their destruction, the leader of the band, known only by his battle-name Strostrup the Bear, cast a corruption spell, destroying the archives.

With their archives destroyed, the Monks of Taketomi could no longer manufacture the GNU ARM's, and chaos ensued....

Honestly, this makes me feel good about my habit for peeling off / throwing away those little ad stickers and cards whenever I see them somewhere and people aren't looking.

It ain't much, but it's honest work.

The amount of times someone has asked me why something doesn't work, and I've silently pointed to the sentence or paragraph next to the code snippet they've copied...

While in general you're right, you're neglecting the fact that theres plenty of land that is suitable for raising animals which isn't suitable for farming. Specifically: The Norwegian population would have been incapable of surviving historically without a bunch livestock living in the un-farmable mountains most of the year.

I think a central point you're overlooking is that we have to be able to assess people along the way. Once you get to a certain point in your education you should be able to solve problems that an AI can't. However, before you get there, we need some way to assess you in solving problems that an AI currently can. That doesn't mean that what you are assessed on is obsolete. We are testing to see if you have acquired the prerequisites for learning to do the things an AI can't do.

Please tell me how, getting up at 5 (and going to bed at 21) is going to give me more time than getting up at 7-8 and going to bed at 23-00.

Also, I would like to know why "society" thinks you are "better" if you exercise at 6-7 before work, rather than 20-21 after work.

Just speculating here:

Bak in "Ye Olde Times", it was said that the king was ordained by God, who is infallible. The king must therefore be infallible. As such, the King only selects infallible subordinates. If someone is sentenced to death by one of the kings subordinates (or the king himself), they have been indirectly sentenced by God, through his infallible messengers on earth. Therefore, the hangman is only acting as the "Hand of God", carrying out the judgment indirectly passed by God himself.

Problem solved :)