RationalWiki:Saloon bar/Archive465

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HBO and Satoshi Nakamoto

So HBO is claiming an up-coming documentary of theirs will drop the doxx on Satoshi. How credible is this? Keep in mind the guy responsible for this doc is also the guy who doxxed the 8chan QAnon. Carthage (talk) 13:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Genuine question here: does it matter who the Bitcoin creator is? Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Try our pumpkin spice lasagna!} 13:36, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Apparently so. Though I admit I know next-to-nothing about the subject. Carthage (talk) 13:45, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I know that it is apparently a big and important mystery in the crypto world - but I'm not convinced the rest of the world will care that much. But, like everyone else commenting so far, it's not my world.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 15:07, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I mean, perhaps. If it really was another one of Peter Thiels' "Let's destroy financial regulation so billionaires can have an even easier time" games like PayPal was, it would slightly increase my desire to see his head on a spit? ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 17:15, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

The struggle of proving usefulness for non-criminals has never been solved: 1) sometimes ridiculously high transaction fees (always in USD, because even crypto-bros don't entirely trust crypto) 2) a transaction process that can be harrowing and time consuming (as documented by Zeke Faux, the tech-savvy author of Number Go Up). There's a built-in fear that some unforeseen event, such as the FTX crash, will suddenly cause a run on Bitcoin transactions, jacking up the transaction fees so high that it feeds into the devaluation of the currency. The high level of capital inequality in Bitcoin (a very small number of people own most of the coins) means that one or a few people could start a run on the currency just by selling out. Who knows, a well-proven announcement of who the original owners of Bitcoin are could start a selloff. Bongolian (talk) 18:15, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Notice in the WIGO entry, I didn't say the documentary creator identified Watkins as Q. I'm not confident Politico got that correct, although I'm uncertain. There may have been people who suspected this long before him. But his documentary did give a possible inadvertent confession, and it did apparently argue that the two Watkins were Q-8chan (there's Q-4chan and Q-8chan; the former doesn't seem to have been well identified). One person who I think may have suspected the Watkins were Q-8chan prior to this doc creator was Fred Brennan who made 8chan in the first place. I may simply not know the timeline well enough here though. Chillpilled (talk) 20:17, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I think it's clear that "Q" and "Satoshi Nakamoto" could easily have been more than one person. In Q's case, from what I recall, the "consensus" is that it started off as 4chan anonymous shitposting type stuff; who knows who made those initial posts. Once it got going, the opportunists started getting involved; the suspicion was fairly strong that the Watkins people behind 8chan post-Brennan were behind some of the "Q drops" once the center of QAnon migrated to 8chan (indeed, I remember Brennan being one of those suspicious of this). Another conspiracy theorist named Paul Furber was possibly involved. Are more possible? Sure. Does it matter? Not really.

With Satoshi, I think the odds are very good that this is a pseudonym for one (or more) of the core players behind Bitcoin's creation, many of which are known. The new documentary apparently identified a Peter Todd. I don't know if that is right or not. I don't think it matters much. On the other hand, I do think there is much merit in the notion (explored in the documentary a little, apparently) that the early Bitcoin community created this "Satoshi Nakamoto" figure just so they'd look far more legitimate than who they were in reality. In reality, the community were a bunch of yahoo IT / math nerds who were really good with computers and cryptography, but (as seen by the countless misuse and abuse and security failures of crypto) had very little experience with real-world finance, and had libertarian rods up their collective behinds. I suppose the "crypto bros" were fortunate that the criminal / shady underworld bellies saw some value in their project, beginning with the Silk Road forum. Cryptocurrency (at the moment, and probably not without large amounts of design refactoring) has very little value in the traditional sense for most people. BobJohnson (talk) 03:19, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Fred Brennan did indeed identify the father and son Watkins duo as Q. Brennan was in a uniquely qualified position to do so, being the founder of 8chan, and later the technical support/sysop on 8chan under Watkins ownership. It's in the new book Black Pilled by Elle Reeve. Bongolian (talk) 07:40, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

The evidence itself presented in the documentary linking Todd to Satoshi itself is largely circumstantial and speculative, also the timelines don't even line up. The most likely theory is that Satoshi is a group of cryptography and software experts in North America and Europe, rather than a single individual, it's unlikely they are of Japanese descent due to the language barrier (you'd be surprised how many people in Japan don't know English), in addition to this Satoshi corresponded in British and Canadian English, which would point more to Europe and North America, as American English is significantly more popular, and is what's taught in Japan. In addition to this, pseudonyms tend to be completely random in order to ensure more privacy, and considering the generally accepted theory is that the individual(s) who worked on Bitcoin is a cryptography expert, it is highly unlikely they would use a pseudonym that has a personal meaning, which could tie it to them. Then again, does it really matter who this guy is? It doesn't affect over 99% of the population, and the importance of Bitcoin is overinflated, and doesn't play a role as major as people think it does in economies or financial markets. Suppose people do figure out who he is, then what? how does it matter? what can productively be done with this newfound information? Just like DB Cooper, the identity of Satoshi will always be captivating, but only for entertainment purposes, and the fact that we as humans can't stand the fact of not knowing and being in suspense The MoR (talk) 14:57, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Satoshi holds 1m bitcoins. He (she?) pre-mined the shit out of it; it's pretty blatantly a scam. CorruptUser 01:36, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

They? Carthage (talk) 01:38, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

@Carthage yeah, "they", because its unknown if its a group of people, or a single person, moreover we don't know their gender if it was only one person The MoR (talk) 17:20, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

I was making a joke about Cory's assumption that Satoshi was a man or a woman. I am well aware we don't know Satoshi's gender, or even if they were a single person or the collective name of a crew. Carthage (talk) 17:23, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh my bad, I thought you were wondering why people referred to them as they, looking at CorruptUser's message preceding yours, now I understand what you were conveying, my apologies. The MoR (talk) 17:25, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Our article assumes Satoshi's gender to be masculine. That should probably be changed. Carthage (talk) 19:48, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

And I've updated the pronouns used to refer to Satoshi on that page. Carthage (talk) 19:55, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

The Internet Archive just got compromised

31 Million Accounts have had their information leaked, and the site is currently down (to me, at least); It seems the group was motivated by IA being from the US and the US being a supporter of Israel (Even though IA is separate from the US Government and also had archived a bunch of resources on Palestine that we cannot currently access because of this).

Allegedly, the group that did this is the same group that once DDOSed AO3 for having 'haram' content a while back under a new name, but the only source I have for this is word of mouth, so take it with a grain of salt. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 17:50, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Last I heard the group that DDOsed AO3 was a Russian op pretending to be Sudanese. (Source here.) Carthage (talk) 17:53, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Sheesh, that's why it was painfully slow yesterday evening, thankfully I don't have an IA account. The MoR (talk) 18:03, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

AO3 and Distributed Proofreaders are both OK at the moment, but I cannot get IA from the UK (sometimes 'different countries work differently). Anna Livia (talk) 19:45, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

I can confirm, at least as far as AO3 is concerned. I have it open in two tabs right as I'm typing this. There is also nothing about any potential DDOS on the AO3 tumblr: [1] Carthage (talk) 19:58, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

I was mentioning them as 'positive collaborations so likely to be attacked by those against such activity.' Anna Livia (talk) 09:50, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I wasn't saying that they're DDOSing it again. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 20:08, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

I got the HIBP notification for my account being in the list. Doesn't seem like anything of personal consequence, though; all it gives is that one of my email addresses is linked to an account there with little to it. The password hash can't be used for anything else, and won't give access. It may matter for some people who want to keep a low profile about being active and having done stuff with their accounts there, or who use the same password in sensitive places, but otherwise it's just a big embarrassment for IA. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 21:58, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

'One of my emails'... I think that's the crux of the matter. How many folks have only one email address these days? KarmaPolice (talk) 22:16, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

I use one Email across almost everything, but I make sure my passwords are always as secure as can be (50-symbol-long randomize dpasswords with Uppercase and Lowercase Letters, Numbers, and Symbols) TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 23:58, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Passwords leaked from the Internet Archive were encrypted, however they might end up cracked in the future so should be treated as compromised. I am not going to describe my credential process for obvious reasons but can say it's very worth going to decently extreme lengths of security these days. Having strong, non-reused passwords between accounts is like step one. Chillpilled (talk) 03:04, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Having 'minor email addresses' (also used for 'enter this competition to win [a year's supply of irrelevant emails]', 'enter your email to proceed' and similar purposes) can also be one approach. Anna Livia (talk) 09:50, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Some services have forwarding addresses, or aliases. If leaked, these wouldn't be especially useful to a malicious actor (assuming you had many aliases). Chillpilled (talk) 19:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

A bit frustrating things I just discovered

I must say the article about the prophecies of the bible is a good one, but when I read the past talk pages of the article, and I found there are several opposing messages that tried to defend the first prophecy (Tyre) in the article, and most of them had no response or terrible response. (This,this and this) A message, which also contained a number of fallacies and lack proper refutations, even specifically mentioned this phenomenon.

I must ask: Did nobody really care about the talk page of that article? If not, why no one refute those messages from religious people? Those words were actually full of fallacies and not difficult to refute at all. We need to engage each opposing argument seriously and cannot simply ignore them, or it would give many people the impression that we cannot handle those arguments, and our points are doubtful or even invalid. I will definitely refute those words if I see them and if I am able to do so, but both pages have been archived. (I regret that I haven't found the page earlier even I already noticed and read some contents on the wiki several years ago.) Of course, I just made a post on reddit to thoroughly refute all the main arguments proposed by Christians, you guys are welcome to read it.

Besides, I found this article has not updated the version of the article it refutes. This is the current version Which had been updated at least twice since 2012 and at least one of the arguments (67, the source is here) has been changed, which was mentioned in the talk page, but I have not found any updates and rebuttal to the new "evidence". Does anybody know any rebuttal to the new one? 七战功成 7:14, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

'The point of a wiki' - you (in general and depending upon the context) are, if 'a reasonable person operating in the spirit of the wiki' are allowed, even encouraged, to update what you feel needs improving (on your own account or at the prompting of others). Anna Livia (talk) 09:43, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

The most important issue is whether the article includes errors or not: and the OP does not seem to be claiming it does. Most of the comments to which the OP refers are many years old, and the vast majority of the editors here would have little interest in comments in which even the original posters have lost interest.

As far the question about whether we should have updated responses to updated claims is concerned - I seem to remember this was debated some years ago. The consensus (if I remember correctly) was that having a constant update, response, update, response, update cycle was not something we wanted to get into.

Nevertheless, as an editor of the wiki, if the OP wanted to go at it I'm sure that nobody would object as long as they remained within our guidelines.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 12:45, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bob M Ok, I need to further clarify my meaning. I definitely said those comments and articles contain errors. I am not asking people to respond to those old comments (The pages are already archived after all), I just want to give a reminder that we need to monitor the talk pages of all articles and actively respond to every comment that question the corresponding articles. We need to deal with those doubts and oppositions more effectively. 七战功成 8:13, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

If you wish to respond to comments on current (as opposed to archived) talk pages then I am sure you will.

If any article contains errors then you should either correct it or bring up the issue on the talk page. Any users who are interested in the topic will respond, but editors are free to respond or not as they feel fit. I'm not sure what more I can tell you.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 17:47, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bob M I know what you mean. I just want to remind folks here that we can do better. Since those messages I mention were from religious people and they definitely oppose something contents of that article they actively tried to refute them and undermine the credibility of the article. Their words were actually full of errors. Someone did notice those messages but virtually no real rebuttal was made, that's what's frustrating to me and I pointed this out. 七战功成 6:36, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

I honestly don't think I can add much to what I have already said - only rephrase it. You can't oblige other users to respond to anything but you are welcome to add the responses you see fit. For my part, I am certainly not going to commit to responding to every single error or exaggeration which might appear on a talk page. You claim "we can do better" a couple of times at least - in that case I encourage you (as part of the "we") to lead by example.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 14:12, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bob M You don’t need to add anything. I just want to clarify my meaning and avoid any confusion, since you are misunderstanding what I mean here all the time. I am not “oblige” anyone to do something. I just think that thing is worth being mentioned. 七战功成 03:16, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

If I remember right, any edit to the mainspace article would cause the user to watch the page [including the associated talk page] unless they opt out, which means any edits hence would show up on their watchlist. Normally, somebody would notice and respond to something on a talk page but occasionally won't happen if it's a very niche-y page [say one where there's only been three diff editors and two are long-gone users].

What the user is encouraging is basically a form of necro'ing which I personally wouldn't encourage unless a) it's still on the active talk page, b) it's a serious-enough issue and/or c) it's more an FYI message for readers than the other user(s). KarmaPolice (talk) 17:59, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@KarmaPolice You may get me wrong. I am not asking people to respond those old messages, especially when the talk pages that host it have been archived. I just want to remind people here that we can do better and to avoid those kinds of situation appear again. It's really frustrating to see several erroneous messages from religious people without any actual rebuttal. It looked like nobody can handle those religious people's arguments, which is actually not the case. 七战功成 6:36, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

You remember incorrectly. Creating a new article(in any space, except user_talk) comes with the "Watch this page" autochecked. But not mainspace edits. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 18:13, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I personally don't see why like say, forum software an edit to a page signs you up to it. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:15, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

The academic scandal of the century

Palgrave Macmillan has just published a book by one David A. Hughes, titled, “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy. If the description doesn't make Hughes look like a conspiracy theorist, some of the section titles certainly do, as he repeats the antivax "microchips in vaccines" conspiracy. Hughes is also a 9/11 truther. How this book even got published is beyond me. Lizardcreator (talk) 22:23, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Feels like kind of a low bar for a pile of conspiracist trash to be the "academic scandal of the century." There's a lot of shit that goes on in academia. So this incident has plenty of competition for that title. Carthage (talk) 22:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

David A. Hughes claims to be a "Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Lincoln", but he is not listed in the university's faculty website. Since this is an open access book, the standards are much more loose for review. Methinks someone pulled a fast one on Palgrave Macmillan, perhaps aided by the fact that there is a legitimate David Hughes who is a senior research associate of molecular epidemiology at the University of Bristol. BobJohnson (talk) 22:39, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I would say this century is still far to young to call it.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 13:28, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

I say for the purposes of pissing on someone's parade, someone should email both the Uni and publisher of the fake credentials [I cannot find any evidence of this 'Hughes-Lincoln' link either...]. I think the 'Head of School' would be the best place?

Also turns out this person wrote a text called 'Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State' which again goes on about a technocratic new world order.

Turns out there is also a 'Lincoln Uni' in NZ. Checked; can't say 100% they aren't there, but can say they don't have a International Relations dept or anything remotely like that [the nearest they seem to have is Tourism]. The only other stuff I can find is them doing a radio show for an NZ-based internet radio show [2].

Like BobJ notes, there is another 'David Hughes' which is the bulk of the sciprofile. This other person has only published in

Dug more. The only 'publishing' this Hughes has done is by himself, an anti-vax 'journal [3] and an international relations one which got flak when they did [4].

There is a biog of him here [5] which I think is the same guy. Did a check for him at UEA, Holloway and Nott-Trent. I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn I couldn't find anything [however, it has to be noted that 'David Hughes' is a fairly common Welsh name combo so I can't be 100% sure. But, 90% sure?] KarmaPolice (talk) 02:26, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

'Borrowing' a meme - which century are we up to ahead of us with this 'academic scandal of the century' (ditto crime and other such)? Anna Livia (talk) 16:08, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

The “Nobellish” Prize in Economics loses further credibility

I had to check twice when I saw the news that Daron Acemoglu has gotten the “Nobellish” Prize in Economics (aka the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences aka Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel aka physics envy for economists).

The reason for my surprise was that I read his claim to fame book Why Nations Fail (co-authored with James A. Robinson) back when it came out in 2012 and it was one long lesson in confirmation bias, using history as a cherry picking grab back and patently absurd arguments.

In short, it showed why economists shouldn’t try to draw historical lessons about economics without actually understanding the historical cases they cite (i.e. by not just doing a casual bit of reading about they Maya and then drawing sweeping conclusions about the state, viability and sustainability of their economic model(s)) and the kind of casual ultracrepidarianism that certain economists seem to fall prey to when they lazily look through history for something to fit their theses.

What really baffled me then and continues to baffle me now were the rave reviews hailing this book as a “modern classic”, but I guess that just reflects that readers were apparently not very curious in scrutinising either the historical examples cited by Acemoglu & Robinson or thinking a bit more about the logic of their arguments from a longer, historical perspective.

Oh, and it probably also helped that their argument was a Panglossian defence of Western, capitalist societies in general and the Anglo-Saxon examples in particular (e.g. via their superficial and bizarre description of the Glorious Revolution as a step towards a more inclusive society, rather than a palace revolt mainly motivated by religious concerns).

The fact that this kind of superficial, self-congratulatory slop can apparently get you a “Nobellish” Prize in Economics should tell you all you need about how unserious certain of the “winners” of these particular laurels can be. ScepticWombat (talk) 18:37, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

There is at least one draft on this wiki (Draft:Poverty) that cites that work as a credible reference. That same draft also uncritically cites Hayek. Carthage (talk) 18:49, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

You mean "uncritically" when it says that his ideas fell out of favor? GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 19:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't remember it saying that last time I checked. Carthage (talk) 19:44, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

It's been there for a while. It also criticizes WNF. It's not the first time ask you to wait because it's a work in progress. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 19:47, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Why Nations Fail is mostly a book made for audiences, and it's not the bulk of his research, kind of like A Brief History of Time is to Stephen Hawking. It can be used by researchers, but the point is to introduce ideas, not come up with novel ones. Acemoglu is the third most cited economist in the world.[6] If you want to discredit him because of a popular book, you're doing it wrong, you should focus on his academic papers. He won because of them, not because of WNF, which, again, just summarizes some of his findings. This is true for authors in general: books are usually (but not always) for introductions, while working papers represents the bulk of their research. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 19:35, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

While far from being my favorite, this is the most cited paper by Acemoglu. I honestly want to know your opinion about it. [7] GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 19:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

That seems like coming up with an incredibly simplified mathematical model with no sociological basis, slapping together several dubious correlations from observation of extremely-higher-order outcome measures(like whether a nation was a democracy in 1900, or reducing "Natural resources" as a single numeric value), declaring them to be a sound model, never using a separate dataset to verify the model's reliability or testing any part of it through experiment, and declaring to totally understand the causes of colonialization-based problems.

To me, it's extremely normal economics writing in that it uses the fact that it has a mathematical model at all to disguise the entirely subjective and useless nature of its resulting assertions. I'd call it trash, but it's actually quite sound by economics papers standards. If the field had any expectation of reproducibility in the first place, it would have a crisis dwarfing neuroscience and sociology. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 19:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Did you read the whole thing? What mistake do you see in their reasoning and/or their models? Also, economics, just like sociology and neuroscience (and many other fields) is facing a reproducibility crisis. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 19:57, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

@Ikanreed, far from saying that their model is perfect (all models have limitations, after all, they are simplifications of reality, and as I said, it's not my favorite work by them), I think you missed the most important part of the paper: how they employed the settler mortality rates as an instrumental variable. This is why the article became so famous, it provided a way to isolate the effect of institutions on present economic outcomes and there is nothing subjective about it​. If you think this does not prove cause and correlation, all you have to do is to build another model. They do account for sociological variables (see how they discuss cultural and geographical factors of development, and how they control them). I didn't see them claiming that they "totally understand the causes of colonialization-based problems" either. Also, it is a quantitative approach, you're studying 60 countries, of course they have important differences, but you expect that this differences aren't very prominent when you are using so much data. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 21:27, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Here's a source paper for the reproducibility crisis in economics: [8] Carthage (talk) 20:06, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, this one is a bit old, but it's good. It's a general problem in social sciences. Some fields, like psychology, realized it before than others. Sociologists, for instance, only started acknowledging it 4 or 5 years ago, with economics liying in between. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 20:09, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

This is possibily my favorite article by Acemoglu, Robinson and Johnson (the trio that won the Nobel Memorial Prize today) in case someone wants to read. They also write about the Glorious Revolution on this one. [9] It's mostly an essay though, and they don't present any complex model IIRC. It's difficult to build good models on economic history. One of the reasons why I chose to make a phd in economic history and not in economic theory is because I suck at math (yeah, I failed at getting my phd in economic history too, but it has more to do with Russia invading Ukraine than with my relatively poor math skills) GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 20:37, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘As someone who has studied both social science and history, Why Nations Fail simply struck me as bad reasoning and confirmation bias all the way.

The depiction of The Glorious Revolution seemed like rehashing the old “Whig interpretation of history” and calling it an event that distributed power more broadly in England seemed an extremely dubious interpretation which the authors spent curiously little time actually substantiating.

For instance, they seem to entirely ignore the system of rotten/pocket boroughs that was key to understanding the English parliamentary system prior to the reforms of the 19th century (especially the Great Reform Act of 1832). I happen to have read one of the early books to actually delve into the nitty gritty details of actual parliamentary workings in England, rather than just looking at “the great documents” (Lewis Namier’s The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III).

Now, Namier’s book is not a new by any standards (it was published in 1929), but it was based on reading a lot of the actual correspondence of English MPs (today it would probably be designated as a prosopographic study) and noted that the system involved a variety of MPs whose terms were defined quite differently than through what we (or, I suspect, Acemoglu & Robinson) would term politics.

These included MPs who signed contracts with those controlling pocket boroughs to step down after a certain time, because they simply used their status as MPs to avoid their creditors while they restructured their finances. Others were illegitimate sons of aristocrats who were made MPs to provide some politesse before they were shipped off to be diplomats. This picture sits very awkwardly with the glib and superficial depiction in Why Nations Fail, nor is there’s any discussions or comparisons to other, similar systems of the time (the Netherlands would’ve been a fairly obvious one).

Furthermore, the claim that the collapse of the Maya was due to “bad institutions” (or what they call “extractive” institutions) was simply asserted, while the authors essentially admitted that they couldn’t prove that. This admission was bad enough, but became outright silly when Acemoglu and Robinson suggested that archaeology would probably prove them right (without explaining how archaeology could distinguish institutional failure from other causes, which I’m fairly certain it can’t).

Even worse, when Acemoglu & Robinson called the Maya civilisation that existed for 600 years an example of unsustainable, bad/extractive institutions they beckoned the obvious counter question from anyone thinking serious about such longue durée historical institutionalist perspectives: How can they be so certain that the current, Western economic industrialist/capitalist institutions which, at a stretch, might be said to have existed for about half of the time the Maya lasted are examples of sustainable good/distributive institutions?

I wish economists would stop trying to make models of historical eras when data is either lacking, dubious or both - especially when these models seem to be created solely for the purposes of feel good paeans to their preferred, current economic systems. The strength of the work of someone like a Thomas Piketty, who takes a somewhat similar approach, is that he works with a fairly systematic and well understood and contextualised data set and doesn’t set out to compare apples and oranges to reach his conclusions. Not to mention that he actually seems to be keenly interested in the particular/peculiar history surrounding his tax records to a far greater extent than Acemoglu & Robinson’s interests in the Maya or 17th/18th century England,

Basically, Why Nations Fail marries the worst aspects of international relations and economics: The glib glossing over of historical particularism in favour of an ahistorical institutionalist perspective and the lack of understanding of and curiosity about how societies in the underlying case studies actually worked and why the actors acted (or who they were as a group).

I think that one of the major reasons I found the book so annoying was that I’m actually quite enamoured of (historical) institutionalism as an approach, but it requires a deep look into the cultural peculiarities if it’s to work well. By contrast, Acemoglu & Robinson lack of interest and curiosity about the actual cases they cited seemed to “flatten” their case studies and shoehorning them into their chosen framework in order to prognosticate about “proper” politico-economic institutions in the present. ScepticWombat (talk) 21:46, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

@ScepticWombat again, I think you're mistaking a book that is intended to be a simplification with the bulk of their work. As I said, Why Nations Fail does not present anything new, it's like A Brief History of Time or Pale Blue Dot. If you want to critize their whole work, you should look at the most important part of it. People that criticized Piketty's (also brilliant) work didn't focus on Capital in the 20th Century (although they also mention it, as this article,[10] problably the main reason why he is far less influential today than 10 years ago, show). The study of economics is not based on books, but on articles. If you want to learn beyond stage one, you should read them, even if you disagree with their models and/or conclusions. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 21:55, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

As far as I get, your major problem is especially with the Maya example. I don't know a lot about the Maya civilization, but it is, at best, an example. You can remove it from the book, and their point still stands: inclusive institutions foster development. I'll trust you that the example is wrong, but again, the most important thing is their reasoning, and it is backed by many studies. Besides, if you really want to refute the book, I think you should focus on their explanation of how Black Death was a critical juncture that divided Europe in half. They provide their main reasoning elsewhere, in an article too, but that was possibly the most important part of the book, not the one about the Maya civilization, that I didn't even remember it was on the book. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 22:03, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The thing is, the fact that Acemoglu and Robinson did such sloppy research with the Maya (indeed, there is ample evidence that environmental causes played a role in the Classic Maya collapse: see [11] [12] for some samples of the literature. There is also evidence of Maya institutions attempting to alleviate drought during the Terminal Classic: [13]) and the Glorious Revolution would reasonably lead one to question the quality of the rest of their book. There have also been criticisms in this thread of the paper written by Robinson that has been presented by GeeJayK. Or of the essay presented by GJK in this thread here: [14] Carthage (talk) 22:25, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

One more thing: Acemoglu and Robinson obviously felt confident enough in their "study" of the Maya to include it in their book. Carthage (talk) 22:33, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

It would be if it was a major part of their work. It isn't. I just checked my copy of the book and they don't analyze the Maya for more than 5 pages (less than 1 per cent of the book). Also, none of your works claim that institutions didn't play a major role on the Classic Maya collapse, the idea that a major civilization that lasted for centuries fell for a single reason sound ridiculous to me. Again, their work is on articles, if you want to berate WNF you're fighting Glass Joe, not a world champion. There is one way to do so, test their thesis empirically, such as the article I posted did with Piketty's work. They did this many times.[15] At this point, criticizing WNF is a waste of time that completely misses the point. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 22:36, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I never argued that institutions didn't play a role in the Classic Maya collapse. I'm arguing that environmental factors also played a role. Acemoglu and Robinson apparently ignore environmental factors in their analysis of the Classic Maya collapse. That's sloppy. Carthage (talk) 22:42, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Did you read the book? Anyway, it's impossible to cover all the aspects of a major event in 5 pages, or course you're not going to cover everything, otherwise an already huge book would get even more bloated. Your articles don't mention the institutional causes of the fall of the Classic Maya, even though they, at least in theory, make a much deeper analysis. Are they also sloppy? Anyway, you still haven't answered (I doubt you will). Do you have any evidence that the bulk of their work is wrong other than a few pages of a book aimed at popular audiences? GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 22:46, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Also, I don't even know why we're discussing a minor part of book that represents a minor part of the work of an author, but if someone wants to scrutinize their sources on the Maya, they claimed to have used, among a few others others, the books Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, and The Fall of the Ancient Maya, by David L. Webster. So, it's not an original research. Unless they've strawmanned these authors, you should criticize someone else. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 22:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I’ve already presented my key issues with the book and if the counter is that the authors have written articles that are better and it doesn’t matter if they don’t really understand or correctly present the historical cases they use to underpin their theory, I don’t see how it’s possible to reject any argument.

I’m not attacking their notion that broad based economic institutions tend to be beneficial when compared to those that mainly benefit a small slice of society, but that idea is not exactly original. If they want to demonstrate a longue durée historical argument, they can’t just botanise willy nilly into the annals of history and claim that whatever societal collapse is due to institutional factors - which itself is something of an elastic concept, btw. Another angle of my criticism thus falls into the category of “what’s good is not new and what’s new is not good”.

It’s as if a historian presented Econ101 as the be all and end all of economic thought and used this to “prove” that the entire field is without intellectual merit. That’s why it struck me as glib and superficial. Sure, institutions matter, who’s arguing they aren’t? But they seem to take the approach that if a nation (or rather a state) “fails” (again, a rather broad and murky concept), then you need to find out why this collapse was due to having extractive institutions, while if it “succeeds” (an equally nebulous concept) then you have to look for its inclusive institutions. And if a society currently exists and is seemingly successful while having extractive institutions, then that is just a temporary phenomenon. Heads I win, tails you lose.

If you want to argue the economic merit of institutions for state economic performance over both a vast span of history and across widely disparate cultures, you’ve set yourself a daunting task that requires research interests far broader than the mere “high politics and economics” that Acemoglu seems to favour. It seems that, rather than engaging with the vast literature on historical institutions (incl. historical institutionalism) and not least the cultural factors that link them with their respective societies and their economic aspects, what is presented is a simplistic framework from which sweeping conclusions are drawn.

Acemoglu simply doesn’t seem to be using very appropriate tools to understand (or even care about) the actual institutions in his cases, perhaps because these tend to fall into other fields, such as sociology and history. Indeed, another reason why Why Nations Fail reminded me of international relations was that a similar limited toolbox made it a minor revolution when the “Copenhagen school” (represented by Ole Wæver) began to argue that the social construction of national security threats (“securitisation”) was a key area that should be studied (rather than “the national interest” being entirely based on some given, exogenous factors). ScepticWombat (talk) 05:17, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Sceptic, you started the thread claiming that we should bin Acemoglu based on a popular book. Of course if we want to know if an author is reliable or not we should look at the most important part of their work, no simply on divulgation book aimed at popular audiences. For instance, you claimed that he didn’t analyze the United Provinces, but if you bother reading his articles, you find a more thorough research on their history.[16][17] We can contrast him with with Ha-Joon Chang, an author that is widely considered unreliable at best and a grifter at worst. He also wrote a book, Kicking Away the Ladder that, just like Why Nations Fail, uses a bunch of historical examples as evidence in order to make a point. Why is Acemoglu so widely regarded when Chang’s work has been labeled as pseudoscientific? For a simple reason: Acemoglu provided evidence to his peers, with clever, intricated models, such as the one that uses IV techniques to deal with potential endogeneity that I posted yerterday.Say that he doesn't use the "appropriate tools" is absurd. Chang, on the other hand, has nothing to offer other than a bunch of anecdotes that may or may not be true. If Acemoglu had never wrote anything besides Why Nations Fail, he would never win the Nobel. Indeed, as you said yourself, his theories are not that original, in fact Douglass North, who also won the Nobel, devised them first. But, to my knowledge, no one brought so much evidence to the field and to this theory as the trio in question, and I don’t think Acemoglu became more prominent than the other two just because his name is fun to say.

Still, even if supposing Why Nations Fail comprised the most important part of his work, I’d still say that you’re being unfair with him. Apparently, your main problem, especially with the Maya downfall, is not that the analysis is innacurate, but that it is incomplete. Why Nations Fail has well over 500 hundred pages (at least the hardcover edition published by Crown Currency has, I don’t know about the British edition), and they dedicate only a few of them to the Maya. Do you think bloating the book would be good? I can't see that as a good thing. Piketty wrote another book after The Capital in the 21th Century called Capital & Ideology. Very few people gave attention to it, maybe because evidence hasn’t been kind to his first book, but being over 1.200 pages is possibly one of the reasons as well. You can argue that they should scrap the whole section on the Maya Civilization instead, but this would be a mistake by the editor, not the authors, or at least not entirely by them. This is also the case of the Glorious Revolution. I agree that Britain only became a democracy after the Reform Act 1832, but the Glorious Revolution was also a major step forward. The causes are not that important. Just like in their studies of the Black Death, they focus on the results, not what in people had in mind back then. So I don't think that the fact that they didn't mention the religious aspects of the Revolution is that important, because they wanted to show what, in their view, the rise a more inclusive society would do (even if such society was for today's standards highly regressive).

You don’t have to agree with everything Acemoglu, Robinson and Johnson say (I don’t). You don’t even have to like them (many people don’t). But acknowledging that Acemoglu is the leading figure on development right now probably means that he has a point, and if he is wrong, it would take more than claiming that one per cent of a popular science book is incomplete to refute them, you need to test his hypothesis empirically, that’s how you treat serious thinkers like Acemoglu and Piketty. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 11:50, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I personally think Why Nations Fail is a good stablemate of Diamand's Collapse - and as such contain many of the same criticisms [ultracrepidarianism, overly-broad brush / cherrypicking to establish an meta-narrative for a 'pop-academia' text etc] but still has worth because it gets people thinking and you do learn stuff. And the point they made about the 'Glorious Revolution' was a sound one - for it was a serious setback for 'royal absolutism' and a win for the English oligarchy which is 'a step in the right direction' [ie rule for 'monarch and their cronies' to rule for 'the oligarchy'.] It's only 'Whiggish' if you then state that these developments were inexorable, and to my knowledge I don't believe they said they did [though it can be said that a lot of hereditary monarchies did develop into constitutional ones partly because of 'historical forces'; aka running a country became too complicated for a randomly-selected individual to do competently and the 'Chief Minister' was that hackfix]. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:49, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

about the "vertical" church

Should I start a draft for the vertical church, or should someone else do it? For context, it has no Wikipedia articular (that I can find) and is on mission. Koafox (talk) 13:48, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

What is a 'vertical church'? KarmaPolice (talk) 13:49, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Seems like it's a heavily branded megachurch. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 14:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

This is what I have so far https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Draft:Draft:_Vertical_Church Koafox (talk) 14:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

There's no Draft:Draft: namespace. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 14:54, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Okay, I moved your draft to Draft:Vertical Church ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 14:59, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

From a quick look it doesn't seem very special. Their stated beliefs are pretty run-of-the-mill as far as I can see. Their scandals are pretty typical as well.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 16:31, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

They are clearly distinct from the Horizontal Church, though. Kencolt (talk) 20:10, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I thought you were joking, but there really is the concept of horizontal and vertical churches. Perhaps there is a "45 degree angle church" which splits the difference.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:00, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I half thought I was myself, but even as I typed it I thought, "The very idea of a 'Vertical Church' implies the existence of a counter example". I'm not sure that the church Koafox is speaking of is really an example of what you have kindly drawn our attention towards, though. Kencolt (talk) 11:16, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Well - we don't really know what where he wants to go with the idea. Somewhat remarkably, I can quote the entire stub within this paragraph: "The Vertical Church (it appears to be a metaphor, by the way) is a Fundamentalist church. It is against trans rights and women in power.". So it tells me that whatever group he is thinking about are fundies with typical fundie attitudes. No doubt more will be added later.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 14:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

"He"? Koafox uses she/her pronouns. Carthage (talk) 16:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

OK - My profound apologies to them. I thought that I read her page to say he/she for some reason. (I actually did check). But I evidently made a mistake. My bad. I'm sorry, I should have been more careful.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 19:48, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Bad news: we're all gonna die

At least according to this Nature article.[18] TL;DR: The rise in life expectancy is getting slower and slower. Living more than 100 years will still be very uncommon by 2100, unless we manage to reverse biological aging, which the authors find possible, but they don't provide much reasoning on it. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 22:17, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Rebecca Watson made a video covering the immortality grift over a year ago now: [19] Carthage (talk) 23:30, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

omg I am going to die someday!?!? - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 23:34, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Are you trolling or you didn't get that the title was a joke? Of course you're gonna die, even if this study is wrong. Protons will decay after trillions of years. The only escape for any life on the Degenerate Era is going to another Universe, but I personally doubt that humanity will ever leave Earth. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 00:22, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

There is the question of how we as a species are 'living longer' and how much of the rises are due to the reasons for early death have been sorted out, and thus pushing up the average lifespan. (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity).

Consider this. Remove famine, infectious diseases, malnutrition, fatal accidents, environmental poisoning and death from childbirth from the mix - we get an average beyond 60 (the UK got here by 1920s). Deal with absolute poverty (and the associated issues) in the land, 65. Put in some relatively basic treatments for cancers, heart disease, strokes, diabetes etc, 70. Anything pushing past that is really taking on age itself.

But... I think there's still more lowish fruit to harvest. Working out what environmental factors accelerate biological ageing will help, as well as well as dealing with the other premature killers - drink, drugs, poverty, stress and mental health. I think we're becoming more and more aware that some of the 'lifespan hinderers' start from birth; that eating right, keeping fit, mental resilience, sleep hygiene etc is something you do all your life, not simply when you hit your 40s. KarmaPolice (talk) 01:49, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

My mom passed away this past Spring, predeceased by my dad by a number of years. She was a bit of a lapsed Catholic... I remember going to church with my siblings when I was very young, but over time the occasion became less and less before stopping completely when I was entering my teens. My mom would often criticize the church over this or that when visiting and talking with the grandparents; nonetheless one of her most prized possessions was a rosary she obtained during her catechism lessons when younger. During her last few days of palliative care in the hospital, she said she was alright but I don't think she was... I don't think anyone could be. The last time she was awake, before the doctor gave her potent medication to sleep through the pain of her cancer-compromised lungs, she did a final call with her mom... my grandmother. It was a short but rough call. She told her mom that she loved her. The next day my siblings and I took her off oxygen.

Days do seem different when an anchor in life is gone. Seems to make one more thoughtful and appreciative of things that are still present. I do think it would be wrong for a person to extend their life indefinitely... I don't know why a person would want to anyways. Perhaps the best way to approach death is to see it as finally being able to rest after a very long and uncertain journey. Sure a person doesn't know what exactly comes next, but neither did they when making their way through life to such a point. I don't know... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Impiricism (talk) 02:14, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm terribly sorry to hear about that. I still have all of my relatives alive, except for an aunt, so I don't really know how I'm going to react when my family starts to die. I agree with Karma, we have to start taking care of our bodies when we're young. In fact, Fortune[20] wrote an interestincle article about it last week too. Basically, if you're under 50, you have to live longer in order to catch up with the latest treatments. As someone in his early 30s, I'm trying to do my best, but I don't know if it's enough. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 11:14, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

When it comes to immortality, my favorite scenario has always been a mixture of mind uploading with Robert Nozick's experience machine. I don't think I'd like to live in such utopia that completely denies the human condition, but I consider it an interesting scenario. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 11:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I think people here ought to express a little more skepticism about claims that we can "halt aging." There's already a cottage industry of immortality grifters out there. That Forbes article mentions one of those grifters by name. Bryan Johnson, the star of that Rebecca Watson video. Carthage (talk) 12:06, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I think most people here are skeptics about it. What makes you think otherwise? At best, we like to dream and fanwank a bit about sci fi scenarios. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 12:10, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I'll put it this way: the things people call "AI" today make me deeply suspicious of the things they will eventually call "mind uploading" ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 17:30, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I suspect uploading will never be legally accepted as 'life extension'. Yes, it might have all the memories, personality etc of the person but a copy of a painting doesn't make it the original. Similar to be said of full cloning. Anyway, the thing do I fear is not if human lifespans become significantly extended, more if that 'extension' is strongly dependent on class. The advanced world already is to some extent a 'plutocratic gerontocracy', but the dividing lines aren't that great - yet. From my quick dig, the current poorest-richest lifespan gap in America is 22 years. What happens if that becomes say, 64 years? How do we square the concept of meritocracy if we end up with the wealthy literally buying [through genetic engineering etc] superiority over us 'vanillas'? We could very well end up with a situation where all positions of worth are 'dead persons shoes', the occupants rarely die and your 'competition' can afford to wait 40 years for that slot [and you can't]. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:35, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

So it will be something people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk will do. Warren Ellis made a point in his sci-fi 'Trans Metropolitan' that freezing yourself will lead to waking up in a future that has everything they need to know about you so hello, hope you slept well, good luck, while uploading yourself is an elite process, only shared between elites in a debutante fashion. The rest is just gonna be kinda what we always do with extra sci fi distractions. Torrent (talk) 09:25, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I suspect more 'something they will try to do but will often go wrong'. Why would we 'unfreeze' you, Musky?

-We, second/third gen Musks wanted to inherit your empire but instead you tried this stunt - guess what, we're not reviving you so we can continue to play with your trainset unmolested. Similar can be arrived at if the empire was left in the hands of professional managers.

-Natural disasters, wars, unrest and so on. Musk goes 'in to the chamber' in 2100 but anything could happen after this point. From wars to angry mobs pulling the plug and stringing your ancient carcass up on a telephone pole 'as punishment for the billionaire hubris which wrecked the world'. In a more mundane level, your empire/the stasis company collapses and you pod is simply turned off, or a major disaster damages the facility that you're accidentally defrosted 'too early' [ie before you can be 'cured'].

-Why would the future want to see you? Imagine by 2200 they've found 'a cure' to what ancient Musk has. It's the future equivalent of us bringing back GP Morgan or JD Rockefeller from the grave today. Yay, Gilded Age Robber barons arise again! There's a good chance what made them 'great' then will no longer apply. What's the benefit to society? In this case, to chat to a famous figure - that's it. Given a choice, I think we'd more inclined to defrost Einstein, Cezanne, Twain or Wagner - for there's a decent chance if they could 'recover fully' they could still contribute to our current world.

The only way I could see this 'working' [avoiding discussions about tech] is if it's a relatively 'quick freeze' [say 5-10 years 'while the treatment/cure is developed enough'] and my empire is held in trust by someone who genuinely wants to see me come back. Another possible if it's a group 'flinging a light into the future' scenario [say to allow 'the virus' to burn out/'the zombies' to all disintegrate/'the event' to pass] in which a billionaire or two learned of this beforehand and bribed their way into a pod, but that's more an attempt to buy your way onto a temporal life-raft than 'cheating death' per se.

The critical issue is that human society revolves around birth and death. That the rich and powerful, sooner or later do die and 'leave it all' to their successors. If a small minority get functional immortality we'd soon end up in a nightmare world where they control/own everything because there's never any succession breaks and money breeds with shit like compound interest. I could see a kind of 'neo-luddite' movement coming in with the express purpose to make 'cheating old age' mind uploading illegal. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:40, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Christo Columbos the Converso

Welp, that happened. It's been a sort of dark joke in the Jewish community that the world would never accept the Crypto/Converso theory until Columbus's name was sufficiently tarnished, and here we are! CorruptUser 07:20, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sceptical. The results were announced in a TV documentary. No analysis of autosomal DNA, just the Y chromosome, which is never enough to prove ethnicity.

It seems like the motivation of the researchers was to show that Columbus was Catalan, with the Jew thing being almost incidental. I've heard they're linked to the Institut Nova Història, who've claimed everyone from Da Vinci to Shakespeare was Catalan, but that could be false. Christopher (talk) 10:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

As I noted on the Ten Lost Tribes page, there is no reliable genetic method for determining Jewish ancestry. The Cohen Modal Haplotype on the Y-chromosome is a weak determinant for the hereditary priesthood in Judaism (typically Cohen and similar surnames), but many Jews consequently do not have that haplotype, and some non-Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry do have it. Bongolian (talk) 18:32, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree the Y haplotype is insufficient, but autosomal DNA would have been perfectly reliable if they could have gotten a good sample. It may not give you the full picture with those who claim to be members of the lost tribes, but it would've identified a converso. Christopher (talk) 19:43, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

a) how are we 100% sure the remains analysed were his? and b) the mere presence of a 'Jewish' genetic marker doesn't really prove anything. If what I know of my family origins my Y-chromo should be 'R-L21' ['Western Celts'] but I'd not be shocked if it was revealed it was in fact 'I-M253' ['Scandinavian']. So, what does this mean? Vikings interacted with Ireland a millennia ago, and their genetic stock [Normans/English] have interacted with it since. That marker could be as recent as my own father, as far back as a thousand years with a Norwegian screwing an slave-girl while in dock. Ie it means nothing. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:26, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

From reading some other articles they have - or claim to have - DNA from descendants which they were able to use to confirm his identity. As for the "Jewish" claim I agree with other posters. Even if some conclusively "Jewish" DNA markers were present we certainly cannot discount: his ancestors being conversos, various people having extramarital adventures or being raped. I'm also led to wonder why it's considered to be important.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:52, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Changing your mind?

I've just finished rebuilding John Major, and I found myself [a little to my surprise] making an article which was more sympathetic to him than I thought it would/could be. Has anyone else ended up being swayed by the 'evidence' you've collected for refs etc during doing a mainspace page? KarmaPolice (talk) 15:45, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

When I actually used to create articles I would usually find something new, quite often something which I had assumed to be simple would turn out to be far more complex when I wanted to write something sensible. But I started life an a right-wing, fundamentalist, young-earth-creationist (parents can be a bad influence) - so discovering that my beliefs might be wrong about other things was not a big surprise.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 16:01, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I did an overhaul of the Israel article about 3-ish years ago, and I ended up taking a much harsher and more negative direction than I had expected, because I ended up learning a lot from my research. It was actually a genuine contributing factor to my opinion being vehemently against Israeli actions during this current war(s). Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Try our pumpkin spice lasagna!} 16:27, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

i used to be more neutral on the british empire, in the sense that it was not a wholely evil thing, it did good things as well as bad, it was a different time etc. while that is probably true, i am much less forgiving of its ills as i gradually became more aware of the lasting impact on the world, that it was not merely a period of british history removed from the world as it is now, and that we in britain seem incapable recognising it for what it was but as a fantasy with all its faults removed impeding our growth as nation, actively sending us back decades - it was a fantastical notion past empire that helped seal brexit. i'll not credit whatever 'good' came from it while people actively use it to obscure the bad, rather face up to the horrors that were kept far far away from from britain itself, with a population only ever witnessing first hand the wealth and power it brought us.

the only slack i will give it, is in defence against other europeans pretending that britain was the only empire of the time, and that britain was the sole imperial power of the day. we were the biggest sure, but half it formed not from stealing land directly from the natives, but from other european powers after they had stolen it from the natives with just as much, sometimes worse, looting and pillaging and genociding as us brits are responsible for. AMassiveGay (talk) 17:30, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

and dont get me started on american indendance, where the yanks rebelled against the tyranny of the least oppressive and tyrannical regime in history. AMassiveGay (talk) 17:35, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Like many such organisations (but it was far more complex than that) the British Empire had its good points (I have come across the Indian argument that the English Language was a Good Thing, as it is 'neutral to all local languages, and the Brits created 'India the sub-continent state' etc; and other aspects elsewhere) and bad points: and it changed over time. Anna Livia (talk) 08:32, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I think it should be remembered that whatever "good things" the British Empire did, they were always ultimately intended to make it easier to control and exploit their colonized subjects. Imperialism is not a virtue, nor is it a "mixed bag." Carthage (talk) 11:26, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. Any perceived current positives are incidental to the objectives of the empire at that time. And we don't even really know if they are relatively positive outcomes - as we don't have an alternative reality where the empire didn't exist against which we can compare outcomes.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 12:27, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I used to have a vaguely negative view of Timothy Leary & Richard Alpert, a vaguely positive view of Margaret Mead, and no view on her one-time husband Gregory Bateson. After reading Benjamin Breen's book Tripping on Utopia (Leary, Mead and Bateson as well as L. Ron Hubbard all connect through psychedelics and the Macy conferences.) and the followup study to Leary & Richard Alpert's LSD studies, my views of Leary/Alpert went to strongly and objectively negative. My view of Mead became more nuanced but mostly positive, and my view of Bateson went to mostly negative. Long ago I dabbled in herbalism, but that too changed to negative as I read more about the research over the years. Bongolian (talk) 17:02, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I have done very personal psychonaut trips. My first trip was after I had sat with friends who had been tripping for months. Once they all kind of got over acid and moved to MDMA I said 'I'd like to try it now.' My best friend at the time was annoyed, and said 'if you're gonna do it, do it' and I bought ten hits. I took six and gave two friends two each. It was okay. I have had friends who have tried micro dosing LSD and mushrooms and it just doesn't help them. I have always Macro Dosed, I haven't done any psychedelics in like, 6 years, because my last trip was intentional and peraonal and really good. I had a 'bad' mushroom trip where I spent a semi eternity in self reflective hell, but I pieced it together and I just chose to sit down to pee and got tripped up in my pants trying to stand back up. I was trapped in my jeans for 1000 years. My best and last trip, I planned. I cleaned my apartment from carpet to tub. I taped a note on the door 'not yet' I took 3 gel tabs, somewhere between 9 and 12 hits, got drunk, slept through the peak, woke up insane, hid in my closet with my camping gear, climbed into my shower, traveled through time and dimensions, cooled off and then just generally had a really nice day alone. That was actually four or five years ago, not six. I have never micro dosed, but also over the course of 15 years I have only tripped 8 times. Every time, as big as I can get. Every time, spend time reminding myself, 'that is what drugs do.' Torrent (talk) 05:21, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The issue I have with Leary/Alpert was not advocacy of psychedelics per se. It was 1) very bad research design followed by invalid conclusions and 2) Irresponsible advocacy of psychedelics, especially Leary. Bongolian (talk) 05:57, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I do not advocate for the use either, just wanted to point out that I had both good and bad experiences both while using irresponsibly. I have a friend that shuffles instead of walking. Way back in the day, he bummed a cigarette off me. Later, he asked if he could pay me back, his cigs were in his car. I said OK cause I hadn't seen him in years. We walked so slowly to his car, all he did was breathy laugh and side eye me when I asked how he was and such. When we got to hos car he asked if I wanted a bump of cocaine, I said 'Nah, man.' Then it hit me. This man was moving at a snail's pace while on cocaine. I can't tell you not to do them, but I can say I've seen what happens if you aren't careful and intentional with drugs. Also, don't trust drug using friends or professors to know better. Drugs mess with your brain chemistry. Your brain chemistry is important. Torrent (talk) 07:07, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

'careful and intentional' those are two things that tend to vanish pretty quickly after the first hit, along with good judgement, inhibition and self awareness. AMassiveGay (talk) 12:52, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

On based topic, I did think a Ring species would be a slam dunk, but had to give it the 'um actually' treatment that it deserved when I looked at it too hard.Torrent (talk) 07:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I also tried https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Area_51:_Alien_Interview but dishonesty sold as plausibility fucks me up. If people believe this is real, people believe Haitians eat cats. It's infuriating, and I don't like to be angry with idiots.

'Just for funsies over the weekend I watched Discovering Bigfoot which is BAD and injured me, which I didn't expect it to. Somehow I thought it would desensitize me a little. The difference was, in its audacity, it showed unrelated and obviously forged footage that claimed to show actual Bigfoots. The worse part was when they dragged this old professor out and confused him, sent him home, brought him back and confused him more so he would come over to the side of "Bigfoot, plausible." It was just a different kind of terrible. This kind of blatant dishonesty boils my brain, I just can't engage with it. I understand why they do it and how they do it, but I cannot comprehend THAT they do it, at least to an extent where they don't explicitly call it "funsies." I am disengaging from this project, I don't need to be frustrated 24 hours out of every day. It's phony, it's basic, me pointing out every minute detail isn't going to affect anything but my own mental stamina. 02:58, 23 June 2020 (UTC)' I always could tell the future. Torrent (talk) 08:11, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

You don't need words to think.

Well this concept certainly got me thinking. I must admit that I had always thought that language was necessary, but the article gave me some, well, food for thought.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 16:04, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

What did you think a mouse does when it solves a maze? Pure instinct? What does a chimp do when it decides how to share food? Think in ooks and eeks? Humanity sure relies on language a lot, but it's basically* unique to us. Cognition isn't. My intuition would be language depends heavily on cognition, not vice versa. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 17:38, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm the one who wrote most of the article on Genie (if you're unfamiliar, don't read unless you want to lose a lot of faith in humanity), so this is up my alley a bit. From the time doctors first began interacting with her they could tell that, even though she had not acquired a first language at 13 years and 7 months, she had memories; among other things, she clearly knew who her mother was and liked both plastic objects and classical music played on the piano (as plastic objects and a piano from the house next door were two of the only sources of stimulation during her childhood). Once she began learning language, one of the revelations of her case was that she could speak about events from her childhood. Though her language was always stilted, she could both independently speak about and answer questions about her entirely non-verbal childhood. So beyond common examples of non-linguistic thoughts, such as shape rotation, it's possible for humans to know things that we typically describe using language without actually knowing language. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:50, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Started reading the Genie article and yea... immediately became very saddened. Really wish things were different for just like, the world in general. Impiricism (talk) 18:44, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, it was awful. I have my own very strong views on where blame lays for how her life went the way it did, though I hope none of them are evident. There are plenty more deeply disturbing facts about her case out there, and that's just what's readily publicly available; I know (because Susan Curtiss said it) there's much more the people who worked with her know. Her brother also had a horrible life, which he admitted had a bad effect on his only child (who died 2 years after him of a drug overdose and left her two school-aged children motherless). So much misery, Russ Rymer said his research on her still sticks with him and I absolutely get it. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:56, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

So Language is a way to describe cognition in an extremely effecient way. Communication can occur, cognition can occur, but words, language, really mean a lot in human communication. It's really silly to think that something like this makes the idea of language less important or impactful to the human experience. Just because there are ways of communicating without common language doesn't mean common language isn't wildly powerful. Torrent (talk) 08:17, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Fate of the US in 2025

The elections are nearing a dead heat as swing states teeter on the brink. Yet I ask myself this out of concern. What would be the ultimate fate of this country in the next decade or so if tRump wins? Will this country turn into a fascist one party dictatorship? Or will the guardrails save the US from becoming a fascist state? And if things do get bad, which country should I escape to for my own safety? TheEternalOutsider (talk) 19:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

As is quite evident by now, Trump is quite "off his rocker" so to speak. So I guess my question is, should Trump actually win, which faction will end up being REALLY in charge? There seem to be two dominant factions behind Trumpism at the leadership level: the kinda dumb racist / evangelical faction (as represented by Project 2025 and whatnot) and the neoreactionary movement "tech bros" (as represented by JD Vance and Elon Musk). Neither group bodes good omens for democracy, so here's hoping that what we see in GOP trifecta states now (as well as the House of Representatives) happens in this case. Namely, a helluv a lot of in-fighting between the "silly but slightly sane" and "whackdoodle" groups, but not a lot of actual concrete legislation or changes.

I don't expect "blue states" to take Trumpism lying down, so I also expect a lot of court battles if Trump wins. Such happens in reverse, too, so either way expect more decisions from the John Roberts court that probably will continue to cement them as the worst Supreme Court in American history since Roger Taney. But even in Trumpism infected states like Florida, Ron DeSantis type bullies still get neutered by the courts some. So...

The "let's fire all the non-political experts in government and replace them with conservative lapdogs" tenet of Trumpism is one thing to watch. This has the potential to really muck up certain areas of government where politics wasn't previously a concern. Weather is an excellent example... it's bad enough that companies like The Weather Channel and Accuweather sensationalize the weather these days. Project 2025 goes even further than previous musings from some of these companies, and demands not only a complete privatization of the forecasting end, but also desires to whitewash *any* effect of climate change from any weather government agency. Even Accuweather, no stranger to the "privatize everything!" cult, balked at Project 2025's plan! But... if Trump wins, will Trump (or whoever ends up being his handler) do the same? BobJohnson (talk) 21:26, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I forget who posted the comment, and am too lazy to do a thorough search through bar history, but I recall the one user here saying the US has a greater chance of becoming an "illiberal democracy" ala Viktor Orban's Hungary, rather than something like Nazi Germany; I do think it is a more accurate evaluation. Regardless of Trump winning or not though, the fact that it has reached this point really does not bring optimism for the future... there's 2028 of course with more competent Republican-fascists (such as Ron DeSantis) still able to run if Trump expires by then. And where to escape to? I recall Canada's immigration website supposedly crashing due to surge in demand post-2016 election... I wouldn't be surprised if it were to happen again. But with Republican rhetoric making significant in-roads into Canada (Tucker Carlson's sold out show in Calgary that the premier, Danielle Smith, herself was a guest on, just to give one example), I'm not sure it would make much of a difference. And with the US being a superpower known for particularly messing with the politics of Latin America too, I don't think it would be outrageous to suggest the US would try things with even more countries should it become a dictatorship. Impiricism (talk) 22:06, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

That would have been me who said about Orban, though not only me... anyway, people - consider this.

MAGA is a cult. A personality cult. Revolving around the body of a 78 year old man. Who is increasingly doing Grandpa Simpson stories. And is clearly overweight.

It is unlikely that Trump will be alive/lucid for more than ten years. In fact, I suspect even five is pushing it..

'Charismatic' rulers normally by this age have set down their 'ism' in texts and have groomed a 'Chief Disciple' to [normally] take the cult over once they've died [just ask N Korea how to do it]. But Trump's done neither - mainly, I believe out of sheer narcissism and jealously [I am fairly sure that like Hyman Roth, Trump thinks he will live forever and no star can be allowed to threaten his].

This means his cult will collapse on his death. There will be people who will try to become the 'Dear Successor' but they will fight each other.

Like with Putin and Hitler, he is a very 'personal' strongman - all the disparate elements in the country aren't loyal to an 'ism' or the country - just to the Dear Leader alone. This is different to say, Xi's China or Stalin's Soviet Union - where while he has been elevated to 'Father of Peoples', they still have 'the Party' in the background to be loyal to afterwards. A lot of folks are merely sucking up to the Orange One because he is popular and has his cult.

This means the disparate elements will fall away once Trump is dead. Less nuts conservatives will bail on his 'legacy' the moment it is politically expedient to do so..

Trump is an incompetent strongman to boot. Folks from his business days tell us of a lazy micromanager with huge Dunning-Kruger, even bigger ego and with zero loyalty to anybody save himself. Business associates tell us of a guy who would bully, deceive and fuck over whenever he could. This is a guy who even back in 2015 would only be able to get a character ref off someone he was paying. His previous reign showed us a man who simply didn't get that folks might have a loyalty past self or be motivated by anything save money. He hates people who are more competent than him, do shit he doesn't understand, who have spines, or differing views. His is the only star which can shine, all the time.

This means his attempts to forge a fascism will fail because he is too muddled to work out how to do it [and might not even care, if this is simply 'another grift'], won't listen to anyone else and doesn't trust anyone who could actually pull it off to pull it off.

The problem is, however even with this working against him, he could do a fuck-load of damage to America before he croaks - and it is possible that someone actually smart, driven and competent manages to somehow get control of Trump and forge this 'new America'. But I most fear the fact that a lot of 'the whackdoodles' do not seem to fathom that 'them woke Marxist gloablist lefties' will fight them every step of the way - and with arms, if needs be. Why not? They would if the roles were reversed! They think they're the only ones motivated by shit like 'don't tread on me' or the history of events like the Revolution which means like a bully, they will be shocked when their opponent finally whacks them over the head with a chair. [and that's how civil wars begin].

I cannot advise you what to do, Outsider personally - I don't know your situation, resources, precise location etc. But I would say it wouldn't hurt to start thinking about 'the unthinkable'. Most obvious three being 'how far are you really willing to fight', 'how easily could you run/hide if needs be' and 'what's the chances of you needing to'? Truth is, unless you are a 'designated Other' chances are you could survive a full-blown fascism as long as you kept your head down and gave sign of outward conformity [or non-resistance]. However, deciding earlier in the regime to voice some opposition [even if mild and hesitant] is most likely gonna mark you down as an Other... even if they don't come for you straight off. In this case, it's where my 'Kenny Rogers maxim' comes in - knowing when to hold, when to fold, when to walk away and when to run.

Preppers have a term 'SHTF' - [when the] shit hits the fan. I think it's not hyperbole to consider a Trump victory an orange shit in the fan if you're an Other [or likely to be marked down as one]. They also have another line which is not nuts - 'when the Event is on the TV it's too late to prepare' [proven 100% correct by the pandemic; remember all the panic-buying at the start?]. The time [for example] of getting a passport, salting away a wad of cash and working out a provisional destination [and off-grid means to get there] is not when the cops are knocking on your door! KarmaPolice (talk) 22:19, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

What I will tell you is that my finances are limited and my disability and lack of social skills means that I am often ostracized by peers. And authoritarian regimes are a death sentence if I ever go there due to my vocal nature on these topics. TheEternalOutsider (talk) 22:34, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Are there any strongmen (there being no obvious females of the species) who were able to arrange a succession, or is it the nature of strongmen to *not arrange* a potential succession?

There are various possible outcomes for the US:

• Either candidate strong win
• Either candidate weak win
• Bush/Gore 2000 election repeat
• Trump incapacitated
• Others?

Possible outcomes? Anna Livia (talk) 23:41, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Red Letter day...

There was an election last week [no names, no packdrill] where I live. Remembered today, checked the result - my person won. By single digits. For the first time in twenty years of voting, my vote actually mattered! KarmaPolice (talk) 22:48, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

There is a video on YouTube about your voting costing like, 1k dollars, however I haven't watched it because I don't trust people to not somehow turn it into a flame war in the comments (Also, I think it's about the US Elections, not the UK ones) TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 00:29, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

It was only a local election, so not that important. It's just that the 20+ elections I've voted in up to this date my choice either a) won with a decent majority [rare] or b) lost by a wide margin [usual]. It was also a fairly 'multi-cornered' election to boot, in which a minibus-worth of voters could have thrown it in more than one direction. And I was convinced to vote for the winning side for literally one policy. KarmaPolice (talk) 00:44, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I am in a purp!e district of a red state. I am really glad you voted. Local elections matter, at the very least because things go up the chain. The fish can rot from the head or the tail in modern politics. It's really bad if it does both. Torrent (talk) 08:36, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Domain ownership?

A thought just occurred to me. So you can buy domains. But they can expire if you stop paying for them. I thought "ownership" kind of implied a sort of perpetual title? This is yours. It rather seems to me that when you buy a domain, you don't actually own that domain, you're just leasing it. Am I getting something wrong here? Carthage (talk) 05:02, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

You're not, really. Wikipedia:Domain Name Administration, second paragraph, has a pretty good explanation of what's going on. You can't really 'buy' them outright either, because the various entitites that make them work (including ICANN itself) charge nominal fees.Namako (talk) 07:45, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

A brewery and restaurant my family and I go to often could close soon

Sanford Brewing Company has pretty decent food and beer, and now they're setting up a GoFundMe and saying if they can't hit that goal, they will have to close, citing the economy and inflation. --DoomTay (talk) 03:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

But. Florida doesn't even have income tax so nobody should have less than it costs to dine there. Corporate tax rates are the lowest, that means business big boombah. The rent and the supplies must be killing them. Do they just have a bad location? Torrent (talk) 04:20, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I guess so. The GoFundMe also mentions Heritage Park failing as another factor, plus someone on Facebook claimed that Sanford is "a tough town for businesses" and that city management has made decisions that "go against tourism". Still hasn't stopped my mom from saying "They have survived COVID, but they couldn't survive Joe" --DoomTay (talk) 04:25, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

A bar that was REALLY popular in my city turned into a Walgreens or a CVS, Iunno which, but way back in 2019, I got no real reason to visit either now that it ain't the 49er or the ODB. It's gonna get bought, don't give them extra dollars, they are selling. Torrent (talk) 04:28, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

What is it with this lying Florida spammer? I still remember their weird lies about there being no student debt or something.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:06, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/florida-taxes and I think their corporate tax is 5.5, which is very low. Student debt is contingent on the lender and university. Torrent (talk) 06:30, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

It does appear to exist at least, and there is a GoFundMe, but the cynic in me says it sounds a little like they're bankrupt and trying to avoid the process and the potential associated liquidation - they mention both unpaid wages and wanting to sell the building. Also, Sanford sounds terrible for businesses and trying to sell buildings, this one in particular. Namako (talk) 12:12, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

What are you talking about? That barely sounds like me at all. I've even been digging through history to try and dig up anything resembling that and I can't find anything. --DoomTay (talk) 01:44, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think they're talking about you. Carthage (talk) 01:51, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Who else could it be? I don't see anything else about anything in this thread being removed between, say, yesterday and now. Only other possibility would be Torrent, but I'm having a hard time finding anything linking him to what the other guys are talking about either. That or my search fu just sucks. Closest I could find was this, which seems to involve someone else completely. KarmaPolice's tone toward the end of their comment below does not help. --DoomTay (talk) 02:41, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

On closer inspection, yes it does appear to be a different person who spammed shite about Florida. Comments withdrawn, with apology. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:11, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QnOEvfpwV5Y I don't know what discussion I've ever had on this site, let alone with you, pertaining to this topic. Torrent (talk) 10:45, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

No, we're not having that bleeding discussion again, Torrent!

Anyway, Bob - your powers of remembering shit continue to serve you well - this is also the account which 'asked' us where to move to 'because taxes are so high' and in another whining about inflation like it was controlled by a knob or something on Biden's desk [slightly fucking ironically, headline inflation would have been better if if it was...] But as I'm in a puckish mood, let's dig a little further.

Okay, the company in question is a mixed brewery/hospitality business. They're fucked from several directions, which would hurt anybody in their industries [or industry in general].

- The market in craft beer has collapsed. This was bound to happen due to the over-investment in 'craft beer' indies in the previous surge in the 00s/10s and larger players finally producing drinkable 'craft' beers [or taking over successful craft operations and expanding]. This is normal in capitalism - a new market arises [in this case the 90s], loads of entrepreneurs set up shop, there's a boom while the going is good and everyone is interested in the novelty but then the market ends up with overcapacity and a lot of mediocre beers being made [similar can be said about vegan foodstuffs, at least in the UK]. If you hit up the brewing Reddit [for example], you'll find tales from all over America of smaller outfits either cutting back on production, mothballing plant or shutting down entirely. In the 'boom' phase some business mistakes were made - for example, I wonder where the 'brewery' part of their business is [brewing takes up tons of space and buying/renting 'retail-price' floorspace for it is a bit stupid if you can get 'warehouse-price' space for that bit on an industrial park on the edge of town].

- Americans are drinking less booze and drinking less beer. America is ageing too, [esp in God's waiting-room which is Florida] which means there's gonna be more folks who can't drink [most obviously, meds] - but the place in question doesn't have any 0% beers on offer [at least of their own product]. I also note that none are listed as vegan, which suggests they aren't [brewing has yeast clearers which many are animal byproducts] which is cutting off another small section of the market.

- Inflation is a serious issue. But it's not our 'everyday' inflation [yay, my knowledge of homebrewing is useful!]. Barley, hops and sugars have gone up like 50-75% in the last couple of years [and 90% of brewing of this]. Extras [such as 'additives' for flavouring notes etc] have also gone up considerably. Could 'the Dems' / 'Biden' have stopped this? Unless they started to fix prices for ingredients, my answer is 'no' - for the rises were due to the Ukrainian War, supply-line tightness post-Covid and a series of weather-related events which have hurt crops. Inflation for food ingredients has also been considerably above headline inflation rates [I've heard mentioned between 25-50% in the UK] which is really hurting the restaurant side of things. Brewing is also relatively energy-hungry and electricity/natural gas prices had the 'Ukrainian spike' because y'know, 'free markets. The only 'silver lining' is at the moment while new capital costs have ballooned [due to ongoing supply issues] is that due to the 'bust', a lot of second-hand kit is going real cheap right now.

- Covid is a lingering problem for businesses directly affected [ie ones like this]. Often, Govt support etc 'kept them alive' but they then came out of it with significant debts or at least with their savings seriously depleted [just like some people]. They then got hit with the inflation spike which would have made their debt service costs soar. The pandemic also changed habits too, and some of those are to stay. For two examples; I now make my own coffee/meal bars instead of buying them and a sibling of mine now gets in takeaway delivered [via Deliveroo] with friends rather than going out to dine. From more folks working from home to being more health conscious, the whole structure of the market has changed and businesses need to adapt or die.

- Florida has labour shortages. This would be really hurting their restaurant side of the business, esp if they feel they 'cannot afford' rises [free markets again!] to get employees [which is in some respects a false economy, because 'chronic overwork' is a major reason for folks quitting and you have that in spades in businesses which run on chronic skeleton crews]. You know what I hate? Going to a place and getting real shit service because it's clear the server is doing the work of three people [it tells me it's a management which quite often doesn't give a fuck, which doesn't bode well for the T/Cs the back-staff have, with the resulting knock-on for my food etc].

- As Namako alludes to, recent events aren't good right now in general for Florida tourists. Two hurricanes back-to-back, the latter which left bits of the town itself with flooding. [Oddly enough, I don't want to holiday with waders unless it's fishing. Plus, I might get in the way of the cleanup etc]. Dim Santis culture war posturing etc wouldn't have helped attract tourists. I mean, let's hear from the NAACP;

'If you do decide to travel to Florida, please exercise extreme care in all parts of the state. Be aware of your surroundings. If you do decide to go to the State of Florida, please be aware of the open hostility towards African Americans and people of color.'

Or what about Equality Florida?

'...Florida’s slate of laws and policies targeting basic freedoms and rights pose a serious risk to the health and safety of those traveling to the state. We regret that these attacks have already led many to flee the state and are driving others to consider relocation. And, in a state whose economy is fueled by visitors from around the world, it is with great sadness that Equality Florida has had to take the extraordinary step of responding to inquiries by issuing an official advisory warning about the risks of travel to the state.'

It's hard to not get the feeling that there's elements of 'we don't your type here' when the state pulls LGBT vacation details from their site. Holidays are supposed to be relaxing, not having to constantly look over your fucking shoulder. The town itself might very well be fine, but the perception surrounding the state is masking this. When foreigners have started to comment on this, you are in fucking trouble.

- Oh, and 'Heritage Park'? Projected large redevelopment which got scrapped, from the looks of it. As they don't seem to have even started construction, I'd guess if a company was pinning their hopes that an upswing of business in 2-4 years time would get them out of the red now, that's kinda 'clutching at straws' territory.

- Please explain to me how any of these are 'Joes' fault'.

- For bonus points, do you believe everything 'someone on FB says'. For bonus bonus points, why the hell do you have to listen to said rando account rather than taking to locals [as if it is a place 'you go often to' this shouldn't be hard']

KarmaPolice (talk) 13:29, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

So basically typical bubble burst, changing times/habits. I had a feeling that the two hurricanes would somehow be a factor, or at least the straw that broke the camel's back.

"Please explain to me how any of these are 'Joes' fault'." I should probably reiterate that that angle is something my parents believe, and they definitely seem to have developed a more conservative streak lately. But to answer your question, they seem to be the type that blame the economy on the President. In fact, they (still) seem convinced that Biden's whole taxes for those making more than $400,000 had some kind of negative impact on the economy through indirect effects such as layoffs, and that Harris's policies will quote-unquote "devastate the economy". [DoomTay]

Yep, alongside a pandemic, an inflation spike and shortages. It's arguable that it turned out be a 'perfect storm' because like an illness, 'you' could have survived the infections etc if they'd not been all at the same time. As they think layoffs are a problem [current FL unemployment rate 3.3%, which is not only effectively 'full employment' but is also at what it was in Nov '19] suggests to me said parent is retired [because most folks in work are aware that the slack labour market of the 80s-10s isn't there anymore]. In fact, a major problem is a combo of underployment and of pay not keeping up with said inflation spike [partly because folks 'actual inflation' was like 25% when at best the benchmark was saying 15% and often the raises were 10%].

'Blaming Biden' is not 100% stupid, because if this had been a 'normal situation' it would have been more his fault. However, the issue was more 'supply shocks' than anything else; mainly the post-Covid ungumming of trade-routes and then the Ukrainian War which did a doozy on the international food/energy markets. Yet Biden is still to blame, because it was he who signed off the Covid recovery/emergency funds, which were inflationary [as it was throwing demand into the economy with no similar rise in output] - my theory here is that Biden knew there would be some inflation but felt it was a lesser of two evils when compared to the inflation-free but anaemic recovery after the banking crisis of '07-'09 [part of the inflation blame has to go to Trump's stimulus cheques too; it was more money into an economy which was barely functional at that point] but Ukraine compounded with this and the usual unfurling of Covid-era pent-up demand.

The hurricanes were, perhaps most likely the thing which 'killed the hope spot'. As I laid out below, if they're asking for $125k and haven't paid their wage-bills this strongly suggests they've been swimming in red ink for some time. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:11, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

"For bonus points, do you believe everything 'someone on FB says'." Hell no. I don't know where you got that idea from.

"why the hell do you have to listen to said rando account rather than taking to locals". 1) even though it's in my city, it's still a good 15 minutes away. 2) I guess "often" was the wrong word here. "Occasionally" might be more appropriate, probably not much more than twice a month or so. --DoomTay (talk) 01:44, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Your message inferred 'local connections'. Therefore, I hold it was reasonable comment to make. KarmaPolice (talk)

I'll add another factor. Ron DeSantis unfortunately used all of his magic sharpies removing climate change references from the state law books, so unfortunately he is unable to use his magic sharpies to redirect hurricanes from Florida, like his rival Donald Trump. :) In seriousness, though, Florida already is bearing a huge load on climate change. Infrastructure here was largely designed in the 1950s-1970s booms, and subsequently is ill prepared for increasingly more powerful, wetter hurricanes and sea level rise. Florida may have no state income tax but property and flood insurance have gone through the roof, because naturally actuaries understand that climate change is no hoax (sorry Ron's sharpies). It looks like downtown Sanford's issue with flooding (which has happened a few times in the last few years) comes from Lake Monroe / St. John's River, which borders it. As we've seen this month (especially in Florida and North Carolina), storm surge isn't the only bit of flooding that can happen with hurricanes. Hurricanes (now wetter due to climate change) can dump a whole lot of fresh water in an area at once, causing fresh water flooding too. BobJohnson (talk) 13:49, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Fuck, I forgot about the insurance issue, which is not defensible as I read an article about the buckling of the entire property insurance system [to the point it very well might be the 'next great bailout'] just last week -Here's one about Florida. The other problem with Florida is that it continues to develop, which means put bluntly 'there's more shit to wreck'. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:05, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Looking into a little more, I agree with Namako's deduction that they might be so hard up against the wall this is their final, desperate attempt to survive. I mean, a quick look suggests the place they're trying to sell [I assume they'd own outright] would be worth at least $300k which suggests to me the bank is about to foreclose [because if it was unencumbered they could fairly easily get a secured loan on it]. Asking for $125k sounds like a business which has little to nil working capital left and again, this would be the kind of thing I would talk to the bank about and if they've nixed the idea of extending your overdraft that normally a bad sign that your figures are all wrong.

It's a chronic problem in 'business rescue' shows like Kitchen Nightmares; by the time the Ramsey is there, half the time it's too late to save the patient [which is why his 'success rate' is only about 25%]. One of the ways 'Bar Rescue' works better [success rate 50%] is that from I can tell Taffer is willing/able to be a much more generous sugar daddy and provide a larger dollop of seed money to his charges. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

If you want to see racism and Nazism live...

I'm not advocating piracy. I'm not saying every person, it's not my first time and some people get baited. But if you, yourself, would watch an NFL football game on stream, via a 'crack' mirror site, as I did tonight there is a chat. And it was a very boring match, so the 'crack' stream really entertained itself. It will do it again on Sunday. If you think the Republican party/platform isn't creating Nazis, please watch an NFL game with a crack chat stream. It is the most actively racist platform I have ever seen. You can post anonymously to the crackstreams chat. It isn't hard to get spammed out if you make an anti-nazi point. Torrent (talk) 03:52, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

If you want to watch racism and Nazism live (without doing any internet piracy), simply watch footage of the American CPAC when it's going on.

In all seriousness though, I'm honestly feeling a sense of dread as the American election gets closer... and I don't even live in the country. Impiricism (talk) 15:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Same here. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 17:07, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

NFL is a very conservative leaning institution, though they try not to make hay of it because their audience still has a fair chunk of liberals they don't want to lose. Piracy is a criminal-leaning institution. What do you get when you add conservatism to a disdain for the law? I don't think you get an environment without nazis, let's say. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 17:35, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Piracy of a controlled public broadcast is not a disdain for law. What a take. If I could watch it on a TV in San Fransico, or a TV in Cleveland, only if it were broadcast there, otherwise I am forced to eat ass, what are the options? I am a hockey fan, I split an NHL pass with three friends during COVID and we all got games we were not allowed to watch because of broadcasting rules. I bought some NHL gear, because I liked a couple teams and found a way to watch them. Piracy does not harm franchises and I really don't think it correlates to 'disdain of the law.'. If you go over 2 mp/h past the speed limit to pass or overtake or whatever, is that 'disdain of the law?' Torrent (talk) 07:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

This is such an first-world-centric worldview. Try living, working and earning money in a developing country such as Serbia or Bosnia and getting your favorite games, favorite shows, favorite software legally. Some content won't be regionally available and some sites will be blocked. You think VPN would be a solution? How about companies stop putting regional restrictions at all? Also, you'd have to pay the same as in USA. We have to wait for sales, while you can buy stuff on day one. Don't get me on living costs, renting costs, electricity, food etc. 🇷🇸 Serbian Arbiter (What would you have your arbiter do?) 09:31, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

And speaking on conservatives. There were conservatives on FMovies who complained about the "woke". But there are conservatives on legal sites too, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, news sites and even Steam forums too.

how about companies stop putting regional restrictions at all, exactly right. The US is a federation, like the EU, it's not exactly easy or the same from New York City to Los Angeles, there is a lot of country in between. Buying national sports hoodies and toques online and waiting for delivery, I mean, I wasn't complaining about that. Do you want a Habs hoodie? Mine wasn't free, it's a few years old and I still wear it because I don't buy new clothes every year, but if you really want it... Torrent (talk) 11:17, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

The Britannica Encyclopedia has a chatbot

Oh, joy. Carthage (talk) 01:48, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

This isn't necessarily a 'bad thing™'.

From my little play-around it's nothing more than a 'question answerer' programme which then trawls Britannica's entries to try to come up with an answer [several of my tests failed partly or wholly because there was a lack of internal content on the topic for it to present]. The length of answer is also dependent on how many articles it pulls up to answer the topic - my question on wikis got me a stub from one article, while a question on left-handiness got me a three paras collated from four articles. This in fact one of the better examples of LLMs which we will see more of - them providing useful assistance because it is locked within a strictly curated walled garden, not picking about on whatever it can find in the great online.

There's others. Ever hear of 'Wolfram Alpha'? It's good with hunting out facts and stats - I get better results out of them than trying to tease them out of Google [esp these says as I think their NLU has perennial glue ear]. There's another called 'Watson' - it's one of the things which IBM has been doing for the last 20 years. I bet ya've experienced Watson without knowing it. In fact, all search engines have been using varying levels of these since about 2010 when they went into 'natural language search' [I remember using the likes of AltaVista/Google c 2002 and it was a very 'website finder' and not at all a 'question answerer' [in fact, a lot of this function comes direct from WP]. In fact, there was a site - 'Ask Jeeves' which was billed to be capable of answering 'questions in normal language' which I can testify some twenty-five years later, was fairly shit. [Does history rhyme?] KarmaPolice (talk) 03:12, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

There seems to be an AI mania going on where if someone labels something as AI-powered, it will attract some additional level of attention whether its AI-powered or not. A necessary component of AI is probabilistic decision making, so one way to test whether something is really AI or not is asking the same question twice or the same question in two different ways then comparing the similarity of the two answers. Bongolian (talk) 06:24, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Kids these days with their wikipedia and fancy search engines and fast internet. No waiting for Encarta to load on your 2x CD-ROM drive so that it can crash or ask you for the other disk. Not having to dig out a heavy index volume of Britannica so that you can figure out where the article you want is on the shelf. No trying to make Altavista give you something useful before your browser bugs out. No tromping off to the library in the cold to find that they don't have any books you want and there's a long waiting list. On the other hand, I guess I got to experience encyclopaedias going from books to CDs to the internet inside my childhood. Very cyberpunk. Namako (talk) 08:02, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Which is why I make a point of not calling them 'AIs' - they don't have intelligence. It's why they keep on producing fails; they don't spot 'incorrect number of limbs' when drawing a picture, fail to realise glue isn't edible, that nobody wants to spend overnight waiting on outdoors platform for a train or making a video clip of 'how people made the pyramids' and having said stones being lifted by a single person. Limited-purpose LLMs with NLU ['natural language understanding'] and carefully-curated 'walled garden' datasets is [in my opinion] going to be the medium-term 'AI revolution' - that 'data collection' jobs like paralegals, librarians, archivists and so on will be made functionally obsolete [or more correctly, will become much more on the 'data science' end of things as you'll need professionals to tend those datasets to avoid GIGO situations with LLMs - I mean the problem will be not with Britannica's chatbot retrieving info, but another bot writing that info]. But yeah, there's gonna be some more AI-woo around for some time yet.

However, while all the above is cool and promises to be a real time/effort-saver in the long run there's also issues. To whit; people losing the ability to do manual searches for information. The main question being, 'does this really matter'? After all, a ton of 'formally useful skills' have either died a death in schools or fucking should [such as cursive with fountain pens and long division]. I've heard about teenagers now reaching uni/work age who don't get seemingly 'commonsense' things like 'digital filing systems' in particular and 'computer file systems' in general. This isn't a 'bad' thing per se; they were reared in a world of smartphones, half-decent search functions and broadband perma-connections, while I was reared in a world of beige PC cases, tons of local storage [due to shitty metered 56k], said machines OSs had poor/zero search facilities [which demanded good digital organisation so you didn't lose shit] and even the 'average' user was forced to get down/dirty with the OS a lot more to make shit run etc which meant they got to know the OSs file system whether you fucking wanted to or not. Lost skills, due to not really being needed anymore. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:31, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

This election WIGO got me thinking...

Fox News polling claims Harris could lose the popular vote yet win with the electoral college.

Now, of course, Fox News is not at all a reliable source (I've heard their polling is surprisingly bipartisan, but I'm not sure how true that is), nor do I know of the reliability of NJ.com, but I think it would be interesting (as well as really funny) if this does come to pass, and Republicans freak out about how the situation that won them the 2016 election made them lose this year. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 18:07, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

It would be so fucking funny that I almost hope this happens. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Try our pumpkin spice lasagna!} 18:29, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Hmm... updates map...

Wisconsin Evens.

Pennsylvania Harris +0.1%

Harris needs to win both to win. Trump only needs one.

But all the polls are waay within the margin of error... KarmaPolice (talk) 18:56, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

More than funny, it would be the best chance America has at destroying the electoral college in decades. "Yes, the election was stolen, let's get rid of the garbage institution that did it" might actually work. Maybe. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 19:30, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

@KarmaPolice What poll did you source these numbers from, by the way? I figured it would've been the Fox News one, but it strangely never mentions Pennsylvania or Winsconsin. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 19:32, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

FiveThirtyEight 'poll of polls' for the key states I'd flagged up a couple of months now. There's about 10 states which are 'within the margin of error', and yes it depends on how many decent polls have been done in the first place. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The Fox polls have indeed been called reasonably accurate for what it's worth. Fox has at times attempted to put its own spin on poll results. There is also the inherent problems of modern day polling: due to spam bombing of phones, most people do not answer the phone unless they know who it is. Polls of "likely voters" (and hence new voter enthusiasm) are not likely to include new voters at all due to a lag from registration to access by pollsters. "Margin of error" is hence a deceptive sort of nomenclature, it's more accurate to say "statistical margin of error" that does not include qualitative methodological flaws. Bongolian (talk) 19:35, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

See https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2019-09-21/the-numbers-from-fox-news-pollsters-dont-lie-whether-president-trump-likes-it-or-not Chillpilled (talk) 21:42, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

The issue with polling is normally gonna be in weighting - knowing that '81% of Xs in Y state intend to vote Z' is one thing, knowing how many Xs are gonna turn out [and where] is much more guesswork [for example, students]. There's also the various bias factors being edited in - for example, one which shall be constantly debated is the 'shy Trumpian factor' - ie the amount of folks saying they'll vote for Harris/Oliver because the perceived 'public negativity' over saying Trump, but really intending to. But again, you can do this too far; one of the reasons here in the UK the political class was shocked at the crushing of the Conservatives was an exaggerated belief in the 'shy Tory factor' [in the end, it turned out more of these simply stayed at home] which shored up the predicted results. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:01, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘i'm actually hoping this happens. maybe then, republicans will finally unite to get rid of this joke of an institution. otherwise, at least the irony of their preferred candidate being deprived of the presidency by the electoral vote that they so defend will be absolutely delicious. The G (talk) 17:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

One of my bookcases collapsed (rant)

Just came back from a trip with my family to see that one of my bookcases collapsed when we were out, with some relatively rare books being ravaged. It wasn't a very good bookcase: I bought it only two years ago. But it was not supposed to be a good one, since I was extremely stingy and bought an extra-cheap MDF bookcase and I was cramming it with far more books than the recommended. My wife said that this was going to happen. As it usually happens when we disagree on something, time proves that she is right, and I am wrong.

It was my history books bookcase, and at least two books of my complete Histoire Générale des Civilisations collection, from the 1950s, that belonged to my grandparents are probably beyond salvation. They were in the highest part of the bookcase. My grandparents gave them to me because, as a kid I always loved the collection in their living room, and it's now partially gone. I don't even think I'll tell them about this episode, it will just upset them even more in a moment when I think at least one of them won’t live by the end of the year. The books on the history of Soviet Russia and the history of communism (my greatest passion when it comes to history) were not hit very hard, and the rarest and most expensive books were all in the same part, so they didn't suffer so much. The rest of my books are mostly unscathed, though I haven't really checked them all carefully yet.

I'll buy on Monday a new bookcase for the books that were on the one that collapse. I'll have to replace my remaining bookcases as well soon. They are all the same, just as crammed. I emptied another one and it’s also in really bad shape, as you can see in this picture.[21] Really didn’t want to spend money on it this month. Finding a temporary place for all of the books was also a hassle, and forced me to do something I really hate, pile them up. Right now, they are at my dining table.

I think I can at least learn a few lessons from this episode. The first one, listen to your wife, because she's smarter than you, Gee. Second: listen to common sense. Either you don’t put so many books on a cheap bookcase or you buy a better one. Saying that money spent on a better bookcase is less money spent on books is an asinine argument when you haven't read a third of the books you have (I bought Will Durant's Story of Civilization collection more than a year ago and I only read the first volume, even though it cost me a fortune and I've dreamed about this purchase for very long).

My esteem as a self-proclaimed bibliophile has never been so low. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 01:33, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I used to have a huge collection of books. Including an entire set of the Britannica Encyclopedia. I lost my collection a few years back because of an eviction. The few times I have tried rebuilding my book collection the books I ordered were delivered to the wrong address. So I just gave up. Carthage (talk) 01:57, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

If the books that you think are damaged beyond repair and are important enough to you, you might want to contact a professional book repairer or bookbinder about prospects and costs of repair. I've had both solid wood and Ikea wood fiber book cases. Both types have gone kablooie when abused. The solid wood one had a board that bowed severely on the shelf with the heavy books. Bongolian (talk) 03:21, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

'Cheap bookcase' isn't entirely the problem here; it's bad design too. All the weight of your books would have around the 1/2cm of MDF above the three wooden dowels in the shelf [the bit of wood joining the 'shelf' to the 'wall' of the unit] which would have given out sooner or later. If not that, it would have been the dowel itself and/or the hole it went into breaking apart [the other main fail of this style being buckling shelves]. In fact, the 'internal walls' might have been stopping the failure for a lot longer than otherwise because it was dissipating some of the weight.

In this particular case, you might have been better served by instead of using the provided dowels drilling the dowel-holes all the way through / deeper into the shelf and then using some long socket screws to fix the shelf in - this would allow the weight pressure to be better-distributed. Whacking in some more supports doesn't usually hurt either; for if it only has two connecting pins/dowels putting a third through the middle etc so each join carries less weight [some people swear by glue, but in this case that's more to help make a flatpack more rigid than increase inherent strength]. Other options include the shoving of some brackets underneath and/or using some battening to again, distribute weight better. If this had been me, I would have backed these shelves with sheets of plywood to help strengthen it [though by this stage I'd only do this if I'd got those shelves given to me, as the costs would entering 'uneconomic' territory]. The cynic within me also wonders whether the person who assembled it in the first place did it as well as it could be [vanilla version].

There is an element 'what the fuck were you thinking' coming into play here; another part of the issue isn't that it's MDF, it's that it's thin MDF [and is obvious from the pic]- I wouldn't have risked anything in these past paperbacks. I'm currently in something similar position to you; are pissing about with squared paper and websites trying to find a affordable/acceptable/fittable new home for my 250kg's worth [I'm going with a load of Ikea Billy narrows; they're rated at 14kg per-shelf but a canny eye can see they're exactly the same materials as the fullsize (30kg per-shelf). Conclusion; as it's the dowels/materials which are the important bit of weight limits, the narrow shelves should have about the same limit...] KarmaPolice (talk) 16:32, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I used to have a large personal book collection. I purged it a few years ago. If I hadn't picked it up in 12 months or it wasn't exceptionaly rare I gave it away. Still keep an academic collection though because they are bit more specialised. Honestly IMO book collections are often less about the actual books as they are about what "owning books" projects about the owner. Kind of similar to gun dudes who stock up on military hardware they will never use. The collection is more of a private demonstration of taste than a useful resource. Most of the people who think they are curating a personal library for reading (but never re-read the books they insist on keeping) are really just curating an analogue version of myspace. Tikitime2 (talk) 15:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Guilty as charged. As I said in the OP, I usually buy far more books than I read, and I often see them as ornaments more than as resources. I have books that I bot 6 or 7 years ago that I still haven't read, and I doubt I'l read them anytime soon. And yes, it is very hard for me to donate books than I won't ever touch again. Actually, Tikitime2, thank you, you just gave me an excellent idea. I'll try to donate some of them. It won't be easy, but this way I'll fight my hoarding tendencies, maybe won't have to buy a new book case and some people will make use of something that just accumulate dust in my home. Thank you. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 17:35, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

And thanks for the other good comments as well. I'll see if I can find a bookbinder to fix at least my grandparents books. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 17:36, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/07/bookshelf-say-about-you

As well as periodic culling [perhaps yearly] I also don't allow new books to actually join my collection straight off - that instead I stick a post-it on it with the purchase date and it goes in a 'new book box'. The note only gets removed when I've read them enough to decide to either a) keep or b) dump [ie donate]. If it's been a year and no decision is made, it gets donated by default - if I've not 'got around' to reading it yet, chances are I never will. The definition of 'enough' naturally depends on the subject; if it's a refrence work I need to have established the information within is 'useful', 'correct', 'current' and 'unique' while other works need to have been at least skim-read and judged to be worth reading again/properly. And if the box is full, no I'm not allowed to buy any more.

Residency in the bookcase is an honour, not a right. KarmaPolice (talk) 22:58, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Legal Riddle

By law, you may only be convicted of a specific crime and the state must prove beyond reasonable doubt that you are the culprit. Two identical twin brothers, by coincidence, both murder an innocent person at roughly the same time in completely unrelated events. There's video evidence in both cases, witnesses, DNA, etc. The only problem, the courts have no way of determining which twin killed which victim, even though it's clear that each twin murdered someone. How do the courts proceed from here? CorruptUser 04:26, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Were both twins completely in the nude when committing the crime? Did they just appear out of thin air right next to their victim? Surveillance cameras, license plates, even the clothing one wears can be used to track and identify you, and not even identical twins are completely identical. What if one twin has a noticeable scar that the other doesn't? Carthage (talk) 04:34, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Mobile phone signal triangulation is another option. However, the most obvious method would be to either work out casus belli for said murders, though that assumes that both twins wouldn't have a reason to kill the same person. Then the prosecution can argue to the jury that as twin X clearly had a good motive to kill and Y didn't. If they can nail one of the murders via this way they can then do the other one via a process of elimination. KarmaPolice (talk) 04:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

This stuff has actually happened. Another example of twin confusion, but slightly different.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 05:17, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

If there's DNA evidence, it may be possible to differentiate the twins based on DNA mutations that occur between time that the egg splits and the crimes are committed.[22] Bongolian (talk) 05:27, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not asking for how you solve the case. I'm asking for how to proceed in a situation where you know the suspect is guilty of some heinous crime but you aren't sure of which crime. CorruptUser 05:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

If the prosecutor cannot specifically identify that an individual committed a specific offense then they cannot be prosecuted. It is by no means uncommon for the prosecutors to be convinced that an individual committed a crime or crimes - but unless they have sufficient evidence to convince others beyond reasonable doubt - they won't waste time and money on a prosecution. Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:21, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

You have received several answers as to how to plausibly identify the perpetrator of which crime already. Carthage (talk) 07:02, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Some jurisdictions would be able to try them together, by arguing that the two had clearly colluded with the other to cause the double murder. Therefore, it wouldn't matter if you didn't know which one caused it, for both had caused one and that's thirty years [the sticky situation happens if one murder they were found guilty but not the other]. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:01, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

There is the occasional alibi of 'I did not commit [this crime] because I was committing [that crime] at the time.' Anna Livia (talk) 16:53, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Having a firm alibi would effectively drop the other twin in the shit. Therefore, the prosecutors/investigators themselves very well might work out if one of them does have an alibi [they often will as a matter of routine, just to ensure cases don't collapse]. The police are not [as a rule] geniuses or anything, merely folks who have a lot of resources and normally, a very methodical way of working. I once had a very illuminating conversation with a detective about a pretty complex case which surprised me the lengths they'd gone into unravelling it [I was a background witness right at the end of their investigation] to the point they bitched that this had been, like six months of their life. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:53, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

How Come When I Look For Criticisms For Judaism All I See Is Antisemitic Shit. (Not On This Sight).

I Like To Look At Criticisms Of Religions Such As Christianity And Islam, Etc. But When Look For Stuff On Judaism All There Is Stuff About Jews Being Evil All That Stereotypical Stuff Right. And Even When They Examine Stuff Like The Torah And Talmud, They Find Them As An Excuse To Paint Jews As Evil Folk, Now Don't Get Me Wrong I Find A Lot Of The Stuff In The Torah And Talmud To Messed Up (Like The Bible And Quran), But Use To Paint A Unsavory Picture Of Jewish People Which I Tried Looking At Their Side (Which I Do When Looking A Different Arguments). There Were Some Ok Ones Such As How Criticism Of Judaism Is Often Conflated With Antisemitism (Which Fair Enough Nothing Is Free From Criticism). But Then Most Of It Was Conspiracy And Ruling The World Drivel. What Do You Guys Think. P.S I Not Antisemitic In Any Way I'm Just Like To Look At Religious Criticisms As I'm An Ex-Muslim. ^{— Unsigned, by: Tryhardbutnottoomuch. / talk / contribs}

When you make a post, use four tildes (~) to add a signature to the end so people know who is speaking. Sadly, a lot of people just want an excuse to hate an Other group, and historically, this has often been Jews. While I'm opposed to all religion and think there are things within Judaism and certain Jewish communities to criticize, I don't see it as an excuse for discrimination. I oppose all genital mutilation regardless of gender, for instance, and Orthodox/fundamentalist sects are very sexist. I'm also quite critical of the Israeli government, but some people will say anti-Zionist as a dogwhistle for anti-Semitism, so I just avoid the term "Zionism" entirely since it's way too loaded. It helps to understand people's motivations when they talk about these things - do they want to help humanity or hurt a certain group? IntrepidSkeptic (talk) 02:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

I think there's a simple reason for this; Judaism isn't a 'missionary' religion like Christianity or Islam is, so unless you've got a personal connection you won't really know much about it [because you don't 'need' to] and as a fairly strong 'ethno-religion' even agnostic/atheists from Jewish backgrounds still see themselves as 'Jewish', even if this continues over generations. I also suspect there is a lot of arguments etc over their faith/culture/traditions etc within their own milieu which partly through design and partly through us goys not really giving a fuck [because, why?] only about 5% even really gets out into wider society. Though similar can be said about Islam; most can't even name any of denominations of, let alone be aware that there's various schools of through within it.

Lastly, a lot of criticisms of religion normally focus on their treatment of 'others', normally driven by their 'ultras'. Judaism has not really had much chance historically in showing this, as they've only been rarely been in the driving seat anywhere. However, these days we have the example [like Intrepid points out] of the Ultra-Orthodoxes [Haredis] have made an unholy alliance with the hard right-secularised Israelis in their calls build a utterly homogenous 'Greater Israel' and to have said country ringed with steel tips [part of the problem being that these groups have been the tail of the wagging dog of Israel and particularly Bibi for about 20-30 years now]. However, there has been criticisms of this, for example of them refusing to interact with women who aren't their wives etc [here is an archived NY Times one] which suggests either you weren't looking hard enough or [more likely] didn't know what questions to ask when looking.

But it can be put this way; a hardline Puritan, a Wahhabi and a Haredi all sit down around a table for a chat. As long as they don't actually directly talk of religion [and are all male, obs], they'd spend most of their time agreeing with each other, mainly over all the stuff they hate [ie most of the known world] and complementing each other in their choice of attire. KarmaPolice (talk) 02:50, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Puritans haven't existed for literal centuries. A somebody. (talk) 03:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Fine, what about Plymouth Brethren? Jehovah Witness? What about digging up the corpse of Fred Phelps? Anyway, I shall argue that the New Puritans are alive and kicking, strutting their stuff around the old Bible Belt and breaking the Second Commandment by their idolatry of the Orange One. But yes, you're technically correct. KarmaPolice (talk) 03:18, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Plus, discover that Not Every Word Needs To Start With A Capital Letter. KarmaPolice (talk) 03:02, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

One can find criticisms of ultra-orthodox Judaism, even by non-orthodox Jews. In particular, Messianism (especially Chabad/Lubavitchers), excessive insularity, religious education that leaves children with no real-world skills, relegating women to the domestic realm, and in Israel there has been much criticism of the Haredi for the exemption (recently repealed) from military service so that the Haredi can spend all their time on Torah study. The Lubavitchers by the way have engaged in missionary activity, trying to convert non-orthodox Jews to Chabad. Bongolian (talk) 03:25, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Or more particularly by other Jews. We have some Heredi here in the UK, but they're so insular that most-Jews don't even know that they exist [I think they only came up in public consciousness during Covid in their utter refusal to do anything like even 'damage limitation', from keeping all their 'schools' open and having large weddings.] I've vaguely heard of the Chabad before; they strongly struck me as being almost like 'Jewish Jehovah Witnesses' - and if I remember right, Messianism is deeply suspect with lots of the wider Jewish movement [just like JWs are because they reject the Trinity [along with Mormons]. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:44, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

This post may say more about what google is serving to the OP - perhaps as a consequence of their previous search history. When I did a google search on " criticisms of Jewish religion" I did not have the experience they describe.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 04:43, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

I Can Asure You I Have Not Searched Up Anti-Sematic Stuff. (User:Trytohardbutnottoomuch) 5:09, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Then i Do Not Know Why You Had That Experience.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:33, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Most Of The Antisemitc Stuff I Stumbled On Too Was On Twitter (Yes, I Know I Made A Mistake).^{— Unsigned, by: Trytohardbutnottoomuch / talk / contribs}

twitteR? thaT maY explaiN youR probleM. (Also please remember to sign. If you don't, then people have to clean up after you.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 08:24, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

That wasn't a sewer-pipe you were holding up to your face, that was Musky's 'Fweeedom tube'! Seriously, that thing is of almost nil worth for anything relating to learning, information or intelligent commentary now. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:44, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Google enshittification self-pwn

My Google search result

For your amusement:

“”AI Overview Google is considered an example of enshittification, a term that describes the gradual decline of a service or platform's functionality. Enshittification occurs when a platform initially offers benefits to users to attract them, then prioritizes profits over users. Here are some examples of how Google has been criticized for enshittification: Increased advertising Google's search results have become less relevant and more ad-heavy over time. Search engine optimization Google has used search engine optimization to benefit its advertising customers. Fraud Google has been accused of fraud. Jedi Blue Google colluded to rig the ad market through Jedi Blue to regain value for itself. AI search chatbot Google is developing an AI search chatbot that will show users what it thinks they should see, rather than what they ask for.

Bongolian (talk) 04:11, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

one could always use bingAMassiveGay (talk) 14:54, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Microsoft's version of AI is called "Copilot" and their AI at least tried to show that they were Concerned.

"It seems like you're referring to the concept of "enshittification," which is often used to describe a decline in the quality of online products and services over time. In the context of Microsoft, this term has been used by some to describe changes or updates that users feel negatively impact their experience. Is there a specific aspect of Microsoft's services or products you're concerned about? Maybe I can help clarify or provide more information!"

If Twitter had an AI, its response would probably be a poop emoji. BobJohnson (talk) 15:22, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Twitter does have an AI though. Elon was concerned that ChatGPT wasn't racist enough and spun up "grok". ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 13:22, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

You're right, thanks for reminding me. Of course, there's no fuckin' way I'd actually pay for a "Premium Plus" dumpster fire subscription to Twitter to try this "grok" bot out... BobJohnson (talk) 13:49, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Don't forget the abundance of AI generated "art" that you have to filter out manually. 🇷🇸 Serbian Arbiter (What would you have your arbiter do?) 19:14, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

This is probably the most accurate result I've seen in ages. Been using DuckToGo for a almost a year. While not as good as Google on its prime, it's still IMO better than any alternative. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 12:38, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Google still gets my business when I am looking for stuff to purchase online; find their results superior to Duck's. Otherwise, Duck gets my 'general' searches while Wolfram gets my data-based ones. Apart from shopping, the only other use of Google I have is doing searches merely to see 'what people using Google' see. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:55, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Question - are certain parts of the Internet demonstrating de(-)evolution? Anna Livia (talk) 20:06, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Internet enshitification is in many ways not new in media; I think it's quite similar to a television concept that Wikipedia calls channel drift and TV Tropes call "network decay". It's not really "de-evoltuion" to me. The crux of the issue is advertising-supported media chasing fads and profits, with the result being that the original (often more niche) purpose of the media is often neutered or even completely abandoned. (This even applies to Internet enshitification. Remember Google's old slogan "don't be evil"?) Media quality (not always but usually) declines in favor of low-cost sensationalism. (The poorly named "reality television" is somewhat equivalent to the Internet's clickbait.) Essentially, it's a "capitalism side effect" thing to me, where chasing consumers over time trends media towards lower costs and "lowest common denominator".

I would not be surprised if one could find this phenomenon in other historical advertising-funded media. (Though advertising in its modern form really didn't exist before the late 19th century, so you probably won't find a good parallel before then). BobJohnson (talk) 21:29, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I think Reddit is perhaps the best example of this. It just might be me, but a lot of the subs these days seem to be half-dead or worse. Some are now populated by nothing more than some chatbot attempting to drum up topics which nobody bites. Almost all old-school forums have the fraction of the traffic they used to, and even RW is sitting on something like 20% of the traffic it used to in the mid-late 10s [which might be seen in retrospect as it's 'Golden Age']. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:40, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

What Are Your Thoughts On This.

https://nypost.com/2024/10/23/us-news/doctor-refused-to-publish-trans-kids-study-that-showed-puberty-blockers-didnt-help-mental-health/?utm_campaign=nypost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social ^{— Unsigned, by: Tryhardbutnottoomuch. / talk / contribs}

That the NY Post is normally a shit source? NY Times version. In this edition, the doctor in question isn't 'refusing to publish', from the looks of it they'd like a bit more time before publishing to try to work out why it goes against other studies [including ones funded by the same batch of cash which did this one] and their own professional experiences. If you get anomalous results, it's basically standard procedure to rule out problems etc before releasing [like when CERN found a particle breaking the speed of light but then it turned out to be a measuring error].

But you'll be shocked to learn that the NY Post coverage [which I also read] didn't mention either the other studies or it's not a refusal to publish, only a refusal to immediately publish. Perhaps the fact this coverage called her 'woke' was part of the reason? KarmaPolice (talk) 12:30, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

My thought is that I'm not going to click on a NY post link. GeeJayK^{Where all evil dwells} _{Where every lie is true} 12:39, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I didn't. I read an archive.is copy. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:08, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

NYT piece (from which the NYP piece is derived) is by Azeen Ghorayshi, a recurring character the paper assigned to write its articles on trans medicine. Known for misrepresentations in the past, apparently considers James Cantor reliable. The NYT's own journalists protested its coverage of trans people in the past, the company responded this protest would "not be tolerated." So it goes. Chillpilled (talk) 21:05, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

For fuck's sake, please, this is not difficult! Sign your posts with (~~~~) or (if that's too fucking hard) by clicking on the fucking sign BUTTON: on the toolbar above the edit panel. (You can indent successive talk page comments using one more colon (:) for each line.) This keeps the place tidy and stops you looking like a complete arsing tool so please, just fucking do it already. Carthage (talk) 13:05, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

It might be worth noting that not all keyboard layouts include ~ without needing an alt-code. Also there is no sign button above the edit menu or anywhere for me. Namako (talk) 18:49, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

It's a pain in the arse to dig out when I post from my phone. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:11, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

There is a 4 tilde button underneath the edit dialog that will insert it for you. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 20:23, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

What Do You Think.

Theirs This Twitter User @Maia Poet I Want Your Thoughts On Her. ^{— Unsigned, by: Tryhardbutnottoomuch. / talk / contribs}

My thought? You are hanging out in some really shitty bullshit circles on Elon Musk's bullshit Twitter de-evolution if you've even heard of this obscure purported transgender "detransitioner". BobJohnson (talk) 13:01, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Looks like your average detransition grifter. Also for the love of god will you start signing your posts? Carthage (talk) 13:03, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I think Tryhardbutnottoomuch may be entering the troll zone here: posting a bunch of whatdoyouthinks without giving a reason or an opinion of their own start. Bongolian (talk) 15:08, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

And Here I Thought That The Only Ones Who Capitalized Every Word Were The Nuwaubians. —cosmikdebris ^talk stalk 17:35, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

We have at least one other established user who uses non-standard capitalization. We currently don't have any who blatantly disregard out signing conventions - though we have had in the past. Possibly our new user could comment on these two somewhat irritating issues.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 18:02, 24 October 2024 (UTC)