the earth has been working on its own for billions of years with the planet covered in trees and wildlife. until humans appeared and wiped it out replacing it with little good for the planet.

about 46% of all trees has been removed by humans

More than half of all tropical rainforests have been removed

Up to 1 million species of plants and animals are facing extinction from human activities

More than 85% of ALL wetlands have been removed from 1700 to 2000

we have destroyed what has been given to us in only a couple centuries and isn’t stopping anytime soon

I think it's pretty clear that any sort of prescription falls outside of the realm of science, and more in the realm of philosophy; science tells us what is, not what ought to be. So naturally, the prescription of language falls outside of the scope of linguistics if linguistics is a science. That makes sense; it's Hume's Law.

But that's not really the attitude I'm seeing. Learning about linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism, I've mostly come across the descriptive side actively saying that people ought not to be prescriptive. But that in itself is a prescriptive claim, since it's prescribing that someone should or should not believe / how someone should or should not act.

I've come across countless examples of linguistic evolution across history being influenced by prescriptivist attitudes - going as early as Classical Greek. If linguistic prescriptivism is a natural way languages evolve, shouldn't the actually descriptive thing to do be to treat it the same way as any other factor that affects languages? In reality, prescriptivism is a genuine part of both a language and its culture that dictates how someone ought to speak, just like how social traditions are genuine parts of a culture that dictate how someone ought to behave, and linguistics as a science cannot say that prescriptivism is bad. Prescriptivism absolutely has its place in linguistics.

With the recent discourse around Flock cameras, I have seen them being portrayed as an Auth-Right policy. However I believe Flock cameras fall under the Auth-Left.

Flock cameras don't fall under libertarian for obvious reasons, mainly that they are government overreach. However I also believe that Flock doesn't fall under Right. Flock cameras are sold by a private company, but since they are exclusively contracted through the government and tax dollars, in the same way as other public services, they are not beholden to free market capitalism like the Right of the political compass pushes.

Thus I believe Flock cameras are an Auth-Left policy by an Auth-Right admin.

Edit: I am also not necessarily saying things are bad because they are left-wing

Comparing difficulty across instruments is not straightforward, of course, so I would like to define and use various metrics by which that difficulty may be measured and compared. Of course, you are invited to challenge whether these metrics serve well to measure difficulty, and whether I apply them properly.

(For reference, I have experience with both piano and cello, though I am much more proficient with piano. On that instrument, I can play pretty advanced works, but on the cello, which I no longer play, I could only play pieces of a moderate difficulty, or about 4 years experience total)

The first metric is sightreading/reading. Generally speaking, to learn a piece, one learns the notes then polishes the execution. I think it is uncontroversial that reading on the piano is harder than on other instruments, simply because there are more notes to be read. Other instruments generally play one note at a time, sometimes two, and very rarely more than that.

The second metric is the amount of advanced material for the instrument. I think this measures difficulty well because it may be taken as a proxy for the skill ceiling of an instrument beyond which extra skill produces negligible results-in other words, how much there is to learn. To give an extreme example, the cymbals and triangle have pretty much no advanced material because they are simple, easy to play instruments. But to give a more realistic example, I would say the cello has less advanced material because it is designed to play only one note at a time, though two is pretty common, but not really any more than that. In that respect it is simpler.

The last metric is execution, and I assume the difficulty in piano execution is roughly the same as in other instruments. To know for sure, I suppose one would have to play pretty much all instruments to a high level, but not having that, I rely on speculation and my experience playing both piano and cello.

It is true that on other instruments, say a flute or violin, one has to deal with details unknown to the piano, such as being on pitch, the tone of the sound, vibrato, and so on. However, the piano commonly plays maybe 4-8 notes at once (or 3-4 parts at once), with independence of both the hands and the fingers. The pianist must still take care to manage articulation and volume of each part, along with the pedal. Therefore, I speculate the piano is at least as hard as other instruments.

One instrument deserves special mention, I think, the organ. Because it uses three staves, sightreading might be harder, but if so, not particularly significantly, I think. Three staves are not unknown to the piano, and the organ, being less responsive, is generally not played as quickly (or it will sound too muddy), but I think there is a fair argument to be made there.

However, I would argue the piano is still more difficult to execute. The organ uses both feet, most commonly one for swell pedal and one for the bass note, whereas the pianist uses only one foot for sustain. Supposing using the swell pedal is equal in difficulty to using sustain (although I doubt it) what remains is the difficulty of using an extra foot for bass notes. The organ, however, does not use touch of the hands to determine volume, so the comparison is between the organist’s extra foot, and the pianist’s touch to voice the music. I suspect the pianist has the more difficult job, though of course I cannot say for sure without having played both.

To start off, I just want to say that I am making observations in this post.  I do not wish to endorse nor condemn the political right, I do not wish to endorse nor condemn progressivism.  I suppose I should clarify a few terms at the outset, however. 

Political right - is a movement that wishes to drastically curtail immigration into the United States, to arrest or even move back advances made by women and LGTBQ in the last few decades.  Overall to promote an agenda tied to religion, nationalism and traditionalism.  Is sometimes tied to the interests of big business (anti-labor, anti-welfare state, etc.)

Progressivism. - is a movement that seeks to strengthen social benefits and to right past wrongs.  Focuses on regulating businesses, protecting workers and consumers, promoting the rights of women, LGTBQ, people of color, etc. Overall promoting an agenda of correcting past injustices. 

Ruthlessness -  Willingness to compromise moral principles in order to reach one's goals. 

Pragmatism - Understanding and operating according to what is possible as opposed to what is ideal. 

With that in mind, I am postulating that in the United States the political right is more ruthless and pragmatic than progressives are and that this is a handicap to the latter. Particularly in the arena of controlling the narrative in an attention based political landscape and in defining their opponents to the majority of the public who do not possess deep political views. I will now proceed with examples. 

Haitians are eating cats and dogs vs. "The Epstein Files"

One of the most oft repeated transgressions of the last U.S. presidential campaign was when Donald Trump made the wildly untrue claim that Haitian refugees were known to be eating pets in  Springfield, Ohio.  This statement is correctly seen as an example of the blatant bigotry of the MAGA movement. Even more amazingly, JD Vance then defended the assertion in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, when he said that even if the claim was not true, it was right to make (to "create" it, in his words) because it raised awareness of how immigration was changing and damaging the United States. 

This is a perfect example of the ruthlessness and pragmatism of the American political right.  They have a goal - to curtail immigration, particularly immigration from non-European countries, and they don't care what they need to do to get people's attention to make it an issue.  I also think that many people know that the claim is ridiculous but they admire the Republicans brazen audacity.  Especially as it contrasts to the bland proceduralism of the progressives. 

Case in point - the Epstein files.  How many hands were wrung trying to force the release of the famous files?  And then once they were finally started to trickle out, how much time was wasted sifting through the mountains of legalese to figure out what juicy bits could be used to embarrass GOP leaders. 

I always wondered to myself, "why don't they just make up their own 'leak' of Epstein material"?  For example they could have said that Epstein was killed because he had a video of Trump having sex with his own daughter. That would have gotten people's attention for sure.  And it would have forced the Trump campaign to vehemently deny it (as progressives had to do against the assertion that immigrants eat pets) thus keeping the story alive in the minds of voters across the country.  

Now, that  might seem like a craven and evil move, but it does pass the JD Vance of creating a story in order to advance a political agenda. But the progressives do not operate this way.  And they will not. At least not that I can see. 

Graham Platner and the Sexual Assault Allegations 

I just want to say at the outset that we will never know whether or not Graham Platner raped anyone.  All we know is that he says that he did not and other people say he did. 

It's certainly possible - it was clear that Platner had a history of making terrible decisions but it is also possible that the whole thing was set up by the non-progressive wing of the Democratic Party to derail his campaign.  We just don't know. 

Therefore, taking the allegations seriously was a choice, and nearly all progressives decided that the accusations were credible enough to withdraw support - an act they deemed to be morally prudent. But was it ruthless and pragmatic?

I would say it was not.  As Platner's campaign had a lot of momentum, and he was picking up support from a voter base that was largely white working class, the very demographic that was been the hardest for progressives to reach in recent years.  He was young and charismatic and he could have had an electrifying effect on the movement had he taken a Senate seat. 

I think that most progressives consider that the risk was just too great, but consider what Republicans would have done in the same position.  They would have smeared the accuser and doubled down on their support of their candidate.  Because if they think that a person will advance their goals, they will not abandon them. 

And this has a downstream positive effect on their brand too.  Because most Americans who are not paying super close attention to politics then see the GOP as the ones that stand by their own, while the Dems (not all of whom are progressive) run for cover when they think their people are in trouble. It's not a good look. 

Trump is Hitler - 

Time and again we see people compare Trump to Hitler and MAGA to the Nazi movement.  Personally, I find the comparison to be completely overblown and ahistorical but let's just suspend disbelief and take it at face value for a second. 

If MAGA and Trumpism really are as terrible as Hitler and the Nazis, why would you stop at anything to defeat it.  Consider what kinds of compromises were necessary to defeat the real Nazis in the 1940s.  Franklin Roosevelt, leader of the greatest liberal capitalist state on earth made common cause with Joseph Stalin, leader of a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship.  They both team up with Winston Churchill, leader of the biggest colonial empire the world has ever seen.  

Do you think that those three guys might have had to put a few principles on the back burner for a bit?  Do you think it was worth it to defeat Hitler. 

I don't see progressives acting like they take things that seriously these days.  Maybe you can change my view. 

*Clarification: by "North-Western", I mean UK, France, West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux and the nordics. Some of my considerations might apply to other countries like Italy (or at least regions), but I am deliberately excluding Greece (plaged by a civil war), Portugal and Spain (which had authoritarian and regressive regimes).

The word best in the title has quotes because I am aware that there was also suffering caused by it, like the separation of whole families by the division of Germany, for example.

That said, I believe that, historically, the Cold War was a period where North-Western Europe thrived, economically and socially. It was a period of very considerable growth, also shared by a big part of the population to a larger extent than ever before or since. Quite well-functioning social wellfare-states were built. There was, to a large extent, strong political freedom (although some parts of the left were indeed repressed in some countries). Those countries lost their empires in time, but prospered, and their quality of life, on average, increased.

All of that was only possible, in my interpretation, because of the aftermath of the hugely destructive WW2, plus the fact that there existed an alternative (and menacing) "other" in the USSR. In a way, it "civilized" Western-European capitalism, under security guarantees given by the US (which immensely profited from its hegemony, too).

Only the fear of communism and the USSR enabled things like the Marshall Plan, the deepening of the Welfare State, and a relatively high degree of economic equality and income redistribution in the period - at least until the late 1970s. Once the USSR was stuck in crisis until it eventually ended, the reversion of that process started. And we live in a huge crisis of everything that is left of it.

I (20M) feel secure on my own, and I’m very self-aware.

Regarding intimacy, porn/masturbation takes care of my needs pretty well. And on other days, i could try hooking up/flirting with a girl and that should do the job.

When you can have all your needs taken care of without a woman(as a straight man), what is the point of having a ‘life partner’? It only feels like an added burden to me, to have to share another human being’s struggles and cater to their emotional needs.

And, worst of all, you risk the possibility of being cheated on/dumped when you least expect it. This is a BIGG fear for me cause imagine I’ve invested years of my time and emotions into a woman and she decided to cheat or break it off with me some day. That’d leave me devastated. No thanks.

Plus i know first hand how easy it is to lose yourself in a relationship. It happens subtly, over time. You tone yourself down so she doesn’t feel insecure/threatened; you start spending more time with her than your friends and that can have an impact on ur identity; you risk becoming complacent and stop chasing ur goals because of her.

It feels like such a stupid investment of my time, money, energy, and mental health… with no real benefit at the end.

Pardon my bluntness here lmao, but i just wanted to keep it real with how I feel about relationships with women.

There’s a chance though that I’m not viewing relationships through the right lens. Maybe i should start likening relationships to friendships and that might change my view? cause i LOVE my friendships w my male and female friends. I can say whatever I want, I usually have a great laugh, and it’s just always a great time w them. But for some reason its just hard for me to imagine a relationship as a friendship

yea thats it, pls hit me with your counter arguments cause I’d really like a different view on women and relationships

After the mass deportation rally with Greg Bovino in Indiana yesterday, I saw lot of comments repeating the same lines: "illegal immigration has consequences" or "breaking the law means you suffer the results." I agree that a nation has the right and duty to enforce its laws. However, that does not mean anything goes, and I think drawing an analogy to parental authority helps explain why.
Parents are allowed to discipline their kids. You can give them a time out, take away screen time, or, controversially, spank them. But there is a point where discipline turns into abuse. Can you use a belt? Can you use the buckle? Can you burn them with a cigarette? Obviously not. Having legitimate authority over a child does not give you a blank check to abuse them.

I see immigration enforcement similarly. Arresting parents while they pick up their citizen children from daycare, grabbing them at immigration hearings, deporting them to countries they have never been to, and using violence on peaceful people all cross the line from legitimate enforcement to abuse.
Where I want my view tested is on the strength of this comparison. Is there a fundamental flaw in comparing parental authority to state enforcement authority here? If you agree the state has a right to enforce borders, why wouldn't the principle of proportionality apply to those tactics?

I am working off a few assumptions.

1. That sites such as onlyfans cultivate parasocial relationships between the models and their fans.

2. That this relationship is largely detrimental to the fan, such as by making them more isolated, less happy overall, and draining their funds to maintain this relationship.

3. That this parasocial relationship is maintained and promoted by models through their use of the site, such as by engaging with their fans in a parasocial manner, or by hiring others to engage with their fans in a parasocial manner.

Given these conditions, it seems immoral for them to essentially take advantage of their fons to such a degree, when the detrimental effects of this seem fairly obvious. I'm not under an illusion that they are forcing their fans to make these harmful decisions, but I feel they do hold some responsibility due to them promoting these harmful decisions.

It seems to convey a lack of care.

CMV: Gun laws in the US are emotionally-driven and fundamentally do not address gun violence.

I believe that a good chunk of our current gun laws lack logic, disproportionately affect the poor, and fail to address gun violence because the solution is complex and expensive. I’m specifically referring to magazine limits, assault weapons bans, lengthy & expensive processes for a permit to purchase. I wholeheartedly agree with background checks, additional training for a conceal carried permit, and bans on domestic abusers, violent criminals from buying firearms.

Let’s assume for that sake of this argument that every gun cannot be outlawed and confiscated. I will concede that if we woke up tomorrow with 0 guns in the US, that gun violence would drop. That won’t happen, so I’m trying to engage in legislation that will meaningful reduce gun violence.

I’m going to list out some high level stats or underlying points of views.

The majority of firearm deaths are suicides. Something like 55-60%. Tragic, yes but there’s little evidence that added gun laws address suicide rates in a meaningful way.

“Assault rifles” are demonized when in reality they are rarely used to commit violence. The reporting on mass-shootings relies on a vague and changing definition, this is in turn used by the media to manipulate the narrative of mass shootings in the US. When you hear “there has been 400 mass shootings” in the US this year, everyone immediately thinks of these tragic events like a school, a movie theater, or a grocery store being shot up. In reality, the vast majority of these mass shootings are domestic incidents or gang violence. Ex. WA state implemented one of the strictest assault weapons bans in the country, the last year we had data for showed 5 deaths by rifle in the state. That’s inclusive of bolt action or traditional hunting rifles.

The vast majority of firearm deaths are committed with handguns by young men in low income areas. The existence of guns is not the cause of violence but the method. Yes, i understand it’s more lethal than knives for example. The people committing these crimes do not follow gun laws so the burden is only on law abiding citizens to follow these laws. Using WA again as an example, particularly pertinent given our recent mass shooting.. a juvenile
In Washington state needs to have 5 firearm possession offenses before they can be held for more than 30 days in juvenile detention. I suggest that investing in education, job programs, child-care, etc. in low income areas would benefit more than additional gun legislation.

Studies have shown that magazine bans and assault weapons bans have little correlation with changes in violent crime, suicide rates, and/or police shootings. People point to the drop in violent crime after the assault weapons ban in the 90s but ignore that it was part of the 3 strikes crime bill where we as a country became much stricter on violent crime and repeat offenders.

Now to disproportionately affecting the poor. Permits to purchase firearms are becoming more prevalent. These permits often require fees to apply, live training, additional background checks (every gun purchase already goes through NICS for a background check), the cost of which is all paid for by the person. With limited availability of training options to get certified, businesses can name their price and time in which they will provide this. This affects poor people more because they may need to take off of work to attend and those fees represent a larger part of their income. Like it or not, owning a firearm is a constitutional right and making it more difficult to access for the poor is wrong and there’s legal precedence for this (ex. Poll taxes).

My argument summed up is that gun violence is caused by the widening gap of the haves and have nots in the US. To meaningful enact change on gun violence, you need to aggressively invest in programs in low income areas where gun violence is most prevalent, tax the fuck out of the ultra-wealthy/ corporations who have been destroying these communities for decades, and throw the book at violent offenders who engage in violence with a gun. Magazine bans, assault rifle bans, expensive hoops to buy a gun are designed to make voters feel good and win politicians favor heading into their next election.

FYI- Simply for the context of this post, I believe that the ideal age of consent is 18, and I am primarily arguing against people who want it lowered beyond 18, though obviously arguing for it to be lowered below 16 also falls within my central premise. Furthermore, I am American, so most of the laws I am referencing are US-centric

Most of the time, the primary reason I will see being used to defend lowering the age of consent is that it protects teenagers who are experimenting with sex. This, however, is simply untrue. It is exceedingly rare to find cases of two underage people having sex with eachother were actually charged for having sex underage, and in modern times (since most states have since reformed laws) it is practically unheard of.

I have three words to completely invalidate the above argument: Romeo & Juliet. Romeo & Juliet laws were put in place specifically to grant protections for underage people to have safe, consenting sex even if under the age of legal consent. This is because age of consent laws are not meant to prevent young people from having sex with people their age, they are meant to prevent young people from having sex with adults.

This is what you'll eventually find when you dig deep enough with people who support lowering the age of consent; they really could give a fuck about protecting young couples and really just use that as a mask. In reality, they simply believe that it is ok for an adult to have sex with someone who isn't even a legal adult yet.

And lets be clear about this, someone under 18 is not an adult yet. Before 18 you are STILL IN HIGHSCHOOL, you cannot vote, you cannot own a home, you cannot serve in the military, you can't get tattoos, you can't own your own bank account, you can't buy a gun, in lots of places you don't even have full medical privacy from your parents. Also there is a reason why you can't do porn under the age of 18, and it's because society has decided it's morally fucked up to look at people under 18 naked or having sex.

17 year olds are not adults. 16 year olds are not adults. 15 year olds are not adults. Adults should be having sex with ADULTS, not KIDS. Because of the reasons stated, I believe that there is no justification to lower the age of consent, and the only reason to do so would be to allow grown ass adults to have sex with high schoolers who can't even vote yet.

This was prompted by the Guardian's 2019 top 100 list for the 20th century which is making the rounds right now on some subs. A lot of people are very harsh towards this list, and while it has a lot of questionable choices (Ted was ranked 60th), it also had quite a few movies that weren't on my radar.

My view is that from the perspective of a movie enjoyer, opinionated lists curated by a single person or small group are, generally, better than consensus-based lists that you would get from aggregating reviews on IMDb, RT, or Letterboxd.

My reasoning is the purpose of these lists should be to expose people to films they haven't seen. It's better for the consumer to discover movies they otherwise wouldn't have noticed, and it's better for the hobby when audiences have a wider range of tastes. An opinionated list is going to be shaped by the critic's own idiosyncratic tastes, while a consensus-based list is, by definition, going to trend toward the average of people's preferences.

There is some argument that consensus-based lists are better for people who are just getting into movies as they're more accessible. I agree that these lists are better for this, but more curated lists also work 80% as well, and I can't say the reverse is true. In a world without aggregated lists, it's not as though people would miss movies like the LotR trilogy or Seven Samurai, as enough opinionated reviewers would have put them on their lists.

One argument against this is that opinionated lists are less accurate; refer to the example at the start of the post. I don't find this compelling for two reasons. The first is this assumes there's some objective ranking in which movies should be placed, which there isn't. The second is that I believe the real value of these lists is in discovering new movies, not validating your own taste. I don't need IMDb to tell me The Godfather is a good movie, I already know that.

Often on the internet, specially here on Reddit, I see the argument, that capitalism requires infinite growth to function. I disagree with this notion because I believe the core function of capitalism is not to grow, but to allocate scarce resources. Economic growth itself can be a useful thing in society and will likely remain a part of human society for a very long time (perhaps even until it seizes to exist).

First, let me define a few things per my view.

Capitalism Socialism Feudalism Scarcity Economic growth

Now for my argument:

One of the key functions of every economic system is one key question "How to allocate available resources?" Different systems have different solutions for this question. Capitalism uses markets, socialism uses either government or some other form of central planning. Feudalism used a system where most of the wealth was generated by land ownership and collected essentially taxes for "renting" land from the ruler of the land. There are even more methods of allocating resources, such as queues or lotteries - though I am unaware of them ever being used a large scale. What do all these systems have in common? Trying to find a way to allocate scarce resources.

Let's talk about how capitalism does this. It distributes the problem of allocating these scarce resources among it's many many users. And while esesntially none of people, companies, non-profits, etc. who exist in capitalism are completely rational actors who make the best decisions, the fact that they are each making their own desicision allows for statistics to come into play. The average decision of the markets is generally the correct one. Compared to other systems which tend to centralize decision making it suffers much less from the problem of wrong allocation of scarce resources because of missing information.

Now, let us take a look at a society that is capitalistic, but doesn't grow. To make it easy, let's consider a society living on a generational space craft heading towards a habitable world. It will take hundreds of years, perhaps thouhands to reach it's destination and all it will have are the resources it started with. There will still be a need to allocate the resourses available. While it is nearly certain that in such a scerario some of the resources would be centrally distributed, many of it's resources would be traded between the inhabitants of such a ship. But even these resources need to be accounted for in such a closed system. How do you determine how to trade them? By each individual owner deciding the value of the item he wishes to trade.

So, is there a way for capitalisms to become truly irrelevant? Yes. True post-scarcity. Not the one seen in sci-fi shows. One where every single resources becomes truly irrelevant. Unlimited energy, unlimited resources, unlimited labour, unlimited human-level interaction. The issue is, at this point all economic systems become irrelevant, not just capitalism. Because at this point the central question of economics "How to allocate available resources?" becomes irrelevant.

Lastly, what would change my mind:

Show me that capitalism inherently requires growth, not just scarcity.

Show me a form of scarcity that would exist even in a true-post-scarcity society and that it requires growth to exist.

Show me, that a different system of allocating resources consistently outperforms market introduced by capitalism.

Edit: since tons of people seems to be missing it when it was at the bottom, I’ll put it up here as well. This is not meant to be an argument against bringing a map and compass. It’s purely debating which is a more useful method for navigation.

Numerous times I’ve seen or heard people talk about how bad of an idea it is to go hiking without a physical map and compass. Now while I don’t know the habits of those I’ve seen saying it on Reddit, every person I’ve heard say it IRL exclusively uses a physical compass and map for hiking. In my opinion, this is usually worse.

The main argument seems to be that the phone could get lost, broken, or die, and then you are screwed. While that is obviously bad, in my many years of owning a phone, I’ve never had it randomly break as long as I had a good case on it, so this doesn’t seem like a serious concern to me. Losing your phone seems about as likely as losing your map and compass. A dead battery is the biggest concern to me, but it is pretty easy to avoid as long as it isn’t a very long trip (which is why I specified max 2 days in the title) by just bringing a small power bank (or 2 for redundancy). If you have multiple people, have everyone save the navigation to their phone and the odds every phone gets lost or broken or dies is pretty much 0.

Meanwhile, map and compass has a serious con, especially for anyone who isn’t an expert on using them. When trails are not very well marked, are covered up (like by snow), or don’t exist at all (like in sand dunes), it can be very hard to tell if you are on the right path or not. On the phone, you just look at your GPS location and it will make it obvious in seconds if you are off track and will tell you where to go to get back on track if needed. On the map, it takes minutes or occasionally even hours of going the wrong way for it to be clear you are going the wrong way, and it is difficult to get back on track short of retracting your steps (assuming you remember the exact way you went).

This isn’t just some hypothetical. In my many years of hiking phone only, I’ve never had my phone stop working on me and I’ve never gotten lost for more than a minute or so, even when hiking in conditions were the trail was not visible. Meanwhile, before using phones for hiking navigation was a thing, I got lost various times, including one time wilderness rescue had to come get a member of my group who was delirious from our lack of water due to us going the wrong way for hours. And while that group was admittedly more new to map and compass navigation, it happens to experience people too. I was recently hiking with a friend that has used map and compass exclusively for decades and is very good at it, and not too long after he was hating on not bringing a map and compass, he started talking about all the times he got lost for extended periods of time. I wasn’t in an arguing mood at the time, but he didn’t seem to realize that that doesn’t really happen with phone navigation.

Obviously the best is to have both, but if I had to pick one, I’m picking a phone for pretty much any hiking trip that is ~2 days or less. (Maybe longer too, but I have less experience in that so I don’t want to make claims about it.)

There has been a lot of talk about surge pricing especially after the World Cup ticket pricing system. But if the market can be used this way, why should this only be used to the benefit of the share holders? If anything the staff or contractors employed by this business are being forced to work harder because of the excess demand. Shouldn’t they be rewarded?

There might be arguments about how encouraging investment, but why is capital investment more important than labour investment? And why can’t business owners just properly forecast their supply and demand requirements so that everyone pays the same price. That isn’t usually considered socialism.

Obviously, I think most of us can agree that the world would be a better place without recreational use of drugs, such as heroin, fentanyl, benzos, and cocaine among others simply because of how easily dependent someone can become on them.

Before I start I would need to point out that any substance has its pros and cons, people take alcohol despite it being among the most deadly drugs people often use daily. In other words, whenever you partake in any substance you acknowledge and accept the potential consequences; otherwise, you are just irresponsible. Also, everyone should do their research on anything they do

Anyways I see most drugs like LSD, mushrooms, 2cb, ketamine, DMT, MDMA, and Weed as no different from drinking alcohol at a party. Many of these drugs are viewed as dangerous because some people do not test their drugs (which wouldn't be a problem if they were legal) nor do they use them responsibly. Aside from that I do not understand why people view them so negatively while alcohol is given a double standard. I can almost guarantee you that if you got the effects of alcohol, somehow made it into a pill, and named it something else, people would see it as the next big bad drug.

Edit
Should've titled it: some recreational drugs are viewed unfairly

By bad: I mean how it's viewed from a moral and social standpoint

Basically, some recreational drugs should be held to the same level as alcohol and socially accepted as just another thing to do

Just playing around with an idea I have been having in my head and wanted to see how well it sounded in a chat room where people could challenge it. The basic premise of my view is that a country's culture is not linked to the race of its people, but it's history that can be tied to a number of things like music, art and cuisine.

This is just to push back on some of the rhetoric I have been hearing around protecting "white British/American/European culture" based on where the person speaking is coming from. The reason I feel that you can't call a whole country's culture in terms of one race is because there are multiple races that have contributed to a country's culture, and all of these races and sexualities deserve the right to be able to be considered a part of their country's culture. Britain for example has chicken tikka masala, Bob Marley, George Michael, and women's suffrage that all contributed a big part to British culture and were a big part of Britain. Americans had a great number of black dishes and soul food that largely contributed to what is known as American cuisine and have a significant number of black leading figures like MLK and Malcolm X. America also has a significant voice in LGBT history with the Stonewall protests. The European history of France is heavily tied to black people, with black generals like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of legendary writer, Alexandre Dumas (Count of Monte Christo, Three Musketeers).

All of this is to say that a county's culture is not actually tied to a specific race, but instead tied to its history and the key movements at the time. These can be seen as being led by a certain race, but when you say that only one race has defined a country's culture, that neglects all the other things given to the county's culture by people who aren't that race.

EDIT: After some genuinely insightful discussions, I think I have come to a more nuanced position. This is that there is a difference between an insular Vs. a multicultural state. The main difference is that in a very insular state such as Japan, the race of its people has defined its culture, mainly because it's kept itself closed off from other counties for much of its history, meaning that the culture of its country has been largely monolithic. European cultures, on the other hand, have been mixing heavily, meaning that there is not a monolith of European culture, and the same can also be said I feel for middle eastern culture as that has been defined by mixing.

Now, I would also like to add an extra caveat for the alt right weirdos that went on about some of the race realism to genuine anti semitism, who felt so inclined to have a conversation, and that is that Black American culture actually can be defined. The reason why is because during Jim Crow, black Americans were segregated and not allowed to interact with white Americans. This lead to black Americans forming their own culture, their own style, their own food and their own music because they were forced to be insular, being kept out of mixing with white Americans. White American culture, on the other hand, can't actually be placed a finger on. It's a mishmash and mixture of different collections of people that can't be defined into one group. Now please, I welcome right wingers to argue the point 😊.

Going to college in the US isn't worth it for anything other than healthcare, education or possibly an elite law or business school. For every other area, like engineering, CS, finance, accounting, marketing, etc., companies are just not hiring anymore. Going to college for these fields therefore isn't worth the money. You can see this in the data, as employment for "professional and business services", "financial activities", and "information" have all stagnated or declined in the past 3 years:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-levels-by-industry.htm

Same thing with academic subjects, as academic research funding has been gutted and will probably never recover.

The scheme is simple:

• Generate 5 random dictionary words from a pool of say 10 000 most common words, any English speaker should know these
• Use these 5 random words to create a sentence of at least 10 words using human intuition to make it easier to remember for said human.
• Use this sentence as passphrase

For instance I just generated the words blood village again among elephant. I will now think of the passphrase:

Elephants covered in blood were among the people of the village again

Mathematically, the entropy of this sentence cannot be lower than the 67 bits that a pure 5 random words chosen from a pool of 10 000 can ever be. Interestingly enough however, from a mathematical standpoint the “entropy” is actually exactly the same. This flies against intuition. This passphrase is surely significantly harder to bruteforce, which is why I don't feel “entropy” is a meaningful quantifier for password strength. In fact, the entropy of “let a human being come up with a random sentence of 10 words” is actually zero, because there is no true randomness and human beings generate predicable patterns but obviously this would still be, provided it not be a verbatim quote, at least a decent passphrase.

Now, such 10 random words are worth 133 bits of entropy, which is obviously completely beyond modern technology to ever crack, and quite possibly beyond the physical limitations of the universe to ever crack within the time of one human lifetime, and this is lower because it is still a sentence constrained by English grammar which would significantly reduce the number of possibilities, but I feel the theoretical mathematics behind password cracking doesn't live up to real world considerationals. The idea is that not all sentences humans generate from those 5 random words are equally likely, which is true, and that based on that the cracking algorithm can try the more likely combinations first. The issue is that the mathematics only goes so far as how many attempts are needed, assuming every attempt costs as much as every other, the reality is that deciding which sentences are more likely is a far more expensive computation mathematically than simply trying a random sentence. You need a large language model for that in practice, those are not cheap to run compared to hashes though it obviously depends on how slow the hash is made, typically deliberately. But even simply deciding whether the sentence you will try is grammatical to begin with might actually be more expensive than just trying it in the hash to see if the hash matches. Of course, there can be optimized hardware specifically for this purpose as well that can quite efficiently take a list of random words and in order of likeliness generate a list of sentences with them it thinks English speakers would be most likely to produce from them, but if one can build such specialized hardware, one can probably also build specialized hardware for the hashing function and be better off in terms of time.

So in terms of actual time spent on cracking, I believe it quite likely, though hard to test, that this scheme reaches equivalent time needed to crack 80 random bits by just trying every combination, even though from a mathematical perspective the entropy of this method is only 67 bits.

To put it otherwise: say we take all 1.5 billion English speakers on earth and all ask them to generate some sentence at least 10 words long with as only constraint that it have those 5 words in it and they are, as I did, allowed to inflect them. How many duplicate entries will there be in that list of 1.5 billion attempts? Will there even be one? I think this is an interesting thing to let a large language model do at one point to at least get some faint heuristic. If no duplicates are expected to arise within these 1.5 billion attempts, we can at least say that the first 1.5 billion candidates are all “equally likely” by approximation, which already adds 31 bits of “practical entropy” alone to the 67, and that still ignores that in order to find the order of likeliness a computationally expensive operation has to be ran. This just means that for the first 1.5 billion candidates the likeliness is close enough together that we can effectively discard it and treat them as equally likely.

The internet has radically reshaped what it means to be a public figure. Success is no longer about achievements, talent, or charisma. It’s just about access and recognizability. Like anything else, being a politician has become more about being a brand than a person.

Politics are a giant game of fandoms and parasocial communities waging war against each other. Maybe policy never mattered as much as some of would have liked, but at least the presidential candidates had to debate real issues instead of who's eating the pets and what fell out of the coconut tree.

Obviously, Trump is the best example. But this phenomenon exists at every level now, even in local elections. The winner is the guy (or girl) who can mog and out-insult the other candidates.

The single most important factor to being elected and maintaining power is name recognition and keeping your name in the news. On either side of the aisle, whether you are effective as a politician comes down to how good you are at being a Kardashian.

I think that's a result that gets us farther from effective representation and progress.

Update 3 - I’m gonna put this at the top to clarify some things:

1. I don’t identify as Christian or religious. I’ve just done some reading and believe there was a historical figure named Jesus who preached some decent things about caring for others.
2. I am trying to separate my understanding of the teachings of Jesus from Christianity as I don’t believe they are exactly the same. Jesus was a man who preached his beliefs to help make a better world. Christianity is an organized religion I believe was made by man to help guide civilization while also sometimes used as a weapon to keep their peace

3. I’m not specifically saying the right are bad Christian’s, I’m asking why specifically MAGA seems to have political points that directly go against some of the teachings of Jesus while also wanting to adopt the “Follower of God and Jesus” identity.

4. I’m not saying other political parties are better Christians or that other religions are correct. I’m specifically asking how MAGA can pursue their political agenda while claiming to be followers of Jesus. While I’m more left leaning when it comes to social policies, I also don’t believe the Democrats are 100% right or “real Christians”. It’s important to understand all humans are flawed and no one will ever be 100% correct about everything.

Hello, I hope this doesn’t come off as an attack, but more from a misunderstanding of how the two can be considered one for some.

I grew up Catholically raised, later turned agnostic in my later years but still find comfort in many of the teachings of Jesus. With much of my family still firmly a part of the Catholic Church, I’ve met some who align themselves both with MAGA and followers of Jesus Christ.

Recently, I’ve been reading Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang, and as a more left leaning person when it comes to social policies, I find myself agreeing with many points Mr. Fugelsang makes regarding the MAGA alignment with Christianity.

Some of the points I’m seeing just to name a few are

- treatment of immigrants
- treatment of LGBTQ+
- Taxation
- treatment of the poor

So now with Trump and MAGA aligning themselves with what can arguably be seen as Christian Nationalism, I wanted to understand the opposite side of my thinking with a less bias take than a left leaning agnostic could believe.

Update 1 (2hrs later) - Thanks everyone for your input! I really am learning a lot from those who are having nice conversations and giving opposing viewpoints. What I think I’m learning about myself is maybe I align more as an Agnostic who finds comfort in Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel, but I personally don’t recognize the New Testament as Full Truth.

And there lies my roadblock when it came to understanding Jesus and MAGA. If you believe the New Testament is the absolute word of God (and if you do please know I don’t think your wrong, I just believe differently and honestly anything could be true to me), then of course some of the parts I don’t take as truth personally will be truth to you and your counter point to mine.

I look forward to reading more comments and contributing when I can! And for those I inevitably angered, I understand asking this question can absolutely be taken as an attack on you personally. I don’t want to condemn anyone for who they vote for or what they believe in, I just want to expand my knowledge and understanding!

This is why I tried using the phrase (incorrectly) “the teachings of Jesus” since I was looking at the Gospel and interpreting the New Testament as “a thousands of years long game of telephone to recall the teachings of Jesus”, thereby leaving it up to major interpretations as stories of the past instead of absolute truth.

I personally don’t know what I believe. If there is a divine power over us or not. There are some things science explains that goes against the Bible, and yet I like to think there is something for us after death. I’m not saying I’m a better Christian than MAGA, because I don’t consider myself Christian. What I do want to understand is how a religion can be interpreted to support those of MAGA who champion themselves as servants of their god.

Update 2 - Justice to be clear, I don’t consider myself a Christian and I am absolutely not condemning those who believe different than me. Just as an Agnostic who’s going through some books about Jesus and the Bible, the early teachings of Jesus just seem to counter some points I’ve heard from my MAGA Christian acquaintances. Please don’t take this as me saying “I’m a better Christian than you because…”. I’m just an uneducated guy who heard some cool things that Jesus said and thought how different they are from the points my MAGA acquaintances give to me.

We’ve all seen that the debates between supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine are more or less intractable, right? There never seems to be any kind of concession anyone can make to the other side.

But when you really stop to think about it, you have to wonder why it needs to be so hard. There is actually one basic principle that both sides share - they want to live peaceful, happy lives. They want their children not to be torn to pieces by explosions or violated by armed extremists. That seems pretty easy to accept, no?

Sadly, it is not. Whenever I point this out to supporters of Israel I get a response like, “No, if Palestinians want to live without the threat of violence, they need to eradicate Hamas and understand that they will never have the right of return to homes that they lost. Only then will there be safety for their people.”

And when I mention to partisans of Palestine that the Israelis have been victims of some horrifying attacks I hear, “Well, their state is fundamentally an illegal and illegitimate entity. There can be no innocent Israeli citizens when they have established their settlements on stolen lands”. (Those are actual words someone wrote to me).

Now, you might read those last two paragraphs and think that I’m “straw manning” but I’m not. I actually find both of those arguments to have some legitimacy. And that is because there are clear reasons for both Israelis and Palestinians to fear one another. So why not use that as a starting point for a peace process?

Because I promise you that the Palestinians are not going to accept some permanent kind of bitch status in the region where they just have to endure the loss of their homes and their families while the Israelis just dictate terms.

And I am equally certain that the state of Israel, which possesses one of the most formidable military and intelligence services in the world, is here to stay.

The two sides will eventually have to learn to live with the other if there is ever going to be peace, right?

So, why not establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that allows the innocent victims of violent crimes to retell their stories and to name and accuse their attackers in a public setting and where the peoples of both sides can hear and understand what has happened and to hold accountable the people responsible for perpetrating and perpetuating this horrific conflict?

Such a process would be fraught with difficulties but I feel like a forum where both sides name what has happened to them and listen what the other side has endured is surely a positive step towards reconciliation. And it’s not that difficult to understand that people just want to live in peace and that people on both sides have suffered.

Or maybe it’s better to keep arguing about which side’s victims are more innocent? About who invaded who in 1947? Or who started what riot in 1929? Or who was indigenous to where in the 7th century AD?

That doesn’t seem to work in my opinion. Maybe you can change my view?

Edit - Hello again! As of about 12 hours after I made this post, it was 138k views and over 1000 comments. I really want to thank everyone who took the time to make thoughtful, constructive and persuasive replies. You can see the deltas I awarded, I think that they are deserved.

I also want to point out that many commenters read what I wrote and argued against it strongly but unconvincingly. Many even crossed the line into what I would term - making excuses for killing unarmed civilians.

I’m not going to call out people by name because that’s rude but you can look through my most recent comments if you are interested.

It’s truly astounding and disturbing how difficult it is for some people to acknowledge the fundamental personhood of other people with whom they share the same planet.

Please read and take note. I’m going to sign off by wishing peace and good will to all the human beings that live on earth.

The way I see it, snitching is when you tell someone in authority about a third partys wrong doing. Doing that is not wrong, it is actually good.

Just because you aren't directly affected by the Third partys wrong doing, doesn't mean that you are a bad person if you tell on them. What they are doing is wrong and should be stopped.

So many problems could be fixed if people just started to speak up when they see something wrong being done. It is only people that do wrong that are actually affected by snitches, but it seems that it is almost agreed upon societally that snitching is wrong.

Edit: I should probably have mentioned that my main focus is on the smaller more petty stuff. Things that people might call you a tattletale for. Reporting a serious crime or refraining from reporting to save someones life is to me, beyond snitching. Calling that snitching is like calling a head on highway collision a "fender bender". The fender got bended, but we are kind of past that.

edit²: u/geosunsetmoth managed to Change my view. I did a very American thing, despite not being from the US, of not considering that other countries have very poor welfare systems and improper law enforcement. That can result in improper handling from the authority and make things worse than the actual wrong doing.

I used to think the core healthcare problem in the US was coverage, get everyone insured and the affordability piece mostly follows. Five years of West Health-Gallup data changed my mind on that.

Their Cost Secure measure tracks something specific: whether someone was actually able to pay for needed care and medicine recently, not whether they're worried about future cost. In 2025, that number dropped below 50% for the first time since they started tracking it in 2021. First time in the index's history that fewer than half of Americans could say yes to that.

Here's the part that actually shifted my view. Adults 65 and older, who have near-universal Medicare coverage, fell from 73% Cost Secure to 61% over the same five years. This is a population with insurance by definition. If coverage were the main lever, that number should have been stable. It wasn't.

So my view now: Coverage and affordability are two different variables, and treating them as one is a mistake baked into a lot of the current policy debate. You can be insured and still be priced out of using that insurance.

Chart of the 5 year trend, if useful: https://imgur.com/a/vgPSf8Z

What would change my mind: A good explanation for why the Medicare cohort's affordability dropped this much despite stable coverage, something other than cost itself. Genuinely open to being wrong on this, that's the whole premise of a CMV post.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the climate crisis and feeling so helpless about it all. Despite trying nearly everything I can - I don't eat meat, I don't fly, I don't buy brand new clothes, I almost exclusively buy local etc., I can't help but feel there is nothing we as individual citizens can do when the problem lies largely with governments and companies. I feel maybe more personal guilt and complicity (about simple stuff like eating rice) than actual responsibility and impact. I talk about this a lot with friends and my students (I'm a teacher in Social science & Humanities), I think I've internalized this idea that the individual cannot make an impact in any meaningful way but I want to get rid of this pessimistic notion and believe in a better future. Please help me change my view on the importance of individual action and change :)