TheVat

Urgk. One confounding factor is that most people have basic inhibitions about consenting to sex with a complete stranger. This is doubly so for women, where there are more fraught consequences, and this underlies the creepiness. And improbability of a yes. (I would be quite concerned for the welfare of a woman who would readily agree to such a random solicitation) The study I can almost envision is an anthropologist conducting a survey, anonymized, on past sexual encounters. And self-report, especially on such an unorthodox sexual encounter, is pretty dubious as data. More locker room boast than factual report. The YouTube that's a vast trove of sensationalism and exploitative crap? That's not science. That's some jerk pestering strangers in hopes of garnering some titillating video clips. If I saw that on the street, I'd put his camcorder way up there where the moon don't shine.

Why can't I permanently eliminate the rust spots in my tub? Apparently rust will go through a lot to survive. Just saying, it's very easy to anthropomorphize processes that are not at all conscious. Natural selection leads to DNA code that preserves and replicates itself very well. That doesn't mean DNA is conscious or has wants. This is an assertion you (Gees)(messed up quote box, sorry) keep making, one which is not supported by any evidence, and would be rejected by most biologists (myself included) as a metaphysical conjecture. Awareness has, in research so far, correlated with a complex neural structure in multicellular animals. You would hope the member understands how the site works by now. And read the posting rules, on providing citations. Given their tenacity and posting length, I found their plea of fatigue unconvincing.

Maybe Pinocchio could have reclaimed the title by claiming that he actually won that contest.

I started using the term about ten years ago. Not a coincidence. Aside: I thought Keaton's stunts in The General were more dangerous, overall, but agree the SB Jr stunt was impressive. The locomotive stunts in The General were more dangerous in the sense of depending on Keaton's flawless timing and coordination to not be killed or maimed. The SB Jr stunt depended on simple geometry.

He seems to have missed out on Valar Dohaeris. The usual countersign.

What, you have never heard of a magnetic personality?

The vast majority of restrictions on religious freedom in USA has been on non Christians who have experienced pressure or even coercion to take part in Christian rituals. The manufactured outrages (as @swansont put it) of the RWE et al do seem like people taking to their sickbed over a pimple. If you feel your faith will be trampled by a gay couple who want a wedding cake then don't open a wedding bakery in a secular nation with a commerce clause in its Constitution. The idea of limited freedom is illustrated by the reality that, if your personal beliefs discriminate against others, then you aren't free to enshrine your belief via a public business or via some enforced ritual at a public event. The right to not be discriminated against overrides any right to act from discriminatory beliefs. It's really just another iteration of the nose v swinging arm filter. Constitutional republics err on the side of the nose, recognizing that's where the greater harm occurs. (though one could have gotten a nasty crack on the knuckle swinging their fist at Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, most of whose nose was a prosthetic composed of silver alloy)

My post must have been missing something, due to its hasty typing. I hope I've clarified that I meant the DoI offered a framework with "LLatPOH" that could be expanded to all citizens. No one is disputing the narrow view that men of the 18th century had of what is a citizen. I think MSC caught my meaning with "...the framework for equality was always there, and now that initial framework has been amended to be much more than that, it has made diversity, equity and inclusion, constitutional." For their time the Framers were pretty egalitarian - again, I would never argue that their century provided anything but a myopic view of equality.

The sentence in parentheses that followed the DoI quote clarified my post. I was saying that it took a BoR and Constitution, modified extensively, to articulate a meaning that implies DEI.

I think your definition of "more educated" might need some clarification, given that someone who had, for example, studied the history of Fukushima and Chernobyl, or the ongoing problems with Yucca Flats and other waste disposal options, in the course of their education might develop views that didn't support the hypothesis. I would question if there is a predominant educational track in Western nations that leads towards greater acceptance of nuclear power. It might be useful to differentiate between STEM and humanities majors, for example. Another factor to consider is that less educated (say, high school and no college) may correlate with a stronger tendency to be swayed by charismatic politicians and/or social media misinformation which promotes a propagandistic view backed by industry money.

OSA was enacted into law in October 2023, almost eighteen months ago. Must be moving pretty slowly if we're only now getting marching orders. A friend was pretty happy with LiquidWeb, FWIW. They handle transfers well. From personal experience (with a site that went belly up recently, and we members were not treated well when trying to get information), I would avoid A Small Orange.

DEI is actually stated in our nation's declaration of Independence, which holds that government should secure the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens. (we needed a Bill of Rights and Constitution, with many revisions in order to articulate that to where it could begin to be implemented) It takes a shit-ton of Orwellian Newspeak to obscure this reality. F all these right-wing snowflakes and their whining litany of grievances. If you're stupid enough to believe all this anti-woke garbage, you probably are too stupid to be hired for that job you're whining you didn't get.

What part of "we all answer to the same laws" are you not getting? The law enacts Kant's categorical imperative. We follow a law because there is a morally acceptable outcome (e.g. safe streets, clean water, disease control, less traffic accidents, etc.) when that law is universally applied and followed. Most desirable personal freedoms are secured when we exercise restraint in our actions and respect those freedoms in others fostered by our restraint. Absolute freedom would be anarchy, and no civilization has promoted it. Anarchy, lawlessness tends to result in a lot of violations of personal rights. So we accept some reasonable restraints on our personal actions in exchange for preventing general anarchy. To give a (I hope) clarifying example, imagine being sleepless until 4 AM and then doing poorly at your job the next day as a result, maybe even becoming ill from the stress. Would you accept this outcome in order to preserve the freedom of your apartment neighbor to play his stereo loudly all night? It seems pretty clear that apartment buildings (and more broadly, municipalities) need some kind of code which all must follow for the general good of those who dwell in them. The value of knowing you can sleep at night and not being subject to a bullying inconsiderate neighbor vastly outweighs the childish freedom of being able to make loud noise whenever you feel like it. So apartments have rules. Cities have noise ordinances.

May joy be yours in realms of eternal bliss! Plus one, I mean. Will try the FF posthaste.

65 meters, for both Greenland and Antarctic ice. Around 210 feet. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Sea level.pdf Sure, the topic is silly, but let's not confuse metric and English systems of measure.

A lot of voters don't absorb much economics, either in school, or from life. So when the CBO (congressional budget office) puts out a report a few years ago on, say, the Green New Deal, in which a vast assemblage of experts do a cost/benefit analysis and find something like cost = 150 billion, benefits = 750 billion, they might as well be announcing the results in a vacuum. People are information poor (partly due to an information glut, without gatekeepers to handle it), and settle on cynicism about any value to understanding numbers, statistics, or causality. And there's enough of a germ of truth in their cynicism, especially about statistics, to perpetuate that condition. There are many things that are of value to human beings that are still mostly invisible to the market, based as it is on consumerism. And it's a lot of trouble to figure all that out and realize that you driving a personal car and paying $3 per gallon of gas is building up all kinds of social costs and ecosystem service costs that will come around a bite you and your children in the ass. You might sense something is wrong, and get a few bits and pieces, but you can't engage with some collective plan where society evaluates what makes life pleasant, and assigns values to experiences that aren't material stuff - those neatly tracked fungible goods that reduce complexity to a seller and a buyer and a pile of stuff in your home. Much easier to think that feeling of something wrong is a group of Others, and be led by a demagogue.

Earth population: 8 billion people - no way this was achieved without putting a woman in the mood.

Well it was a flood. 😉 Of those taxa, which seem most prone to drowning? LoL.

Seems to be. To "save money" they are cutting federal workers from the Bonneville Power Authority, and other western grids...jobs that aren't funded from the US Treasury. The BPA operates on the revenues it makes from selling power generated by federally operated dams. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5180779-federal-job-cuts-power-grid-resilience/ This level of stupidity makes the most decadent and lead-poisoned Roman consul look like a genius by contrast.

That was funny. Trurl is becoming the Bertie Wooster of SFN. The base is there for now, anyway. Pituffik (formerly Thule) exists under a NATO treaty agreement. If we the clown regime blows up NATO, then the US will constitute an invading force occupying that chunk of the Kingdom of Denmark. Fun times. If some more moderate administration follows Trump in 2028 (still a faint hope), I really pity the enormous mopping up operation they wil face.

I wish I could say our intelligence community is smarter and more sensible than El Douche, but am no longer confident that will stay the case. It will be quite the goatf---, trying to remove operations like Pine Gap, in Australia, if the remaining Four Eyes decide to separate and keep up intel ops without the massive US technical infrastructure. Since Pine Gap is a US base, for example, what does Australia do? IIRC, there has long been a movement in Australia to close Pine Gap and boot out the US - I'm guessing current events are giving them momentum.

The housing shortage here is an effect of rising costs of land, building materials, labor shortages, and poor zoning laws. And developers incentivized to focus on building high-end luxury homes. We have a shortage of homes due to particular causes like these, not because the middle class is vanishing. What you are hearing is that it is harder for the middle class to own a free-standing house, and so more middle class people are renting apartments or buying condominiums or mobile homes. This shift away from free-standing houses has been happening in Europe for a much longer time, because land there has been more expensive for much longer (population density is an important factor). The shortage here accelerated during the pandemic, which meant high demand for apartments and soaring rents - again, a severe market problem and not a vanishing middle class. As cities are starting to change zoning and incentivizing affordable housing development, the problem will gradually diminish. We expect little help from the federal government, since it's now being dismantled by an angry toddler.

Not really, just distinguishing between western analytic philosophy and theology as they currently are done. Not saying that someone like Spinoza didn't do both, in his day.

You were able to translate it? Still in gibberish, on my device. That is so hot. "Don't know much about geometry..."

Because it presumes in advance that which a philosopher would question. I.e. theology assumes it has an object of study: God. Whereas philosophy, spec. metaphysics and epistemology, would question if such a being existed and if so, how it could be known by humans.