DomeGuy @ DomeGuy @lemmy.world

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There's plenty of references in the OT to Jews doing the same thing.

And European Christianity chased out worship of anyone save the God of Abraham rather violently after a generation or two.

My parents chose each other. They're both good people, but they weren't a good match at all and none of us were especially surprised when they divorced.

The Mrs and I chose each other, and while it would be arrogant to assert that we're definitely a good match I get the impression that my kids would be shocked if we split.

The structural key to a happy marriage is, I think, the freedom to leave. If my parents had split when I was a kid they'd probably have a better relationship. But because of economics and law and pride they didn't, which made the pain last way longer than it should have.

It sounds like you're not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.

Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.

If "people vote" is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.

If you don't see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.

The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.

Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.

You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.

I don't think you'll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.

Let's talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they're in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are "fake" economists? How would we remove them from power?

If we're talking about which forms of government are "better" than others, we need a benchmark of what makes one better or worse. I'm a big fan of the ideal stated in the US declaration of independence: governments exist to preserve the rights of their people, in the broadest possible sense.

A technocracy, where established experts make relevant rules, is probably the worst form of government that's still trying to be good. For whatever topic you have, the original paradigm becomes fiercely embedded, and because power wants to preserve itself that basic framework would be even worse than what we have now.

Imagine if a group of goldbug economists had been in charge of markets and banks when the great depression hit. Or if ma bell has been in charge of telecommunications when the Internet was invented. Or if the same GM engineers who killed the EV1 and bet on trucks were in charge when electric cars and hybrids started becoming popular.

Technocracies don't have a way to change perspectives. You get all the bad parts of a bureaucratic democratic Republic, and none of the way to short circuit bloody revolutions that makes democracies the least-bad option. You might as well just go back to monarchies -- at least for those, there was a person who could be almost impartial when it comes time to decide if old ways need to change.

That Democrats didn't respond to the "death tax" rebranding by saying "ok, let's just make the estate tax smaller but annual" is a great example of how we got to this absurd chapter of America.

Because neither Kotlin nor JavaScript load images.

Kotlin is a Java runtime language, whose most common use is being compiled to bytecode to run full desktop or server applications.

JavaScript is a web browser language, whose most common use is being sent alongside HTML to augment the behavior of a web browser.

Since Kotlin tends to operate outside of a browser sandbox, it makes sense to expose JRE features to allow memory efficient image handling.

In contrast, JavaScript within a browser sandbox only gets images loaded by the web browser, which were already sent over the Internet and loaded in their full size.

( There are ways to run JavaScript outside a browser and Kotlin within, but that's a bigger topic.)

I think this is the case that found "profound agreement" over the actual issue that was appealed -- if the courts should let some appellate divisions require an additional burden when a white/cis/het/xian/guy says they were the victim of discrimination.

The civil rights laws are supposed to protect them, too.

The Republican party chose not to impeach him when he sent a mob to stop a pro forma session.

The Federalist supreme Court declared him immune for prosecution for whatever shit he does in the white house, and exempt from punishment for what he does outside it.

Fucker didn't declare himself above the law. He just finally realized what his traitorous party has been saying for years.

The Democrats are a minority in both chambers of Congress. The Republicans should be able to pass a simple spending plan on a party line vote, and if they can't then their dysfunction is not and should never be treated as the Democrats' fault

Pascal's wager is a defense of theism in general, not a specific flavor of theism. If you accept that there is a God, any God, then you can reason and argue about which way to worship her is correct.

If you do not believe that God exists, however, then the particularities of which godhead you worship are irrelevant trivia.

If God or Brahman or Kamisama exist, then they are aware of the imperfect worship flavors that they receive and have appropriate accommodations included, if they are worthy of worship at all. (Please note that Zeus is not included in this list, because that guy's just a rapist bastard.)

Do you think those morons know that the US military reconfigured itself to be an all-volunter professional force after the Vietnam debacle, and that drafting the unemployed would only be arming them?

You're right, the behavior of how Iraq and Afghanistan were handled was entirely different from either Germany or Japan after WW2.

My assertion is that the USA did too much "occupation" and not enough "governance". Both Iraq and Afghanistan essentially had anti-government resistance movements forced into pseudo-national rule without any time to develop local governance.

Once the states were broken W wanted to get out, essentially since he feared accusations of imperialism. Which kept a good twenty year plan from being implemented, and instead led to a twenty year quagmire with one of the two essentially being a failed state.

(Man, that's a lot of essentially's)

I don't mean to defend either invasion as either good for the people or necessarily for American security. I just want to point out that W's position was "go and break things then go home" which is about as imperial as a viking raid.

Spoiler alert : it was just a survey of the reported confidence of folk who admitted to using AI.

So, AI users exhibit a reduction in literally the one skill that the AI expects them to actually have?

I should probably go read that link and see if it's actual degradation or just selection.

"I just do what I want" isn't a philosophy, because it doesn't give guidance as to what someone else should do . It's just childishness.

Even Randism / Objectivism stretches selfishness into "rich people should do what they want". Trump doesn't even get that far

I'll grant that the orange felon is consistently selfish, though.

Even Bush jr wasn't as much imperial as he was militaristic. Iraq and Afghanistan would both have arguably benefited from a time as an American protectorate like Germany or Japan, but W handed over "sovereignty" while the wars were still ongoing.

Trump isn't coherent enough to have an understandable philosophy

A wizard drops you on the moon. You immediately panic about not being able to breathe, plus your salivia is boiling and your blood is...well, it killed you pretty darn quickly.

Thankfully, the wizard noticed and set spells that puts a tiny bit of atmosphere right over your head, and , repairs the damage inflicted already. There is a chair and a go-board in front of you.

"Wait, that's it?" you ask the wizard after he explains what the spells did. "Arent I going to burn, or freeze, or something?"

"Eventually, yeah," says the wizard as he sits down. "But the human body's great at homeostasis. Since your blood isn't boiling it can circulate heat within you, you can burn calories to add heat as needed, and sweating is absurdly effective since the relative humidity of a vacuum is pretty much less than zero."

"But, didn't the Apollo capsule spin to manage heat, and aren't there huge radiator fins on the ISS so they don't slowly burn? I thought managing heat was hard?"

"It is. For an inanimate object. Especially one that isn't filled with water or surrounded by a thermo exchange medium. You ever see a capsule bleed or a probe sweat?"

4567

While 0 has no value and is often placed after 9 on keyboards, you asked about digits in a base and not numbers. This becomes clear if you describe the various bases.

• Binary is 0-1
• Octal is 0-7
• Decimal is 0-9
• Hexadecimal is 0-F

If you sort zero at the end, you'd need to spell out the digits or label them all as 1-0, which isn't very descriptive.

Mind you, "zero-first ordering of digits" is not a fundamental rule, since the glyphs only have a need to be sorted when they stand for a numerical value . And if you used a phrase like "first X digits" without noting a range the omission would be a composition error.

I see you understood the point made by the example.

For nuclear weapons specifically, the activation code was supposed to be a command and control measure to prevent unauthorized use. Having it both be an easily remembered code and one widely known made that whole system meaningless theatre.