What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”
Oh, in that case it's not horrifying at all. Who doesn't keep 3 years of past salary in their checking account for the occasional rainy day?
If I had to pin an exact date on it, it'd be when he bought the most expensive mansion in Beverly Hills (at the time, $70M was a lot for a mansion).
Why? Because you need to deal with life changes one thing at a time. Pro-tip for the future billionaires currently scrolling this comment section: don't move away from your friends, family, and home country immediately after getting rich -- it might screw with your head a little bit. Do what the old money does: stay grounded, dress down, and pretend to be normal.
Nah, dump em' to /tmp/ and let the user figure out the rest
Rub harder.
Terrorists Win (the drip competition)
This is what tenured professors do. They apply for research grants in their field, run laboratories, and publish papers. It's how most public academic research gets done and this is indeed a full-time job that pays decently (but not fabulously) well. As far as the focus of her studies go: she is an Oceanography professor at the University of Miami, so... like... what else is she going to research other than the boundary of the western Atlantic ocean?
Consider visiting Seattle, or (god help you) London.
Oh boy, can't wait for Youtube Mail and Youtube Maps next
The back and forth on what is and isn’t communism will continue until there aren’t two humans left to argue about it. I’ve described the classical Marxist view of communism including the withering away of the state. It has been redefined by various persons and groups over time, but I don’t have a high opinion of those definitions.
Very eloquently put! If you'll forgive me for quoting Engels (circa 1872) rather than Marx, I'd like to highlight a salient excerpt from his letters (bolded emphasis is my own, italicised emphasis preserved from original translation):
While the great mass of the Social-Democratic workers hold our view that state power is nothing more than the organisation with which the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists have provided themselves in order to protect their social prerogatives, Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by favour of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to hell of itself. We, on the contrary say: do away with capital, the appropriation of the whole means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall away of itself. The difference is an essential one. Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is in itself the social revolution and involves a change in the whole method of production. Further, however, as for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can maintain the existence of any state, whether it be a republic, a monarchy or whatever it may be. Hence therefore complete abstention from all politics. To perpetrate a political action, and especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle. The thing to do is to conduct propaganda, abuse the state, organise, and when all the workers are won over, i.e., the majority, depose the authorities, abolish the state and replace it by the organisation of the International. This great act, with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.
[...]
Now as, according to Bakunin, the International is not to be formed for political struggle but in order that it may at once replace the old state organisation as soon as social liquidation takes place, it follows that it must come as near as possible to the Bakunist ideal of the society of the future. In this society there will above all be no authority, for authority = state = an absolute evil. (How these people propose to run a factory, work a railway or steer a ship without having in the last resort one deciding will, without a unified direction, they do not indeed tell us.) The authority of the majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual and every community is autonomous, but as to how a society, even of only two people, is possible unless each gives up some of his autonomy, Bakunin again remains silent.
As you can see, even early Marxists did not actively advocate for the abolition of the state and in fact strongly sought to be perceived as separate from those who viewed abolition of the state as a fundamental prerequisite. Engels even ridicules the idea of completely abolishing state authority as magical thinking despite conceding that communism could eventually lead to the obviation of traditional state functions.
For everyday writing I like to use MessagEase. It's highly ergonomic thanks to the 3x3 grid and deeply customizable. I've been happily using it for over a decade now (it continues to receive updates) and for the past 8 years I've been able to touch-type on it without looking at my fingers
The documentation is all in-app, so I've taken the liberty of screenshotting the relevant pages for illustrative purposes:
The statistic quoted is for "users", so presumably the measurement was made against randomly selected individuals of the general population (though the article frustratingly fails to cite a source). This is important because the effect is not evenly distributed among demographics, per the article:
What’s more, we don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others, but we know that there are numerous markers that make us more likely to experience it. Women, as mentioned previously, are more likely than men to get VR sick. Asian people are more likely than other ethnicities to experience motion sickness in general. Age is another factor—we’re more likely to experience it between the ages of 12 and 21 than in our adulthood... until we reach our 50s, upon which the likelihood increases again.
I do agree that the ideal communist state has never existed, though I need to challenge the assertion that communism demands the existence of no state. Anti-state philosophies are generally characterized as "anarchism" -- it's certainly true that communists and anarchists have historically held common interests, but in general they do not view themselves as members of the same group.
It's a weird distinction, but the distinction exists for a reason. Communists do not reject the establishment of a governing apparatus, so it's actually very inaccurate to say that "communism requires there to be no state". You could instead adopt the anarchist argument that "communism is self-defeating because it leads to the creation of non-communist states", but keep in mind that this is in-and-of-itself a rejection of communism in favor of communal anarchism.
This might be a dumb question: what do you mean? I know very little about Finland, so I'm just genuinely curious. Are the Finns in particular well-known for being anti-communist or is it more like a geopolitical thing since they share a border with Russia?
Tragically, however, it may spell the end of the sandwich artist.
Background context: the Unification Church (popularly called "Moonies") are the group which Abe Shinzo was assasinated for being associated with. The incident led to what could be described as a public "outing" of the Unification Church and its ties to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) -- you read that correctly; public opinion turned against the assasinated former PM and remains firmly with the assassin.
Anti Unification Church sentiment has continued to grow to the point where their status as a tax-exempt religious organization is being challenged and the NHK is airing exposés. I'd say that the situation is comparable to the American anti-Scientology backlash, except on a bigger political scale and under a more compressed timeline.
So, like... a claim so broad as "As long as money’s involved, there’s no way AI tech benefits society" is obviously untrue, right? Even if we accept a premise like "On the whole, AI will hurt society more than it helps", it's basically just dogma to blanket deny any practical usefulness. Take firearms, for example: they're often strictly controlled, but rarely if ever completely purged -- almost all societies accept that some situations exist where the utility sufficiently justifies the harm.
To be honest, I feel really weird pushing back against this because we seem rather ideologically aligned. I think we both feel that technologies which promote economic development will -- by default -- disproportionately empower those rich and powerful few. With that being said, from an ideological perspective, technological developments are not in fundamental opposition to Marxist philosophy (yes, even technological developments which render some skilled labor obsolete).
On the contrary; if we are to believe that the next step of economic development lies in casting aside class division, then we must necessarily concede that the only way forward is to recruit novel technological developments toward that purpose. It is self-undermining and shortsighted to argue that simply allowing a development will inherently undermine anti-capital interests, because how then could such a system so apparently incompatible with future technologies also claim to itself be the future?
Faraway Paladin 2nd Season? I'm hyped. Not much else that I'm overly looking forward to in terms of sequels, though (I've sworn off AoT for now until it's genuinely over).
Which new shows do you folks foresee making the top ranks this season? Most of these titles are totally new to me, though I've heard that the 100 Girlfriends manga is kind of notorious. Maybe that'll be this season's so-bad-it's-good show?
NO! Look at me! I am the Boomer, now.
Far be it from me to demand frugality from a billionaire. It would have been wiser to waste money without simultaneously scoring an "own goal" on his mental health, though...