nednobbins @ nednobbins @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Thanks. Not the answer I was hoping for, but I appreciate the response.

They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.

The “net” in “net wealth” includes debts. Anyone can claim she’s broke but all the available evidence shows she’s not.

Various sites estimate her net wealth between $1.5 and $2 million.

While that you can argue if that makes her rich, it definitely makes her a millionaire and she's certainly not broke.

Any mod (packs)?

I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.

He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It's very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.

The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!

But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:

1. It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn't even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they'll define those freedoms differently.
2. It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it's almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.

It's a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.

I’ve thought about that too. Do you know if it works?

Primarily because it's really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is "better", by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.

You brought an economics argument to a rage thread. OP isn't making a technical claim when they say "rent seeking behavior", they're angry and using it as a synonym for "greedy people".

Didn't know it had a name.
That once stopped me from registering a video game title.

I was feeling silly so I figured I'd go for a nonsensical contrast. "Evil Grape" got rejected. After several failed attempts it eventually dawned on me that some dumb algorithm thought it was a reference to sexual violence.

It kind of annoyed me but I just picked an other fruit. It wasn't until later that I considered that "Evil Banana" was probably more sexually evocative but it was too late by then.

So if you're ever playing a video game and shoot (or get shot by) "Evil Banana", know that, if it weren't for the Scunthorpe Problem, it could have been "Evil Grape," but either way, it wasn't intended as a sexual reference at all.

I could see that as fair as long as everyone agrees that a small symbol on their neck is an appropriate expression of their religion.

If I were to think of a Muslim country that officially embraces secularism in government what would that look like? What if they said that everyone can wear a discreet head covering. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Daoists, Jains, etc are also allowed to wear small headscarves appropriate to their religion.

The problem is that headscarves just aren't generally meaningful to those other religions.

I'm even more suspicious of the intent of the French law since they apparently went out of their way to create an exemption for non-Muslim head scarves. The law seems to be constructed and interpreted as, "If we can tell that its related to Islam, it's out." The case where a girl was sent home for wearing a skirt that was too long really just looks like they want to make Muslims (and Muslim girls, in particular) more uncomfortable.

I want to be very careful around judging the intentions of people who live 5000 miles away and speak a language I don't understand. There's a lot of room to misunderstand people's intentions.

But from what I can see, it's looking like there's an intentional bias.

I read up on it a bit more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools

It seems like regulations on religious attire are selectively applied. Small crosses and stars of David, some variations of Sikh turbans, Fatima's hands are acceptable and the final decision is left up to school headmasters.

It also sounds like the legislators who created it specifically intended to target Muslim headdress.

It's one thing to keep religion out of education. It seems that they're disproportionately concerned about suprsesssing Islam in their schools.

Do they ban other forms of religious expression? Crosses/crucifixes? Yarmulke/kippah?
Or is it just Islamic symbols?

That's unfortunate but not terribly surprising.

Humans will build a bar as soon as there are more than two people that want to drink but you typically need much larger populations before you get a sober community at all. You usually only get dedicated sober spaces when those communities get big enough.

Fortunately, as many others on this thread have pointed out, there are many sober options beyond dedicated sober spaces.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/

It’s been documented already. I guess the next question is if there’s any reason to think it’s stopped.

Update: I guess not. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/us-spying-allies.html

You can check out https://soberbarsnearme.com

Robespierre has entered the chat.

This isn't about own vs rent, it's about house vs apartment.

Open flames are dangerous and smoke is annoying to neighbors. Condos and coops typically won't let you grill. Some of them have designated grilling areas and those often have restrictions on how you can use them. Even many apartments with fireproof balconies won't allow them because not all the neighbors want a balcony full of smoke.

Every house I've ever rented, allowed grilling. Even the cheapest one, a row-house in Baltimore, let you grill in the back "yard".

Yeah. We mostly think of grammatical number as a simple choice of singular vs plural but that's not what we do in real life.

We generally have multiple labels that describe the concept of progressively expanding circles of what's included when we think of ourselves.

There's the very narrow sense of I/me/myself. We have various expansions around us/all'y'all. Jamaicans have the phrase "I and I" which focuses on the individual but explicitly calls out the connection with others.