Last time Iran tried to become a liberal and democratic country the UK and US organized a coup to replace the government with a more dictatorial one, which is how they ended up like this. Is more violent foreign intervention the solution? We’re about to find out!

Looking at their track record there’s no reason to believe Isreal would give an occupied Iran any rights or do anything good for them. More likely it’s just more territory to be ethnically cleansed and repopulated after they’re done with Palestine.

Repeating what they heard is very different from automatically processing the chat to harvest personal information about the participants.

Just because some data is publicly available doesn’t mean all processing of that data is legal and moral.

You’re both getting side-tracked by this discussion of recording. The recording is likely legal in most places.

It’s the processing of that unstructured data to extract and store personal information that is problematic. At that point you go from simply recording a conversation of which you are a part, to processing and storing people’s personal data without their knowledge, consent, or expectation.

There are LED bars for mounting in your rear windows to display text to those behind you

Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.

Economists refuse to accept that their subject is really just sociology. They like to imagine it being like physics, where study of reality leads to underlying mathematical truths to extrapolate from. Not a big messy subject where you can’t be certain of anything.

What makes it even more freaky is that many of the subjects being studied know they are playing a game. So in many ways economy is more like the evolving metagame of competitive sports, where hardcore nerds constantly try to game the system and outplay each other, and what was a solid strategy last month doesn’t work anymore, even if the rules are the same.

Then you just pay the president for a pardon. No worries.

It’s petty funny to see them rediscover why we have all these financial regulations

Being “fungible” means that something is functionally equivalent with something else.

For example even though every dollar bill is unique (they have unique serial numbers), they are all fungible. If you deposit $100 in the bank, then withdraw $100 later, you are not getting the same bills, maybe not even the same denominations, but you don’t care because it doesn’t matter.

In the digital world copies are cheap and perfect. There is literally no way to tell a copy of an image from “the original”. So in the digital world all copies of something are fungible, and originals don’t meaningfully exist.

NFTs try to introduce artificial scarcity to the digital space by creating a distinction between “the original” of something and the copies, by introducing a sort of chain of custody tracking system.

What if we took the art market, where prices can be whatever, so it’s really easy to launder money. Then we let people easily set up multiple accounts for wash trading. And we supported currencies held in stupidly large amounts by people who can’t legally use them for anything useful.

I just assumed that if a motherboard had an RGB header you could control it from the BIOS, because that’s how it worked ten years ago. But no, these days you need their software, which crashes on install under windows and doesn’t support anything else.

If you are lucky OpenRGB might work.

One common misconception about meditation is that meditation is and end goal, not a practice. That to meditate is to sit down and have your brain be quiet, and if you can’t do that, your session was a failure.

But that’s like saying weight lifting is about deadlifting your body weight, and any session you don’t manage do that was a failure. That is something you might be able to do after years of training. But you start with the smaller weights, learning form and technique, setting reasonable goals, and find a practice that you can make a habit out of. Because a five minute walk every day beats a day at the gym/retreat once a year.

You are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life. So just like when you have a coworker or classmate that you don’t like but must work with, you just have to get a working relationship going where you can get stuff done and not fight.

Try to not get annoyed at yourself, reward good behavior, be kind even when you don’t deserve it, be the bigger person etc.

More generally, feelings do not care about facts. We must accept how we feel, even if those feelings don’t “make sense”. Trying to reason with feelings is a fools errand.

That doesn’t mean we can’t change how we feel. It just doesn’t happen by denying reality.

Or it measured how rare it was for them to get candy. The most interesting thing about the experiment is honestly the many ways in which it was flawed.

Pigeons are actually a domesticated animal that used to be bred for (among other things) food. So you re-domesticate a few of them, and then eat their offspring which you feed household scraps.

You might also save on heating in the winter by having larger cattle in your house and sleeping on a loft above them.

Pretty much all Germans with any experience post WW2 were in some way nazis. As I understand it, you had to be a party member to hold any important job.

Something like an actual true NATO-nazi conspiracy is how nazi chief of staff and war criminal Franz Halder ended up avoiding the Nuremberg trials and working with the US Army Historical Division and the coming founder of the CIA to create the myth of a clean and non-political Wehrmacht.

But any reasonable person will understand that that was an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of deal. (We all know NATO are secretly Islamists as proven by Operation Cyclone.)

A stronger argument IMO is that those types of crimes are premeditated, calculated and committed by those who have many other options. So deterrents are likely to actually work against them.

Not that I agree with you. But there’s an argument to be made for using deterrents where they are likely to work. Rather than against the desperate or impulsive.

If it’s pornography of an unwilling subject, surely the distribution and consumption is harmful to the subject, as it’s a violation of their privacy and integrity.

If someone had put secret cameras in your bedroom, would you be completely cool with them selling the pictures online?

What if you were abused, let’s say threatened with a weapon and forced to undress in front of a camera, a traumatic experience for sure. Afterwards you learn that the film is being traded between people who get off on this stuff. Would that really not feel like a further violation?

Would you really be unaffected by the knowledge that for the rest of your life, at any time, there could be creeps getting off on your abuse?