• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Huge companies used to make a lot of stuff back in the golden age of capitalism. General electric was a big chemicals and plastics company for instance. It was just normal.

    Nowadays, those mega-corporations make more money acting as a bank than they do selling stuff. They’ve just kept some product lines rolling because they’re profitable and safe.

    You couldn’t just start a motorcycle company and be competitive against Yamaha. The specific expertise they have took decades to build, so why waste it by closing down those weird branches when they’re still making money.




  • It sounds absolutely great in theory, but in practice it could never work.

    Say I want to build a house: As a society, we’ve come up with mandatory building codes that tell me how to build a house that’s going to be safe for everyone.

    Suppose we got rid of this regulation for libertarianism’s sake.

    Most people would still build to code because that’s just the smart thing to do but a small proportion of people would build it the cheapest way possible because it is now their god-given right to do so.

    When that house inevitably fails at the worst possible time, I don’t care too much about what happens to the guy himself. He understood the risk and did it anyways. But in a worst case scenario, he could’ve been hosting a kids party that day or something.

    Now apply this analogy to… Basically any regulation you’d want to get rid of.

    It’s kind of always a balancing act between stopping people from killing each other from sheer stupidity, and letting them do and say whatever the fuck they want when they’re between their own four walls, and pure libertarianism doesn’t allow for that.








  • Lmao yeah, I’m about the same rating as the author (1300 on lichess), for the same reasons (don’t care for studying a game) and I highly doubt I could win a game against a 2200 rated master even if I played them 500 times lol, no chance.

    Also worth considering that Stockfish is as good as the computing power you give it. A browser based Stockfish 14 is not the same as Stockfish 14 on a supercomputer.

    I don’t think there are odds that would let me win against 3500 ELO full blown Stockfish. It could probably beat me with like 4 pawns and a king lol


  • DjeecetoStandardizationWow! It actually makes sense!
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    2 years ago

    TBH the temperature humans can stand is easy in metric too. 10-30 is livable. 30-40 is getting real fucking hot. 0-10 is cold but you can cope with a little clothing

    -30 to 0, though, you’re gonna need special winter clothes and shit. I would not consider 0F (~ -17C) to be the limit of what we can stand, and I’m Canadian.


  • DjeecetoStandardizationWow! It actually makes sense!
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    2 years ago

    IMO, the only logical part of the American date system is that it’s the same way you would say it (July 1st 2023).

    Since English is my second language, though, and in French you would say 1er Juillet 2023, it still fucks me up anytime a date is like 10/10/2023.


  • A lot of the beliefs surrounding this issue are decade old lies that have been repeated so often that they’ve become the “truth”.

    Best example is the classic rhetoric of public bathrooms.

    You might have heard that “Trans people just want to rape little girls in public bathrooms”.

    The fact is, the only instance of a trans person ever raping someone in a bathroom I could find was at a women’s prison. Prison bathrooms have a certain reputation regarding rape, so let’s leave it at that.

    Meanwhile, trans people are 4 times more likely to be victims of rape than the general population, and I was able to find multiple instances of trans people getting raped in bathrooms by cis people. Let that sink in for a moment.

    Getting people to realize these old lies are just that, old shitty lies, has given me some amount of success in educating people in real-life debates.