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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It was a disaster. Trump lied for 90 minutes straight, but he did it confidently, with a straight face, and without rambling. It was a vast improvement over his stump speeches. Biden mostly told the truth, but he meandered, stammered, got mixed up, and was obviously ill. That’s just what happened.

    I’m going to vote for Biden anyway, because the old man stands for policies that actually benefit me personally (and a second Trump term is a threat to the existence of the Republic). But the debate was bad for him, possibly catastrophic. His campaign desperately needs an October surprise, and at this point it’s hard to guess what it might be.





  • Really? I’d be very interested in seeing a peer reviewed article in Nature in which someone reputable claims to have disproven the existence of the soul (especially without making a bunch of other ontological assumptions first). Can you point me to one?

    As far as I can tell, the existence of a soul, like the existence of God, is inherently a non-scientific proposition–i.e., it is not falsifiable. But correct me if I’m wrong.





  • “reasoning that these vehicles are safer for drivers in the event of a crash” Sounds like an arms race. Soon we will be driving armored personnel carriers.

    Well, yeah. It is an arms race. I drive a “midsize” SUV, and a large part of the reason is that these trucks are going to be on the road no matter what. Statistically, in the event of a collision between a truck and a car, the truck driver will live and the car driver will die, no matter who is at fault. Is it more dangerous for drivers of small cars and pedestrians? Absolutely! But it’s safer for the person in the tank. Ergo, if you want to maximize the safety of yourself and your passengers, be the one driving the tank. Am I selfish for driving my SUV? Probably–but it’s hard to make a moral argument that defeats “This is more likely to keep me alive.”

    I live in a rural area, so walking isn’t an option even if we had the infrastructure (which we don’t), and I dream of a future in which we have commuter rail here. But until then, I’m going to be in the thing that’s most likely to keep one of these monsters from killing me, and once my son is old enough to drive, you bet your ass I’m putting him in one too, because these things are on the road whether I like it or not. The tragedy of the commons is that everyone contributing to the calamity is rational.

    All of these ridiculous trucks should be off the road, and I will cheerfully give mine up–once everyone else has, and not a moment sooner. Until then, anybody selling APCs yet? It looks like that Abrams has better sight lines than a 2500. Where do I get a road legal one of those?



  • Is that realistic? Not a rhetorical question: I’m genuinely curious. I ask because the last time I tried to update a single (desktop) part, it was more cost-effective to replace the whole Pc and migrate the salvageable parts since the only thing I could have held onto would have been the ram, SSD, and PSU.

    I suppose with a laptop you have the monitor to also consider, and admittedly I know nothing about laptop boards, but it just seems like 6 years is replacement time anyway, at least for a daily use computer.




  • It’s not abstract at all, but my favorite is the Living God. It’s an old one (Elohim khayyim), but I strongly empathize with the sentiment: if there is a God, God must be alive. She must be able to do things–God must have volition. He isn’t just a product of natural order (e.g., the Sun). He might be a prick sometimes, but His actions are better than chance. If your god is a coin toss, your god may as well be a coin toss. Whichever God demonstrates Her existence is the real One. Everything else is make-believe at best, a long con at worst.



  • Xhieron@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlHow do you deal with being broke?
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    1 year ago

    Crime. That’s the answer. I don’t suggest or recommend it, but people who genuinely can’t survive or achieve any meaningful quality of life while participating in the social order will violate it instead. Some people shoplift; others engage in elaborate plots to rip off their landlords and creditors, but there’s no squaring the circle. I’m not in the same boat, but I’ve been there, and it’s only a stroke of good fortune that kept me from a very different road.



  • Xhieron@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in God?
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    1 year ago

    Yes, and yes to the OP. It’s very similar.

    An older family member once asked my siblings and me, as older teenagers, whether we believed in Santa. We scoffed, laughed, and incredulously said of course not.

    She responded that she believed in Santa, and she gave this explanation: Santa is a cultural shorthand for generosity. Do you believe in the spirit of giving? Do you want to see smiles on children’s faces on Christmas morning? Do you want to make the people you love light up because you had special, almost supernatural, insight into their heart’s desire and made it real?

    I don’t believe a magical man in a red suit gives presents and coal to kids. I similarly don’t believe in a white bearded cloudy Jewish giant in the sky.

    But I believe that there’s something sublime and immaterial in the love we can have for one another, something only partially explained by ecologic survival pressures and biochemistry. I think there is something out there beyond what we can perceive on a daily basis, and for lack of a better lexicon, “spiritual” is as good a term as anyone for the realm of the imperceptible.

    So I think there’s a God, and I think there’s a Santa. I don’t understand either, and I think they’re neither anything quite like we expect. And God the Creator is certainly an asshole sometimes. But I think there’s Someone out there.


  • Absolutely. There is no business yet in which you invent money from nothing. Everyone works for someone else. It might be a capitalist boss, it might be a client, it might even be constituents or donors, but no one truly works for themselves. The only winning move is to not play, and the ones fortunate enough to not have to play were born rich. Being self-employed and/or owning your own business is just trading one boss for another.

    Source: Was in private practice for a decade; now I’m a corporate attorney, and it’s just a different set of people making my job hard.


  • Hear, hear. This isn’t a case of Mercedes selling an upgrade. It’s more akin to selling the car pre-booted and then demanding a monthly payment to remove it under threat of returning to re-apply it if a payment is missed. It’s absolutely a protection racket. Sure would be a shame if something happened to those fancy features we installed.

    The good news is that the companies who will float this first are the ones most likely to do business with politicians, and unfortunately I’m cynical enough to believe that the best way to get regulation in place is to personally inconvenience the decision-makers. I hope that results in action.

    If it doesn’t, well, the next step is self-help. If we’re changing the definition of private property, it’s only so long before people begin questioning whether there’s any point in having private property at all.