Legally easier to ignore a ghost department.

No, I’ve seen this before. One whack to the head changes someone, but then another whack changes them back. Same principle.

Everyone with long covid just needs more covid to fix it.

The US sent 592 athletes and competed in 34 events.

China sent 388 athletes for 33 events.

These world class athletes are just better and stronger than us, so they can totally tolerate 5x the safe level. Maybe even 10x! It may be true that we don’t know how many times more they can take! A million? These are important questions that we must answer.

That’s a delightful response to my snarky comment, thank you.

I agree, the incentive structure is such that it undermines the goals of journalism. Compounded with a firehose of misinformation, even full-time journalists must be overwhelmed.

I’m unwilling to give them a pass, however. Their job is to report accurately, they understand the risk of reporting things that are not fully vetted, and choose to anyway. As you say, they’re complicit.

Surely you’re not accusing the media of any malfeasance!

To paraphrase GW “Fascism me once, shame on you. Fascism me twice? … Can’t get fascism-ed again!”

This article is from 2018 and talks a bit about the suspected causes of increased myopia. The theory is that our eyes are responding to the environment and elongating (axial myopia). So it’s not that humans have lost the ability to have good vision via selection, it’s that we’re adapting to screen vision.

Your point about natural selection is well addressed by @Shawdow194@kbin.social already.

There are so many justifications for fascism within religions (Maybe most especially, but not exclusively, Abrahamic)

What you say is true, a lot of potential voters are not seeing this as a change of heart, but rather a theatrical distancing from an unpopular issue (perpetrating genocide).

https://china.usc.edu/wealth-inequality-us-and-china

I see that the US is bad and that China is rushing to catch up. However, I’m not a USA apologist and one graph can’t tell you all the disparities between governments.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-inequality-by-country

Shows the US at #28 worst and China at #35 worst.

And then violence should be met with ultraviolence.

I don’t believe in the escalation game and the state having a monopoly on violence hasn’t worked out well.

AI is not needed for predictable tasks, it excels in finding predictions in a mass of data.

For example, one of the most dynamic systems we have is global weather and GraphCast is incredible at it.

It’s not like we don’t have the technology

As of 2008 it is an FAA requirement that the recording duration is a minimum of two hours.

Just designed to (minimum) spec.

psychohistory

Fascinating. Well thanks once again for the link to Turchin, I have a big stack of books to add to my list now.

Very interesting link, thanks for sharing. I’m curious, do you know of Daniel Schmachtenberger , and if so, are you willing to draw any parallels?

I did misread initially, thank you.

Each of the abrahamic religions after Judaism

I’m no scholar, but aren’t there only two and their various sects? Would have been shorter to just name them, unless it was to tie them to their Abrahamic roots and then I’m curious why you don’t include Judaism.

There’s an aphorism that science progresses one funeral at a time, but I wonder if the same could be said of culture.

And regarding The Lord of the Flies. Keep your faith.