Commencing the naval operation by tooting my Warp Whistle

We should have gotten a second season at least.

Fox Media was run by sadists

I’m going to take a bold position and say they were all good consoles. It was a beautiful time for video games.

Hell without Hitler doesn’t really sound so bad

You’re saying that god is so oblivious (even though he’s supposed to be omniscient) that he’ll be fooled by you claiming to believe just because you’re hedging your bets?

More that repetition reinforces an idea. By commiting to the bit and accepting a God at face value, you reduce your psychological defenses when the priest or prophet comes around with the next ask.

So you admit you believe in God? Then you won’t mind putting a few coins in the collection plate to prove it.

Oh, you’ve already donated? Surely you’d be comfortable making a confession.

My son, you’ve got so many sins! Surely you’d like to join our prayer group to get yourself right with the God we all agree exists.

Can’t have prayer without works! Time to do some penance.

More like a Chain Letter.

There was a trend when I was a little kid of people sending you mail that said something to the effect of “You have been cursed by reading this letter. If you don’t mail a copy to ten other people, you will die in thirty days.”

Roko’s Basilisk is a modern manifestation of human paranoia and superstition. It exists to exploit and extort the gullible.

I’m staring at the front page of lemmy.ml and I’m trying to find what’s got people so worked up. It seems fairly simple to not go into a prolonged rant about how much you hate China when the content is just silly imgr memes.

I mean, by all means, block it if you don’t like the content. But why are you obsessed with the modlogs of an instance you blocked?

https://hexbear.net/post/2648774?scrollToComments=false

Their top stickied post seems to be a biography of a 19th century French anarchist. That’s about as 10/10 wholesome chungus as it gets.

Past that, the front page is mostly full of screenshots of other social media posts mixed in with the occasional news item.

This guy is asking for help meeting people because he’s an introvert.

This is a meme about the Roman Empire being a vector for olive trees.

Like, this isn’t a difficult challenge.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Unironically the future of capitalism, as it devolves into feudalism with more killer robots.

You’ve got the CEO (Absolute Monarch) who owns all the shit and you work on it in exchange for not being killed or deported. Maybe you get some treats from time to time. More likely, you just get someone from the PMC to tell you to pray more.

Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.

A handful of humans with the power to deliver unlimited genocide on their neighbors are hard to keep in check.

The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face

We’re surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.

It’s less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it’s difficult to chart a path through the racket.

You’re bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.

My whole library is wipped out

I assumed this was about an actual library and not some shmuck who got suckered into a thinly veiled rental service.

As far as I’m aware, protons don’t decay. If they formed at the beginning of the universe, they stick around until they get annihilated by anti-matter. But are we getting new protons after the universe formed? No idea.

I’ve had the opportunity to foster kids three times in my life, and every time I would wake up in the morning with this incredible sense of purpose and fulfillment.

Having someone who relies on you and trusts you and genuinely wants to be around you as much as possible gives a deep sense of meaning to my life.

Being around someone with this endless curiosity and boundless energy is invigorating. It makes me feel young, in turn. And it gives me an outlook on life I haven’t had since I was very young, myself.

And babies are fucking adorable! I cannot express how crazy cute babies are. Everything they do makes me smile, even the gross things or the grumpy things, because they do it with such naked sincerity.

Currently working through the official adoption process with my wife, because we can’t have kids the old fashioned way. And my only real regret is that we didn’t do this shit ten years sooner.

Sure. But you can just… lie. When asked “have you ever used drugs”, say no.

There are policing organizations that are still very hungry for well-educated and intelligent recruits. In the USA, the FBI and the CIA both have high barriers to entry. The NSA is easily one of the biggest employers of mathematicians in the world. The IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the FCC, the DEA - all happy to hire smart young professionals.

You’re not going to get a job as a beat cop, but you’re very much in the running for the DA’s office as a prosecutor or the state homicide detective’s unit. And don’t worry, there are plenty of very intelligent people who are also very dependable when it comes to taking a kickback and keeping their mouths shut.

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

The short answer is “Yes”. Scores rise about 3-pts every decade and the “Q” is adjusted accordingly. That said, modern education and modern intelligence testing aren’t independent of one another. It is very possible to train for an IQ test and improve your score (a thing that was originally argued as impossible when these tests were formulated). And - both consciously and unconsciously - we’ve geared our education system around improvements on standardized exams.

There’s also a host of environmental improvements - better nutrition, fewer diseases, less heavy metal poisoning - which all contribute to higher cognition. These latter factors are suggested in no small part thanks to a leveling off of the Flynn Effect in later years, both thanks to marginal declines in all of the above and thanks to the diminishing returns once individuals reach peak performance.

But intelligence testing is also a very sketchy and misunderstood field, with lots of scams surrounding its practical application and enormous stigmas associated with any population that scores “below average”.

Much like polygraph testing and dowsing (yes, American police still use dosing rods), its a methodology that police seem to cling to long after it has worn out its usefulness in practical terms.

Credit scores are meant to remove obfuscate some of the racial and social bias

However, as its been forced to get more abstract, it’s also become less effective. Without absolute prohibitions against African-Americans attending the same schools as white people, there has been more upwards mobility of African-Americans to live in better neighborhoods with better schools and end cycles of poverty.

That’s highly debatable. There are definitely some groups of African Americans who have cracked the glass ceiling. But on average, black household wealth has significantly lagged white wealth accumulation year-over-year. Case in point, the '08 crash decimated black households to the tune of 40% of their total accumulated savings. The COVID crisis saw higher rates of mortality in black communities, as well as higher rates of unemployment, of declines in school completion rates (from high school up through graduate programs), and of divorce. All negatively correlated with wealth accumulation.

Maybe since '89 things have improved. But the last two decades have sucked and African Americans have eaten disproportionate amounts of shit during it.

Mass incarceration in the modern era makes that a hard comparison to square up.

Are you better off today as a middle class black suburbanite throwing a third of your paycheck at a subprime loan for a house you couldn’t even legally own 40 years ago? Yeah, sure, I guess.

Are you better off today as a teenager in a Texas supermax prison without working A/C, working 12 hour shifts for less than a dollar an hour, while the state government frets that there aren’t enough people like you to meet some arbitrary imprisonment quota? Doubtful.

Post-Reagan, society has been a decided mixed black for African Americans.

Except we don’t get the free housing and tuition, the cheap and efficient mass transit, or the retirement at age 55.