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cthalupa commented on He set out to walk around the world. After 27 years, his quest is nearly over   washingtonpost.com/lifest... · Posted by u/wallflower
marcusverus · 5 days ago
> Who cares?

The vast majority of people care.

> We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.

Reasoning from pre-agrarian living patterns is, quite frankly, hippy nonsense. And no, we didn't settle in cities because of "the designs of the empowered few", but because agriculture leads to more permanent, prosperous settlements, which attract raiders, and settling close together allowed for common defense. In other words, as soon as people earned a living by their own planning and sustained effort, (as opposed to merely collecting the bounty of the earth) they settled down and drew borders to protect what they had built from people who wanted to just show up and reap the rewards of their effort, at their expense!

> I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense.

We can't have borders because you could see Tijuana from your back yard?

> We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.

Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.

cthalupa · 4 days ago
> Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.

Fundamentally, everything in your post down to this ending boils down to whether or not you think that immigrants coming into the country is a good thing or not. People will try to split hairs over "doing it the right way," when until the 1900s doing it the right way was basically just having enough financial stability to make it here - many states had nothing beyond 'means testing' that would easily be passed if you could afford to make it to America rather than stowing away, and many states had less than that. For most of American history, immigrating properly was literally just showing up.

For the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants, the only difference between them and the legal immigrant is the amount of paperwork on file. And many of us arguing that that paperwork matters are beneficiaries of a time where that paperwork wasn't necessary.

It's very explicitly a case of "Fuck you, got mine."

cthalupa commented on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help   hey.paris/posts/appleid/... · Posted by u/parisidau
inkyoto · 4 days ago
Civil tribunals in Australia (an equivalent of small claim courts in other countries) do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.

In fact, the NSW Civil Administrative Tribunal explicitly requires the Tribunal’s explicit permission for a person to be represented by somebody else, including a lawyer.

But tribunal's decision is binding on the commercial entity, should it be found at fault and incurs penalties for avoidance or non-compliance with the decision.

cthalupa · 4 days ago
> do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.

Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to represent the corporation besides a lawyer? In the US, some states explicitly do not allow a lawyer and require a different officer of the company represent them, but plenty do allow lawyers.

If Paris is taking Apple to the tribunal, there's no single human equivalent to Paris on Apple's side. This seems like the exact sort of situation where a lawyer is approved to represent somebody else.

cthalupa commented on Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis   med.stanford.edu/news/all... · Posted by u/DeusExMachina
youarentrightjr · 5 days ago
Don't take this the wrong way, but the run on sentences are quite hard to parse.

> That’s a vague hypothetical

Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.

> I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers

This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.

Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.

> it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.

The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.

Yes, people are going to say wrong things, and mislead other people. But the cost to suppress this speech is far, far more detrimental than letting it be.

cthalupa · 4 days ago
> Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.

Speech restriction being able to be abused doesn't mean that speech restriction is never appropriate. There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.

> This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.

If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.

> Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.

Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.

> The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.

Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property. This isn't a societal priest class.

Even an extremely slanted Supreme Court didn't find that the actions of the government had significant influence on social media companies and their tamping down of covid misinformation.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-side-with-biden-...

cthalupa commented on Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis   med.stanford.edu/news/all... · Posted by u/DeusExMachina
pkphilip · 5 days ago
It is not rare at all. Fact is, as more and more data comes out we are becoming more and more aware that the Covid vaccines have caused severe damage.

Here is the data collated from 125 countries: there were about 31 million excess deaths across the 2020-23 period.

Spatiotemporal variation of excess all-cause mortality in the world (125 countries) during the Covid period 2020-2023 regarding socio-economic factors and public-health and medical interventions https://hal.science/hal-05110349

Explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBkKBqpLjAk

cthalupa · 5 days ago
The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.

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

He's not a credible source. HAL is not a peer reviewed journal, it is an open archive where you can upload papers regardless of publication status.

Meanwhile, we have excellent actual research done by credible researchers in peer reviewed journals like https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... that directly dispute this nonsense.

cthalupa commented on Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis   med.stanford.edu/news/all... · Posted by u/DeusExMachina
cruffle_duffle · 5 days ago
“See, we were right, there shouldn't have been any vaccination at all!”

Nobody sane says that. Such rhetoric is a divisive wedge.

Same people would have liked to see an open honest discussion about the vaccine. Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion. All medicine has side effects… but these fuckers were on a mission. Anything remotely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, not everybody should get a vaccine… oh boy can’t have that.

But if you want to mis-characterize things, by all means do so.

cthalupa · 5 days ago
> But if you want to mis-characterize things, by all means do so.

People were allowed to have open and honest discussion about things. I saw plenty of discussion about myocarditis at the time from reputable sources and in reasonable manners.

But they were all pointing out that this is just an aspect of flu vaccines, that we had known it could happen even with regular flu vaccines for a long time, that the incident rate is lower than just getting covid (or the flu) in general, and that the severity was also less than that of if you had gotten it as a result of covid.

Because that's a better picture of reality because it gives you the full context.

Instead of pointing out that whole context, a whole lot of people left it at "it's the clot shot! it gives you myocarditis!"

And despite this apparent widespread suppression that everyone claims was going on, this bad-faith misrepresentation of the reality of the situation was all over the place. I saw many times more people spouting misinformation than I did the actual full details of this stuff. Like .01% of the potentially fatal misinformation got cleaned up and people are acting like there was this brutal suppression of the truth.

cthalupa commented on Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis   med.stanford.edu/news/all... · Posted by u/DeusExMachina
ericmcer · 5 days ago
I mean your being a bit obtuse if you don't think there was a stigma around criticizing the vaccine in 2021/22.

Writing a LinkedIn/Facebook post about how the vaccine causes heart problems might result in you losing your job and would definitely cause you to lose a few friends. There was a massive stigma around pointing out flaws in vaccines at that time, it was not a nuanced issue, either you were all in or you were a psycho anti-vax nut.

cthalupa · 5 days ago
The problem is that if you're criticizing the vaccine for this, you're at best uninformed, and quite often, doing so in bad faith.

As has been pointed out in the thread you're responding to, it causes these effects at lower rates and lower severities than just getting covid while unvaccinated. It's also just something we've known some flu vaccines to do for decades now. (And just the regular old flu can cause it, too)

cthalupa commented on Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis   med.stanford.edu/news/all... · Posted by u/DeusExMachina
mc32 · 5 days ago
Slowly the skeptics and the conspiracy theorists are getting proven correct in this case.

It’s unfortunate it’s taken so long for the hidden truth to come out. It’s also unfortunate they swept this under the rug which just increases people’s suspicion around vaccine safety. I hope they, the establishment, learn from this boondoggle.

cthalupa · 5 days ago
Vaccines can cause myocarditis. This isn't new information, it's not specific to Covid vaccines or mRNA vaccines. It's a well known potential side effect of vaccines. We've known that flu vaccines can cause myocarditis and pericarditis for a long, long, time.

But importantly, just like other flu vaccines, the Covid vaccines cause them at lower rates than getting infected while unvaccinated, and the actual severity is also lower.

cthalupa commented on Blender 5.0   blender.org/download/rele... · Posted by u/FrostKiwi
MichaelEstes · a month ago
That is not a very big studio or very big production, Blender falls over in the pipeline department. It’s a constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility needed to get a major project out the door, just the fact that only a Python API is provided is enough for most people who have worked on massive scenes with massive amounts of data to consider it a non starter.
cthalupa · a month ago
3.0+1.0 was the highest grossing box office release that year in Japan and has a worldwide fanbase. The original series + End of Evangelion are considered by many critics and fans to sit among the best anime series of all time, and the Rebuild movies were absolutely huge.

Personally, I think they pale in comparison to the original series and lose a lot of what makes Eva special and interesting to begin with, so I'd kinda love to dump on them a bit, but... it's about as big of a production as it gets in the anime industry. They're of course nowhere near Pixar level or similar, but it is clearly an example of Blender being battle tested by a serious studio on a serious project.

cthalupa commented on Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill   hightimes.com/news/politi... · Posted by u/bilsbie
nobody9999 · a month ago
>My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.

I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.

I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market. Even though I live in a (now) legalized state, there's still a thriving black market, both for folks who have been growing for decades who maintain a positive reputation among distributors/wholesalers, and those who purchase out-of-state product (that's tested and sold legally in those other states) without tax or records, and can then undercut the legal dispensaries.

I'm not familiar enough with the "hemp" growers/sellers, but IIUC, since it's not supposed to be used as a mind-altering substance, the testing and purity regulations may not apply.

All that said, things are a mess WRT to cannabis in the US. Some states are doing it well, others are not. And the Federal government, while not irrelevant, has not made progress in this area -- and that includes the "hemp" loophole which (and I could be mistaken here) isn't regulated at all.

Hopefully sometime in the future the states and the federal governments will get it right. Which is often how these types of issues are addressed in the US -- study the issue carefully, choose the path that is least effective and most harmful, then iterate, trying less bad and less harmful "solutions" as you go along.

Presumably we'll get there eventually.

cthalupa · a month ago
> I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market.

Just basic laws around farming. For example, lead arsenate is banned in the US, and I trust the hemp farmers to not be using it as much as I trust any similar operation, but someone illegally growing stuff? They're already breaking the law. And who knows where it was grown to begin with?

And in general, there are companies behind all of this. There are names. Legal recourse if shit goes wrong. Who am I going to sue if I find out that the shit Bob has been selling me has been full of harmful pesticides or if the oil was full of some harmful additive, etc.?

cthalupa commented on Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill   hightimes.com/news/politi... · Posted by u/bilsbie
Terr_ · a month ago
> The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced.

As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.

One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.

cthalupa · a month ago
True.

I just meant in practice that the low-population states tend to be rural.

u/cthalupa

KarmaCake day5518April 24, 2014
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