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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Memorization is not the same thing as critical thinking.

    A library of internalized axioms is necessary for efficient critical thinking. You can’t just turn yourself into a Chinese Room of analysis.

    A well designed test will freely give you an equation sheet or even allow a cheat sheet.

    Certain questions are phrased to force the reader to pluck out and categorize bits of information, to implement complex iterations of simple formulae, and to perform long-form calculations accurately without regard to the formulae themselves.

    But for elementary skills, you’re often challenging the individual to retain basic facts and figures. Internalizing your multiplication tables can serve as a heuristic that’s quicker than doing simple sums in your head. Knowing the basic physics formulae - your F = ma, ρ=m/V, f= V/λ etc - can give you a broader understanding of the physical world.

    If all you know how to do is search for answers to basic questions, you’re slowing down your ability to process new information and recognize patterns or predictive signals in a timely manner.



  • This isn’t a profound extrapolation. It’s akin to saying “Kids who cheat on the exam do worse in practical skills tests than those that read the material and did the homework.” Or “kids who watch TV lack the reading skills of kids who read books”.

    Asking something else to do your mental labor for you means never developing your brain muscle to do the work on its own. By contrast, regularly exercising the brain muscle yields better long term mental fitness and intuitive skills.

    This isn’t predicated on the gullibility of the practitioner. The lack of mental exercise produces gullibility.

    Its just not something particular to AI. If you use any kind of 3rd party analysis in lieu of personal interrogation, you’re going to suffer in your capacity for future inquiry.




  • Reminds me of the time Vivek Ramaswamy bilked investors for over a billion with a phoney Alzeheimer’s drug

    he helmed the leadership of Roivant, a multi-billion-dollar American pharmaceutical company he founded, and gallantly relinquished his CEO role in 2021 due to his unwavering stance against ESG principles, despite facing opposition from his liberal workforce. While this narrative might seem appealing, it is akin to the endless “flip-flops” that have plagued his campaign—an elaborate work of fiction that unravels upon a modicum of scrutiny.

    Let’s start with the basics. Ramaswamy has funded his campaign through the sale of over $32 million in Roivant stock options in February of this year. This could lead one to believe that Roivant, based in Bermuda, is thriving and that Ramaswamy is a great entrepreneur. Except the company reported staggering losses of $1.2 billion in its financial report of March 2023. This isn’t a one-time slump: In March 2022, when Ramaswamy was still Roivant’s chairman and a major shareholder, the company reported an annual loss of $924.1 million.

    Ramaswamy’s defenders may argue that Roivant performed better during his tenure as CEO in 2021, but alas, the numbers tell a different story. The reality is that Roivant’s finances were abysmal under Ramaswamy’s watch. During his tenure in 2019, the company’s net operating loss exceeded $530 million. By 2020, the losses had doubled to over $1 billion, accompanied by a 65 percent decline in revenue.


  • Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media

    Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You’re still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You’re still securing the URL from a private DNS. You’re still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).

    Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

    There’s not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

    If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting “Communities I’m interested in” on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth “Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!” reactionary in between instances, that’s an immediate turn off that I don’t think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.

    Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we’re all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).

    Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.


  • Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?

    In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.

    In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.

    Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.

    Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.

    If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.

    The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

    • Michael Parenti

  • What sets him apart is he is EVIL.

    He’s an absolute piece of shit. But if you think he stands above Donald Rumsfeld or Steve Bannon or George Shultz or William J. Casey or Samuel Alito on the Evilness Spectrum, you’re suffering from profound recency bias.

    The history of evil shits running this country goes back a long, long way. Elon’s just the latest to claim the mantel. And its safe to say he won’t be the last.

    What sets him apart is the recklessness and the fecklessness of his actions. He’s jamming code updates into a 60 year old system without bothering to bug check them first. Very real possibility he bricks a significant portion of the Treasury software suite before he’s done. Prior administrations had an eye towards continuation of careers and legacy of their terms. This administration is treating the term as a Smash-and-Grab, with an eye towards fully expropriating the functions of the federal government to the private sector.




  • If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should.

    Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn’t necessarily hit on a given roof.

    For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you’ll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don’t get anywhere close to that.

    Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you’re going to get better and more consistent yield.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldOne Shop
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    3 days ago

    Gunwalking (Wide Receiver/F&F) is at least allegedly intended to map firearm traffic for the purpose of orchestrating stings.

    I might argue the Republican scandalmongering was about shielding their deep state counterparts from being outed, rather than persecuting CIA linked gun trafficker assets in the ATF.

    But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everybody is just stepping on one another’s dicks.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldOne Shop
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    You hardly have to speculate.

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

    Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.

    In 1980, Regional Security Officer James Blystone had met with an Argentine Intelligence Source. In the declassified memo, Blystone had asked about the disappearance for two Montoneros that had plans to travel from Mexico to Brazil to meet with other Montoneros. The Argentine Intelligence Source had explained that they had been taken and interrogated, and later contacted their Mexican and Brazilian counterparts for approval to conduct an operation to capture the other Montoneros that were expecting their arrival. Once they were under custody, they had utilized fake documents to check into their hotel to impersonate their presence and not alert any other Montoneros of their capture. They were imprisoned at Campo de Mayo

    The Mexican Connection of the Iran Contra Affair

    In what newspapers here are calling ‘‘the Mexican connection’’ to the Iran-contra affair, the Mexican political establishment and its right-wing opposition are trading charges that each has maintained improper contacts with American organizations supplying aid to anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua.

    Critics of the opposition National Action Party accused the party of treason after it was disclosed last month that a prominent party member met several times in Washington last year with Carl R. (Spitz) Channell, director of the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty.

    Mr. Channell recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the American Government by raising tax-deductible contributions for a purpose that was not deductible: buying arms for the contras. He was an associate of Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, who developed the contra arms supply network while working for President Reagan’s National Security Council.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9rida_Initiative

    Some examples of Mexico’s paramilitary abuses at the time included the sexual assault and rape of dozens of female detainees by police in San Salvador Atenco, and the disappearances of dozens of teachers in the state of Oaxaca in 2006, as well as the killings of seven innocent bystanders, including the American journalist Brad Will by off-duty policemen. Almost half of Mexican police officers examined in 2008 failed background and security tests, a figure that rose to nearly 9 of 10 policemen in the border state of Baja California