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Joined 14 days ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • I hope so. Textual analysis suggests a “2 Q” theory where the earliest posts were mostly one author on 4chan (interestingly not all, several early drops are believed to be from different users) and then another person (who I believe wholeheartedly is 8chan administration Ron Watkins) started posting as Q and moved to 8chan. I’m interested in knowing who the earliest Q was and what the content of the very first Q drops was, given that there are believed to be several that didn’t get archived. Several people have claimed to be 4chan Q but none of their stories are particularly convincing. My guess is that it was a bunch of random trolls at first and then one of them just went with it when they started getting a following.


  • On one hand this is obviously absurd but on the other hand I don’t actually know how one could solve the sheer scale of pedophilia happening on their platform without some dystopian shit. It seems like there is a maximum size for something like discord because at the scale it is now I’m not sure how you could possibly moderate it. I’ll probably stop using it if they implement this but I can definitely understand why they feel like it’s a good idea.



  • Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.


  • This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

    TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.



  • I may legitimately lose my supposedly magical and highly important American manufacturing job because of this shit and these dumbasses think that this is all a genius move that will finally Make America Great Again. Everyone else I know who works in manufacturing is feeling the same way. One of my coworkers is mildly Trumpy and was talking about how he thinks it’s a negotiation tactic and was shocked when I said I think the people in charge are just legit stupid and think tariffs will magically make things better in their own right. He didn’t have anything to offer as a rebuttal he just seemed surprised that anyone would think Trump isn’t a turbo genius who is secretly making 5000 IQ negotiation moves.








  • It’s more complicated than that since I do believe God exists but in a way that is incomprehensible to humans, and, according to all evidence, doesn’t “intervene” with the universe. I say “intervene” because God, as classically described, is simultaneously incapable of intervening and incapable of not intervening. If we define God as “an omnipotent being”(which, for the record, I do not), then He is necessarily also all knowing and exists outside of the limitations of time and space. Such a being would be perfectly optimized as well, and so it would be impossible for anything to occur without its express permission and cause. Therefore, under classical theism, it seems impossible for God to say, answer prayers, because this would imply that He could possibly change His mind or that what was happening wasn’t already what He wants to begin with.


  • Eh. I could care less about downvotes and I understand that the idea of practicing Christianity for reasons beyond personal faith in it is going to be controversial to Christians and atheists alike. If someone made a chill Atheist/agnostic “church” where there was singing and discussions on moral philosophy, and a community of people devoted to helping each other and their community I’d probably be doing that but as it stands religion is the only game in town for such things and I think that it’s good to do something like this. Plus I don’t know, it’s kind of cool to be a part of rituals people have been doing for thousands of years.


  • It’s complicated but I used to be essentially atheist but now believe that there is something one might as well call “God” after studying philosophy. Essentially everything has a cause and something must be at the end of that chain, and we might as well call that “God.” I also practice Christianity because I feel that it is good to have the community and structure that a religion can provide but I don’t think that “God” necessarily exists in the way Christianity typically presents it.



  • Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.