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Limit of 50 would allow a person to try 50 most common passwords:

e.g:

http://mashable.com/2013/11/05/20-most-popular-passwords-adobe/

This would significantly increase a chance of a breach than a lockout after 5 tries.

1) Does not MTG have rotating formats, so that no meta gets too entrenched as only few most recent sets are in play?

https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/standard-formats-magic-gathering

2) Also, does not MTG have "limited" (draft) games, where you take turns drafting cards from boosters.

This format seems to be exactly what you are looking for - looking through opened new packs and figuring out a way to build a deck.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/formats/booster-draft

I got pretty fed up with Google with the whole Google+/YouTube comments fiasco, so I decided to use DuckDuckGo. It respects my privacy much more, the interface isn't as heavy, and bangtags can be really useful.

From time to time, DDG won't be good enough. Then the only thing I've got to do is to write a bangtag in the search query, !yt (for youtube), !g (for going to Google) and so on. Hell, there's even an !xkcd tag. Look at the full list. I used to be skeptic, but it's definitely good.

> To name just one example, there has been a 79% decline in the number of 1st year undergraduate women interested in a Computer Science major between 2000 and 2011.

Is there a known correlation between the implementation of girls-only STEM promotion programs and a decrease in interest in computer science? Recently I read a flurry of articles about female high school senior disinterest in computer science because some university did a study about the women's cultural stereotypes of computer science--it was seen as a nerdy, lonely profession for social outcasts. I can think of three female computer scientists on tv shows off the top of my head (NCIS, Arrow, and Criminal Minds) and only one of them subverts this stereotype--the other two are oddballs who don't dress or behave like anyone else in their professional environments. And the one who does presently subvert the stereotype was an oddball in the past. I also feel that it is necessary to point out that there was a general overall decrease in computer science majors from 2000-2011 (dat burst bubble) that has only recently picked up again.

So maybe it's not the fact that girls-only programs exist, but that they're attempting to solve the wrong problem. From your description, it sounds as if these programs are "ra ra, girls can do anything, even science!" affairs that try to appeal to "feminine" interests, Barbie Astronaut style. Instead these programs should attack inaccurate cultural stereotypes by introducing girls and women to different types of STEM experiences without explicitly attempting to "gender" them. Still, such programs should be accepting of "gendered" responses to assignments. That is, a CAD design of a jewelry holder or makeup case should be just as valid as a car or rocket design. To insinuate that "women's" products are somehow "lesser" just reinforces more stereotypes.

Yours was my view to begin with. This changed my view: "When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime." I still think the rampage was primarily about mental illness, but there's no reason to exclude a discussion about feminism and misogyny from the discourse in our efforts to reduce the frequency of these events.

We don't have to choose between contextualizing this as the act of a mentally ill person and that of a misogynist. It was both. And it's worthwhile to address both misogyny and mental illness in our (apparently futile) hunt for a solution.

I'm currently typing this on a MacBook with homebrew installed, which allows me to easily install basically any open-source Unix application. It's just a handy package manager, though. Most Unix open-source applications can be installed with Apple-provided tools, unless there's something about it that makes it specific to a particular version of Unix, which would be as likely to crop up with any version of Unix other than the targeted one, regardless of how open it is.

I don't think that Apple is significantly restricting my ability to install anything I want to. There is some package signing that will complain if an application specifically packaged for MacOS usage (an app bundle isn't signed properly, but I can bypass that by right-clicking and selecting "Open" (instead of just double-clicking) and clicking the "Run" button that shows up in the warning. After doing that once, I can start it with a double-click from then on.

Financial costs aside, adding classes to students' schedules requires removing other classes, unless you're advocating for longer school days. Same goes for school size. Would you recommend that something be replaced, or leave it to parents to decide?

>Even if the programming is more centered around seeing the effects of basic functions like using Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/), this sort of practice will greatly benefit future generations in whichever career path they go down.

Yes and no. Building logic is certainly necessary for learning minds, but arithmetic and pre-algebra already exist, and not only have these goals in mind, but are also much more applicable to real-world situations.

I'm inclined to agree but the biggest issue with your position is the potential for disingenuous writing of the test itself. What would weighting of the test be about? Laws? Civics? History? Congress is already overweight with lawyers who learn about the things they vote on through Wikipedia. This would only exacerbate the problem.

Remember, at one point Congress thought an aptitude test for voting was necessary. I mean, that was logically sound on an empirical level, if you're too dumb to understand what you're voting on, you don't deserve to vote. Of course, it was abused and this was the result. It may sound great, but any kind of exam to participate in voting, either on the legislative level or citizen level will invariably start to edge out the poor and undereducated and overrepresent the wealthy and college educated.

Think of it kinda like cherry cough syrup: it might taste like shit, but without it you fundamentally degrade the foundations of democracy.

"Those who ignore mandatory evacuation orders should be prepared to be self-sufficient for the first 72 hours after a storm...In addition, public safety officials will not risk lives to respond to emergency calls in mandatory evacuation areas during the storm."

https://weather.com/safety/news/what-mandatory-evacuation-means

I really think you are being somewhat unfair here:

> AND requiring the user to purchase a separate lightning-to-3.5mm adapter that costs $10 and is described as "fragile" and "poorly made".

They give it to you ~~for free~~ at no additional charge in the box when you purchase the phone.

>Mac OS is exclusive to Apple products, which forces me to pick up one of their $2000+ Macbooks if I want to even touch their operating system.

You can buy a Mac Mini for $499 on the website (not to mention the number of used offerings out there. I got a couple year old MM for $150 on Ebay). They don't sell the OS - they haven't for years. They give it away ~~for free~~ at no additional charge with their hardware.

>Want to add some songs to your iPhone? Better open up iTunes!

Which they give away ~~for free~~ at no additional charge

>Need a new cable? Time to go the Apple Store!

Or Amazon, where you can purchase a replacement cable for $6

>The company has done such a great job at establishing their brand image over the last few decades that they can send out overpriced, mediocre products and still make money.

While you may not agree with their product and pricing strategy, many people do get value for the products. That does not make them overpriced or mediocre.

Edit As someone pointed out to me, nothing is really "free" - it is all baked into the price of the products. The phrase "at no additional charge" is more accurate.

Man. I don't pretend my approach is universal, but you may give it a try.

I got rid of depression, anxiety and panic attacks through meditation and nothing else. Before starting to practicing meditation, I did some research - as this field is 99% bogus. I found that the most effective and close to the real deal is the Theravada tradition and the most competent and practical guide is Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M. Ingram.

I chose meditation because during my attacks I observed that trying to avoid a confrontation with the monster does only postpone the conflict and even makes it bigger. So I decided to enter its den: my mind.

I've read the book and other bibliography to which the book directed me and started to sit at least 1 hour a day. Sometimes 2 hrs, even more.

The results were spectacular. I didn't get rid of depression, anxiety and panic attacks. Instead I achieved a way higher goal: I master them. It's been 1,5 years since I started to meditate and now I can handle those previously horrible states of mind like minor inconveniences. Moreover: they are useful to me. They keep me alive. I reflect more on my existence, I am not numb and indifferent anymore. I can handle a major full-blown panic attack like a spectator watching a beast doing its part on a circus arena. I have tamed the most horrible enemy of human's mind, the DPDR. But meditation is good far beyond this purpose. Its benefits are countless. Just make your own research on this topic. If you want some suggestions, feel free to PM me.

The good news about your condition is: depressed and anxious people are smarter than the average. Use this extra brainpower you benefit of to heal yourself.

So, give it a try, buddy, it will work. Good luck and happy sittings.

Do you have any source that supports the claim that the judicial system discriminates against men in custody cases?

The majority of child custody cases are settled out of court. In 51% of cases the parents decide that the mother should be the custodial parent. In 29% of cases, there is no third party involvement. In 11% of cases, it is decided during mediation that the mother should have custody. In 5% of cases, the issue is resolved after custody evaluation. Only 4% of child custody cases go to trial. According to source. Is it the judicial system’s fault that fathers choose not to get custody?

It is also dishonest not to mention the fact that women are more likely to be the primary caregivers of children. Just one of many sources you can find on this. Shouldn’t the court favor the parent who has been the most active in their children’s upbringing?

"We used to think of it that way, until we better defined what it meant to be a planet and what it meant to be a satellite, i.e., moon. Now we know that the moon is too small to be considered a planet, so that we don't consider our system to be a double planet.

However, Pluto is a double planet with its main large satellite, Charon. Or,make that a double dwarf planet ever since it got demoted. This is because Charon is so large - just over half the radius of Pluto - that instead of Charon orbiting Pluto, they both orbit a piece of empty space between them. As a counterexample, the moon's gravity is such that it only makes the earth wobble around a bit, but the moon definitely orbits the earth, and not the other way around. However, Charon's gravity is such that it makes Pluto look like a yo-yo as it wobbles around in space."

https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Earth-and-the-Moon-better-described-as-a-double-planet-system-rather-than-a-planet-moon-system

> I would not judge someone professionally based on their height.

Whether you think you would do it or not, it absolutely does play a role.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/height-bias-found-in-us-hiring-promotion-practices

Well, what do you know. This is my first time using the argument:

"Think of the children!"

There are some words that are taboo in society. Those three are good examples. Whilst I agree that in adult conversation we should not shy away from using the words we are discussing- that we should hold them up to the light, if you like - that's not what's happening here.

Spotify, broadcast television etc all have a duty of care to their audience. This can include young people who aren't fully aware of the power of those words and the consequences of using them. If my fictional 6-year-old child was listening to the radio and an unedited version of Straight Outta Compton came on, he or she might start to use the words in it in the same context they do- freely.

But that's not great for the child. But that's OK, because I'm there and I can explain that there are some words we don't use and the reasons behind that.

What if I'm not there? Spotify can't know that. So it's right for them to let me do the parenting and decide when Child is ready to have that discussion and understand the complexities of language use.

Our effective tax rate is much much lower, about 18.6%. This is competative with other nations we are usually comparing the 35% to.

You may feel that you are owed a refund morally and based on your understanding of the terms & conditions you agreed to. I won't speak to the issue morally, but the terms & conditions you agreed to pretty explicitly state that Spotify can advertise to you, even as a premium user;

>7 Rights you grant us >>In consideration for the rights granted to you under the Agreements, you grant us the right... (2) to provide advertising and other information to you

Paying for premium does not exempt you from being advertised to, plain and simple.

“Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be “apolitical” is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.”

— Rebecca Solnit

https://quotefancy.com/quote/1421138/Rebecca-Solnit-Politics-is-pervasive-Everything-is-political-and-the-choice-to-be

You can say you don't want to be political, but in reality your silence is tacit approval for the current situation.

The ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah identifies the two most basic general principles of what he calls a "Cosmopolitan" morality, though he really means any modern morality worth taking seriously: (1) all people matter, and (2) it's OK to be different.

These are the principles that cause us to value multiculturalism. If you don't agree with (1) or (2) above, it's going to be very hard to change your view here.

This doesn't mean we can't--as a society--pass judgement on ideas that violate these two principles. And it doesn't mean we can't--as individuals--show preference for some people or some lifestyles. But it does mean that we should value a society that, on the largest scale, allows all people to live the kinds of lives they want.

For practical reasons (not to mention for the sake of kindness and humility), we should withhold judgement about other ways of life unless absolutely compelled not to.

It is vital that you provide the specific accusations, because there are a whirlwind of different ones right now and on close examination they seem to never show what people claim, or confuse really standard stuff with something "shady." Things like being aware Sanders wasn't going to win in May, being annoyed by attacks against the DNC, and the like are being spun to support a pre-existing narrative.

My very favorite was this one, which people are claiming is admitting a vast conspiracy. It is actually bullet points on an episode of Fox News Sunday. There is another one going around that "proves" the dastardly deeds of the DNC based on bullet points about an interview Ben Carson gave to MSNBC. There really isn't even the most basic level of scrutiny on them, people are reading what they want to read and then running with it.

So, could you provide the specific emails that you think show collusion to the detriment of the Sanders campaign? It is really the only way this claim can be addressed.

Magic isn't one game - there are literally hundreds of formats. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/serious-fun/compendium-casual-magic-part-1-2012-12-11

To Quote Gerrard's Wisdom - "A Duel is a fight between two men. A War is a fight between two armies. You lose the duel if your opponent comes expecting a war."

A Draft Deck cannot compete against a Vintage deck. A Sealed Deck cannot compete against a Legacy Deck.

Hell, one of my personal favorite formats is "Deck of Steel" where the point is to build the worst possible deck, and then you and your opponent switch decks and try to win with your opponents terrible pile of crap. Obviously a Deck of Steel is going to literally lose to everything, that's the point.

If you are just starting out - play a few drafts - everyone is on the same footing (namely 3 packs) - or play sealed (everyone gets 6 packs). Since no outside cards are allowed, you cannot pay to win.

As for infinites, does it really matter if you win 20-0 or -100000000000000000000000 - 1??? A win is a win. I like doing Graham's #'s worth of damage - its one of the things that makes Magic special among TCGs.

Edit: I've been playing Magic for 25 years, feel free to PM me if you just want to ask questions.

You have two threads in your argument here, some based on books, the others based on side services that libraries provide, which don't need to be linked.

1. This really depends on the book in question. There are 150,000 publications available through project Gutenberg and their partners. Libraries have increasingly limited paper book collections, as people move away from using them. There are interlibrary loans, but they are a hassle and take time. Plus smaller towns have even more limitations with dead-tree editions - the internet is better for rural users.

2. Have you see the "People who bought this also bought..." when you shop on Amazon? In addition, the indexing you can do online is far more useful than happening upon a book on the library shelf.

3. Yes, access to computers and internet is a good thing. But there's no reason it has to be in a library.

4. Is this something that the government should pay for? Do we need a whole building for it?

5. Yes, many ebooks work with libraries - online from the comfort of home. Why do you need a brick and mortar building if you're downloading ebooks?

6. Um, you're posting on reddit to say that you need libraries to get exposed to new ideas? There are many many places on the internet (such as reddit) that are far more likely to have diverse views rather than going to a lecture at your library attended by people who live in your town.

7. Again, this is great, but it doesn't require libraries to accomplish.

I know for a fact that I am being paid more than one of my co-workers, for the same job (at least in title and description). If we discussed our salaries, he would be immediately upset and probably go asking for a raise. If he did this, my employers would know that we discussed this and be unhappy with me for costing them more money. I would also hurt my own chances of getting a raise, even if they didn't suspect us of having discussed salary, because it would cause their overall budget to increase, making them more resistant to my own raise.

Further, I believe that I am a much superior employee to my coworker. He makes careless mistakes, complains too much, and openly wastes time at work. Due to the structure of the company, we technically have the same job, but I tackle more responsibilities, more effectively. Why the hell should I discuss my salary with him? It would only benefit him, not me.

Conversely, I would much rather negotiate my own rate, based on what I believe is fair for the work that I do. If someone else makes more than me, I'm happier not knowing. As of right now, I am perfectly happy with my salary, so why would I want to go and ruin that by finding out someone else makes more. It would just make me bitter! In the wise words of a disgraced man.

Your problem problem is not with Muslim immigrants, but with immigrants from certain cultures within the Middle East.

There are many different Muslim cultures around the world. For example, Indonesian Islamic culture is much different than Middle Eastern Islamic cultures.

> Indonesian Muslims are more tolerant to other religions and beliefs compared to Muslims in some (if not most) Middle Eastern countries. This can happen because those walis adapted - rather than of confronted or flat-out rejected - local cultures that have their roots in Hinduism and/or animism and dynamism and use them to teach the message of Islam to the common people. Source

Muslim immigrants from Indonesia do not cause the same problems that you describe. The problem is cultural, not religious and that is an important distinction to make.

Read the book "The Millionaire Next Door."

Much it details the lifestyle of the majority of millionaires in the U.S.: They are a self starters that own their own company and work at it every day. They don't have flashy jobs but run businesses that are "economy proof" providing essential services. And they don't lead flashy lifestyles, but live in modest houses, drive modest vehicles, and so forth. Basically most people who are actually millionaires you wouldn't know it unless they told you, and they do provide backbones to local communities.

I'll concede that the book is 18 years old, but I can't imagine the data has changed that much. I suspect that in working in estate planning you are far more likely to encounter wealthy people who have complicated and flashy holdings hence the need for planning, whereas the average millionaire doesn't really need any more than a simple will because their estate won't be much different than the every man's, just with some higher numbers on the accounts.

Edit: To further support my point watch the ESPN "30 for 30: Broke" which documents the high rate in which multi-millionaire athletes go broke after their playing careers end. They have all the legal types in the world advising them, and yet they can't figure out how to hang on to their money. I'll concede that there are other factors in pay there as well, but if it was as easy as, "Hire a financial adviser and you'll never have issues," that wouldn't be such a prevalent thing.

Look at the map of the US on this page, with the red dots: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/17/us/womens-march.html

This is where marches are happening. Some are very large, I've heard of huge crowds in places like Memphis and St. Louis. This is not even considering where people are coming from to attend the largest ones in Chicago and D.C.

Many of these people ARE white and working class. Most don't live in New York or Los Angeles. You acting like there's this monolith of people in the middle of the country who love Trump and hate Black Lives Matter isn't useful.

Besides, if you can be driven away from a party from the fact that a celebrity makes a speech, you were looking for an excuse already. And given that likelihood, and given the obvious benefits of exciting your base which could counteract losing WWC voters, this isn't even necessarily the big deal you're saying.

> But with the removal of pre-existing conditions through the ACA, I could sigh up for health insurance if I felt I needed it at any point, IE: cancer.

This isn't true. This is why the period of open enrollment ends today (or already ended, depending on your time zone). You won't be able to sign up on your own again until the next open enrollment period, to prevent the problem of people signing up once they get sick.

You can read this for more info. tl;dr, if you get sick now, you have to wait until next November to sign up.

> the only sensible thing to do with it is submerge it entirely in glue for safe transportation

Why not just start with a product that fixes that? Such as glitter glue. I don't have any of the issues you're describing with glitter glue. Or things like glitter nail polish. Glitter is great in those kinds of products.

This podcast episode from Freakonomics will change your view of just how powerless the President really is:

Has the U.S. Presidency Become a Dictatorship? by Freakonomics Radio https://player.fm/1gSmkG #nowplaying

Transcript here: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/u-s-presidency-become-dictatorship/

I don't disagree with that, though I think you're over-estimating how sophisticated the teaching would be (at least at the lower levels).

I'm thinking broad strokes, the sort of information you find in populist economics books. I remember reading The Worldly Philosophers and it was a great overview of economists, their theories, and economics.

It was clear and easy to understand, and I don't think it would be that difficult to make similar syllabus for kids (which is basically what happens with all subjects anyway).

Of course it wouldn't benefit if these subjects are taught badly, but I don't think it would harm any. This is not a topic most people engage with, or are interested in at all, so the potential damage is minimal if any.

So by the study linked in this article being born in the 90th percentile for income (parents are making 150,000 a year as a household is about average for this range) on average make 200% more than those born in the 10th percentile and 75% more than those born in the 50th percentile.

So basically being born into a wealthy family you can expect to earn 75% more than the average person.

Contrast this with attractiveness which has been found to account for 4-9% increase in wages.

So the conclusion from research is pretty clear that having rich parents is better than being pretty.

I think we already would have consensus that psychopaths should not be in control, just based on the fact that it sounds bad. However, this is probably not as possible to test for as you might think. The difference in screening for psychopaths is that it is motive based. You can easily lie about motives and take steps to fool the test if you're aware of what they are looking for. Your post was probably inspired by this same post that talks about masking the condition https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2fx7km/there_could_be_increased_numbers_of_psychopaths/

>no person, be it the Pope or the head of a central bank, can survive being seen as a racist

Also to nitpick, Donald Sterling has shown racist tendencies for a long time and he's been doing just fine financially

He may not be:

In 2011, one third of Americans would be unable to make their next rent/mortgage payment without their next paycheque (source). Additionally, 76% are living paycheque to paycheque (Source)

> The wipes are more durable and are less likely to shred or break while using them

That's what makes them absolutely terrible for your pipes. They simply don't break down.

If wages were preserved, and assuming raw material cost stayed the same, then the cost of increased labor and location overhead would be passed to the consumer.

People tend to forget that while manufacturing jobs left, the cost of things has gone waaayyyyyyyy down since the 1960s. Take a look at this tool catalog from 1960. A basic circular saw cost $55. Adjusted for inflation, that's like it costing $450 today (using official inflation numbers, which some economists criticize as being too low, but it's a complicated thing). You can now get a pretty much identical saw for $50, the same cost as in 1960, even with 56 years of inflation.

> Trying to "go back to the way things were" is impossible.

This seems to be the general point of your argument, which actually applies to literally every community.

There are however things you can do. You can promote more "traditional" things. For example, you could pass a law to make sure the native language is taught in schools. You can also make sure all documents and signs and the such are available in that language.

You can also promote more activities and events. Scotland is a great example of this. A lot of things we associate with Scottish tradition were in fact introduced (or reintroduced) at the end of the 19th century. These are things that are outlined in a book called The Invention of Tradition.

​

So no, you can't completely remove the influence of colonisation (or culture or geological changes or pretty much anything else), but you can take steps to promoting ideas and cultures that might have been lost as a result.

>Can you walk into a psych and get a brain test that shows depression or suicidality?

Yes. [1] [2]

>Mental illness itself is like defining liberal or blockchain or whatever buzzwords are around these days - heavy on rhetoric, shallow on actual substance.

You started your comment with rhetoric. Just because you can't see abnormal brain patterns with the naked eye doesn't mean they aren't real. Why do you stigmatize illnesses that affect the brain?

My understanding is that Google is paying for the stops, and that price is locked in by the city.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/07/us-google-commuterbus-sanfrancisco-idUSBREA0517L20140107

> The fees will be calculated based on a company's usage of SFMTA bus stops, which SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin said would result in charges of around $1 per stop per day. That creates fees averaging about $100,000 per company that uses the buses, or about $1.5 million total for the city.

> City rules forbid the city from collecting more than the cost of providing the service, officials said.

Even still, in response to the protests, Google has provided free bus rides to SF youth. From the end of the article, it sounds like Google is aware that they're not paying a fair share and want to change that. But, due to the previously mentioned rules they can't, and changing the rules isn't trivial.

> "San Francisco residents are rightly frustrated that we don't pay more to use city bus stops," a Google spokesperson told CNET. "So we'll continue to work with the city on these fees, and in the meantime will fund Muni passes for low income students for the next two years."

Tinder doesn't advertise itself as a "hookup app" - nothing on its website mentions hookups. It's society that's placed the label of "hookup app" on Tinder, and Bumble, OKCupid, or any other free dating site.

Tinder is used by people not looking for hookups because they need a place to find love and Tinder is free. Why should they be forced onto another site?

Thomas Sowell and a number of others have argued African American hip hop culture is basically white redneck behavior, Sowell in "Black Rednecks And White Liberals" which I'm about to begin. Colin Woodward's "American Nation's" touches on this as well, as do other authors who've penned books on the topic, although his book is more about all of the regional cultures that make up our country dating back to the groups that founded those regions and how their beliefs are still resoundingly alive and well and how politicians actively exploit these differences we have between one another. There are other academics I've heard doing research like this but I'm having trouble recall their names, I heard about them in some podcasts. But, there's definitely more reading you can do to explore this idea more.

Amazon links to check out both titles I mentioned:

https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1594031436/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502125308&sr=1-1&keywords=black+rednecks+and+white+liberals

>No it's not. Social constructs are unique in that they are not actually written or bound by any explicit agreements.

What basis do you have for this assertion?

Looking up several dictionary definitions and articles on the term, none of them use anything like that restriction, and often include examples such as games with sets of rules which explicitly would not meet the standard you propose.

Here are two of the most direct examples of Trump being racist:

From an article in "The New Yorker": "Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,”

Why would the Casino managers think to do this? Either they had been told to by Trump himself (A notorious micromanager) or they had been around him long enough to learn that having black employees in public facing roles would upset Trump.

From the book "Trumped!: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump" Trump was reported to have said: "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump himself later said of the book: "The stuff O’Donnell (the author) wrote about me is probably true.”

That is textbook racism.

The wording of your post implies that before California employers had to pay their servers $9/hr that they had to pay them only $2.13/hr.

Do note that before the $9/hr requirement it was $8/hr (i.e. the state-wide minimum wage).

Your same link, snap-shotted a few months ago shows the $8 figure.

In other words, it's always been the case that tippable employees in California receive minimum wage disregarding tips.

So these aren't "recent changes", so we've always had whatever you consider to be "societal obligations" to tip even though they've been getting enough income. (By "enough" here I mean whatever minimum you would require to change tipping policy in society)

Does your first point mean that the 12 step program may become a 5-6 step program and that that's okay depending in the beliefs of the group attending? If so I'm actually pretty cool with that as it would mean changing the program based upon the situation and needs of those attending.

> Because we don't have any treatment to put back an alcoholic brain and organs to its initial state, so the only "cure" we have is to stop and resist toward the alcohol craving, which is based on will power.

According to WebMD there three medicines approved by the FDA and a fourth that is showing promise in clinical trials that help with the treatment of alcoholism. Those drugs are Antabuse, Naltrexonem, Campral, and Topamax. These are meant to be used in combination with various therapies and potentially AA, however it's simply untrue that medicines don't exist. https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/features/fighting-alcoholism-with-medications#1

Regarding your last statement I would disagree wholeheartedly. People shouldn't be acting on false information to get help. If your program promises it can help and it's promise is only based upon, "Well at least we got people to try something" even though what is offered is ineffective then that's not actually a success. What needs to be offered is something that has an actual high success rate and if not new solutions should be researched and tried.

https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households

> No single program explains immigrants' higher overall welfare use. For example, not counting subsidized school lunch, welfare use is still 46 percent for immigrants and 28 percent for natives. Not counting Medicaid, welfare use is 44 percent for immigrants and 26 percent for natives.

> The welfare system is designed to help low-income workers, especially those with children, and this describes many immigrant households. In 2012, 51 percent of immigrant households with one or more workers accessed one or more welfare programs, as did 28 percent of working native households.

> The high rates of immigrant welfare use are not entirely explained by their lower education levels. Households headed by college-educated immigrants have significantly higher welfare use than households headed by college-educated natives — 26 percent vs. 13 percent.

You said, "scientific and intellectual progress could be heightened with more people [from those in Central America]". What data are you using to base such a claim? 97% of all innovations have been from Europeans from 800BC to 1950AD.

Obamacare established out of pocket maximums, eliminated lifetime insurance caps on healthcare, and mandated insurance cover essential health benefits so almost all catastrophic care must be covered (no "nonsurance" sales). It absolutely served to reduce the risk of medical bankruptcy under the previous system and make catastrophic care significantly more affordable for almost everybody.

Yes, it's still possible to go bankrupt even with insurance, but a high premium + $7150 out of pocket is a hell of a lot more affordable than a six figure bill for cancer treatment or major surgery.

The base corporate tax rate in America may be very high, but after rebates, exemptions and other bits of financial trickery, the average effective tax rate is about 19%. This still puts the US amongst the higher taxed businesses, but isn't the massive difference the 39% figure would suggest.

A good tax bill would lower the base tax rate and cut out methods for companies to reduce their taxes, leaving the effective tax rate largely unchanged. The problem is that each one of those exemptions was put in for a reason, and special interest groups will shout if it's removed. These could be incentives to open businesses in deprived areas, or to cut pollution, or to develop new medicines, or offer healthcare, or train gun owners... And each one may seem a good idea on paper.

So how many of these rebates and exemptions and loopholes have been removed? What will be the new effective tax rate for companies?

I'm not sure how much you hang out with actual trans people and not weird denizens of Tumblr but I think you will come to notice, this is the only case trans people are concerned about (Yes, I realize this is no true-scotsman, but that doesn't make it true). Any other reason is just you not being attracted to a persons body shape, or reproductive capability. That is not transphobic, because you could find those features in cis people. I'm just granting reproductive capability even if it is a fairly eye-rolly feature to describe attraction, especially for casual sex. People mention it though.

The transphobic sentiment trans people are concerned about when we utter, "it is transphobic to not date a trans person," is the sentiment that we really-deeply-truly are sex/gender we were assigned at birth and transition is just some sort of deception.

There is an interesting article about a related issue that of genitals and actual violence but the line of thinking and arguments can be repurposed here.

https://www.academia.edu/2589078/Evil_Deceivers_and_Make_Believers_On_Transphobic_Violence_and_the_Politics_of_Illusion

> This is pretty unfair....

The reason I mentioned those specific features is that they are both invisible to the human eye, or internal to the body. You can't know if a person has or doesn't have them via karyotyping, gynecological exam, or rectal exam. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would be very odd to say, "I'm only attracted to two X chromosomes." Most people don't even know with absolute certainty what a chromosome looks like, let alone what anyones is besides making educated guesses.

> The second easiest one to address, is your claim that this would be done by police force. I make no claim that fast food chains should be forced to pay higher wages by the government.

I assume what he meant was that any government law or regulation is essentially backed by police force when you get down to it. And if government isn't going to impose it how else is it supposed to happen? The good will of McDonald's franchise owners?

> Essentially, what I am saying is that businesses should begin to accept that there is a higher cost to labor and that mass-minimum wage is harmful to the employees and harmful to the business because employees are not motivated.

You say there is a higher cost that fast food businesses should "accept". Why? Things seem to be working from their perspective already. If the cost were actually higher, people wouldn't work there, and they obviously do work there.

> Finally, regarding the idea that reasonably higher wages = higher unemployment, I have seen no evidence to show this beyond your claim that "basic economics" shows as much. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable of the field of economics (econ / business major, now involved in policy), and that simply doesn't fly as an argument. Let's see some more effort!

I think you can't just wish away his point because you don't like it. Obviously this extra money to pay the employees has to come from somewhere. Do you think fast food franchises are running at a high profit margin? They are not Admittedly, McDonald's actually does have a pretty good profit going, so you might have a point with them, but the other big fast food chains are pretty tight. Look at Wendy's with 0.3% profit margin! Any sort of mandated raise for their employees would probably kill them, and they'd have to fire a lot of employees.

https://medium.com/@cainejw/an-actual-statistical-analysis-of-gamergate-dfd809858f68

the harassment that Anita receives is incredibly inflated for the sake of victimization. and for the record, the "negative" in that graph doesn't mean "threats".

very, VERY few people have actually sent any threats or harassment to any women involved. what is not debatable is that many are taking these rare threats as the norm, that is willful ignorance.

take Anita off of her pedestal, and you'll see that there is primarily criticism, NOT harassment against her.

honestly, at this point, there is just an overwhelming amount of information out there that invalidates her videos, proves that a minority of the reaction to her was threats (pro gamergate people found one of the harassers for her, btw), and just shows that she is a dishonest, manipulative person. she aims to create her image through headlines on mainstream news outlets, instead of actual activism. she gains followers by having the media advertise her image for her, because she can't appeal to enough people with her own message.

>Reason? She's a feminist and is complaining about the portraying of female characters in many video games.

it's because she's wrong. why is it that people just can't consider the possibility that she is actually a liar? the points she brings up aren't new, the reason there is this type of outrage about her is that she actually has a following for some reason, and people are tired of having her twisted version of feminism injected into gaming unnecessarily. she isn't a revolutionary, she isn't going against the grain, she isn't changing society.

How do you interpret this quote?

" I read Betty Friedan’s book [<em>The Feminine Mystique</em>] because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby. "

So here's the thing - holocaust deniers aren't convinced by evidence. They're not "just asking questions" because they genuinely want the answers, they're trying to sow discord and mistrust in institutions. Their other goal is to just spread anti-Semitism (which by giving them space, you allow them to do).

Have you read this write-up of why r/AskHistorians doesn't allow Holocaust deniers? Here is a particularly helpful quote:

>Discussing the ad campaign in her essential book <em>Denying the Holocaust</em>, Deborah Lipstadt highlighted the naïveté of those who believed that the “light of day” would dispel the lies of the deniers. “Light,” she wrote, “is barely an antidote when people are unable … to differentiate between arguments and blatant falsehoods.” Lipstadt ended by darkly observing that “correctly cast and properly camouflaged, Holocaust denial has a good chance of finding a foothold among coming generations.”

> It is vital that you provide the specific accusations, because there are a whirlwind of different ones right now and on close examination they seem to never show what people claim, or confuse really standard stuff with something "shady."

There actually seem to be quite a few examples, but the most prominently cited in the media of what's been uncovered so far seems to be this doozy from May, wherein the CFO of the DNC, Brad Marshall, sends an email to (among others) the Communications Director, Luis Miranda, suggesting that someone of Jewish heritage and atheist belief should be asked about their religion because of the perception that Mr. Marshall had it would make "several points difference" with his "Southern Baptist peeps".

Now, the thing to realize here is that, although the official has offered weak denials that he remembers this e-mail, there's basically only one guy on all of this election cycle that fits the bill, here, for any office that perceptions in KY and WVA would be at issue. Bernie Sanders. And there's every indication that the e-mails are legitimate, not forged. So my view is, that is who he was talking about.

Lets take that example first. Two party officials colluding on talking points to tear down one primary candidate.

> Let's get to the story behind the story: we are supposed to believe that a lack of turnout is somehow a measure of a lack of support for Trump. That, in itself, is media gaslighting, to use your term.

I'm sorry, but Trump himself said, in the leadup:

> “We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars,"

So don't blame the media for using the inauguration crowd size and celebrity/entertainment pedigree as a barometer for popular and cultural acceptance nationwide. Trump clearly cared about it enough to mention it. All the media did was follow up.

Don't get me wrong, it's not as though it matters what true or not. Trump's supporters will just continue to say that the Main Stream Media is corrupt/biased and have already begun to suggest that they either faked the pictures or somehow framed the shots to be disingenuous.

>Disliking her is fine. Disagreeing with her opinions is fine. Criticizing her methods is fine.

so would you say that you're fine with at least 95% of gamergate?

https://medium.com/@cainejw/an-actual-statistical-analysis-of-gamergate-dfd809858f68

>The modern practice of withc craft comes from cultures that practice voodoo or santaria.

Any evidence for this? There is a long history to witchcraft in Europe and hundreds of books on the topic like this one.

> the source of those claims are in the book: https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters/dp/1684510317

I'm not going to buy a book to try and find a source. Can't you just link the source, since you clearly know it. (After all, if you don't know the source, why are you trusting the claim.)

>for your first objection, i'm aware there might be a bias with parents, but the analogy you raise doesn't really make sense. the parents are not making an unfounded scientific claim about causation. they are giving a descriptive account of the behavior that they see in their kids.

And if you go looking at anticvax websites, you'll find that all the parents will claim that their kid became autistic right after the vaccine.

Bias is not just a possibility with the way this study was structured, it is guaranteed.

Here's a great book on it.

https://www.amazon.com/Deliberate-Dumbing-Abridged-Charlotte-2011-05-03/dp/B01FGMTF02/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=RD42900SGSVCEJP8QCCM

> illegal immigration.

Alienating one of our only two neighbors is a really bad idea for security purposes. The best move for our GDP would be an open border policy or a North American Union, in my opinion. More workers = more wealth being generated. The only problem with illegal immigration is that it's illegal.

> bad deals for the us

What, like how we pay more in export tariffs than they pay in imports? The US is getting a pretty good deal if you look at the big picture. We're primarily a service economy, not a goods economy. And how are we gonna "force" China to start paying higher tariffs? They'll just respond like rational actors and we'll lose money.

> radical Islamic terrorism

Islam has to decide to reform itself. We can't force that to happen by restricting immigration. All that will do is alienate young Muslims and create new terrorists.

> the debt

We're paying something like 2.5% on our debts. That's really fucking low. In fact, that's under inflation. I can invest in a mutual fund and get 8%. Floating this enormous amount of debt IS the plan. We're practically borrowing for free.

Trump has ideas that sound like they might work at first, but really think about the long-term real effects on our money. Consider that Bernie supporters are going to be pressuring the Democratic party to absorb his platform.

The important thing about the President isn't how likeable they are. It's their executive plans and how effective they're going to be in the real world.

You want results. Hillary is a demonstrated Machiavellian. She is the new Kissinger. She will get you results. She'll do a whole bunch of illegal shit in the process but she'll get away scott free and so will America.

Read The Prince and The Art of War and decide if you want a loud blowhard or a quiet schemer to run your State.

Even Adam Smith, champion of the free market invisible hand, says in his book The Wealth of Nations the government should fund thing that the market would not. This included various things such as museums, parks, roads, etc.

>You're still just a penisless male who can easily be identified (simply by looking at you) as a transgendered person. Dressing up in girl clothing and wearing makeup can never change that simple and undeniable fact. I cannot recall a single time in my life when I was unable to identify based on appearance alone, a trans gendered person.

This is called the toupee fallacy. You cannot think of a single time in your life you weren't able to identify a transperson/toupee based on look alone... but if the toupee was actually effective you would never actually know it was a toupee. So how can you actually be certain you have never seen one

https://www.tumblr.com/search/kim+petras and https://wiki.bme.com/images/thumb/6/6a/Buck-Angel.jpeg/400px-Buck-Angel.jpeg are my go to examples but I'm sure you could find a lot more if you tried.

Cool, well your definition is totally arbitrary, and kinda ridiculous to be honest.

Is Paul Ryan not a leader? What about Pelosi? McConnell? I don't think virtually anybody would agree they are not leaders of their party.

Your time period is also built to juke this stat. In your time period, their are 6 republican presidents and 3 democratic presidents. Turns out being the president means you appoint a lot of people in your own party. So if their are more republican appointees, chances are there will be more convicted.

And based on the wiki link, I can find two executive branch convictions in the Clinton years, so your 1 stat is pretty shaky.

You can stick your head in the sand and claim your metric is the right way to define leaders, but it's obviously cherry picking the stats, since my stat refutes your findings.

Edit:

>Slice it any way you like it

You're definitely using this statement wrong:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/any-way-you-slice-it

I sliced it a different way, and came up with an opposite conclusion, so the way you slice it matters. That should cause concern for your arbitrary definition.

> I feel like the ACA allowed the insurance companies to raise costs without any controls.

Actually the ACA says that insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of premiums for health care. That means they can't set their premiums higher than 125% of what they are paying hospitals. https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/

I also googled it in an attempt to find any sort of reliable source for these numbers, but could only find unsupported claims. Like you, I find these numbers utterly ridiculous - can you imagine every American going through 23 of these every year? I'd love to know how these facts got started.

According to the OED, the definition of mankind as referring exclusively to men is "archaic," and therefore doesn't reflect modern understandings of the word. Anecdotally, I can't recall when I've seen someone say "mankind" as referring just to men, excepting when it was immediately followed up by "womankind," presumably to emphasize that the archaic definition was being used.

I'm a little curious as to why you're defining "mental disorder" as going against the "main goal of reproduction".

I mean, for starters, this logic doesn't make any sense at all. By this definition people who primarily had sexual desires which didn't lead to reproduction would also be considered to have "mental disorders", even if they weren't homosexual or transsexual at all. For example, you could have someone who simply preferred oral/anal sex to PiV and as a result did it more. You could also have a fetish for finishing outside of your partner- would that be a "mental disorder"?

Next, this isn't even a definition which is exclusive to the groups you've mentioned(or sexuality in general). Perhaps someone just isn't interested in being in a relationship long enough to have kids, or they practice safe sex whenever they are intimate with others. These folks don't have "mental disorders". I'd also like to direct you to the fact that not engaging in reproductive sex does not necessarily exclude someone from reproducing by default. Homosexuals can have surrogate children who are inseminated by their sperm(or the opposite), while there's absolutely nothing preventing a transgendered person from having children in the first place(read: not transsexual).

Finally, if we look at what is actually defined as a mental disorder, you'll find that while gender dysphoria(which applies to some trans people) is listed as a mental disorder, Homosexuality is not. This is due to the fact that, at the very least, the "symptoms" of homosexuality within society do not meet the official criteria for mental illness.

If we look at the Mayo definition, "Many people have mental health concerns from time to time. But a mental health concern becomes a mental illness when ongoing signs and symptoms cause frequent stress and affect your ability to function.

Your argument seems to be based on the premise that eating meat is the primary cause of obesity. Meat is actually has a far better protein/calorie ratio than vegetarian options do. Making meat more expensive would actually cause more obesity, not less.

Any effort to reduce obesity should focus on making sugar more expensive, not meat.

Additionally:

Vegetarian diets are not necessarily better for the environment. About 90% of US cropland suffers from top soil loss at 13 times the sustainable rate. 92% of US soybeans (a vegetarian staple protein) are planted with genetically modified soy, immune to herbicides. This immunity allows soy farmers to douse their fields with large quantities of weed-killing herbicides which are toxic to other plants and fish. Some scientists worry that increased herbicide use could create "super weeds."

Processed vegetarian protein options such as tofu can cause more greenhouse gas pollution than farming meat. The production of soy-based proteins such as tofu could contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions than eating locally produced meat. According to a peer-reviewed 2009 study, giving up all animal products would only give a 8% reduction in green house gas emissions, not enough to be worth the dietary sacrifice.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228790125_Dietary_choices_and_greenhouse_gas_emissions_-_Assessment_of_impact_of_vegetarian_and_organic_options_at_national_scale

> I would still rather know that if I ever wipe my Xbox or Clear some space of a hard drive that I can still Play/Watch the things I've paid for long after the download servers are gone.

Non-digital media has a shelf life.

http://www.storagecraft.com/blog/data-storage-lifespan/

So even if you have a physical copy, there is no guaranteed that you can play that media far into the future.

Besides, what's stops you from moving a game from one digital storage to the next ad infinitum, the same way you would have to copy the physical version of media to prevent degradation?

I think the irony is you're trying to do exactly the same, but with the other form. Neither is "correct", except from certain points of view. This is why certain words in every language have multiple accepted pronunciations and sometimes these change.

Dictionaries list both as accepted: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/GIF

America used to have tests to determine whether racial minorities were competent enough to vote. Could you pass this test? The problem with voting tests is that an official or bureau with their own biases must create the standard for whether someone is "smart" enough to vote or not.

> Trumps outburst on twitter tanked the Canadian dollar a few months ago.

When was that?

Looking at a chart of the CAD-to-USD rate over the last year, the main feature is how much stronger the Canadian dollar has become against the US dollar in the last 5 months, with no big moves in the 7 months before that.

I agree with you that Trump's words have much more power than thought behind them, but in this particular case the numerical data does not appear to show the effect you're suggesting.

> I am more so in shock about the applause and near uniform support this idea got from the crowd. Maybe Seattle is the culprit here but it was a very disheartening case of mob leftism, where I felt marginalized by my own tribe. Not a good feeling.

What you're witnessing is leftism taking over liberalism. As you've noticed, liberalism was not always like this. It was about freedom, equal opportunity, free trade, social safety nets and policies that protect and encourage upward mobility for the working and middle classes.

Then the Marxist worldview started to creep in and change the narrative to one of class struggle, of the oppressed and the oppressors. Except, since class has never really been as big an issue in the US as it is in other cultures, it was modified a bit to what we're really obsessed with: race and identity.

Suddenly, blue collar white coal miners became oppressors even though they have no real institutional power. To see how far this has played out, check out Mark Lilla. He's a lifelong Democrat, and a liberal's liberal. He wrote a book called The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. He basic premise is that liberalism has lost its way and that the embrace of identity politics has damaged the long standing liberal goals of inclusion and progressiveism.

How did liberals respond? By calling him a white supremacist.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/atheism

"Disbelief or lack of belief in deities".

Atheism encompases an active disbelief (strong atheism/gnostic atheism) and also a simple lack of belief (weak atheism).

"Atheism" is used for both situations, but whether or not you put forth the answer as knowable is what determines it as gnostic or agnostic.

Ultimately, atheism is anyone who simply lacks a belief in a deity.

You're right. All that would be required to increase female representation in STEM careers is encouraging them to pursue those careers. You're also right that there is already some work being done to encourage women to apply to STEM careers.

That's why female representation in STEM is increasing. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/262640975_fig1_Fig-2-Percent-women-in-engineering-math-and-computer-science-and-physical-sciences

Further encouragement would probably lead to even higher participation, until women are roughly 50% of scientists. This encouragement already happens, but people want it to happen more.

Well, for a charge like your's to be leveled, you would need to demonstrate favorable treatment to people of a certain race. Let's see what ESPN said about other players when they had interviews that were less than professional:

Jim Everett- no comment

Jared Allen- pretty much praise

Can you show examples where players of one race acting up in interviews were treated to a different ESPN reaction than players of another race? If not, I don't think your charge stands up.

Because of the nature of social networking sites, people are going to upvote posts that closely relate to their experiences. The problem with that is that nearly 48% of reddit users are Americans. The site started in America, and gained a lot of traction in America before it reached Europe and the rest of the world.

The only way to actively combat this is to spread reddit to the rest of the world and make it more widespread in countries outside of the U.S. Outside of this, there isn't much that can be done about this aside from blatant censorship and vote manipulation, which would make reddit an overall more toxic and horrid place.

• TouchID: Motorola ATRIX had fingerprint authentication two years previously, though it wouldn't be until Android 6 that there would be a standard API for fingerprint readers.
• Apple Watch: Microsoft dropped the Microsoft Band in 2014, which had the same sensors as the Apple Watch, for less than Apple was charging.
• iPad Pro: the iPad Pro was a reaction to the Surface getting good. Apple knew that the Surface would eat its lunch if a slightly larger iPad didn't enter the market. Windows tablets were already becoming more popular, with Sony producing several, plus Microsoft buying the best pen tech out there (nTrig).
• FaceID: Microsoft, again, had them beat: They miniaturized the Kinect hardware and put it into their flagship Lumia 950 in 2014.

I feel like your point is really tangential. Chess and Rubik's cube solving are fundamentally different in that Chess is oppositional and Rubik's Cubes are not. They are both exploring a finite state space, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. It's also ironic to me that you are browbeating OP saying they don't understand competition when you haven't shown you know much about Rubik's Cube competitions and just shown you're familiar with Chess, which as I said isn't terribly relevant.

Also, top chess competitors are generally not happy with the fact that Blitz and others are used as tie breakers. With regards to the recent Norway Chess tournament where an Armageddon format was used to break ties, Vishy Anand said

>[Anand] had a hard time calling it a win though, because he felt that Grischuk had to commit suicide on the chessboard because of the Armageddon rules.

...

> Anand went as far as saying that there are no victories in Armageddon unless White wins. “Because White is playing under this pressure he is often taking quite unjustified risks, so it’s not a normal victory in any sense.”

>The five-time world champion argued that the scoring system used for the Armageddon system is not perfect:

>“I think it’s slightly unfair that the tournament ranking is plus-one, plus-one, 50 percent, plus-two," said Anand. "My whole life, you think: If you work for four hours that should count for more than if you work for 20 minutes. For me, my scales are a bit confused, let’s say.

>“Having said that, if this is a better format for television or something, then fine. But I am used to seeing it as some kind of injustice. It feels wrong that Ding is in fourth place, with plus-two. Then again, I am not saying it’s unfair, because we knew what we were getting into, but something feels wrong," Anand said.

(emphasis mine) Source

Are you sure you aren't reading the "feels like" temperature? I went to Accuweather to look at the temperatures New York City had in August, and the highest temperature that they have is 92 degrees, and the average high for the month was about 84 degrees. That is a little warmer than the historical average of around 82-83, but I wouldn't be alarmed by that alone. It is impossible to look at just one month in one location and interpret it to be a result of climate change. Climate patterns occur over the course of years and decades, so don't let a few hot days convince you the planet is going to be destroyed. I also notice how much of your post revolves around how you feel, so I would recommend doing research on climate change to see if your feelings actually have merit. None of this is to suggest that climate change is not happening, but I do not think most of the scientific community agrees with your outlook that it will lead to "the inevitable collapse of the entire planet."

How many conservatives do you actually know in person, who actually hold all those views? You might want to try comparing the views of educated conservatives with those of equally educated liberals.

One problem is that people from one "side" will be exposed to more media in favour of that "side" (either from the sites and papers they read, or from facebook friends, etc.), and when they hear about the other side, it will often be selected for outrageousness.

So, conservatives see evidence showing that they're right and that liberals are nutcases, and liberals see evidence that they're right and that conservatives are nutcases.

To compensate for that, everybody should try to get an idea of what the other side actually believes, for example by reading blogs of educated and articulate people from the other side, not by trusting the media/blogs to give them an accurate picture of it.

For a specific example:

> They're Pro-Big Business and Pro-Big-Lobbying, Essentially Turning the United States Into An Oligarchy > > This isn't necessarily a conservative thing, but you won't find a conservative against this sort of thing

I've heard plenty of conservatives complain about lobbying from big business; some quick googling pulled this out:

> Conservative talk show hosts across the country are training their fire at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade agreement they now refer to as “Obamatrade.”

Many others of your example make me think "only a minority of uneducated nutcases believe this" (like, the actual christian theocracy), or seem to be a misrepresentation of conservative views.

And of course, conservatives get a similarly filtered and distorted view of what liberals think.

https://www.healthcare.gov/what-are-my-birth-control-benefits/

That discusses the fact that vasectomies aren't required by the affordable care act,

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5543916

And there's an article on the fact that vasectomies are covered by hobby lobby.

But it doesn't look, at the records I posted below, the difference is very clear. Most leagues do not actually have explicit rules stating a woman cannot qualify, it's simply the fact that they are unable to. Take the NFL for example: http://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061114

"all humans are eligible"

These 'male leagues' do not exclude women, women leagues are made to exclude men.

>Some might find it unbelievable that Frozen's two princesses, who spent their childhood shut-in with essentially no social interaction, have such fully developed personalities.

Fully-developed!? Ha! Anna is a ditzy girl whose only goal is to find a man who loves her. She's retarded and needs to learn not to fall head over heels over every man she meets. WOW WHAT A STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER.

Elsa is a pouty, whiny girl who never outgrows being a teenager. She's selfish and only returns to her home after being bound and gagged. She has zero personality apart from being the stereotypical loner/outcast. WOW WHAT A GREAT PERSONALITY.

They also both look EXACTLY the same.

Kristoff, on the other hand, is a smart, self-sufficient all-around nice guy who is gentlemanly enough to ask permission before kissing Anna. He is an admirable, kindhearted person who has a strong bond of friendship with a creature of nature. He initially thinks Anna is stupid because she is. He is not driven by a single-minded desire to be her husband, either, he admires her gumption.

Hans is just a villain, nothing new.

The irony is that I just recently read an even-more-lengthy breakdown about how FROZEN is sexist against WOMEN. I just summarized some of its points. https://medium.com/disney-and-animation/7c0bbc7252ef

Blocking can be helpful. I've had some trouble with gear-shifting with it anyway. I'll get sucked into the thing I'm doing enough that the timer goes off and I'm right in the middle of something and it feels really jarring to try to just drop it. And with some tasks, say programming, I'll want to stop just as soon as I finish this feature — but it's SO easy for finishing up a feature to linger and drag out as I find little things that could be polished or made slightly better.

Tricks like these are definitely things people with ADHD should try; some will be helpful. I'm as functional as I am largely because I've accumulated a lot of little things like this that work — like always trying to be really early and just reading while I wait, and keeping EVERYTHING important that I might forget in my backpack so I'm unlikely to forget it (doesn't work on my phone because I leave it out to charge).

In the end though doing time management with ADHD is kind of like someone with bad knees climbing the stairs, figuring out ways to use the handrail to make it easier. It's doable, and sometimes they have to do it to achieve their goals in life, but it's difficult. Having other people's support and understanding goes a long way!

So really all I'm trying to ask is that you imagine people complexly. Different brains work quite differently, and what might be easy for you might be quite difficult for others — even if they expend a lot of willpower on it, or try the same things that work for you. Psychological conditions are especially hard to deeply understand without firsthand experience or spending a lot of time around people who have and understand them. Hell, I didn't even realize I had ADHD for 21 years because my conception of it was so wrong.

EDIT: Shoutout to Beeminder for being one of the only incentive schemes that works for getting me to do things like consistently wake up before 10.

I liked /u/fox-mcleod's answer and I'll try to add a bit more structure to it.

Essentially, all materialists (which includes basically all scientists) agree that the mind is the brain and thus is subject to deterministic*** physical laws. However, many people are compatibilists who say that defining "free will" in terms of physical processes misses the point.

Consider two scenarios: in one, Bob and I leave the room together. In another, Bob forcibly removes me from the room. Both scenarios describe the same action: two people leave the room. However, in the first I was leaving by my own choice, in the latter I was not. It does not matter that in both scenarios my brain is just following the laws of physics. It is useful for us to make a distinction between the two scenarios because they help us predict future actions. The difference between the two scenarios is free will.

If you're more interested in this kind of thing, I would recommend "Elbow Room" by Daniel Dennett.

*** I'm very aware that there is an element of randomness in quantum mechanics, however, all of the probability distributions are determined by physical laws, so I'm still comfortable calling a quantum mechanical system "deterministic" in this context.

I just double checked, and I have to respectfully say either you're wrong[1][2] or we're both paying fealty to different authorities on the English language. I believe you're mistaking the phonetic similarity to "ignore" as being etymologically significant, when the reality is they invoke quite different assumptions (to ignore implies willful choice, to be ignorant does not necessarily imply will). The reality is that "ignorant", as I understand it, comes from the prefix "i-" (like "a-", roughly meaning "without) and the root "gnosis", meaning knowledge. Perhaps you could offer me conflicting sources that I might expand my mind on this.

> While the system might improve “diversity statistics”, it does nothing to address the root cause of oppression.

I disagree. Consider that many blacks are in poor neighborhoods because we zoned them to be there and wouldn't give them loans in other areas (look up the Fair Housing Act). Doesn't giving someone access to a higher paying job - whether that be through a college education or through a hiring process - help 'undo' this wrong? Furthermore, doesn't having a more educated populous empower the individuals of a disadvantaged class to fight against the system? MLK would not have been as successful had he not been the orator he was.

> Finally, excessive hiring requirements can lower the quality of service you are receiving. The aforementioned goal of proper workforce representation is really a conundrum in of itself, because by hiring a slightly less qualified, more diverse teaching staff, you are reinforcing the very disadvantages AA is attempting to solve.

Are we sure that they're less qualified? The employer is already making fairly arbitrary decisions about who to hire based on GPA, school attended, reference/referrals, congeniality, and other factors. They might hire a "less qualified" but nicer person -- is that wrong too? Research indicates that more diverse groups tend to problem-solve better so it might be in the company's best interest to do this - in other words, it might help to have the extra diversity, not hurt.

You aren't totally wrong about it. Anecdotal advice is the reason Amazon values its reviews so highly. People do find a lot of value in reading another person's experience. I'm one of them: I bought the watch that I'm currently wearing after reading over a dozen user reviews on Amazon.

However, unlike with scientific evidence, you should be much more skeptical about relying on anecdotes. There are plenty of fake reviews on Amazon. In fact, there are so any that Amazon has had to take action. So proceed with caution and try to get a LOT of feedback so that you aren't influenced by false or misleading reviews.

>I absolutely agree Em is good at what he does. Is he a poet? No. Not in my opinion, or not anymore than anyone who writes something that rhymes is. I have read many things elaborating how Em's rap patterns and cadence. The guy has a way with raps. But when I think of poetry, and this is subjective, I think of something saying more than what is on the page. Something deep. It is summing up some human emotion that is hard to put to words by regular people, and putting it in a beautiful way. It requires effort. It requires introspection and examination.

Eminem does all of this. Go listen to Rock Bottom and tell me how it doesn't encapsulate the desperation of being white trash in a ghetto, with no realistic outs. How the only way out is a pipedream. Yet at the same time, it comments on how this state of mind poisons peoples minds. how it leads them to lash out at eachother, instead of at the system that put them in this position in the first place.

It's introspective, and reveals a deep understanding of his self. How he himself buys into this mentality, while being perfectly able to dissect and understand how and why it's poisonous.

http://genius.com/Eminem-rock-bottom-lyrics/

Read the lyrics at the same time. You seem to be struggling to grasp the lyricism of songs and how the multiple interpretations + rhyme schemes come together. Using rapgenius might help you get some perspective on the lyricism of the rappers named in this thread.

>And who defines what the goals of terrorists have to be?

Well, that would depend on the individual terrorist or terrorist group. Again, they define their own goals by definition. You might theoretically work with a range of goals between removing Western influence from the Muslim world and provoking an apocalyptic war around Raqqa and fit most groups in that range, and I don't think you could argue that they've succeeded at achieving any set of goals on that spectrum. If anything, they've increased Western involvement and may conclusively fail to fulfill the millenarian prophecy ISIS claimed it would fulfill - which might cause irreparable damage to Islam as a whole over time.

You're essentially wrong about what they claim - or at least, you don't seem to correctly relate how acts of terrorism mesh with stated goals. They see themselves as fighting a war, but bombing a concert is a poor use of resources if you're trying to defeat a nation-state through attrition - by killing a bunch of people. Terrorists attack symbolic targets with the intent of influencing policy by inculcating fear in the polity.

They scare people so that the people demand their government yield to demands so they can feel safe again. That's the purpose of all terrorism: to make people react to fear by changing behavior in a way that benefits the terrorizer.

A perfect example of this would be 9/11 and the documents in the Al-Qaeda Reader. AQ made very explicit statements about their goals and the intent behind the attacks.

A bunch of people in Afghanistan didn't care about the World Trade Center because it was there. Their violence had a message they intended to deliver to the American people and government and a desired reaction. Whether or not they succeeded is a debate that may never be resolved.

> i will have to check out Neuromancer as it seems interesting.

the movie, Johnny Mnemonic, is also based off Neuromancer, but it's not super great at presenting the themes the book develops.

Snow Crash has a lot of Gibson/Neuromancer elements, but also includes some interesting concepts about language and religion.

here's Amazon links for both of them. $20 well spent IMO.

https://www.amazon.com/Neuromancer-William-Gibson/dp/0441569595

https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553380958

Are you being so minimalist that a CD binder is too much space, this one holds 80 DVDs and is the size of a harry Potter book.

I think T-shirt slogans and Twitter hashtags are just another type of "performative wokeness" that lets your colleagues demonstrate to one another how seriously they take racial injustice. It's really not attacking white people, because it's more likely than not to be a white person wearing the damn thing.

At this point, these activists are not interested in generating a dialogue with others outside their in-group. They're looking to solidify bonds with each other. It's a bit of ass-backwards tribalism, but liberals are sick and tired of having to be the adult in the room, so college-aged academics are happy to adopt a sarcastic, countercultural, 4chan-style "burn it all down" approach in order to build a foundation to stand on against out-group members. It's an emotional release rather than a productive move in favor of social liberalism.

I really enjoyed reading Kill All Normies, which breaks down the politics of transgression (attacking what we think is socially acceptable or polite) that both Tumblr reactionaries and alt-right superstars have engaged in. I see the "white tears" stuff as a natural extension of that, an attempt to reclaim a transgressive voice on the left that falls on a lot of deaf ears because of its inherent contradiction.

In other words, those slogans are not inflammatory or counterproductive to social liberalism, because they never were intended to advance social liberalism. Instead, they have been successful in uniting certain voices in this blip of time during the Trump era (for better or for worse), though I'm not sure how much longer that kind of rhetoric can sustain itself beyond that.

It's true that I'm still finding my values (I'm 21) so I still feel like I have a great deal of growing to do as an individual. However, I definitely know that my values are far more concrete than they were a year in the past.

You are damn right when you say that in a state of limerence, one is far more likely to focus on shared interests as opposed to shared values. I've been looking back on this very relationship and I've caught myself doing it once or twice.

You also hit the nail on the head when you say that you figure out people's values by watching how they act. There is a book very close to me: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Habit 5 embodies your last sentence perfectly: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

I find it fascinating how I can read things on the internet and apply them directly to my situation to help give me clarity on things. Thanks man!

Let's talk about your definition of the word soul. You describe a soul as being a supernatural entity that gives you life, controls your personality, and manages your conscience. This isn't a bad definition; souls are depicted as doing all of these things in film, television, etc., which means a lot of people view souls the same way you do. Also, Merriam-Webster includes these characteristics in their definitions of the word soul.

But that's not how I define the word. The definition I use is similar to Merriam-Webster's third definition: "a person's total self." To me, your soul is YOU. It's your consciousness. It's your awareness of yourself and the world around you. With this definition, I know my soul exists, because I am aware of my own existence. There is no mechanism in the brain that points to the existence of consciousness. It cannot be measured or proven. But we know exists, because we experience it for ourselves.

Fucking around with the Constitution is not a new thing in American democracy.

For instance, around the same time we amended the Constitution to ban alcohol, Congress also decided to ignore a census and not reapportion seats. That was a pretty clear breach of the 14th Amendment's apportionment clause.

Speaking of state sovereginty, you have to recognize the incredible importance of the civil war and 14th Amendment. That war dramatically changed the state/federal dichotomy in the US. Congress has the power, under sec. 5 of the 14th Amendment, to enforce equal protection of the law, due process of the law, and the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States against the states.

All of this is to say that the problems you talk about aren't terribly new, and courts do take them seriously. Laws have been struck down when they had no connection to interstate commerce, such as the Gun Free School Zones Act.

Lastly, I don't think you fully know the powers listed to Congress.

>You want to change how someone becomes a fucking citizen? You better pass a fucking amendment.

Congress has an Article I Section 8 power to make a uniform rule of naturalization for the whole country. So they can change how someone becomes a citizen through the naturalization process, pretty much entirely at their discretion.

>PP sacrifice and expose their body to earn money or gain fame/fortune.

They do expose their bodies. They do not sacrifice them any more than do football players or construction workers or dancers or anyone else who uses their body to make their living.

>Thus they are more ready or prepared to any legal, but unscrupulous, method to advance their career.

This doesn't follow. Unscrupulous: willing to lie or cheat to succeed, behaving in a way that is dishonest or unfair in order to get what you want. Being a porn actor isn't dishonest or unfair, so it doesn't make sense to infer that willingness to act in porn has any relationship to being unscrupulous.

It isn‘t my definition though. Just picked the one that comes up when you search Google for „female definition“.

Cambridge dictionary has a very similar definition of it.

It isn‘t even really my personal stance on this topic tbh, I just kinda like playing devils advocate on this subject because it sometimes seems to me like it‘s just stretching / changing the definition of words just to please the trans community.

> vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's or animal's ear.

Well that's just ONE definition.

There are others. For example:

"The sensation produced by stimulation of the organs of hearing by vibrations transmitted through the air or other medium."

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sounds

The key points here are sensation produced and organs of hearing

If a tree fall in a forest with no one around, there is no "sensation produced," as there are no "organs of hearing" around to enable the sensation to be produced.

I apologize. My wife is the medical professional, not me. I may get some of the details mixed up a bit, but I trust you understand the concept I was speaking about.

Right. And those are the cases I said I was fine with.

As far as halacha is concerned, every compression is it's own action. Inaction is never murder, even if there are times when action is required. By the time that it's clear that CPR isn't helping, I'm no longer obligated to continue. On the other hand, removing life preserving care is a serious problem. There are times when it is acceptable, but you there are a lot of details to account for. Jewish medical ethics is an extremely in depth field. I am neither a Rabbi, nor a medical professional, so I only feel qualified to speak about some generalities. If you're interested in it, I would suggest Dangerous Disease and Dangerous Therapy in Jewish Medical Ethics: Principles and Practice by Rabbi Dr. Akiva Tatz.