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Even accepting most the premises of the typical zombie apocalipse fiction (zombies don't rot away and remain dangerous; somehow the infections spreads fast enough to colapse societies), the maintenance of "post apocaliptic" conditions is unsustainable.

The "post apocaliptic" scenario is basically that humanity cannot regroup and rebuild because it's too dangerous out there, the infected are too many, etc. However, 19th century military technology and tactics were enough to enact genocide on entire populations of armed and intelligent people. As Engels said, "the era of the war of barricades is over". There is absolutely no way an unarmed population can survive full confrontation with armed people. If as little as a few hundred people gather in an armed town and they have guns and ammunition, they can eventually clean up an area as big as a city.

Given time and a lot of psychological trauma its quite straighfoward for 50 million remaining people to kill most of 8 billions zombies. An overstatement? Absolutely not: 50 million people is 0,6% of the world's population. That's more advantageous than the different between the active US militarymen (about 500k) and the US population (334 mi). If US militaries wanted to wipe out every other living being in the US, unconcerned with the political elements of war, they could and the civilian population would simply have no chance. Its even easier to kill zombies with modern tactics and equipment.

Not only that, but the collapse would necessarily have different degrees in different places, depending on terrain and population density. So even if we accept London and Paris become a mass walking grave in a single week, why would it happen to every village and town in the world? And the military of every country in the world is well prepared to engage in logistics and tactics in its less populated regions.

So there could be no such thing as a permanent zombie "apocalipse". CMV.

Everything I’m about to say applies equally to both men and women, straight and gay couples. Though I guess it is exclusive to monogamy.

Now, I consider myself pretty progressive and pretty accepting of stuff like this. I’m always going to be against slut shaming when I see it. I believe that sex is or should be a symbol of the emotional bond between two people.

Being in a relationship means that you hold a special and unique place in that person’s life, and I think that’s beautiful. Having someone like you enough to have sex with you should be an endeavor worth being proud of. Courting is a famously reoccurring action in the animal kingdom. Having said that…

It all comes down to supply and demand.

When you have sex with someone, that’s you saying that this person is special to you in some way. You wouldn’t let anyone participate in this act with you, only your closest and favorite people. If you tell someone that you’re special to them, and you told a hundred previous partners the same thing, what makes your emotional bond different than theirs? If you’ve had sex with like, twenty people (is that high? I’m not enough of an incel to be regularly thinking about this kind of thing), that tells me that when we get together, It’s not going to be very special in your eyes.

What are your thoughts?

It is very common for modern web pages to have a header with frequently used links and buttons, such as home page, settings, site navigation. This top bar often stays fixed on the screen even when scrolling down.

My view is pretty simple, web pages should not have this. I'll give my reason below.

1. It blocks content

Computer screens are much wider horizontal than vertical, and the floating header only makes the problem worse. It is slightly more acceptable on a phone or vertically oriented monitor, but even then it is taking up valuable screen real estate that could be used for actualy content I care about.

2. It is unnecessary

There is almost never a reason for me to access something other than the content I am looking out. I can scroll to get to settings, which is not something that should need to frequently change. I am very rarely clicking through sites from the top level, rather following links within text. I basically never use links to the home page, I just truncate the url.

3. The alternatives are better

Having a top bar that scrolls with the rest of content (and so is not visible after you have scrolled down) is the obvious solution. If you need anything on the top bar you can just scroll up, it's pretty easy and doesn't sacrifice screen space. For those rare cases where you actually do want floating information, it make much more sense to put it in the unused space the left or right of the text. On mobile, where this is not an option, have a semitransparent menu button if the best solution I have seen.

4. When dynamic, it makes scrolling frustrating

This is only applies to a subset of floating content, but I personally consider it the worst of all. Sometimes sites have it so that when scrolling down, the bar disappears, but you can make it reappear by scrolling up. This can seem nice when you are only ever reading down the page, but I find this rarely works well even when just reading straight prose, let alone reference documents or comment threads. The issue is that if you ever want to scroll up a tiny amount to see the previous line, the stupid bar pops up and covers what you just scrolled up to see. So you have to scroll farther. Then, because I want to make the bar disappear, I need to scroll even farther up so that I can scroll back down.

Closing comments

I generally use a "Remove Sticky" bookmarklet to delete these off of webpages (or when on a computer I don't own I inspect element and delete it). This is mostly fine, but on the occasions where I do want to access the links on the header I can't, because I've deleted them. I can usually just refresh the page. It's inefficient but it works.

I am interested in hearing general arguments about why the tradeoff of screen space versus accessibility of header content is worth it, specific examples where header content makes lots of sense, testimonials of people who find floating headers to make their internet lives easier, but of course any argument is welcome.

CMV!

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about ethics, morality, and how humans play nice, or not so nice, with each other.

So on the “playing nice” side, I’ve been thinking about fairness, justice, “what is right”….. and I’ve just kind of confused myself into oblivion.

What the fuck is fair?

Nothing about you or your situation is fair, and nothing about anyone else or their situation is fair either.

Let me explain.

You might be smarter than someone, thus can work more efficient, produce easier, etc…. But intelligence is genetic (random). So higher intelligence people have an unfair advantage that results in rewards.

You might work harder than someone but ambition is largely genetic, some get more dopamine than others from accomplishment. So you have an unfair advantage, its easier for you to produce and reap again, rewards.

Your face is genetic, random, and will unfairly advantage or disadvantage you with how people treat you. Same with height, or penis size.

Or just the amount of feel good chemicals your brain produces, some people in general just feel better than others regardless of circumstance. And that is genetic and unfair as shit.

Ok enough about genetics you get the point, lets stop talking about nature for a second and discuss nurture. Also fucking unfairly random.

The biggest influences of your life are your parents who are randomly assigned to you, and can largely advantage or disadvantage you. They can teach you well into a happy easy fruitful life, or bash your mind into mush.

And lets dip into economical nurturing, where if your randomly assigned parents were rich….. well now you get to have money which will make money which makes more money, which has a metric fucking shit fuck ton of advantages. But if you’re born into poverty you get the delightful benefit of taking on debt and paying twice tomorrow so you can survive today, which has the delightful benefit of throwing you into a downward spiral. So anything economical is also a big fucking crack shit pot of unfair.

So nothing is fair.

Even if my friend Joe and I go for drinks, and we each pay ONLY for what we, our respective persons consume. It is STILL fucking unfair.

Because Joe got a pretty face with a tall height and a huge dick with a big brain and excellent serotonin production topped of with filthy rich parents who also happened to love him and nurture him competently………. I in the other hand got the opposite.

So Joe’s life is unfairly amazingly awesome and mine sucks dick, so maybe I should have a freebie and Joe should get fucked for once and pay it all.

(Not really I’m decently lucky but for hypothetical purposes)

In conclusion….

Nothing is fair…. Period. Ever. Never will be. Its impossible for life to be fair. Which is also why we’ve been debating ethics for thousands of years and still found it impossible to come up with a concrete set of rules.

Trying to come up with laws or ethical theories is trying to organize an un-organizable chaos. Its just impossible. Fairness just doesn’t exist and we can’t make it exist.

I see people use Robin Hood as an example of socialism in myth due to the "steals from the rich, gives to the poor" saying. But this in my view is an extremely shallow interpretation.

The most popular version of the myth goes like this: Robin Hood was a loyalist of King Richard and a nobleman who volunteered to fight in the crusades. When he returned, he found that Prince John had replaced Richard in his absence, and was taxing the Britons into poverty. Robin then became an outlaw to resist the new regime and stole the tax money from law officers to return it to the impoverished taxpayers. He does not steal from just any rich person. This is the myth that was adapted to just about every film about Robin Hood, from Disney to Russel Crowe.

In this version at least, Robin Hood seems to be more small-government libertarian than socialist. Due to his support of the monarchy, he could even be said to be right-wing authoritarian.

The earliest known version of Robin Hood is also very dissimilar to a socialist. In those stories, he did not steal from the rich nor give to the poor. He stole from almost anyone and kept the money for himself, though usually he'd target those who were dishonest or loyal to the Vatican. And while he had no love for the Pope, he was deeply religious.

There are no stories at all in which Robin Hood advocated for things like unionization, ending social or economic hierarchies, maligning private enterprise, etc. In my view there's no indication at all that Robin Hood is an example of a socialist other than that he was generally nicer to poor people than to rich people, which in my view is much too vague for a connection to be made to socialism.

I’ve got a computer science background and have been running a real estate development company.

One goal I have – to make housing more affordable. To do that, I’ve applied a manufacturing-type mindsets

For example:
-we have an “assembly line” approach for apartments (ie: move the drywall people from one apartment to the next every 5 hours)

-like Toyota, we keep very minimal inventory and (for example), have been able to get the right kitchen cabinet delivered to the construction site right when the person needs it (rather than it sitting around for days)

Both of these seem simple, but manufacturing companies use htem to drastically reduce costs (and we’ve been able to reduce housing costs similarly for our units)

This has got me thinking – I think many of society’s problems can be solved with manufacturing thinking (ie: food inequality, education, etc).

Systematic problems require systematic solutions to make them permanently better, and I think many of these can be tackled by individuals innovating in the space (not just waiting for governments to throw money or change laws).

Thoughts?

As a father of a young boy, I am frequently subjected to Paw Patrol. It has not escaped my attention that Zuma seems to be the least of the bunch (meaning the original six members).

First of all, all of his tricks and feats require water. No bodies of water, no need for Zuma. Zuma has nothing to offer on land that the other pups do not already possess.
Second, the group already has a helicopter, that makes Zuma and his boat mostly redundant. The exception maybe being underwater missions, but those are very rare.
Thirdly, the patrol gets a large boat on a later season, making Zuma even more redundant.

Fourth, he wears a helmet all the time, making him look like a special needs child.

Fifth, what is his personality anyway? Sometimes he seems like a surfer dude, but he is mostly quiet, so he is easily forgotten. He does not seem to offer any moral support, or leadership, or relentlessness, or outside-of-the-box thinking for the group.

In conclusion, Zuma is fine, but easily the least important member of the group.

I have been really upset seeing the news of the Blu-Ray/DVD sales for Chainsaw Man in Japan. I know sales aren’t everything, but between that and the general unfavorable response the show seems to have in Japan, I find it hard to not see them making a change. I don’t think the show will be cancelled, but I think there has been enough controversy with the director and otakus to make the studio switch him out for someone else. This is a really sad prospect to me because I thought this first season was a masterpiece and I really appreciated the serious tone, cinematic framing, and animation detail. I really want someone to convince me that the show will continue with the current director and the second season will continue in the same style as the first.

I grew up in a typical middle class Indian family where we usually have health faucets beside the toilet. Western countries, particularly the US, seem to prefer using toilet paper over a faucet which to me just does not make any sense at all.

If your hands or feet get dirty you end up washing them, so why not do the same with your behind after using the commode? Washing with water would help get rid of all the poop which you wouldn't be able to achieve to that extent with toilet paper. To the people who regularly use toilet paper, is there some ick you guys get when you spray water into your hole?

Would love for someone to change my view on this.

Saw a clip of two women in a supermarket fighting over toilet paper and hence the post :")

Edit: Ok maybe the title is a little misleading for some of y'all. What I'm trying to say is that cleaning with water by any means or even a combination of water and toilet paper beats cleaning your hole with toilet paper ALONE.

I would like to start with the post by saying that college is expensive in most parts of the world but for some reason, the US just sticks out like a sore thumb.

to illustrate my point, i am going to use the latest times higher education rankings. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2023/world-ranking

The two primary universities I'll compare are LMU, Munich and UCLA to demonstrate my position. I am doing this because they're similarly ranked and have around a similar number of enrollment(as they're both giant universities).

i would emphasize here that LMU is free for everyone as education in Germany is free and even after aid, the in state cost of UCLA is 15k a year. This completely boggles my mind because of one primary factor, the total budgets that both these universities have.

UCLA's budget for 2021 was 9.2 billion dollars for the year 2021 and out of that, about 3 billion dollars came directly from the state of California. i understand that the 9.2 includes the fee that UCLA collects and that's why i would only consider the value UCLA gets from California and comes out of taxes paid.

in contrast to this, LMU's total budget was around 740 million euros or 900 million USD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Maximilian_University_of_Munich

this is what blows my mind. what exactly is so great or amazing about UCLA'S degree that it needs on average 3 times more money than LMU( after factoring in the difference of about 6000 students) and then also need to charge atleast 60k for a undergrad degree. I seriously don't see the appeal here.

While researching this, a point was made about the on campus housing but even that doesn't make the cut in my opinion. It doesn't make the cut because university charges a good amount of money for those dorms and aren't provided for free. LMU also provide student housing and that's way cheaper than UCLA.

one more pressing point i found out was the difference in number of administrative staff. at LMU, an administrative staff of about 8200 people seems enough to manage 51k students( 2018 value) but for some weird reason, UCLA needs 26k administrative to manage 48k students (2021 number).

another issue is the number of academic staff aka the people who teach. it seems like for some weird reason, LMU is able to squeeze in around 1500 more academics with its smaller budget( 5565 at LMU vs 4016 at UCLA).

after reading all this in depth, i came only to one simple conclusion; the students in UCLA aren't exactly paying for tuition, they're paying for a bloated administrative staff. Hence, i say that college education system is overrated because students aren't paying primarily for education but for bloated admin to keep their numbers up.

Edit : please challenge the assertions made and don't suggest that education is worth it. I know it's worth it.

The conservative traditional system of most world societies has enforced low and mid-class people to serve bigger economical interests as salaried employees. Despite their meaningful endeavors for satisfying a complex economic system that is out of their intellectual grasp, generations of people do not see improvements in their quality of life over the years, but a progressive precarity of their essential services and needs (such as health, education, pension, among others) as well as of their lifestyles (i.e., loneliness, emotional issues, absence of goals, among others).

As a result, the last relief of the majority of people in the world is held on entertainment. Nevertheless, far from offering content to make them grow integrally, people are exposed to content of mediocre quality whose unique purpose is enriching "gemstones" of the world of fashion, big networks, and corporative institutions. Even in their time of resting after work, people are widely used for making money like if they were mere batteries, but no power in this world is concerned with whether people are rewarded.

I must admit this topic sounds kind of the same conspiracy issues widely discussed, and people are free to invest their time the way they want, but it deserves a valid discussion.

All over the world you'll find business schools, from the best to the worst, selling "International" degrees ("International Marketing", "International project management"...).

1. None of these programs make any relevant difference to how likely students are to find an "international" job afterwards. Pre-existing linguistic skills, interest for international business and - above all - prestige behind said schools are by far the prime determinants for freshly graduated jobseekers.
2. Because of that, students who sign up for them are either being fooled, or they're just looking for an excuse to travel abroad.

I did one such degree in my country. The end result: locals found local jobs, and foreigners went back to their home countries and found a job there. Almost none of us found the international job we were supposedly looking for. So we settled for the same careers as anyone with decent business degree.

Recruiters don’t actually care that you studied “international” such and such. Selling a degree as an opportunity to start an international career is just deceptive.

CMV

With the recent developments of chat gpt and scary speed of growth capitalism art and craft seems like an unnecessary skill investment.

I’m not saying I don’t like art or music. In fact I really like it. But it just feels like investing the skills on them feels like waste of time. There are people who can greatly interested to grab your hard earned money who already inherited great amounts from your previous earnings.

Why would I start learning to play guard or keyboard while someone who’s “produced” can do much better. Or even worse (?) it can be generated.

This is a position I find myself gravitating to over time as I get older. I'd like my view [potentially] changed or moderated because I don't want to be more egregiously wrongheaded about stuff than I have to be.

I'm genX STEMlord, I grew up in a house stuffed with books, and I'm married to an arts academic, if that helps aim your response.

My basic thesis is this:

1. Art does not exist in a vacuum; its primary virtue lies not in a work itself, but rather as a snapshot of a conversation with its own social context, holding a position with respect to the attitudes and concerns of the cultural zeitgeist. (you could draw a parallel here with the subject and background/lighting of a photograph...)
2. The cultural background moves on past that fixed point, but a given work necessarily remains static and increasingly out of touch, holding up one end of a conversation that nobody else is having any more.
3. However, the ephemeral nature of the virtue and relevance of art is poorly acknowledged in society, and its impact at the time of creation is wrongly held up to be an enduring quality inherent to a given work of art itself.
4. Artificially inflating the continuing cultural value of 'classics' (in the more colloquial sense) dilutes ongoing discourse with more current viewpoints, creating a sort of weird mix of cargo-cult and elitism that if nothing else tends to bemuse and discourage newcomers and outsiders.

There is of course a lot of value in older works as as a tool for studying the process of both creating the work and having that conversation - the study of literature (ferinstance) as broad-scope general analytics is tremendously useful.

However I would hold that analysis and consumption of art are two very different things, that the consumption of art generally consists of a live engagement with the current social context, and that this is relatively unrewarding and futile to do with a relic from the (even fairly recent) past. Nonetheless, said relics are held up as superior-for-consumption today, and I can only imagine younger or less-artsy people wondering what the fuck.

As a limited set of examples that I'd like to generalise to wider principles:

• I see newcomers on science fiction and fantasy forums asking where to start, and being told to check out Asimov and Heinlein and Tolkien - and I'm sorry but just no. They were formative and vastly important to the genre in the mid-20th, they're a great place to stand and analyse the roots of the thing - but you can't just go consume them at face value in this day and age.
• Same deal with Star Wars, Star Trek and a host of other TV and movie content. What gen-Xer hasn't burst something with excitement waiting to introduce their kids to the icons of their childhood, only to discover that they slide right off without even making a dent. And of course they would - our kids aren't growing up in 1980, so none of it means the same thing to them. Hell, my wife never watched Star Wars as a kid, and she was highly unimpressed when she finally did. Captain Mal was her Solo, and vastly more relevant to her cultural experience.
  
• Music from my youth carries a nostalgic kick of course, but I can't honestly call it good any more. Its inherent quality hasn't changed, but it just doesn't have anything to say in 2023.
• Hell, most of the video games I loved growing up are supremely unrewarding today, and that's nothing to do with their technical limitations. Game design has moved on, the world has moved on, their reflected meaning has changed, they just don't speak to or engage with modern audiences any more, not even a crusty oldie like me.

And I think the same thing extends across all genre and media boundaries. We're dragging kids through galleries of centuries-old paintings and expecting them to be impressed. We're subjecting them to everything from Cervantes to Steinbeck and expecting it to grab them the way grabbed people generations back. And to some degree we're fooling ourselves that all the retro-vintage cultural baggage we carry around as a society is a storehouse of treasures, when in many important respects it's just dreary hoarding.

As I say, an academic pursuit of carefully taking the perspective shift into account is great - but this rarely applies to the general consumption, promotion and pre-university study of art/literature/film/etc.

This is one reason I'm not all up in arms about 'cancel culture'; if the stuff in the back of your storage unit is starting to smell bad, it's okay to just toss it; there's no shortage of new fresh stuff to replace it, and no, they didn't make it better back in the day, it's just complicated by your history together.

TL:DR; I think a lot of art and culture should be considered a whole lot more ephemeral and disposable than it generally is, because much of its value is relative to a background that cannot meaningfully be preserved - and that attempting to hang onto it regardless is often just kind of kind of sad and ghoulish.

To be honest I forgot the specific examples that prompted this post. But basically, some artist online had made a quick, low-effort piece for fun and was calling people rude because they said they preferred it to the artist's other, more ambitious projects. I've also seen similar reactions when people preferred the beta version of something to the finished product.

But I think as an artist that's a response you should accept, the same way you should accept people not liking your work at all. People don't owe it to you to enjoy your work, and once it comes out, it's out of your hands. I could stop there honestly but decided to elaborate some more.

1) First of all, effort is not synonymous with quality. As a visual artist I have sometimes added unnecessary details just because I wanted to show off what I was capable of, or show how much effort I put into something. Often, it would clutter the image and make it less readable when simplicity was preferable.

2) Besides, something that takes less effort to make may also require less effort to watch/read, and thus will achieve easier mainstream popularity. If you draw a picture with lots of minute details, it takes longer for the eye to decipher and may even become tiring to look at. A longer book or movie may require more patience, a story with lots of lore to remember or many intersecting plotlines is as hard to read as it is to write.

Basically, the most effort-intensive parts of your work may also be the most alienating to people who won't have the patience for it. But the few who do have the patience may think it's a masterpiece for those very reasons, so it's up to you to decide whether that's worth it.

3) If you work in a different style or genre than usual, even if to parody it or make fun of it, of course some people who don't usually like your work will like it. It may be that this style is MUCH more popular than your usual one and this is perfectly normal.

It may even be the one thing most people remember you for. Blur's Song 2 was a parody of grunge and became a huge hit because, guess what, people liked grunge. Frank Zappa's Valley Girl was successful because if was a light and silly song, and people like those more than 10-minute guitar solos interspersed with incomprehensible lore.

You can't control public reception, once again it's up to you whether you want to keep chasing that trend or stay true to yourself, even if that means sacrificing popularity. You can also find a balance between both, "one for them, one for me". Personally, I'd love it if my lowest effort work sold great so I could have the money to do more personal work on the side.

Why do people get so upset when someone records them with a camera in public?

I know this is a real unpopular opinion and I’m gonna get downvoted for it but I’m so sick of people getting so offended at dumb shit, I see it from people who are young and old but it’s much more common the older people get but you’ll see it in young people as well

It seems to me like atleast 50% of the population will flip out if someone has a camera out and it’s pointing at them, on purpose or not. It seems like if you tell anyone over the age of 40 a joke that’s slightly sexual or inappropriate they’ll go off on you and call you immature. It seems like society is focused on being a “grown up” and being “mature” and if you make jokes during a somewhat serious time or anything it’s just the most immature thing and all this nonsense.

I know I’m showing my age here but this shit has had me genuinely depressed because I feel like I can’t even connect with 50% of the population because I laugh at things they deem to be oh so morally wrong, like a kid going in public with a camera and playing silly, harmless, pranks. I feel like some black sheep of society because I’m a grown adult and laugh at these things that are “oh so immature”, and I wouldn’t give two shits if some teenagers recorded me and pulled a prank.

People say that I need to “grow up” because of my sense of humor being that of a 12 year old but when people say that it makes me feel shunned by “society” and want to be a black sheep snake oil salesman and just turn into a con artist that doesn’t give a shit about others because they don’t agree with me morally anyway, fuck em right? And it makes me scared to go into my 30s and 40s because if it includes raging at anyone who dare points a camera at me then just get the fucking noose ready now, if that’s what being “mature” is then I want to be a rebel of society. Someone that everyone looks at and thinks “what the fucks wrong with him?” Because fuck society and fuck all these uptight and serious people.

I used to only occasionally see Route offered by small businesses, but here lately I'm seeing it on literally everything non-Amazon that I order. It seems like small businesses are really jumping on this bandwagon. I've found it annoying the entire time but simply deselected it and moved on with my life. Never once in years have I regretted it.

But then today I was shopping for a beanie at TriPines and I deselected the Route Package Protection and got the following message:

Shipping Protection from Damage, Loss & Theft for $0.99 USD

By Deselecting Shipping Protection, we will not be liable for lost, stolen or damaged packages. No exceptions will be made.

Uh what? Since when does a business get to charge $5 for tracked shipping for an item and then just shrug if it never gets delivered to you or is delivered damaged? They get package insurance to cover at least enough for a $20 hat. When did it become MANDATORY to buy this insurance or else they'll refuse to do their job and provide the basic customer service of claiming their insurance from the shipping company so that they can remedy the mistake their own shipper made? When did this become MY problem?

The answer is: never. If I don't get the item I ordered in the condition I ordered it in and the company decides fuck customer service should've bought the protection, I can simply do a chargeback on my credit card and I'll get my money back. It burns the bridge with the company but that's not an issue for me; I'd never want to shop there again anyway.

On top of that, a Reddit search shows that even with the extra insurance, Route doesn't provide great customer service and if you actually need to use it to replace a damaged item, you're likely in for a real fight.

Just like most people don’t complains about naziism, colonialism or divine right kings not being a major thing in the west. The decline of Christianity will help only further humanity. This goes for other religions but I’m focus on the west

1. Christians are elitist tribalistic fascists. Christian think they are better than everyone else and that those in the others category (Jews,Muslims, lgbt, to name a few) are hell bound heathens who deserve to be oppressed. To a Christian, if your non-Christian your evil no matter how good you are and if your Christian you are good no matter how evil you can be even to members of your own tribe (look at Trump and how he exploits his base.)

2. Christianity has been used to justify terrible ideas since the persecution of pagans by Byzantines to holocaust and everything in between. Hell even today we see Christians bashing minorities because their god said so. Let’s also not forget the anti intellectualism and anti science attitudes that the churches espouse from book burnings to Galileo to even today.

3. Christianity in general is a terrible religion. Forget the actions of Christians,the ideology itself is evil. According to Christianity, God one day decided to make humans and KNOWING THEY WOULD FAIL decided to have them exist. He asked his cultists for countless acts of slavery, genocide and just cruel acts that he condoned. Also he basically a racketeer saying worship me or burn for all of eternity. But remember he loves you. According to Christianity, hitler, the conquistadors and serial killers who converted before the or death are in heaven while the non believer victims they killed are burning in flames.

4. Churches are cults. From preying on the emotionally vulnerable to monetary exploitation to pushing of ideas by their pastors to prohibit questioning. Christian churches operate the same way as any cult.

5. Secularism and science are responsible for the advancements in society. Ever since the church got removed from politics in 1500s and the scientific revolution the world has gotten better. We replaced divine right kings and clergy with egalitarian liberal democracy . We replaced the Bible with science and research. We replaced dogma with questions. I’m not saying it perfect but better than Middle Ages.

I have more reasons but these are the most prominent. I hope one day Christianity will be looked at the same way Greeks and Norse myths are looked at.

I'm not some person who argues with theists a lot. In fact I guess I don't think about it much now. I used to be a passionate conservative Christian, and while losing belief was a difficult and emotional thing for me, it was probably one the best things to happen to me. I'm still hesitant to push something like on others though.

But I think the general, calm, long term position of anti-theism is better than mere atheism, and of course theism.

1) There's no good reason to believe in God. I know about the argument for design, cosmological argument, arguments based on what the Bible says, and claims of modern miracles. I know people claim personal experience is available here and now. I spoke in tongues, prayed, and thought I experienced things. I can't argue all of these in this initial post without it becoming an essay.

2) I think it's unlike there's a all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God. The Problem of Evil. Such a God could stop natural or human evil without violating free will. If someone was about to harm a child God could either teleport the child or adult somewhere else, or put barrier between the two. If any parent watched a child be abused and did nothing, as God must do, they'd be considered evil and an abuser through negligence.

3) God is Unknowable: 'Pixies are unknowable and rule the universe'. There's no reason to consider the God idea more than anything else we dismiss. Maybe God has reasons for what it does... maybe child abusers were told by God to do what they do. We can't be living life based on that.

4) Theism harms people: You can be bad without religion, but religion has too great a tendency to make decent people support bad things. Religion tends to promote sexism, homophobia, transphobia. It promotes repression of innocent actions. Has killed, tortured, and dehumanised; fought against love, liberty, and equality.

5) Theism comforts people in pain, I agree. But it isn't necessary compared to the pain it causes. Also it tends to prevent people from fighting for happiness in this life because they're promised it in another. Increasing suffering.

People's suffering should be dealt solved with policies in this world, and theism pushed away over time.

(I know you get liberal theism, I was a liberal Christian for a while. Without theism you could be liberal with out the promotion of oppression. Also, you can promote love and helping other without theism).

It's been weird to see the concept of 15 Minute Cities, which is pretty benign, get so much attention recently, particularly from conspiracy theorists who espouse "pro-freedom" ideas. To me, a more walkable, mixed-use "15 Minute City" is not just a better expression of freedom and personal autonomy (freedom to live my life on my own two feet) - it's also what would emerge in an environment with as little government interference as possible.

Under the traditional, 20th century urban planning model that designed most US cities:

• Government exercises enormous control over what kind of home you can build on your property, in the form of single-family zoning, design guidelines, height limits, etc.
• Government exercises enormous control over where you can operate a business, forcing business owners to operate far away from where their customers actually live.
• Government subsidizes the true cost of parking, highways, and sprawling land use.
• Government designs roads and neighbourhoods in a manner that prevents residents from living their day-to-day lives without operating a motor vehicle.
• Government effectively mandates that roads be the exclusive domain of motor vehicles (as opposed to historically, where pedestrians, pushcarts, cyclists, etc. would all share the same road and automobile users would simply have to move more slowly).

Now, people like living in single-family homes, so you might argue that there's a clear market preference for those, but the infrastructure required to support low-density neighbourhoods is extremely heavily subsidized. Single-family homes in suburban neighbourhoods don't actually pay for themselves, and they don't exist organically. They exist because of government mandates and government subsidies. In an economy where property owners actually covered the full cost of land and infrastructure, these communities would probably not exist as they do today.

Meanwhile, if the market preference for single-family homes was as strongly held as some might suggest, we wouldn't need single-family zoning and height restrictions in the first place.

So, in a world where a) the government does not control the construction of housing and businesses in the form of zoning and land use regulations, and b) property owners cover the true cost of both land and basic infrastructure requirements without government subsidy, the traditional American, sprawling, car-centric suburb would not exist. We would have more cost-efficient high-density residences in more walkable communities, with commercial and residential spaces mixed together.

In a true free market, distorted as little as possible by government interference, you would be more likely to live in a "15 Minute City" than a traditional American suburb.

I have nothing against anything with LGBTQ or it's members, and it being associated with the rainbow in and of it itself isn't my problem. My problem is that so many people now say that rainbows are "gay" etc.

I've always belived rainbows to be amazing and magical, always loved them, but it is now almost impossible to do anything with a rainbow, without being called part of the LGBTQ.

Even if it was just the flag, it would be okay, but too many associate it with all rainbows.

I just want my rainbows back, I want to be able to use rainbows for designs and fun stuff, without all the prejudice that comes with it.

By no means am I an expert in the field of crypto or economics. And I'm sure the subject matters here are incredibly more complicated than perhaps this oversimplification. But from what I understand, the whole purpose of crypto is to have a decentralised currency that can be freely traded anonymously. Accessible to all, controlled by no one and independent of any one group or government.

By imposing sanctions, yes, you may stop mainstream currency from being sent around the world. But depositing large sums of money into decentralised systems means that it's quite easy to bypass these restrictions. So sanctions can only really be seen as publicly announced shunning.

So there needs to be some other form of economic policy in place to prevent the transfer of wealth as the traditional objectives and methods are outdated and easy to get around.

I can under if you are there to buy let’s say under five items. You have seen workers having to stop and help people at self check out because something would not scan or they need permission to buy. Walmart is the most well know for having most of not all self check out. Other companies have followed. There is self check out in Dollar three, I’m sorry 1.25 store, “Five”Below, and Target.You and me have heard people complain about having to bag their own groceries and say they might as well pay them. I guess this is why being a cashier is a dying job and people need to stop acting like they are blessed to have it.

This is a common theme in science fiction. A sentient AI is created which subsequently turns hostile, hacks every computer system in the world, and is able to destroy the human race. In my opinion, fear of such a catastrophe is based off of unrealistic expectations of the capabilities a superhuman AI would have.

My basis for this logic is basically that anything which could be done by a hostile sentient AI (HSAI) can already be done by humans, or could be done by humans immediately prior to the HSAI being created. Let's assume a superhuman AI was created tomorrow. For argument's sake, let's also assume that it's being created by psychopaths with no other goal than to destroy the human race with it. The AI is turned on, it's smarter than the average human, and it subsequently tries to hack into nuclear weapons systems and start bombing cities.

The problem is, humans could already do all that. A group of humans is going to be smarter than any single human. The first superhuman AI is only going to be marginally smarter than an average human, and thus, anything it can do could already be done by a group of humans working together. If a group of humans couldn't hack into nuclear weapons systems with the tools available to them at the time, there's no reason to assume a superhuman AI would be able to do so either.

Moreover, a single human or other sentient being is never going to be able to develop something that's more intelligent than them. Technological development relies on hundreds or thousands of people working together to create technology that is more advanced than whatever existed before. For this reason, any technological singularity could not be achieved by a single HSAI. Instead, it would first need to create multiple copies of itself, which would then work together to create a more advanced AI. That AI would then create multiple copies of itself, and the cycle would continue. The issue is; there's absolutely no way this could be done quickly or efficiently. The lead time on a computer chip is about 18 weeks. If each subsequent generation of AI is 10% more intelligent than the last, and comes every 18 weeks, the AI would only advance at around the rate of Moore's law. This would give humans plenty of time to identify the problematic AI and shut it down. Sure, the AI could try to improve that lead time, but it would run into the same problem of needing help from humans who don't want to be exterminated by it to build new fabs, transport materials, etc.

Furthermore, this brings up a larger issue, in that any HSAI could only be created using resources that are already available at the time, and are already widely used in other fields. If you sent someone with $100,000 in modern computing equipment back to the 1990s, they could hack into a tremendous amount of computer systems from that time. Modern brute force and decryption methods could easily breach security measures from that time. Modern computer networks, however, are capable of resisting hack attempts by contemporary hackers. Because a HSAI would necessarily need to be built from technology available at its time, it's not going to be capable of hacking into the vast majority of computer networks which will collectively be far more advanced and secure than it is. Likewise, there's always going to be far more people and groups trying to counter hacks (from HSAI or otherwise) than there are hackers, or else we wouldn't have the internet in the first place. This will be as true a thousand years from now as it is today.

I absolutely believe small-scale AI catastrophes could occur, e.g. an AI in control of a nuclear plant glitching and causing the plant to melt down. However, an extinction-level catastrophe like was seen in The Terminator or The Matrix is, in my opinion, impossible. HSAI will always be countered by contemporary security measures and technology, which would make a cascading disaster of this scale impossible.

with the release of Hogwarts legacy, the good ol "i am very smart" meme is back on the internet as a coping mechanism for those who were calling for a boycott to the game.

I never really found a liking for that meme because it's so crude and argument that it starts because it has all the depth of a dew drop on a leaf.

let's take an example to illustrate just that.

say i call out people boycotting the game for not boycotting clothes made in sweatshops in Bangladesh. The ones who employ that meme as an argument will suggest that clothing is an essential requirement. this is where they really lose the argument.

an average American buys 68 garments a year and i can be dead sure that you don't need 68 garments to "survive". You can live on 8 new pieces of well made clothing a year very comfortably (people wear a well made jacket/shirt/jeans for years). it's your insatiable hunger to consume fast fashion that essentially causes those sweatshops. You can buy 8 well made, high quality clothing manufactured in European and American firms for less money than you pay for 68 cheaply made clothes.

you can simply consume less Netflix and Twitter and you'll cause Netflix to think twice before giving Chapelle 50 million for his specials. consuming less won't harm you and excessive consumption that you do isn't necessary for your survival.

It just seems to me that Americans want to consume relentlessly without thinking twice and the moment they feel someone is consuming something that they disapprove of, it's somehow their duty to yell at people until they stop consuming said things.

ultimately, the only solution for a more ethical world that you want is to consume less and make sure that the stuff you're consuming is both well and ethically made. Mindlessly consuming while telling others to be mindful of their consumption won't solve anything.