Why should abelsim be given latitude that we wouldn’t extend to racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism?

My opinion is that embarrassed bigotry in private is still bigotry. It’s good that those with such feelings recognize the harm that they bring (or at least the public shaming that they can suffer), but it makes for a simpler life to just excise such hatreds whenever you can.

That sounds like a great idea actually.

Zelda’s on like it’s 7th reboot or something.

The same folks sending “the left are subhuman!” to the right aren’t also sending “the right are Nazis!” to the left. That would be a duplicate signal and inefficient.

Instead, they’re sending “both sides suck” to the middle.

Because right-wing propaganda is “become Nazis, the left are all sub-humans” and the left wing propaganda is “what the fuck, the right are all Nazis!?”

It’s hard to spot propaganda when it’s just the truth spoken loudly.

A mere casual endorsement is not an appeal to authority. If you don’t like the guy that’s fine, but it’s not a logical fallacy to, for example, describe a late night comedian as “a kinda funny guy.”. (A logical fallacy would require that someone assume Krugman is RIGHT because of his record, not that he’s merely worth reading )

How is dismissing someone because of where they worked NOT an ad hominem attack?

How is splitting hairs over which awards given by the swedish government are and aren’t “nobel prizes” NOT a distinction without a difference?

You didnt attack any of his actual credentials, though. You just said that he should be dismissed because he wrote for a particular newspaper and the award he was given by the Swiss government was not one of the awards given by the Swiss government funded by the gift of a 19th century arms merchant.

If you want to rebut my statement that Krugman “has a pretty good track record”, please do so! But you didn’t, and haven’t, and instead asserted your own biases as fact.

Which is obviously your right to do but, again, is a really weird response to a “who is this guy” post.

Go read the actual text of the US Constitution . The answer is a quirky technical “well, theoretically yes but practically no.”

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-2/clause-1/

The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

That last emphasized line means that if the US Congress were to impeach and remove a president for bribery or a criminal conspiracy, they could also negate any pardons given to POTUS’s collaborators.

Of course, since no US President has ever been removed from office by congress’s impeachment power, and it’s uncertain if a post-term impeachment and conviction would itself pass the inevitable SCOTUS appeal, this is even less likely than the US Congress awarding a no-majoroty electoral collage vote to the other major party.

But we’re always trying to increase revenue and decrease cost. That’s biological. It’s a constant.

You may have this habit, but it’s hardly universal to our species. My biology tells me to value the stability of home life and the predictability of patterns; any increase in revenue or reduction in costs is from learned habits or intentional action.

I completely agree about personal discipline being a good bulwark against accidental change for the worse, though.

I don’t think it’s often useful to react to contrary evidence as special case exceptions.

The “tragedy of the commons” is a real thing, but it’s also literally what “the cathedral and the bazar” is about. I would argue that the awareness and intentional action made based on either side of this mode is why technology seems to behave differently from other areas of human society.

Generalizing from the specific, I think it’s more helpful to say “things tend to change randomly over time, and people can be resistant to sudden change which is not obviously better.”

Since random change is more likely to be a change for the worse than a change for the better, societies will have a tendency to slowly become worse as time goes on. But the worse something gets the easier it is for people to discard it, and since intentional changes for the better are so often deliberate they also are often improvements to the best of what came before.

Enshittification occurs more as a deliberate act to increase revenue or decrease cost, which is a whole different ball game.

An ad hominum attack and a distinction without a difference is a hell of a response to “who is this guy”.

Do you want to show the class where on your wallet the Keynesian model of economics touched you? (Or do you perhaps have a “Krugman sucks and you shouldn’t listen to him” link you’d like to share?)

People making things worse isn’t a natural state.

To give an example off the top of my head, the US House of Representatives used to be even worse. An interpretation of the Constitution’s quorum clause became traditional in that if a rep would not answer “present” when called to a vote they were counted as not in attendance. Essentially, a minority faction gave themselves a veto on the whole body. This persisted for decades until one speaker just said “I can see you there”, and the body got slightly better.

(That it was latter became bad all over again in new and clever ways is a slightly different issue.)

Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.

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

And while I certainly don’t want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it’s worth noting that legally speaking they’re both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.

It’s not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.

Value for resources is also highly subjective.

If I have zero water and $50, but you have 50 waters and $0, I would value one of your waters more than one of my dollars and you would value one of my dollars more than one of your waters. And so we would trade, and both be happier for it.

Eww. It’s a LLM travel agent.

So, the people in companies pushing and making this AI slop treat it like toxic waste, and the author thinks that they’re the problem?

I suddenly want to look at his AI map thingy and see how bad it is.

Is this a graph of “report negative opinions about homosexuality”, or “think homosexuality should be illegal.”

The former is just freedom of speech (“freedom to say something dumb and bigoted”), while the latter is a public policy concern.

Because the killings are targeted actions that are arguably justifiable in the face of tyrannical action.

If a story broke about a criminal gang who all wore identifiable colors and claimed the right to stop anyone you saw and bully them to the point of death, you’d demand that effective (violent) action be taken to stop them. But because the gang is “the police” and nominally controlled by elected officials and the courts, there is a public policy reason to treat both their misbehavior and the public reactions thereto as something categorically different.

(I’d be all in for abolishing police costumes and requiring them to act only within the bounds of permissable behavior for the rest of us, FWIW )

I got all the way to “as I’ve been writing about for years …” before I clocked this as something I won’t bother to finish.

Humans as a species have never listed as the lead quote implies. We’re a shallow species whose interpersonal communication is far more of a handshake than a learned debate. If you go against someone else’s notions you may, at best, get them to remember a short phrase. (And if you’re really lucky and repeat a phrase a few times, it may even be one that accurately reflects your position!)

Sex in heaven is really good, but gets boring after awhile.

So, you’re a (1) university student (2) in a fraternity who encountered a fellow student (a) who is verbally and emotionally abusing an intimate partner.

(1+2)*A = you are a member of two distinct organizations which have some form of code of conduct, and have at.the very least an ethical responsibility to inform about the presumable violation of said codes of conduct.

Do not begin an intimate relationship with either “Beth” or “Ben”. Especially not out of anger.

Your fraternity and university both should have someone you can talk to about reporting unethical actions, who can refer you to people far more knowledgeable about the rules, responsibilities, and laws that apply to you than pseudo-anonymous strangers on the internet ever could.