marinuso
2d ago
They build up a profile of you which can be used in many ways, not just to serve you ads. The data can be sold on to third parties. It's also not just websites that track you. E.g. car manufacturers have been caught collecting driving data and selling it to insurers. Web stores (even places like Amazon) have been caught adjusting prices on the fly depending on what they think they can get away with charging the kind of person they think you are. More and more we're living in a panopticon.
marinuso
2d ago
Drag shows at libraries, no. I'd imagine Western rainbow-flag-ism is about as banned as you'd think it'd be.
But they do have medical transition clinics which see some use. The government will recognize the transition and even change your name and sex on your birth certificate. The public isn't too much in favour of it, and these people obviously do see discrimination, but Khomeini himself issued not one but two fatwas explicitly endorsing it.
It's also a way for homosexuals to get out of the punishment for being homosexual (I'm explicitly not saying "gay" here as I am referring to the sexual orientation and not to the whole culture that's been built around it in the West). They'll make you have surgery before they'll recognize it though, so it's your dick or your life, basically.
Minus that last part it's not too far off from how it used to be in Western countries before the 2010s. Gender dysphoria has been a thing for a while, so has transition, it just used to be rare and not politicised.
marinuso
2d ago
Trans is one example where a real Muslim’s response could be nothing less than trans mental people have a mental illness and should be locked up.
Iran has allowed it since the 1980s. Even while homosexuality is still punished severely, including even executions. So I'm not sure this is necessarily true.
marinuso
2d ago
Unless you get into extreme sports, whatever activity you're going to do is pretty much guaranteed to be less dangerous than the drive to get there. Live a little when you get the opportunity to do so. You don't have forever.
Maybe I'm saying this from the viewpoint of someone who lives in the hyper-overregulated EU, but still.
marinuso
5d ago
I mean, in my day we'd be elated to have the house to ourselves for a few days. When I was 14 I knew the basics of how to shop and cook and clean. We had chores you know. Any decently raised 14-year-old can surely be trusted to keep house for a few days. (Or at least to clean up after the party.)
When I was that age, 14-year-olds were driving combine harvesters down the road and serving beer in restaurants. That wasn't strictly speaking legal but no one cared. This isn't even long ago, I am only in my thirties.
marinuso
5d ago
There are ~300 Vietnamese mail-order brides in the Faeroe Islands. As a result, the capital city of Tórshavn (population 14k) now has its very own nail salon.
marinuso
10d ago
The voting age is 16, but voting is only mandatory between the ages of 18 and 70. If you are 16-18 or >70 years old, you can vote but you don't have to.
Additionally, voting is only mandatory if you are literate. If you are illiterate, you can still vote but you don't have to.
Also, voting may be mandatory but the punishment for not voting is a small fine.
marinuso
22d ago
It's open borders, but only for assholes. Not everyone is admitted, the price of admission is lying and cheating. After all, you're not actually a persecuted refugee, if you were, you wouldn't have made it halfway across the world in the first place. Someone who is honest would be denied, or rather, someone who is honest would apply for a work visa and get that denied.
In fact, it fits the rest of the repertoire of left-wing policy, such as easily-scammable social programs or being lenient on crime. All of it rewards assholes at the expense of honest people.
marinuso
23d ago
I mean, they can't. To remotely hijack a car, the engine, brakes, and steering need to be under computer control. Otherwise there's simply nothing to hijack. You can do it with a modern car (mid-2010s or later), but in the early 1990s they still had carburetors and cable-driven throttles.
If the engine is under computer control you could shut it down remotely. You could plausibly do that with an early 2000s car (if it has a modem on board, which it won't, but which I guess the CIA could sneak in there if they wanted), but I wouldn't call shutting it down to be "hijacking". It's only the cars that have things like active braking and lane assist where the computer even has enough control over the car to plausibly be capable of e.g. driving you into a tree on purpose.
marinuso
25d ago
How much would a third world mariner risk to make 6x wages?
tanker captains are earning $100,000 plus a $50,000 per-trip bonus to transit the strait.
Forget third-worlders. I'd take that job for that pay. Let the bombs come.
marinuso
30d ago
What if some bot joined, made an intentional effort to sound human, became a valuable contributor over a month or two, and then made a sob story about needing help on their real estate project.
That's way too high-effort for a practical spamming operation. It also takes way too long to pay off.
marinuso
30d ago
If the environment is dense enough for skyscrapers, you'll need a lot less parking. After all, there's a skyscraper full of people right there who can just walk across the street and sustain the businesses. If the area isn't dense enough to have a decent-sized population within walking distance of the businesses, probably the land value won't be that high either.
marinuso
1mo ago
Sure, but at that point you're arguing that the law is wrong, that it shouldn't consider your morally justifiable killing to be murder even though it does. Which is of course perfectly fair, different people can disagree on where that line should be.
Killing enemy soldiers in war is okay. Killing in self-defense is okay. Killing in defense of your property is something that some people think should be acceptable, but other people think it shouldn't be. Killing for fun, however, is something that nobody except a psychopath would think is okay.
But rape is always for "fun", there is no other goal, that's the difference.
marinuso
1mo ago
They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...)
Murder is unjustified killing. There are sometimes acceptable reasons to kill people (e.g. self-defense), but those are by definition not murder. Generally, acceptable reasons to kill people involve either defending yourself or preventing worse violence.
Meanwhile, I can't think of any situation where raping someone is somehow the least bad option out of all the options available.
Dunno. If you can't be arsed to write a description, leave it blank. It's not like we were diligent about it before AI (at least not anywhere I've worked). Don't make me do extra work checking if the generated description makes sense. I've got to review the code anyway.
If you had an AI generate it, I want to be able to tell that you, the human being, personally did at least a first pass over it, not just chuck it over the fence unseen for me to either reject or greenlight. And that does mean go through it and remove the most obvious AI-isms by hand. Not because I care about the AI-isms per se, but because I want to see that you have at least read your own submission.
If I'm to sign off on it then I want to make sure it's OK. I'm taking part of the responsibility for it after all.
It's so easy to have AI generate reams and reams and reams of text, or code, and it is not fair, I think, to have the reviewer be the first real person to read through it to see if it all makes sense. Humans aren't perfect either but at least there's a limit to their output.
marinuso
1mo ago
the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won?
I think someone like Noire thinks he won. He did damage, he exercised power. He must've felt pretty good about himself. We call these people assholes, and you find them everywhere.
One thing about these anarchist-style places is that they're very susceptible to such people. You can apparently just barge in and start making demands and everyone has to at least listen to you. He went eight times? How is he a stakeholder in any way? It works only if everyone is playing in good faith, which requires keeping the circle small and invite-only.
You need proper formal decision-making structures. It doesn't even really matter what kind as long as you have something.
I live in the Netherlands, in a progressive city, and I haven't seen a mask since the mandates were dropped. I haven't even heard of any place voluntarily keeping a mandate in place after the government stopped requiring it.
In fact I remember the relief when Putin invaded Ukraine, because everyone who was gung-ho about Covid restrictions could be gung-ho about waving Ukrainian flags instead and it all went away remarkably quickly after that.
marinuso
1mo ago
You can't rightly call this Western society.
This reads like satire. I'll grant you that such people exist but they're not mainstream. They're not even mainstream among LGBT people. This is the fringe of the fringe. It's like pointing at the Branch Davidians and calling it 'Christianity'.
marinuso
1mo ago
People are still masking in the year of our Lord 2026?! I had to check the date. I had expected it to be from 2022.
marinuso
1mo ago
Only about 2% of the population have anything at all to do with agriculture
I don't know about that, the Netherlands has that same statistic but that only counts owner-operator farmers and contract labour (modern farmhands, essentially). It doesn't count the tractor mechanics, feed suppliers, veterinarians, etc, all of whom would be unemployed if we were to stop farming. A tractor mechanic is in the tertiary sector (services). Those people may not be farmers but they sure have something to do with agriculture.
marinuso
1mo ago
Sometimes I really dislike this place. Not enough to try and emigrate (just yet), after all, all my family is here, but I do dislike this place. Well, I don't dislike the place, I dislike what the government is doing to it.
Everyone's blaming Trump, which isn't wrong per se, but which is also no reason for our own government to make the situation even worse. But they can get away with it because everyone's blaming Trump.
marinuso
1mo ago
I tried wandering into the barber shop by my house and they asked me to make an appointment. Like what. An appointment for a place with a barber pole outside? Wack.
I've always made appointments. I'm in and out in 15 minutes. They don't want a long queue of people waiting to get a haircut. I wouldn't want to sit there and wait either, I usually have more chores to take care of. The place I go (which is just the nearest one to my house, I don't need anything fancy done) doesn't even have a waiting area.
marinuso
1mo ago
The research was at least partially US-funded. The release was not on purpose; it needn't have been a bioweapon either. You can think of legitimate reasons for gain-of-function research. A war with China would be devastating anyway. It isn't in anyone's interest. It's in nobody's best interest to whip up such a mood either, and in the absence of that, people would rather move on.
The worst thing you can really blame the Chinese government for is the initial coverup attempt that allowed it to get out of control as badly as it did. Even that's not worth an actual war, surely.
I'm reminded of when we had the PVV-led government in the Netherlands. They couldn't even raise the speed limit. The civil servants just blocked it, despite a parliamentary majority. They would've had to start replacing the civil servants, at which point there'd be court cases, at which point they would've had to start to try to pack the courts, for which there isn't even a legal mechanism AFAIK. It would've essentially required a self-coup. To raise the speed limit. Let alone try to do anything of actual importance. I can't help but conclude that the Dutch government is basically more or less fake in much the same way that Iran's elected government is fake. The elections are real but the elected people have no real say in anything if the institutions disagree.
You're right that this doesn't just apply to "the right", but to anything that opposes the globalist institutional consensus, and that old-timey socialists would run into the same problems if any were elected. That doesn't make it any better.
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