curiousgeorgio

What's funny is that the people who hate on America the most tend to also have a strong belief in American exceptionalism without realizing it. "America is the worst!" in one breath, while in the next breath saying "Everyone deserves to live in America".

What I see missing most in discussions around immigration is what it does to the home countries of the people trying to move to the United States. I know a lot of families who have come into the country from Mexico, and I don't blame them - I'd probably do the same. But if you look at the towns they're leaving (which I've done many times), it's creating a vacuum of good, hard-working people. As a result, crime and drug lords fill the vacuum, making it even more unsafe.

If you ask a lot of those people (which I've done), they'd really like to stay in their home countries - provided that there weren't growing concerns over crime. As Americans, why do we have to act like this is the only place in the world where people can be successful, and the only safe haven? What if we instead supported those countries and encouraged their brightest and best citizens to stay so that their communities can thrive?

I love immigrants, and I also love a lot of the countries they're coming from. I just wish we could stop pretending that everyone needs to move to the United States to be happy, productive, or successful.

And yes, markets tend to be affected by supply and demand, the labor market included. If you have an almost unlimited supply of people looking for work and willing to work at very low wages, of course we're going to see wages stagnate.

The thing that bothers me about the idea of the "Ruliad" is that it's completely unfalsifiable. Even if we existed in a reality where true randomness existed, or computational irreducibility wasn't a given, you could always argue that what we observe is just one finite local slice of that Ruliad where things appear to be deterministic (or computationally irreducible) due to our boundedness as observers.

It's basically the modern equivalent of "turtles all the way down" because it pretends to explain the nature of reality by extending our definition of reality to fit within an all-encompassing mental model that only makes sense on a surface level.

Granted, the words "universe", "multiverse", etc. are insufficient in describing everything in a way that includes everything we currently want to include, but giving a new name to that abstract idea of "everything" isn't itself a compelling argument to also say that everything exists as a static construct and that everything is computationally irreducibile and deterministic at a fundamental level. Yes, that makes sense in a physics simulation, but in reality, we don't know what we don't know. Placing the unknown in a conceptual box doesn't imply that it's now known.

Since apparently this list allows decimals (bozo: 0.208), why does the regex need to exclude words ending in two o's? Words like "boo", "goo", and "igloo" can be made with the same rules, and it's a simpler grep -i '^[izehsglbo]\+$' /usr/share/dict/words

Just bask in the knowledge that if those "social safety nets" and UBI become a reality, you'll have more problems than you do now. You'll look back at this moment in time with fondness. Enjoy it now.

Exactly. It's also pretty disrespectful to the honest people who spend years mastering a craft or skill that is appreciated for the process rather than just the end result.

It's an interesting topic in light of generative AI art. In many cases, the generated stuff can look nearly identical to some really talented artists' work. So are the artists themselves irrelevant? Is their work more or less valuable, given that it took much more time and effort for them to produce?

Why do people line up to see the real Mona Lisa when they can see essentially the same result on their smartphone or tablet?

It's not a problem to take shortcuts when making something for the screen; in most cases that should be encouraged.

But this project wasn't about making a Netflix logo animation; it was about using a fun, low-tech method for achieving a similar result. The whole point of the project was the method, not the result.

So if he had taken shortcuts when making the original Netflix logo animation, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with that. But claiming that he used a specific, unconventional approach to do this (focusing on how he did it, not what he did), then lying about that for clicks... that's pretty disgraceful in my opinion.

And most of that growth is just on paper; it represents very little growth in actual spending power. It can be explained by (1) some economic recovery after COVID and (2) devaluation of the dollar.

You have more dollars, but they're worth significantly less, so you're really not much better off.