Software engineer… we also use all 16 digits of pi

Would there be any aspect of defense you would consider? For example another comment mentioned situational awareness, etc. Basically weapons systems which might STOP them from being used on civilians?

Aren’t fruits subsets of vegetables? Without looking it up I thought that vegetables were the edible part of the plant and fruits are edible reproductive parts of the plant. I could be totally off on that though.

I like riding my bike a lot and camping. Just did a ride down the Oregon coast this last summer and it was a total blast

Self hosting and software of course, but that’s probably pretty common on here

Making me want to get back into go

I’m 5 years down the road and… Well let me tell ya, it gets worse

Totally fair, and largely what I use it for, but it’s also helpful in the term at times to just get out a weird regex for a weirder file operation you don’t want to dork

Add in regexr as well

Geez this guy secures. Impressive

3 actually, and it’s not a good group… And I’d like to say that most Americans actually support the idea of switching, but as a stubborn guy who uses metric for everything here I can sadly say that they are not by a long shot.

Yeah. It’s a lot to go through and a lot more than I was expecting. I’m open to being wrong here, most of the people I’ve met don’t seem to indicate anything similar to the above, but that could still be broadly anecdotal. Certainly a lot to think about and read up on here, and I’m not anti communist at all, but I think that WWII alone is enough for me to be anti-Stalin and make me less likely to believe that his people were treated well. I could be wrong there too.

I’ll point out though that I’m not making an argument. It’s literally impossible to “undermine” someone’s experience unless they’re lying about it. And I’m more likely to believe someone about their experience over the numbers which describe what their experience should have been. I still see some humility in that, but I would understand if not everyone does

I’m going to stick with the countless eye-witness reports and first hand experiences of older people who lived through it over the American lie machine pretty much any day of the week.

you shouldn’t have to work to exist, you shouldn’t have to be useful to anyone else to be part of a community

While I largely agree with your points (or at least some of the core of them) I think you’d have to flesh this out. For anything alive to exist, work needs to be done. And for anyone to be in a community people must mutually agree on membership. The “freeloader” problem isn’t a problem of ability where individuals “not useful” (and that gives me chills as much as it probably does you) to society can’t work, though it’s often framed that way to varying extents from both sides. I feel that it’s a problem where a large enough segment of the population would not be productive at what they could be doing simply because they don’t have to.

Our brains are literally wired to seek out more for less energy.

Again, I agree with most of your points, but these two could probably use a bit more explanation (at least to me)

We’re definitely a subset of it! And you could argue that any machinations therein are a part of nature, but then again I also think that if you have a computer running a simulation, while the computer is the substrate the simulation is run on, it’s also a bit separate. One way to think about it is that there isn’t really a “place” in the computer you can look and find the simulation. So too is our society. Nature (us) is its substrate, but you can’t really point to anywhere in nature with any kind of precision and say “ah, there is the society”.

Your last sentence made me think. It’s not necessarily true that the employees’ benefit does not increase, but what if it didn’t?

Normally employees gain experience and the money to hopefully move away from their current position, but it’s a great point that capitalism has no response to positions of pure stagnation. I don’t think that the answer is communism, but introducing social systems around those edge cases in the economy is incredibly important.

I think they might be talking about stuff like “it’s wrong to expect black people to be on time for meetings” which was a quote I heard from someone who I believe meant well. There is a reasonable argument on both sides of that probably, but it left a bad taste in my mouth

Uneducated guess: the preponderance of subjects which appear to be underage (despite the fact that they are indeed a 1000 year old demon)

I use proton and absolutely love it!

In the cluster munitions argument (which I put in but I don’t believe is core to this argument) I believe we leave behind something like 15% of bomblets to the average 40%. I’m not sure that’s good enough for me, personally… but then again the fact that it’s Ukrainian land does make me think that it’s not quite so black and white as cluster munitions normally are. I’m still not convinced but I think it’s a worthwhile argument either way.

To the rest of the argument. Great points and I hadn’t considered the DOD budget being the primary source of data. As it stands though we’ve still sent something like 30B (a tie with the remaining EU) and yes we’re sending old gear (a wise choice imo) but it’s still not nothing. Even supposing it’s only worth 50% of what it’s billed, we’re still something like 40% above the next largest contributor to the war.

Im still not necessarily passing judgement on it being a good idea (I don’t know what I think) but I just think that it’s a bit unfair to say any opinions against sending more money over is “traitorous” I also think that is a worthwhile debate.

Just here to point out that the USA has sent about $71B to Ukraine. We’ve sent more than the next 7 countries combined. Further the military allotment of that (43B) dwarfs the next country (which I’m now reading is EU Institutions) by 10B.

The conservative party’s job is to reduce spending and make sure we aren’t moving too far into debt. They’re wrong in a HUGE number of cases, and I don’t know what I think about this case. It’s a bit unfair though, to call them traitors when the next country down the list would have to DOUBLE their contribution to this war to even be in the same conversation as us. We’ve paid a lot.

Adding complexity to this conversation, part of what we’re wanting to send is cluster munitions. Am extremely controversial move and one which I believe we should rethink.