My dad never had the patience to write a single python program. Last year (2025) he wrote an entire android app that displays values from some hardware sensor graphically (with a neat animation) in like 1 week with the help of chatgpt. it does help people. it makes mistakes, but so do humans. the question is, is it more productive to do with than without? and i’d say, for some use-cases it’s more productive with than without.

If the people of Taiwan don’t want to be part of China, they’re free to leave,

to where?

create microchips, which requires extremely stable geology. A power outage or an earthquake can cause lithography machines to miss their target, ruining months of work.

TSMC is intrinsically tied to the land and people.

sure, that’s why Taiwan is located on one of earth’s most active earthquake regions

edit: bad cropping of image is not my fault, i found it like that on the internet and am to lazy to find another one

edit: here’s another one

whataboutism isn’t to dismiss the point. whataboutism is to put things into context and establish proportionality.

what was the reaction internationally when the US invaded other countries? that allows you an approximate estimate of what will happen when china invades other countries.

they are interested in controlling the market necessary for even basic modern warfare - advanced microchips.

china already has the capability to produce advanced microchips themselves (it was in the news literally 3 days ago, i’m too lazy to search it out rn) and they’ve been heavily investing in research into microchips the last year so it makes sense they made significant progress.

on the other hand, the us is already building chip capabilities in its own country to become independent from taiwan and so taiwan doesn’t have the significance internationally anymore that it used to have.

i’m even inclined to say that china waited deliberately for taiwan to lose its international status before attacking, so other countries wouldn’t rush to its aid so much.

from what i’ve learned (through experience, not through books), left-wing people don’t like oppression and control as long as they’re the ones being controlled.

as soon as they’re the one controlling others, however, the tide changes. you can see this in germany where self-described leftists want to tell other people that they can’t drive fossil fuels driven cars anymore (“gegen die Technologieoffenheit”) or that everybody has to install a heat pump in their homes. the complete opposite of letting other people live their lifes un-interfered. all of this is justified with the supposed “higher good” (mitigating climate change). you can see where this is going … authoritarianism, unfortunately.

IMO china is making a mistake here. there’s one way to poison yourself and that is to eat something that does not want to be eaten. and the same is the case here. china is a successful country and they could just call that a win and leave it at that. instead, they (think they) have to swallow taiwan, and they will poison themselves. they will get a lot of people into their country that do not want to become a part of china, and they will seek to destroy china from the inside, which is much easier to do than from the outside, and this could become a real danger to china. china should not seek to conquer taiwan against the will of its people.

birth-right citizenship is mostly a thing of the americas

Mostly through happenstance we had the most advanced navy

it happens to be completely surrounded by sea.

I think people revert to “old and proven” behavior in stressful situations. like, people only like to experiment when they feel that they can afford taking a hit. And right now that’s not the case for a lot of people. so people try to go back to behavior that they had in the past, when things worked out for them.

that’s why in the US you see a lot of people today trying to go back to the 1960s. because they think that if they just act the same way as their parents/grandparents, then things are gonna be good again and people will be able to live prosperous lives again. that’s why you have stuff like “conservative” people in the US today and people trying to go back to “traditional” ways of life.

anyways, the people’s wealth in 1960s wasn’t based on how they behaved, but on exceptional circumstances. labor market had a lot of demand, so wages were high. and if people try to do the same things as they did in 1960, it’s not gonna work out. they might do exactly the same thing that their parents did but the results would be different because the labor market doesn’t have so much demand anymore, so wages are low. so reverting to 1960 behavior doesn’t help, but people have to figure this out experimentally to believe it.

proof that their flesh is only held together by their immense psychic powers :)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

Not everybody trusts what’s written in the textbooks. And it’s actually likely that things have to be proven over and over again for some people to actually believe it. That means that there has to be a continuous flow of “bad examples” to incentivize learning how to prevent them. It might not actually be avoidable.

Ah, yes, I agree. It’s definitely the four humors

I think for these people it’s probably less the four humors and more “your personal soul that’s judged by god” or sth like that.

Humans have supplanted natural selection [with modern medicine]. Evolution will not fix this.

It might still if you refuse to go to the doctor.

Apart from that, the majority of evolution today happens through sexual selection: The potential partner that appears fitter is chosen and reproduces, it’s not necessary for the less-fit potential partner to die.

I had read a conspiracy theory somewhere that “freebirth” is all about being “anti-establishment”.

In this picture, everything that has to do with the federal government (including being a “certified” medical personal) are seen as being “top-down”, and it’s “seeking independence” to reject that. That’s why they don’t even want any medical professional to see the baby, because they’re worried that the baby is going to be implanted a chip to make it adhere to future state ideology or sth, and that can only be avoided by basically giving birth at home and not even telling the state that a pregnancy is about to happen (so they can’t forcefully transfer the woman to a hospital), so there’s a bit of secrecy about it too.

Personal comment/interpretation: I mean, it’s interesting to watch how these ideas of “anarchy” and “self-determination” unfold here. It’s very interesting to see how the same idea of “wanting to be independent” can manifest itself in completely different, and often opposite, ways. It’s like if somebody told you that the establishment is bad, and you’ve heard these words your whole life, how do you know it’s not true? How do you go to a hospital if everybody around you is wary of that and says they might want to poison you or idk what? How does a medical system (that is financed by the state) build the trust that it is actually safe to go there? How do you reach the people that don’t know you yet?

is another bad guy with a nuke? because what could possibly go wrong

you’re expected to be grown up and mature by 18 which is impossible because you could never make any experiences at all

you can’t drive anywhere if you grow up in a rural area and your parents refuse to drive you anywhere (happened to me, mum only let me see that one kid from rich parents to socialize because she wanted me to “grow up in good neighborhood” - needless to say, it didn’t work out and we don’t have contact anymore).

lol

They insist that one of my parents must be Jewish and I’m just in denial or something.

u know that exact thought came to me so many times. That some of my grandparent must be jewish because … idk it’s just a vibe.

in leftist European circles in particular that sees porn as inherently patriarchal and wrong and

i would just like to point out that not everybody sees it like that. i identify as leftist and don’t see things that way, even though porn often is exploitative. but that has nothing to do with the porn itself, but with the economic coercion that is at play when the thing is created: for money. that’s the problem, that it happens for money, and not voluntarily. and that’s an economic problem, not one of porn itself.

That should be the default position for everything, including education and law making.

you’d be surprised how much of our modern society is built upon thinly-veiled ideas from theology and spirituality. there’s the whole human rights thing, the whole “education makes us morally better people”, the list is long