Despite having a very similar sounding last name, Ali Khamenei (the guy who was just killed) wasn’t related to his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini. These two guys have been the only leaders of Iran since the revolution so it is actually a change to pick someone’s son for the job, but it is still an election by clerics rather than a strict hereditary monarchy.

I have a bunch. I think the biggest one is that some people are naturally dumber than other people and can’t be fixed by education. I don’t think this broadly applies to any specific ethnic group or anything, but I do think that there is likely a genetic component to intelligence. I also don’t think that we should prevent these people from breeding or treat them as inferior, but I also think that sending these people to college is a waste of time and expecting them to do well on college either waters down the college education experience or puts unfair expectations on them. I worry a lot about how these people will fare in an increasingly automated world and the answer is not good at all.

Charter can suck my Cox

I am skeptical of the premise that long chain hydrocarbons can only be explained by life. Mostly because that logic fails whe examining how life arose on Earth in the first place. If complex organic molecules can only form life, then how did life arise on Earth to begin with? Life itself is complex organic chemistry and large organic molecules. If complex molecules like polypeptides and RNA can’t form without life, then life can’t come into being in the first place. Particularly with these long chain hydrocarbons it’s not that hard to imagine exotic conditions where they might be able to form. It is certainly easier to imagine these conditions than imagining the self replicating RNA or polypeptide strands that most likely became life as we know it. If they had found chains of nucleic acids or amino acids I would be a lot more willing to buy that it’s a sign of life. But hydrocarbons? It’s definitely interesting and a very good thing to look into (particularly in terms of the origins of life) but it’s far from a smoking gun.

That said, I am very interested in this finding because, at the end of the day, I do think it is relevant to biochemistry. Mostly that there are two possible explanations and both are important. If it’s not proof of life on Mars (I don’t think it is), then it is proof that complex organic molecules have formed elsewhere in relatively normal chemical conditions in the universe without existing organisms, which is a major unsolved problem in trying to determine the origin of life.

I’m sure more and different tariffs will surely help

They both look like Very Important People guests

You’re trying to make a weird semantic distinction that doesn’t really accomplish anything. Unskilled labor doesn’t mean undignified or unworthy of respect, it is just a description of a certain kind of work with essentially no barrier to entry. Again it’s very uncommon in modern advanced economies but in the past (and today in some very poor areas) you’d have people whose job it was to push millstones around in a circle all day, a job that is also done by literal donkeys. That is not skilled labor.

Bro there were people back in the day who would just push a heavy millstone around in a circle, a job that was often also done by literal donkeys. It’s hard to imagine in a modern economy, where truly unskilled labor is rare, but it exists. We often forget how much is done by machines that was done by laborers in the past or still is in poorer countries.

It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can’t move yourself. It’s not that you can’t be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure it out very quickly.

These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional “unskilled labor” required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.

Eh. There are definitely jobs that you can grab random guys off the street for and they will be okay enough at them to get started right away or will be able to be trained to do them in an afternoon. Think of any time you’ve done a volunteering project - you don’t get any specialized training to do this type of work, but you can go ahead and get started with maybe like a short explanation of how it works. Sure you won’t be as good as a pro, but you could get up to speed quite quickly if it was all you were doing. These types of jobs are becoming less and less common as they get automated, but they do still exist. That is what is meant by “unskilled labor.” It’s not a dig at the people who do these types of jobs, but rather that you don’t need specialized training to do them.

I’ve read the synopsis of this book and the ones in this book don’t either

I flip off every cybercuck I see. You can’t own one without supporting a fascist so everyone driving one is an asshole. I think you should be socially ostracized for owning one of these pieces of shit and I am doing my part.

I wish it were for political reasons but honestly the main reason for me is that reddit just sucks now. It’s way too sterile and predictable.

Well relatively speaking. Up until the Trump era both major parties in the US were essentially liberal parties before the Republicans became a far right party. The right wing nationalists in other countries would probably be moderate Democrats by US standards.

It’s because Americans don’t give a shit about anything. Europeans actually have the balls to do something if their governments but Americans will just let their government do anything as long as the marvel and Disney slop keeps flowing into their troughs.

I’ll go against the grain and say literally all of it. Every piece of technology that exists is a compromise between what the designer wants to do and the constraints of what is practical or possible to actually pull off. Therefore, all technology “fails” on at least some metric the designer would like it to achieve. Technology is all about improvement and working with imperfection. If we don’t keep trying to make things better, then innovation stops. With your example of VR, I’d say that after having seen multiple versions of VR in my lifetime, the one that we have now is way more successful and impactful, especially in commercial uses rather than consumer products. Engineers can now tour facilities before they are built with VR headsets to see design flaws that they might not have seen just with a traditional model review, for example. Furthermore, what we have now is just an iteration on what we had before. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, people take what came before, look at what worked and what didn’t, and what could be fixed with other technologies that have developed in the meantime. That’s the iteration process.

I think it’s ultimately negative for everyone involved but it’s proven to be impossible to get rid of so we should legalize and regulate it to prevent the worst abuses that are so common.

TFW people realize Squid Game and Parasite are social commentary and not just fun meme shows

Especially when so many big countries are run by fascists who are especially interested in such data

This is why I am just going to pay networks of my favorite youtubers directly when YouTube finally gets too bad to use. I’m never paying for RedTube or whatever the fuck porny ass name their premium service has so that Google gets most of my money and Mr beast gets a cut while the people I actually watch get nothing. I pay for Dropout already and that shit is so much better than Netflix and other services. Sure it’s low budget but it’s still better than the slop all the big companies are shoveling out of their troughs.