Millions of newborns are forced into various religions without their consent. Basing your argument off of consent only is kinda a wash argument unless your willing to fight all the other things parents do to their children without their consent.
Millions of newborns are forced into various religions without their consent. Basing your argument off of consent only is kinda a wash argument unless your willing to fight all the other things parents do to their children without their consent.
College: You get as much as you put in to it.
If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor’s, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.
For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.
As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.
Considering that the death toll caused by the triangle trade is estimated to be between 6 million and 60 million Africans with a general consensus of ~17 million, I think you may need to re-evaluate just how brutal it was.
Many people will point out correctly that Africa already had a slave trade structure before America and Europe got involved; but the fact is the Western slavery was far worse than the slavery in Africa. For example, the fact that slaves’ children were born into slavery was uniquely American slavery. Basically, African nations did not dehumanize their slaves, and it’s incredible what brutal things humans can do to each other the moment one side doesn’t view the other side as thinking human beings, but rather cattle to be done with as they please.


You truly believe the semantics of the English language disproves the point? English and the way it defines “I” is greatly affected by things seperate from biological definitions (one being the spiritual concept of the “soul”)
Also, there did exist languages in other cultures that did not have the same concept of “I” as the English language. Your counter-argument is very weak.


You are correct, the person was on life support. But they grew and went through puberty like any other normal functioning human. (I believe the person was born brain dead, and the wealthy parents couldn’t let go so they kept the person on life support at home).
Cells are living things by definition. So it is alive, though the body functions more like a tree than a mammal at that point. But a decentralized nervous system grew around the different vital organs.


The real flip side of your question is: do you think you’d still be you as a “brain in a vat” without any body?
Ultimately this whole discussion boils down to challenging the definition of “you” or “I”. Biologically every “singular” person is the result of many living things working together, so the concept of “I” is an illusion. Physically, there is no “I”, but only “us”.
This makes the discussion easier. If the hand is removed, then of course “we” are different because “we” lost a piece of “us”. This would also be true if “our” brain was removed.
Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people’s body adapting to the lack of central nervous system, so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.


Blender can be CUDA accelerated which does give Nvidia an edge over AMD. In terms of video encoding, both nvidia and AMD cards are AV1 capable, so they are on par for video encoding; unless a program does not support AV1, then the proprietary nvidia video encoders are better.


It’s not about the content, but rather the skills gained when becoming an expert on the content. For example, physics degrees are often sought after in the financial realm because of they’re expert ability to model things with mathematics.
Philosophers are generally expert thinkers, writers, and debaters. Not a lot of jobs are hiring philosophers for their content knowledge, but instead, they’re hired for their skills.


Gotta think a little further, CmdrShepard49. If the DOJ brings California to court, then whatever decision the court makes will also set a precedent for what happened in Texas. You best believe that if the courts strike down California’s attempt at redistricting, then Texas will be next.
This is such a silly technical argument that I’ve seen twice now in this thread. Watts is just Joules/second. It’s entirely valid to wonder “what rate am I ‘consuming’ energy when I do X” rather than ask “how much energy did I ‘consume’ when I do X”
Making this correction is similar to telling someone that asking how fast they moved is wrong, and they should only ask how far they moved.



The irony of a Republican lawmaker trying to make this point is unbelievable…


BeliefPropagator posted a link above which possibly verifies the screenshot: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/


I get that we need to be wary of AI slop, I really do; but If speaking academic English with decent grammar becomes associated with talking “like a bot”, then we are cooked.


Head over to Norfolk, Virginia and tell them that they are to ignore the years of racism that they experienced and fight a class war. This is the divide racism creates. If all sides can’t come to terms, then asking them to join and fight a class war will be extremely difficult; and a big part of this is white america finally coming to terms with their privilege and actively destroying the caste system.
Hence, why the bosses have been actively demonizing DEI and CRT to maintain white america’s denial of their privilege so that it continues to stoke the divide between the castes.
But you make a point, perspective is everything. Folks in middle america do not see their privilege as much because a lot of them live in towns full of other white people. This means they are largely of the same caste. Nevertheless, they are essentially being convinced that their grievances are due to dangerous people of color elsewhere in America.


That is frankly false, and also my biggest gripe about the modern communist movement. Racism is basically America’s caste system. If the caste system isn’t destroyed either before or during the class warfare, then it will either reform after a revolution or prevent people from banding together to form a revolution in the first place.
Telling people that racism is a distraction to be ignored is a major mistake. If the modern communist movement wants their class revolution, then this would be far easier (or actually possible) in a America without racism. Hence, why bosses have been perpetuating Racism in America for hundreds of years.


It’s actually a bit ironic, because CRT is viewed by many White Americans as a theory which demonizes them; but CRT also defines how racism has harmed poor white people in the past and continues to do so today.
CRT defines the biggest winners of Racism in America as being wealthy white folks. According to CRT, Racism as we know it today, was created as a means to take advantage of poor whites. Rich plantation owners recognized slavery caused great economic harm to poorer whites who did not own slaves. So a solution to stop revolt was to create this system of Race so that poor whites would remain divided from black slaves, and not work together to retaliate.
CRT also claims that this is still occuring today. Racism continues to divide poor white people from poor people of color so that they don’t work together to fight against Injustice.


Religion would make sense to me if it reverted back to polytheism… This monotheistic update was a garbage idea.
Polytheism feels like a superior theological model that is actually evidence based… For example, the personalities of the Greek gods were characterizations of which they were gods. This is also true with the Spirits in Native American religion. They were supernatural based on the natural.
I feel like Monotheistic religions rely on blind faith partly because of the evil problem. One god is supposed to be all powerful, one god is supposed to be omniscient, one god is supposed to be revered; but this means that the one god must be evil and good. Monotheism would make a lot more sense if they can all just collectively accept the notion they worship a neutral entity, not a good entity. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sound captivating enough, so instead, “the evil problem” continues.
The goal is to make personal computing hardware so expensive that the average person cannot afford to do that. 😬