> > Essentially "I am rational therefore I am right".
> Sounds like basically the entirety of philosophy
That's the opposite of the experience I've observed.
The starting point for a lot of philosophy students is learning the teachings of Plato and Socrates, among which the most famous is likely "I know that I know nothing"
The legal restrictions on where you can build a new home are more of a problem in California than in rural Arkansas so your response doesn't address OP's point.
> You cannot calculate the EV of a random variable X by taking the mean of random samples drawn from the distribution of X
My understanding of statistics is rudimentary so forgive me but doesn't the sample mean of a normally distributed variable tend towards the expected value for the population?
I completely disagree with the author's contention that "the industrial revolution could not have happened without slavery".
I think the author doesn't even mean it and instead just wishes to convey a general sense that British economic success is inextricably linked to injustice.
By making this argument instead that the industrial revolution "would not have happened without" slavery allows the reader to infer that slavery was therefore justifiable on the basis that we wouldn't have modern medicine or modern food production techniques without it.
To avoid this, I don't let my mind form words too early. Words can come to mind so effortlessly that I wonder if I'm saying what I really feel.
I refrain from describing what I want to say before I have a chance to search my brain for related concepts to convey or contrast my thoughts. Then I can decide if the thing I'm about to say matches how I feel about the subject.
If you feel like your language is determining your thoughts, then I recommend (aside from possibly bilingualism) just taking more time to choose your words. Supposedly, the "decision-making centers" in the brain tend to activate prior to the parts responsible for understanding and reasoning ... apparently implying that humans usually rationalize decisions we've already made rather than reasoning beforehand.
Then again, I'll digress because I also do that to compensate for my poor communication and multitasking skills, so others may not share my thinking style and limitations.
> What’s the strongest argument in favor of credit reporting agencies? If we got rid of them would borrowing money become so difficult or expensive that we’d regret what we wished for?
Before Credit Ratings Agencies, most people just couldn't get credit. They could bring a letter from their pastor to the bank and hope for the best. There was also a lot of racial bias in the process: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/rjn7uf/...
> According to my way older relatives, as in from the 1920s to the 1960s, most people didn't have access to credit. My family comes from the midwest. Poor and middle class white people at least...paid cash for almost everything. If you made enough money and seemed clean enough and had a letter from your pastor you could get a mortgage with 10-15 year term on it. Most of my family that lived in the cities back then were in their 30s-40s when they got their first homes, and lived among people just like them. Banks would not give them enough money to buy a house in the rich neighborhoods, only the middle class union people neighborhoods for white people.
> The ones who lived on the farms? Someone somewhere up the family tree paid cash after working on someone else's farm for awhile and bought their own land, and passed it down, and there was no credit involved. If they needed credit for things they could get on the ledger at the local general store. That was about it.
> People who were not rich did not have credit like people do now. They paid cash for everything. Banks would not lend money to poor or middle class people except for houses, and you had to have like 30% down and the terms were, as mentioned, 10-15 years tops.
> My Boomer parents have told me over and over again, that until the 1990s people didn't use credit like they do now. You just didn't. If you could not afford to pay for something you did without. My parents first car loan, which they only got when my dad re-enlisted in the military, had like an 18% interest rate and my parents had to put 20% down. My dad had to show his papers from the military and his paystubs from the military. And several dealerships turned them down. This was the early 1980s.
Apparently other countries do fine without it, though.
i've never seen this in Canada but even in the U.S., I don't think it's being misused the way that people are suggesting here.
I have referred thousands of callers to TheWorkNumber (and competitors like 'Thomas and Company') in my years working at a call centre and the reason is always the same: income verification for somebody who needs to get approved for a mortgage loan application or something else like that.
I don't actually see any suggestion that the salary data is being "sold" per se rather than just being used for legitimate income verification purposes
that's a very poor comparison to the outright falsehoods perpetuated by propaganda. Not only was the Trump campaign never exonerated of the collusion accusations, but several associates were convicted for their dealings with Russia related to the election and investigation:
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"If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime... A president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view – that too is prohibited."[164]
Dozens of ongoing investigations originally handled by the Special Counsel's office were forwarded to district and state prosecutors, other Department of Justice (DoJ) branches, and other federal agencies.[165] The following (in alphabetical order) were indicted during the Mueller investigation:
13 Russians implicated in election interference: Mueller's team indicted thirteen Russian citizens, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering with conducting social media campaigns about the U.S. elections.[166] Twelve of the Russian defendants, who were alleged to be members of the Russian GRU cyber espionage group known as Fancy Bear, were charged in June 2018 with hacking and leaking DNC emails.[167] The other Russian indicted, who was not a direct employee of Fancy Bear, was Russian business tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was alleged to have served as the financier for the organization.[168] The US government dropped all charges against Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering in March 2020.[154] In November 2019, Time magazine reported that it was "unlikely that any of the Russians will ever face a trial in the United States, but the charges make it harder for them to travel overseas".[169]
Maria Butina, who had claimed to be a Russian gun activist, was investigated by the Special Counsel investigators and then prosecuted by the National Security Law Unit. She was imprisoned for espionage after entering a guilty plea.[170][171]
Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer, pled guilty to making hush payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in violation of campaign finance laws, and was convicted for several unrelated counts of bank and tax fraud.[172][173]
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who had been appointed as National Security Advisor by the incoming Trump administration, was dismissed from his position and later pled guilty to making false statements to FBI investigators about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition.[174][175]
Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort's business partner in Ukraine, was indicted for witness tampering at the behest of Manafort;[176] Kilimnik is suspected of working for Russian intelligence.[177]
Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman was found guilty on eight felony counts of tax evasion and bank fraud,[178] pursuant to his earlier lobbying activities for the Party of Regions of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich.[179][180] He later pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of justice;[181][182] in total, he was sentenced to over seven years in jail[183] in February 2018.
George Papadopoulos, Trump campaign adviser, was convicted for making false statements to the FBI.[184]
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump advisor who had met with a Russian person offering to sell derogatory financial information about Hillary Clinton,[185] was indicted on seven charges of lying to Congress and witness tampering. He pled not guilty.[186] The jury subsequently found him guilty on all seven counts.[187]
> There are millions of people that can talk to their relatives and have better access to government services and communicate with people they've never met, that would still be cut off if not for Facebook.
One option is to advocate for corporations to be allowed to act as sole providers of social services in exchange for a monopoly on network platform infrastructure.....
....but why not just advocate for taxing the corporations and using the money to provide those services to the public on an open platform instead?
> I google a lot in my job as well, but one thing I’m trying to do is reduce the number of repetitive searches I do and remembering what to do afterwards. I think part of personal development is learning how to do something and not relying on google or any other reference because as we’re all aware they’re will be a time when stack overflow or GitHub goes down.
For me, it really helps to blog with code snippets, annotations and full explanations.
I use git diff > iteration123.patch then copy-paste to OneNote along with a quick summary of my thought process.
It really helps me to retain what I've learned (and it reassures me that I can account for how I'm spending the considerable self-learning time I'm being given during my current internship)
> The videos themselves will live eternally though, they're very popular on torrent sites and collections TBs in size are well seeded (and very sought after, looking at my download:upload ratio).
the same could be said for CSAM (which is exactly what some of the videos you're spreading arguably constitute)
The search result I'm finding for that phrase is "Wǒ bù huì shuō zhōngwén. I kept saying it over and over again, the phrase I had memorized to explain my inability to speak their language".
How many people do you encounter? In which parts of the country? How much do you know about their political views? How do you know whether someone is a Nazi if they don't announce it?
You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.
in your quote, it says that private businesses and political parties are making these decisions. that's likely done as part of their regular screening processes.