The fed “isn’t a government agency” in the same way that the post office and CIA aren’t.

It was created by an act of Congress and managed through appointments from federally elected offices.

The exact same process that names post offices could unilaterally undo the fed in whole or in part and no one has any direct recourse or appeal. Even a desperate appeal to SCOTUS would fail if the law was written clearly enough, since the Constitution specifically grants congress itself the sole power to print currency and regulate commerce.

(Yes, it’s creation was a good thing. Yes, I know how it’s funded. No, neither one changes it being a government agency, no matter what your sovereign citizen website says.)

The EU is about twice the size of the USA…

A comparison of religion to legal systems is both only a sensible comparison to the three Abrahamic religions and incredibly useful for those three. (Other religions such as Buddhism are more starkly personal).

Essentially no Christian, Muslim, or Jew in any century takes the common scripture and reads it like an RPG manual for the game of life. Either they’re laypersons who rely upon the guidance of experts, or they’re the experts and they approach it with the advantage and bias of the years of study it took to become experts. And if those experts are wrong, there is always some authority to correct and rebuke their interpretation.

Ignoring the Protestant schism for a moment, this is exactly how the USA’s legal system works. The body of written law and judicial interpretation are extremely complex and nobody relies only on the plain text of the law when they want to figure out how it affects them. Even the crazy sovereign citizens mostly rely on someone else’s interpretation.

(And “sane” isn’t really a helpful label here. It encourages atheists to think about Christians as if the latter are entirely unpredictable and unreasonable, when it’s much more useful to think of us as mostly rational people who have a philosophical difference with you. More akin to the leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist discussion you can see on Lemmy than a MAGA/non-MAGA encounter.)

Do you want to have a real discussion about morality and religious teaching, or are you just in search of an gotcha quote because you feel the need to reinforce your theocratic nihilism by arguing with a theist on the internet?

I don’t feel bound by any part of the system of violent punishments that Jesus rebuked. Especially not one line which wasn’t even from either listing of the Jewish law in the Torah.

OTOH, there is something to be said for actually teaching children to behave. Using a rod to spank children is a failure of patenting, but so is letting your kid run around the restaurant making a mess because you can’t bear to rebuke them.

(And, again: Proverbs is a pre-Christian work that was incorporated by the gentike Christians when they formalized a canon for the Roman empire.)

“Jesus must be a myth because the English J was only invented in the 1500s” may well be the dumbest argument against the historical Jesus that anyone has ever made.

You are of course entirely free to doubt his divinity or the existence of God, but asseting that both the religion founded by his teachings and the 1s century rabbi were invented after Columbus’s voyage is just bad history.

The ten commandments are a old testament thing, textually written by Moses as he attempted to copy the ones God had written and that Moses shattered after the golden calf.

Christianity extended the Jewish scripture with the gospels, which include a story where God Himself Slumming As A Human was asked what the most important part of the law was, and Jesus said “love” twice.

If “love everyone as you love yourself” doesn’t lead you to not abusing children, I don’t think any book of good behavior is going to stop you.

There are a lot of books that were intentionally excluded from both the mainstream Jewish and mainstream Christian canons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch

Wage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.

Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism

A bit late to the party, but… well…

If a streaming service has an ad-free tier, the ads shown aren’t really there to sell the things they advertise. Oh, sure, the buyer of the ad wants your money, but they didn’t pay a bunch to show you that ad and the revenue from the ad buy just has be “slightly higher than spam” to be worthwhile.

"Ad-Supported’ tiers exist to differentiate the higher cost points. Which is why the ads frequently aren’t aligned with natural break points in the video. And why in some cases it’s the same two or three ads shown for every artificial and clumsy break.

The ads you are seeing exist primarily as an advertisement for the ad-free tier.

That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.

As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.

Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.

I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.

The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.

My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.

It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.

You’re right about the effect (lawsuits and the threat of the same are more common in America than Canada or the UK) but not at all about the cause.

The USA has had a decades-long choice to have our industry regulated primarily not through government bureaucracy but instead judicial liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_through_litigation

“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".

1984 is an anti-tyranny dystopia that has more bad readings than any other work I can think of.

The essential problem isn’t new-speak, the five minute hate, constant war, one-party rule, rat-based psychotorture, or even ubiquitous surveillance. Rather, it’s the abandonment of truth. It’s not nearly so bad if Big Brother is Watching, except that Big Brother lies.

(And Orwell wasn’t even inventing the danger out of whole cloth: both the German Nazi and Russian Communist tyrannies had well trod the path of internal propaganda and historical revisionism)

((AND you don’t have to squint all that hard to argure that 1984’s Britian was most plausibly a pariah state that didn’t actually have any power beyond its aquatic border…))

Like nearly all science fiction, 1984 wasn’t so much written about its future as it was written about the past.

The DSM isn’t a scientific document, but rather a medical and legal one. It is meant to help doctors correlate patients to find potential treatments, and provides language useful for billing and legal purposes.

Schizophrenia may not be an entirely accurate term, but if its use leads to patients who need medicine getting medicine and those not responsible for their actions not being held responsible then it’s hardly useless. But it does make it a good candidate for revision in the next DSM.

Which is beside the point, though. Somebody whose historical notability is half “thing contained in $BOOK is wrong” should not be presumed to be unbiased if they write a “$BOOK is bad” article.

Worth knowing:

Article’s byline is “Jim Van Os” , and the Wikipedia article for someone of the same name is a Dutch psychologist who has a ten-year history of arguing that “schizophrenia” isnt a useful label.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_van_Os

(Of course, as far as I know they may not be the same guy, and I don’t have any reason to doubt the sincerity of his argument.)

You’re the first account I’ve seen endorse OpenOffice, and I’ve been casually looking for a better alternative to word since the copilot bullshit last year.

Do you have a good example of something they added since LibreOffice forked off that’s worth considering if choosing an alternative?

Any work that wouldn’t be done if we had a UBI should either be automated away or sufficiently well-paid that it would find workers even without the threat of poverty.

We don’t need to ritually kill a homeless person just so someone will pick up our trash any more than we need to do so for someone to tended to our elders dying of cancer.

*Tell me you’ve never encountered a real courtroom without telling me never encountered a real courtroom… *

Our legal systems have long required things like “chain of custody” and “corroborating evidence” for essentially any claim. Because in essentially any instance where the opposing sides dispute a question of fact they need to convince a mildly annoyed rando that things happened a certain way while the other team is arguing that it’s all a hoax.

They generally skip all that in courtroom dramas and even broadcasted courtrooms, because the very first phase of any trial is discovery where both sides show some or all of their cards to try and convince the other team to fold.

AI slop is hardly the first time someone invented a new tool for faking evidence. Heck, we had a whole industry based on faking video evidence before the first surveilance camera was ever installed.

(There’s a huge possibility for slander and fraud that the general public should wise up to, but starting with an assumption that evidence is fake unless proven otherwise is kinda how things go.)

(And, yes, the big hole here is that “best avaliable” evidence is often nonsense. ACAB and all that. My point is just that fake evidence isn’t a dangerous new invention courts have never seen before.)