If you don’t think pre-Disney Star Wars EU was worse than what Disney’s done, you either have cognitive dissonance from buying a hundred bad pulp novels or you never read them.
The sequels have palpatine “somehow return” via cloning, while the EU justified Sheev building death weapons because of extra-galactic anti-force bugs.
Whether or not you’re “really” a real person, or a brain in a jar, or a butterfly dreaming you’re Zhuangzi, you and me and everyone else are still “people” we should respect.
Wrestling with the unfalsifiable nature of reality is something all thought traditions have dealt with, and I’d argue that you’re not really an adult in 2025 if you haven’t contemplated that all you know could be a hallucination.
The screwier question always becomes “if this is a dream , what if you’re not the dreamer?”
Was there any reported reduction in training time needed for subsequent words?
Just getting a computer to understand anything from the implanted wires is progress, but it’s “spend hours training for each single word” we’re still at a 1970s scifi level of interaction.
1: what the frick are you doing in Excel that needs even 10^2 columns? Rows go up to 2^20 (~10^6), and the thing starts to run like ass way before that.
2: Excel does have a RXCX format, if you really do need to go out hundreds of columns.)
3: feel free to ignore. Bitching about being forced to use the wrong tool is definitely more stress than anyone needs.
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Getting millions of Americans to go out and essentially shout “F U Donald” is a little bit more than a hang. And is potentially much more effective than a riot or occupy wall street.
America is still a democracy, in that all the roads to power require you to get folk to show up and vote for you.
Who I am and who did the study should be irrelevant. An idea should stand on its own or not.
Or do you really want to be the sort of person who dismissed Einstein as “Jewish science” or who told the Wright brothers that heavier than air flight is impossible? (Or, worse, the sort of person who pays for a scam “bomb sniffer” after a terrorist attack, or assumes Donald must be smart because he’s rich?)
It’s perfectly fine to answer a question with “I don’t know,” especially when your other option is “no, the emperor must have clothes on.”
Since you read it, and don’t reference them addressing the fact pattern I mentioned, I’m not sure reading it would be worth my time. I’d love to be convinced, however, if you can answer one question.
How did she categorize a movement as “non-violent” or not?
It shouldn’t be. Asserting that “no non-violent protests have failed” ignores an obvious null hypothesis.
Tyrannical regimes attack non-violent protests that get large enough, and then call said movements “violent” to justify what the state did to them.
It’s not just “hey, look,.traffic is down”, but rather a few.folks saying "see, traffic is down because you keep commenting negatively to politicians and journalists "
The stats are trending down, but not precipitously so and still at a level that (AFAIK) eclipses the whole fediverse. And there are plenty of journalists and politicians who engage or endure the negative feedback.
There are no such things as unreconcilable contradictions.
*: and by “common” I mean “as I believe most Christians understand it.”. I’m sure some don’t, and that there’s at least one sect that would call me funny names for saying anything.
Common* christian theology posits that God is a perfect judge of law and fact, seeing as she has both infinite patience, infinite subjective time, and accurate knowledge of everyone’s points of view.
“Why does evil persist on Earth then” comes down to either said evil being necessary for some unseen purpose, said evil being irrelevant to God’s plans, or said evil being the consequence of some mortal privilege. Or some combination thereof.
There has been a lot of christian thought about why evil persists, and settling on an answer to it is essentially the base of all persistent ecumenical schisms. Other religions add even greater complexity, because once you examine perspectives off the abeahamic tree you quickly find that not even “Good” is consistently defined.
The moral and philosophical questions don’t get much easier if you remove God from the equation, or even if you adopt a nihilistic “only the momentary physical now matters” perspective.
If you don’t believe me, try coming up with an answer to “why is killing bad” that you can get agreement on. (Not just “is killing bad,” but an actual casual why.)
According to snopes, it looks like you need either fraud, professional misconduct, or an interaction beyond an anonymous donation.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-sued-sperm-donor-for-child-support/
'course, it’s easy to imagine a woman telling some guy she wants a “sperm donor” and then being awarded child support. Which, in fairness, is also usually a strong argument from the guy to have partial custody.
Graceful degredation is a choice, made in the negative by survivors of the dot-com bubbles that fiercely want to extract a level of customer loyalty that mere “actual companies” could never dream of.
Business software is a weird world. Made weirder than there absolutely are people paid by Intuit (not OP) whose job is to convince people who don’t currently pay for QuickBooks that paying for QuickBooks will solve whatever quickbooks-esque problem they have.
It’s worse in the IT side. I’m modestly sure that COBOL and Java are only still around because of IBM and Oracle sales staff.
(Maybe less so for Java than COBOL. Or maybe Oracle’s sales team is just better.)
Just based on the MCU portrayal:
Barnes was a WW2 soldier who was captured and tortured as a POW, only to be saved by his now-buff 95-lbs weakling best friend. He fought alongside Rogers for an unspecified number of months, until he was thrown from a train.
After that, he was captured by the same mad scientist and brainwashed into a remorseless killing machine. His recovery from being so was long, and involved first being on the run, then a superhero civil war, and then some years as a guest of a mythical African kingdom.
Then endgame happened, and the whole darn world had one of two traumatic shocks. Barnes had some lingering trauma afterwards, but can be seen working through it in Falcon and Winter Soldier.
It’s been a few years, but not once did they show him screaming at hydra in Russian.
In Thunderbolts, Barnes is literally the only team member to have actually come to terms with the terrible things he did. (Followed closely by Red Guardian). Whatever trauma he did experience was almost certainly something he had already processed.
It’s fairly in-character for Bucky’s worst trauma NOT being his time as the Winter Soldier.
Other than that, you’re spot on.
There is no pattern of facts where “Apple gets to collect a tax on any transaction you make on your iPhone” is a good thing
If you held on until Ant Man 3, I presume you skipped DrStange 2, Black Panther 2, and "Thor: bring your kid to the movie lot*?
The MCU’s been putting out “meh” and “camp” movies for years. (Thor 2). I still go because I have a fairly low bar for date-night, and they’re still not the worst movies I’ve sat through. But I don’t know if I’d want to re-watch any of the ones I mentioned.