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That would still match "[favouring] white Christian people". Or at least that part matches the "Christian" part, the other stuff Musk associates with seems to suggest at least some racial (and not simply cultural) biases in his thinking, e.g. how he regards DEI as being a promotion of undeserving people rather than a way to give equal opportunities to deserving people who are demonstrably under-represented given their qualifications.

On that basis Richard Dawkins matches the Christian part.

It is entirely unimportant how Richard Dawkins is categorised, isn't it? Last I checked, the "pro-natalist" part isn't there for Dawkins, so how other things modify a pro-natalist stance don't connect to anything.

I am suggesting that a definition of "Christian" that includes Richard Dawkins is flawed.

You're the one who chose to combine Musk and Dawkins in the same group here with "cultural christian", that's absolutely a straw man if this is what you're doing.

I mean, your own link up there has a sub-heading of "Everyone has their own definition".

Especially when you're replying to "he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially" rather than "is a Christian". Queen Victoria wasn't a feminist, neither.


You are saying they are Christian in the same sense of being "cultural Christians" rather than actual Christians. if you say one is a Christian it follows that the other is a Christian.

The point is that given Musk is clearly not an actual Christian he cannot favour Christians "himself included".


Basically all of human history can be described in similar terms, and it's not melanin-specific.

If you can name a historical figure, they were probably some flavour of non-standard mental processing and beliefs.

Even just coming up with "marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better" is inherently a non-standard position relative to how most people live and think.


What you're saying amounts to: ambitious assholes know they need better PR than people who just get the job done. In principle this is an approach open to anyone, but in modern America, it is just a clique of strange white men.

No, I'm saying oddball philosophies and pseudoscientific beliefs are the default.

Even coming up with the scientific method took millennia, and actually trying to take that seriously is still really unusual in the human species.

It may happen to be a clique of strange mostly white men in the USA, but it would be wrong in both directions to label this under "modern America": the founding fathers of the USA were, by both modern and contemporary standards, more than a bit odd. And that was true at almost every point in US (and indeed world, not just USA) history. And it's not just a uniquely American thing, as anyone who points to, say, the Chinese Great Leap Forward's famine will point out. (And that was just the first example that came to my head, basically everywhere and every-when has something weird to pick up on).

Science is hard. Thinking critically and logically is hard. As Feynman said:

  The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

> How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?

Hopefully those particular CEOs are now in line for being replaced with an AI.


At the start of WFH, we were all* rather more worried about the pandemic and what the shops had in stock than childcare.

By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.

Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.

* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.


I think it's more that proof of identity from the union of {payment information, KYC} also includes both of age verification and name, not that name leads to age.

Are the payment providers sending the age to the gamling site?

> union of {payment information, KYC}

As in, if you're not matching the payment info to your customer info, you (which may be the company or the government passing the laws the company is following just fine) did it wrong.

Because, as pjc50 wrote, failing to do that is an obvious exploit for money laundering.


Sorry, I don't get it.

If I'm underage, but already have a payment card, the identity of the card matches my name.

That is why dreadnip suggested the MitID approach.


> If I'm underage, but already have a payment card, the identity of the card matches my name.

And if a gambling site stops there and goes "LGTM", it's not the "union of {payment information, KYC}".

Union, as in combination of both.

KYC, as in "Know Your Customer". Looks like MitID is a thing that would be one way to do KYC? But I've only just heard of it, so belief is weakly held.


If that was a good argument, neither Quorn nor Linda McCartney Foods would have been successes.

They're both doing fine.

And Huel.

Likewise beyond just substitutes, all specific sodas, sweets, biscuits*, most breakfast cereals, etc.

* I'm British by birth, I don't mean those scones Americans have with "gravy".


Pure soy doesn't taste too good in my experience. I tend to prep the dehydrated stuff I get with (ironically) soy sauce, which is quite salty, plus whatever else the recipe I'm using the soy in calls for. In the case of soy burgers, that mince needs some binding agent.

It's odd, as I generally agree that "pure soya" doesn't taste that great, but I do prefer the taste of edamame beans which are just young soybeans. Products like tofu generally need more flavour adding to it - and I personally like tofu and eat it fairly regularly, so I'm not biased against it.

Also, I like the taste of Natto (soybeans fermented in straw) though that's generally thought of as an acquired taste.


I believe the claim being made here is that "a beyond burger" is a thing which fast food chains and supermarkets will offer as an alternative to "a beef burger", that almost nobody will make their own burgers.

I have no opinion about the economics of the brand itself; as a vegetarian I've always thought they were over-priced, and also that it was a shame I don't have a huge range of alternatives, as I actually like spicy bean burgers and can't find them any more*. In fact, because of the limited alternatives in my local markets, I got a kit for making my own burgers from dehydrated soy mince and/or mashed kidney beans.

* I don't know how much of this is "bean burgers are no longer popular" vs. "I moved country and Berlin has never heard of them"; for Quorn I do at least know it's the latter.


> I got a kit for making my own burgers from dehydrated soy mince and/or mashed kidney beans.

Do you have a link or name for this? I also prefer black bean or lentil burgers, but I've been making them by hand really.


One of these, found in the discount bin in a nearby supermarket for about €10-20: https://www.discounto.de/Angebot/BESTRON-Hamburger-Maker-AMH...

There's probably also a cheaper source for the form and squasher if that's all you need, but it came with them so I didn't look for that separately.


> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen.

No, AI has not "already" won. And phrasing it as you do, "It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten" is an admission of that.

People may indeed not pause, but there's never any guarantee that the next step of progress is possible; whatever we reach may be all we can do, and we'll only find out when we get there. Or it might go hyperbolic and give us everything.

I'm not certain, but I suspect Jevons paradox is probably the wrong thing to bring up here, that's about cheaper stuff revealing more latent demand, and sure, that's possible and it may reveal a latent demand for everyone to build their own 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise (any of them) as a personal home, but we may also find that AI ends the economic incentives for consumerism which in turn remove a big driver to constantly have more stuff and demand goes down to something closer to a home being a living yurt made out of genetically modified photovoltaic vines that also give us unlimited free food.

(I mean, if we're talking about the AI future, why not push it?)

What I do think is worth bringing up is comparative advantage: Again, this is just an "I think", I'm absolutely not certain here, but if AI can supply all demand at unlimited volumes*, I think the assumptions behind comparative advantage, break.

> It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming.

Yes, and I think they've also not even managed to figure out the internet yet.

* and AI may well be able to, even if all models collectively "only" reach the equivalent of a fully-rounded human of IQ 115; and yes I know IQ tests are dodgy, but we all know what they approximate, by "fully rounded" I mean that thing their steel-man form tries to approach, not test passing itself which would have the AI already beat that IQ score despite struggling with handling plates in a dishwasher.


> The Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM.

Indeed. But it does change if you want an answer on a non-Euclidian surface, e.g. big scale things on the surface of Earth where questions like "what's a square?" don't get the common-sense answer you may expect them to have.

I bring this up because one of my earlier tests of AI models is how well they can deal with this, and it took a few years before I got even one correct answer to my non-Euclidian problem, and even then the model only got it correct by importing a python library into a code interpreter that did this part of the work on behalf of the model.


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