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Social contagion can result in surprisingly self destructive behavior.

> For the first time that I am aware of, we are seeing clusters of people seeking voluntary amputations of healthy limbs and performing amputations on themselves.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-w...

That was in 2000 and since then it's only increased in scale. Tumblr alone saw widespread suicidal ideation, depression, self-harm and a host of identity crises.

Now the question is, what's the solution?


Amputation. Powerful memes. Where have I seen this combination before?

Addressing it head-on: Galatians 6:13.

Explicitly fighting it by redefinition (how pomo!): 1 Corinthians 3:18-19; Colossians 2:11.

Saying that it is beside the point: Galatians 5:6.

Dismissing the practice as exclusionary: Romans 3:1,28-31.

It shows up again and again.

Christianity deals with it thus: The old blood sacrifice is obsoleted by the new sacrifice -- the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the Lamb of God.

Surely if we look in other faith traditions we will also find, in some of them, efforts to combat this sort of thing. It seems to crop up again and again with memes. They want to mark people.


Turning off the internet and finding your tribe in person.


It makes me wonder if for many years parents knew what they were doing by keeping their kids away from “bad crowds”. It wasn’t just to keep them away from bad behaviors but also bad ideas. Certainly difficult to do today without alienating your kids.

I find it ironic that so much of what is “social” today was built by nerds who I assume had a difficult time socializing and everyone else that did not have a problem socializing for thousands of years are now using these weird social tools.


That is ironic; and the weird social tools give them anxieties and complexes like they never had before. Wild.


But what if all the potential members of my tribe are still plugged into… oh my god it’s the matrix, we have to go find the people we want on our side and flush them out of the machine! Perhaps by fooling the machine into flushing them out for us, ie get them banned from social media :o


> This completely changes our perception of T. rex as a dinosaur that was insensitive around its mouth, putting everything and anything in biting at anything and everything including bones.

I mean, wouldn't sensitivity be the default assumption? Why were they otherwise convinced?


>I mean, wouldn't sensitivity be the default assumption? Why were they otherwise convinced?

I don't know if it's a related assumption, but it was at one time thought that the t-rex had sacrificial/re-growing teeth like a shark ( I don't follow this stuff much, so I don't know how dated that premise is. )

Maybe the assumption goes something like "Hyper-carnivores lose and re-grow their teeth routinely, so let's assume that their physiology has done something to negate the pain associated with the process."


To build on this; Is code equivalent to speech? Is Bitcoin free speech?


Probably not, and no.



yt-dlp is a good fork.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Any other recommendations?


JDownloader [1] is a pretty good all-purpose download tool. It's a GUI tool, though, so it fills somewhat of a different niche than youtube-dl.

[1]: https://jdownloader.org/


jd is nowhere as flexible as youtube-dl is, especially format selection.


As a JD2 power user, could you expand on the inflexibility and the format selection? I am trying to understand your issue with format selection since JD2 can do wide range of formats. It uses FFmpeg as codec backend. If it is about the format selection in the LinkGrabber list, you can set your preferred format in YT plugin setting and JD2 will follows that. The default setting is "Best" which is why it shows you the list based on the best possible format.


Also, youtube-dl can save the video metadata as JSON.


You think John Carmack, a legendary engineer who had his own aerospace company and has likely toured others, is wrong that it's extremely impressive? Which would be relative to others.


The commenter is not questioning the impressiveness of the factory.


The commenter was making the assertion that Starbase is not exceptionally unique or an advanced outlier in its impressiveness.


ULA might be inefficient and seems likely to struggle to compete with SpaceX, but Destin Sandlin's (Smarter Every Day) tour of their factory is pretty freakin sweet.


Do you see how this escalating though? Already concerns are being blithely dismissed, and it only starts as optional and non essential.

In Australia you can see the next step already where it’s being applied to grocery stores. You have to start pushing back before it gets to that.


Do you? Why not just forget what the tyrannical government is saying, and do your part to protect the health of yourself and your community?


Is this tongue in cheek?


so we have to push back against sensible precautions that will likely save lives because of a hypothetical future where they go too far?

also, I can't find anything like what you're talking about with Australia, just more sensible precautions like this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/31/from-social...


You don't even have to imagine. Kamala Harris: "But if Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0

The same thing was broadly expressed on twitter at the time too, she was far from alone in that sentiment.


That's an interesting quote and you're 100% correct. However you only gave a snippet of the quote. The full transcript is:

Commentator: If the Trump administration approves a vaccine before or after the election should Americans take it? And would you take it?

Harris: If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the Doctors, tell us we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it, absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it I'm not taking it.

Harris is alluding to the fact that we should listen to people who actually have medical experience and know what they're talking about. You have to remember this was only a few months after Trump had tried to play doctor on TV by saying:

"So I asked Bill a question some of you are thinking of if you're into that world, which I find to be pretty interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn't been checked but you're gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that. So you're going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we'll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it goes in one minute, that's pretty powerful."


Why did you omit the first part of the quote? “If the public health professionals … tell me to take I will absolutely take it. But if Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it.”

I think this is a reasonable message of caution when talking about someone pushing HCQ and drinking bleach on the daily.


Does the first part matter in the context of what the OP was talking about? If Trump mandated it many would not take it on that basis alone. That’s the point I’m responding to.

“If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the Doctors, tell us we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it, absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it I'm not taking it.“

Note “But if…”. That programmers aren’t able to parse this if else statement is concerning.


With context it is obvious that she is just saying if Trump alone says take it, then she won't be taking it. Which is understandable in the context of the moment since I believe it had been recently revealed that trump was communicating with the FDA demanding that they approve it immediately.


Surprisingly, people don't speak in rigorous, syntactically correct if-statements.


The second part doesn’t? She’s just saying she won’t take it because Donald Trump alone said to.


This has got to be one of the dumber arguments I've seen made in the media and especially here.

Kamala was saying that if the only person telling her she should get vaccinated was Donald Trump, then no, she would not take it.

The (very clear) implication is that she would prefer that people who actually know what they are talking about (i.e. virologists, doctors, nurses, scientists, the FDA, the CDC, NIH...etc) recommends getting the vaccine, then she would get it enthusiastically.

Is this really too hard to understand or are you really trying to use this extremely flimsy argument to accuse her of hypocrisy?


She is absolutely right. If trump touts a vaccine but the medical community does not, she wouldn't trust it - and neither should you.

You have to remember at the time trump was recommending hydroxychloroquine as a preventative and miracle treatment for COVID-19. Sadly some of his followers still believe it (and now are looking at ivermectin as well).


Here's how meaningless this smear campaign is:

> Palantir worked with Cambridge Analytica on the Facebook data it acquired

Google, PG&E, DoorDash, Edible Arrangements, worked with Cambridge Analytica...

> Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

The government does using some of Palantir's tools. Does Palatir itself do that?

> NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

So?

> Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients

So?

> U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

Accuse being the key word.

> How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global spy network

How Google, PG&E, DoorDash and Edible Arrangements helped expand the NSA's global spy network. Maybe the NSA is the problem here, not service providers?

> Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

Why did Britain give them access to that?


If that's the case, then why is student debt such a problem? Or is that equally overhyped?


Student debt is structurally not the same as other debt because it's non-discheargeable and this changes a lot including who is offered the debt in the first place.


The latter difference is a good one in a great many cases. If asked to name two major factors to elevate people into the middle class, I’d choose education and ownership of their home.

Policies and structures to allow people on the precipice access to funding required to take the leap and which attempt to keep the system stable by putting personal “skin in the game” find support with me.


The wage premium holds even after accounting for debt


Is that the only explanation? Or is it possible they see weakening institutions, weakening petrodollar and want to get ahead of the curve or diversify?


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