A simpler explanation would be that he's not a fascist.

CPB might have been useful 50 years ago, but with today's technology and access you can find all sorts of really good educational videos online.

And with the online stuff you can choose to avoid the ones that are politically biased.

Or seek them out. Both kinds are available in the new media.

Some years ago I took the NH tax burden and compared it to CA and tried to come up with an explanation. NH has no income tax or sales tax, most of its revenue comes from business taxes. NH property taxes fund local, not state, budgets.

I couldn't figure out why the numbers were so different. I've just now redone that calculation, and here's the results:

NH spends $5640 per person on state services, CA spends $12,500. More than double.

NH spends $850,000 per square mile, CA spends $1,960,000. More than double.

(California has 28x the population of NH, and about 17x the land area.)

About 1/3 of California state budget comes from the federal government, about 1/3 of NH state budget comes from the federal government.

California has a long seacoast with ports of entry for shipping, a warm, sunny environment, the biggest tech sector in the US, and lots of worldwide industry such as the movie industry, Disneyland, vinyards, and tourism. When I originally did the calculation it had Spacex, Tesla, and Oracle and a number of others.

New Hampshire has skiing and hiking.

California should be swimming in money, but it's not. It periodically skirts with bankruptcy, and everyone complains that you can't get anything done due to regulations. Despite having oil wells and refineries in state, energy prices are through the roof. (CA electricity prices are about 2x the prices in FL.)

I'm totally not seeing the difference. How does a podunk little state like NH have such a high quality lifestyle, while CA has opportunity, variety, culture, but at high cost and stress.

I'd be interested in any explanation people have.

Is this really a concern?

If your organization is doing (ethically) good work, does it really matter where the money comes from?

Accepting money from the mafia, or from a repressive government, doesn't in any way promote those ideals. And if you *didn't* accept the money it would be used by the original owners which are (per the assumptions) of lower ethical standards, so wouldn't it be better to have the money used by someone who is doing good?

I'm reminded of Mother Teresa, who famously accepted donations from anywhere to further her goals, including people with questionable human rights records. Should she have stopped trying to ease the suffering because of where the money came from*?

I don't see it.

If someone can explain why it would be morally wrong to accept the money, I'd like to hear it.

(*) Some controversy over Mother Teresa's actions, but so far as I can tell it's mostly information. But in this case I'm using her perceived legacy as a paradigm without commenting on whether it's correct or not.

I am seriously confused about the rationale here.

You thought Dell was a good fit for your next purchase. You've done some research, and Dell appears to have met your needs for quality and price.

The owners of Dell pledged $625 billion to a system that should help children in various ways. There have been a lot of complaints recently from young people about how the system has failed them: housing is too expensive, not enough high paying jobs, they can't afford to get married, own a home, and have kids.

This donation seems like it would be a start towards fixing this. Perhaps other high-end donors will add to the accounts.

Having an easy way to add to your children's future over time seems like it would help fixing this, it's simple and a "no brainer" for parents: they don't have to learn financing or do research or set up accounts, everyone online will be analyzing the accounts and tell whether they are a good idea. Parents can focus on parenting and rely on expert analysis for whether this is a good idea.

And you are so miffed at this that... for some reason... you've decided to boycott Dell and spend your money elsewhere?

I'm completely at sea here. In what universe does your decision make sense?

Addendum: Looking over the edit page of this post, it occurs to me that there is a universe where "jacks smirking reven" is not a US citizen, and is just making troll posts to foment divisiveness in America. I've seen a lot of really funny news accounts (example) of political shitposters on X being from foreign nations. Are we in that universe?

And will Slashdot ever add the "account based in" feature?

(BTW, I'm from the US, I promise :-)

ChatGPT has three aspects that make this practice - what you describe - very dangerous.

Firstly, ChatGPT implements universal positive regard. No matter what your idea is, ChatGPT will gush over it, telling you that it's a great idea. Your plans are brilliant, it's happy for you, and so on.

Secondly, ChatGPT always wants to get you into a conversation, it always wants you to continue interacting. After answering your question there's *always* a followup "would you like me to..." that offers the user a quick way that reduces effort. Ignoring these requests, viewing them as the result of an algorithm instead of a real person trying to be helpful, is difficult in a psychological sense. It's hard not to say "please" or "thank you" to the prompt, because the interaction really does seem like it's coming from a person.

And finally, ChatGPT remembers everything, and I've recently come to discover that it remembers things even if you delete your projects and conversations *and* tell ChatGPT to forget everything. I've been using ChatGPT for several months talking about topics in a book I'm writing, I decided to reset the ChatGPT account and start from scratch, and... no matter how hard I try it still remembers topics from the book.(*)

We have friends for several reasons, and one reason is that your friends will keep you sane. It's thought that interactions with friends is what keeps us within the bounds of social acceptability, because true friends will want the best for you, and sometimes your friends will rein you in when you have a bad idea.

ChatGPT does none of this. Unless you're careful, the three aspects above can lead just about anyone into a pit of psychological pathology.

There's even a new term for this: ChatGPT psychosis. It's when you interact so much with ChatGPT that you start believing in things that aren't true - notable recent example include people who were convinced (by ChatGPT) that they were the reincarnation of Christ, that they are "the chosen one", that ChatGPT is sentient and loves them... and the list goes on.

You have to be mentally healthy and have a strong character *not* to let ChatGPT ruin your psyche.

(*) Explanation: I tried really hard to reset the account back to its initial state, had several rounds of asking ChatGPT for techniques to use, which settings in the account to change, and so on (about 2 hours total), and after all of that, it *still* knew about my book and would answer questions about it.

I was only able to detect this because I had a canon of fictional topics to ask about (the book is fiction). It would be almost impossible for a casual user to discover this, because any test questions they ask would necessarily come from the internet body of knowledge.

One explanation is in the rise of women in careers and education.

A woman has roughly 16 years of fertility, from age 14 to 30. At age 30, 10% of couples can't conceive after a year of trying and the numbers get worse after that. Yes, older couples can have kids, but the probability goes way down.

Culturally, having a child before age 18 is assumed to be a bad thing (4 years). Then if the woman has a college education (another 4 years), then goes for an advanced degree (up to 7 years), or wants to establish herself in her career (5 years?), or wants to work off some of the college debt (5 years), the remainder of her fertile years is not enough for population replacement.

It's largely the same for men, at age 22 they may want to start a career and pay off some college debt for several years. Men can father a child at any age, but by and large they tend to marry people roughly their same age.

It's also harder to raise a family in an apartment than in a house, so for both parents it may "make sense" to work for several years to save up for a house.

(Don't take this the wrong way, I personally feel that women should be in colleges and have careers, I'm just pointing out the conflict of interests here.)

It would seem that culture has to change somehow to allow (encourage) couples to have kids earlier, but I'm not sure how that would work given our current economic system.

Maybe the US wants both companies to prosper?

Not everything is a team sport...

Imagine a black unit cube cake with white frosting. Take a knife and cut out pieces of the cube to make a black hole outline within the white frosting. When you do this at an angle to the sides, it turns out that a cube 6% larger than the original cube can pass through the outlined hole.

All the platonic solids have this property, along with a lot of other polyhedral solids.

Current consensus is that Neanderthals and modern humans are the same species. Genetic analysis shows a couple of percent Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans. The image of Neanderthal as "hunched, sloping forehead, and ape-like" is thought to be incorrect, it comes from one skeleton that is believed to have been deformed, possibly having acromegaly.

About half a dozen distinct human "types" (Neanderthal is one) are known to have existed, it's thought that there were several more, possibly many more, but evidence from that far back is sparse. It's thought that they were all the same species and could interbreed successfully.

Neanderthals were shorter, stockier, and had larger cranial capacity, but sometime around 70,000 years ago, a different subtype, homo sapiens sapiens, got the upper hand cognitively. Around 40,000 years ago they were the only subtype remaining. (Note that there was an ice age at the time.)

About 10,000 years ago we switched from hunter-gatherers to farming and herding, stayed in one place for generations, and began to build civilization. About 3,000 BC we started casting metal, which was the start of the bronze age.

All of these are approximate, different sources give different dates, the dates change as new evidence comes up (usually pushing the dates further back), and you can't really pin down a specific date anyway. For example, lots of cultures went through the bronze age at different times: it started somewhere in the near East, and swept over the globe over the course of hundreds of years, agriculture was independently invented in 10 or more places, and so on.

People likely to succeed in managing a business will be low in trait agreeableness. This is well known and has been known for years.

Despite the apparent implication of "disagreeable" people being bad, it means that such people are more focused on themselves, unlikely to be swayed by the opinions of others, and more self serving. It's a trait that allows businesses to succeed, by having the owner focus on the success goals of the business instead of the success goals of other people.

Contrast with high agreeableness, where the person is more externally focused. Psychologists and nurses would typically be high agreeableness.

Everyone has an agreeableness score, and it's a bell curve. The fact that there are people who aren't "fair" is compensated by people who are exceptionally giving.

This hasn't been tested yet legally.

However, if operator guidance is needed (autodrive levels 1, 2, and 3, driver must remain engaged), then you are operating the vehicle and can be charged.

For levels 4 and 5, if you're behind the wheel and could turn off the autodrive features, legal opinion is that you can still be charged (you're effectively in control).

If you're not in the driver's seat and the car is level 4 and 5 (and autodriving), then there's a strong legal argument that you're not operating the vehicle and can't be charged.

(And note that if you're autodriving, there should be no reason for the cop to pull you over in the first place.)

IANAL, this is just something I researched awhile ago.

Let's do a thought problem.

For any issue where you're sure you're right, note the number of people who have a different opinion.

Suppose the number of people with a different opinion is excessively large, say more than 5% of the population. They have access to the same information that you do, but have come to a different position.

Given that situation, what does that say about your position, and whether debate itself is horrific?

This was addressed by RFK recently.

1) Most of the measles cases are in Texas, among their large Amish and Mennonite population. These people avoid vaccinations for religious reasons.

2) The number of measles cases is roughly 800, but the number of new cases has leveled off. The number of cases doesn't appear to be growing in the manner of an epidemic.

3) Canada has about as many cases, but with 1/8 the population of the US.

4) Other countries are seeing a rise in measles cases, and are doing less well than the US.

The US is apparently in good shape as far as measles go. Yes, it's a concern, but not much of a concern and it isn't expected to become a problem.

In comparison, the US has epidemics of obesity, childhood diabetes, and autism. These three are the elephants in the room, with autism rising to about 3% (one in 30) of boys, and 5% (1-in-20) in California. The rise in autism has been shown (by study) *not* to be due to changes in diagnosis method or access to medical professionals.

Since 2000, the incidence of childhood diabetes has tripled.

Measles is a concern, but for the three epidemics we *actually* have the MSM is strangely silent.

Almost as if reporting on the health of the US isn't really their goal...