Have you ever heard of Germany?

Sigh, is this the only way you can discuss anything? Continously coming up with excuses for how the other person is supposedly not acting in good faith. I am not moving the goal posts. My position has not changed since the start of this thread.

It wasn't that old an idea, and you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I was saying anyway. Basically the theory was simply that homo sapiens essentially evolved from the hominid diaspora that originated in Africa, then Homo Sapiens gradually became the dominant hominid species. The main difference is that the evidence seems to show that the evolution of Homo Sapiens from that hominid diaspora happened entirely in Africa. Quite frankly, as I already stated, we're still building an authoritative theory from scant evidence in the first place. If you consider the time scales we are talking about, every variant of human would be able to move through the entire contiguous land of Africa and Eurasia many times over at the rate of a mile per year or less (not in terms of individuals, but rather their DNA through generations). So moving out of or into a region is basically all statistical. As I said, "all of this is based on what we can reconstruct, and it is also generalized". So, that probably makes me doubly wrong for trying to correct you in the first place.

Although I did actually genuinely just think that you meant to say Homo Erectus, since they did come out of Africa first.

Anyway, as I said, mea culpa on the dominant theory of precisely where Homo Sapiens evolved. The rest of the stuff about descent where you were just repeating what I had already written about human ancestry was a bit of a waste of time though. You could have just said 'No I really meant Homo Sapiens, here's a reference". Much less typing in the long run.

Yet you turned my short:

Into a pointlessly long thread with vulgar insults and pointless "corrections" to everything but the one error I made. I mean, look at the above. The "Huh?" might seem rhetorical to you, but that's actually a genuine question. I was asking you to clarify.

Gentrification, which you are describing, is widely considered to involve rent-seeking, along with other issues. I specifically referenced an economist and the "rent gap" issue further up the thread. I should note that my part in the thread came when you essentially implied in your post that it is impossible for a landlord to ever be a rent-seeker. As it went on, it became clear that you seem to only be able to see government action as rent seeking, and that you apply the concept to government action that is not normally seen as rent-seeking.

Obvious attempt to cast my position as an unreasoning emotional reaction is obvious. I will note at this point only that you skipped the opportunity to actually make some sort of point from the reference you provided without comment.

Ah, now I understand what you're saying. It appears that current theory appears to support that. Fair enough. That was actually educational. When I learned this stuff, the recent African origin theory in question was around, but not widely accepted, or at least not by any of my professors that I am aware of. It looks like I just defaulted to the older theory that I was taught.

Word of advice, learn to read and respond intelligently to comments at the start. Then you can avoid big, long, pointless arguments. What you do, you see, is provide your reference right at the start, rather than saying weird things like:

When I literally quoted your last line (which was also your only line about this). If you had put in the basic effort to understand, you could have just made that reference there and we could have saved all this typing.

Yes. That level of discourse seems more like your intellectual speed. Congratulations on realizing it.

Jebus, first line of the article:

I have realized something though. It is possible that, with your terrible reading comprehension, you missed some critical things like the "et al." from the excerpt from your post that I quoted in my first response to you on this thread. Maybe that was where you lost the thread? Anyway, not really relevant now since you've decided that throwing a temper tantrum is a better use of your time.

There's no new information in the snopes article and we've covered all of that already. I think it's pretty clear which of us is more capable of coherent though and argument. If you would like to delude yourself into thinking it's you, go ahead.

I am not sure how many ways I have to say it. I am referencing those documents and the mistakes of the past to demonstrate that the same issues that seem to have been identified in the past. Specifically "normalization of deviance". That appears to be exactly what is going on in TFA with regards to the heat shield that is experience unexpected damage. Are you even thinking here?

I quite clearly did not miss that sentence.

Wow. You didn't even read that either? TL;DRPBP again? If you had, I would have thought you would have recognized the first of those hypotheticals as a modified version of the issue Boeing/spirit had with a door plug blowing off mid flight. I altered it so that a problem with missing bolts became something discovered before the plug blew off mid flight with a "what would you do?" question.

The second hypothetical was a direct analogy to the heat shield with a part that is expected to wear, but is expected to wear a certain way under known conditions, but is wearing much more than it should. Once again with a "what would you do"?.

At least, even if you didn't bother with the details of the hypotheticals, you at least came up with basically the right answer. Inspect, determine the scope, determine the cause, figure out if it can be fixed or managed in a controllable, reproducible way and, if it can't be fixed or managed in a controllable, reproducible way, ground it until it either can be, or it is replaced. NASA, with this issue, does not appear to be doing that. It's possible that they have done an analysis and determined that it will take too much time or not even be possible to fix. If they have actually found a distinct cause and solution, they certainly have not publicized it. What they have done, is make a clear determination that they will fly anyway, with an anomalous issue that may kill people, but they're just going to roll the dice. Hence why I don't think their safety culture has really changed in the way that they claim.

I know you weren't talking about Homo Erectus migrating out of Africa. You wrote:

So you were talking about migrations of Homo Sapiens out of Africa. Except that Homo Sapiens never migrated out of Africa. Our ancestors did. Specifically our ancestors Homo Erectus. Try to follow along.

OK. You're not getting this. So I will try to use an easy analogy. I said that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are descendants of Homo Erectus. Try to think of this in terms of an actual family tree. Let's we have two siblins: Homer Sapiens and Nee Anderthal. Homer and Nee have a parent. That parent's name is Homer Heidelberg. Homer, as it happens. also has a parent. That parent is Homer Erectus. Now there's this thing called the transitive property. Can you say transitive property? I knew you could! The way that the transitive property works for things like ancestry is that if your immediate ancestor also has an ancestor, that ancestor is also your ancestor. So, the immediate ancestor of Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis can be Homo Heidelbergensis and the ancestor of Homo Heidelbergensis can be Homo Erectus and not only can Homo Erectus stil be the ancestor of Homo Sapiens, but the two prior relationships actually require it! Amazing, right? It turns out that you can have more than one ancestor, from different generations, and they can still be your ancestor!

Yes. Parent was. Very good. Now, bonus points! Was I asserting that? That's right! I wasn't asserting that. I was just commenting on you saying that Homo Sapiens came out of Africa. Very good. You might get a gold star.

Now, I did do some additional musing on the actual competence of Homo Sapiens. However my view did not actually align precisely with that of the original poster. You can re-read the post if you like. I will not summarize it here.

I did comment on this. No disagreement on the tool part. However, it is worth noting that I pointed out that Neanderthals also went places that Homo Sapiens never did during the time that Neanderthals lived. They had an overlapping range, and then both lived outside that overlapping range in areas where the other didn't.

I should note as a caveat, of course, that all of this is based on what we can reconstruct, and it is also generalized. We might say that Neanderthals lived in area X and not Homo Erectus. However, all we can really tell (and even then without super high certainty) is that the numbers of Home Erectus in area X were low enough that we've found no trace. It's possible number in question is zero, but it could be higher and we just wouldn't know. But our best working hypothesis is that they didn't live there.

Actually, it's pretty obvious to anyone with basic literacy skills and reasonable intelligence. Still neither of those skills are absolutely fixed. If you really try at it, you might be able to improve.

I. Am. Not. Gaslighting!
I am also not lying, and I am not making up "falsehoods". If you can't stand that someone has a different take on a situation than you, then it's too bad for you. But I know what was said, and I know what the situation was and I have lied about nothing, and I am not distorting reality in any way. You are the one who, when I spend a great deal of effort to lay things out so that we can reach a common understanding of what the other means, simply ignores what I write and won't answer questions.

And you're claiming that _I_ am gaslighting? The actual definition of deplorable is "deserving strong condemnation". The wording varies, but that is pretty much the heart of what it means. Meanwhile, you're claiming that 50% of the country think that, for one example, racism is a good thing? That is absolute nonsense. The percentage of people who will actually explicitly say that racism is a good thing is generally down around 5%. It is virtually universally accepted (even among racists, who generally claim that they are racists, or are not "real" racists, etc.) that racism is bad and that, indeed, being racist is deserving of strong condemnation.

If you want to play some game where it's all just subjective and, as long as some percentage of the population doesn't think that X is deplorable, then it isn't, then that means that murder is not deplorable. By the same token rape is not deplorable. X can be all sorts of things: corruption, child rape, illegal immigration, torture, ripping the tags of mattresses, scraping your fingernails along a chalkboard in a crowded classroom, microwaving blue cheese and coffee together in an office kitchen. To repeat myself from earlier. This is just post-structuralist nonsense. Denying that anything even has meaning in the first place.

Of course, having written that, I realize that I have fallen into a trap, because you've fixated on the term deplorable, and I have responded. But it isn't about any specific meaning of deplorable. It is about whether the collection of human scum and the people willing to stand with them at the rally are "very fine people" or not.

OK. You are not remotely trying to be nice, or fair, or reasonable. So I will not be either. I'm getting pretty sick of your abuse. You are clearly acting like an illiterate moron on this thread. On my last post, I listed quotes with the references to all the times on this thread I have referenced those involved. Since you are acting like too much of an idiot to summarize them yourself, I will do the easy work for you, as one would for a whiny child who wants someone else to do his work: (neo-nazis), (white supremacists), (basket of deplorables), (three-percenters), (klansmen), (various other white supremacist groups), (neo nazi adjacent groups), (and their ilk), (etc.). Does that simplify things enough for you to absorb.

As for a "Clintonian definition", did you miss the "you name it" at the end? A term meant to encompass all sorts of people who fit the quite standard version of the term "deplorable". No special Clinton version required, no need for the ones from the rally that I name to be exclusively from that list, to manifest every property on that list, or for them to even have any property on that list for them to potentially be "deplorable" or, once again, not to get tangled in the weeds, to not be "very fine people". You are just trying to use obtuseness and (hopefully) feigned stupidity as a rhetorical technique.

You know perfectly well that there was no redefinition and no false assertion, you lying piece of garbage. You also know perfectly well that the term "deplorable" is irrelevant. It was just one of many descriptions I used to refer to that crowd. The only material point is whether any of them were "very fine people".

OK. So your definitive answer is that they can simultaneously be "deplorable as fuck" and also "very fine people"? That's your final answer? OK. At this point, I would say that you have reached peak stupid, but I am betting you can still surprise me. Often, I like to be surprised by people's intellectual achievements, but I think I would rather skip that one.

Oh look. It thinks it's intelligent. Also that it's non-partisan and that I am, in relation, partisan. Wow. It's almost like having a conversation with an LLM, but I think an LLM may actually be smarter.

Ah, sweet Jebus!!! The pain! It's been a while since I had my nose in an actual economics textbook. I mean, I know that math in economics tends to have no use for geometric constants like the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter so it's technically free to use, but still! Pi as a variable! It just seems so wrong!

In any case. I am not sure why you thought that reading that would bring me around to your view. That lecture is quite clear that using market power to pursue monopoly rents is rent-seeking behavior. That is exactly what we are talking about. It does also talk about the form of rent seeking where political power rather than market power is used and goes on about it extensively. Nowhere at all does it agree with your example of excise taxes, fees, etc. being rent-seeking in and of themselves unless they specifically benefit some group at the expense of everyone else. Maybe there's more useful information in the videos that won't play.

In any case, just posting a whole lecture from an economic class doesn't seem to be very productive. If you want to make an argument from that material, you need to make it and use quotes, etc. from the lecture to support it.

I am not quite sure I understand your reasoning here. My parents are my ancestors. I had plans to go to my father's house for dinner this weekend, but we have had to postpone due to other family issues. My parents did not magically vanish when I was born. Similarly, "ancestor" species of another species don't magically vanish when speciation occurs. So, even if your extended timeline of 750K years is correct (which is highly debatable, based on current theory and the supporting evidence) that doesn't alter what I said one bit. I didn't even mention the age of Homo Sapiens at all in my post, but I did mention approximately when Homo Erectus came out of Africa, and it is further back than your extended age for the evolution of Homo Sapiens anyway.

Keep reading until where? The line that I quoted and was discussing was the last line of your comment. There wasn't anywhere to keep reading to. You talked about Homo Sapiens coming out of Africa, but we didn't. Our Homo Sapiens ancestors migrated into Africa, not out of it. Our ancestors who migrated out of Africa were Homo Erectus, who then became an intermediate ancestor which then became Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens.

No I am not asserting that. You are the one promoting a falsehood with that claim. Note:

You yourself said:

So, how does any of that fit with; "You are asserting that the only people at the event were Klansmen and Neonazis (ignoring counter-protestors)"? Unless you don't know what expressions like "etc.", "and their ilk", mean, then you're either hallucinating what I actually said, or you are just lying.

Before I directly address this, you have already said:

Well, why not actually answer a question and take an honest position for once in this thread? I am going to surround this with words in all caps, not so much to yell, but for emphasis so that it is very clear that I am looking for an answer. NOTE:THE FOLLOWIING IS AN ACTUAL QUESTION THAT I EXPECT YOU TO ANSWER. IT IS NOT RHETORICAL. If they are "deplorable as fuck", can they also be "very fine people"? NOTE. THE PRECEDING WAS N ACTUAL QUESTION THAT I EXPECT YOU TO ANSWER. IT WAS NOT RHETORICAL.

Anyway. There were in the rough neighborhood of 300-500 people (excluding counterprotestors). I listed 15 different symbols used in flags and other markers there. There were multiples of each, and that was by no means an exhaustive list of the symbols. Even at just 15 total and if each one only applied to one person, that would be 5% to 3% of the attendees with a racist, white supremacist symbol. Except that, as I said, there was more than just those 15 types, there were multiple instances of each, and often each one displayed was carried by a bearer representing multiple people. Also, around a quarter to a third of those people was marching with torches the night before chanting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us" and other such slogans. There was no possible way anyone could have been part of that crowd without realizing what they were affiliating themselves with. Not with the ten scheduled speakers being white supremacist/nationalist and neo-nazi organization leaders, supporters of same, holocaust deniers, and one KKK Grand Wizard. "Very fine people" simply don't do not stand with those people, surrounded by racist flags, etc. Very fine people, even if they oppose removal of the statues, say to themselves "You know what. I'll leave this one to the those people and come back another day with my friend George Jefferson Baily-Smith to protest the removal of the statue. You know, he proposed to his wife in front of it. Back before that nasty business with the bank manager and before he went to Washington..."

On a side note, I would like to add that I tried to find some transcripts of the speeches that were actually given at the rally. Google translates this search request as a request for Trump speeches.

The 50% part was hyperbole and wishful thinking, and she apologized and walked that part back the next day. Not the part about a chunk of Trump's support coming from a basket of deplorables of course, because it was absolutely true. The organizer of the rally and the guy that ran people over both cited Trump as inspiration, as did many of the other rally-goers. So I do, in fact, mean it in the Hillary Clinton sense, but not the 50% part. The rally goers at Unite the Right were not 50% deplorables, they were all deplorables.

At least tack an etc. on the end there like I did. You're either being very imprecise, or dishonest. Everyone there was standing with that kind of person. If you sit down at a table with 9 nazis, there are 10 nazis at the table (note that this expression generalizes to more than just nazis since it seems I have to be very explicit about that sort of thing). You have the right to free association, but that doesn't protect you from then being associated with the people you associate with.

Huh. Weird. It really does seem here like you actually believe that I just mean very specifically those two groups. Wild.

Huh? That was probably Homo Erectus you're thinking of in "initial migrations" out of Africa. They appeared about 2 million years ago and neanderthals were more like 400-500 thousand years ago. Neanderthals are considered to be descendants of Homo Erectus (as are Homo Sapiens). Homo Erectus and Neanderthals each colonized places the other did not, but also had a wide overlap.

Now, yes, Homo Sapiens has colonized a much larger area than any other previous hominids, and yes we have better tools, etc. However, we weren't involved in the initial migrations out of Africa. Our branch didn't migrate back into Africa until something like 45 thousand years ago as far as we can tell.

As for our competence, that remains to be seen. We undoubtedly have an ability to alter the environment around us to a degree that at least no other animal species seems to be able to compete with (jury is out on whether we can compete with plants and microbes, though). However, there are serious questions about whether we can actually control that behavior well enough for it to be a net positive for our long term survival. Natural selection is about survival of the fittest, not survival of whoever has the flashiest features. Hence the semi-hum bit about cockroaches being the pinnacle of evolution.

I personally am pretty optimistic about the long-term future of humanity. However, take that with a grain of salt, because I am also pretty convinced that, if we survive long enough and our technology persists, we will get to the point where we redefine humanity. For example, genetic modification of humans to the point where the traditional notions of species become meaningless. That's whether you define species by the "capable of mating with each other" definition that makes animals living on different continents different species even if they could technically mate and produce viable offspring because they can't practically do it, or if you define species by more advanced genetic comparisons. Once we get to the inevitable (if the preconditions about surviving and our technology surviving and advancing) heavy modification of our own DNA, we will be able to turn ourselves into all sorts of versions plus technology will make producing offspring possible even if it would normally be genetically or physically impossible. Then of course there's the potential for creating completely artificial humans from scratch, uplifting other species through biological modification. There's also cybernetics, full on brain-computer uploads. Possibly other modifications that we can't consider. Of course there will be purists who don't take any modifications, but how many hundreds or thousands of years can that actually last. After all, even the most ultra-conservative Amish communities are using limited forms of electricity, tools made with modern methods, etc. now, and they've only been doing the technology shunning thing for what, 200 years? Those sorts of attitudes tend to die out bit by bit with each successive generation and, without modification, those generations are going to die out (not that post-humans require agelessness, but the point is that people who shun any sort of genetic modification, etc. will definitely die out over time and their attitudes will fail to carry over too many generations.

So, anyway, that means that my optimism about the future of humanity hinges on a situation where distant future humans no longer actually meet any current definition of human. That leaves the philosophical question of whether the future I am describing is one where humanity is thriving, or one where they are extinct. They're both the same future, it's just a question of subjective philosophical interpretation.

Anyway, that's far future speculation. For now, our challenge seems to be that we are smart, but possibly not smart enough.

I very specifically covered this scenario and the reason (barrier to entry for the poor) why you could maybe, just maybe consider it as a form of market distortion. Except that I also covered why it appeared that it wasn't because there is no apparent "market" that you have to have a suppressor to be part of. You certainly didn't illustrate any "market" that people without suppressors are kept out of. Why didn't you use the cosmetology example, where there at least is a market that you need the license to participate in?

OK. Whatever, agree to disagree I suppose. Although I am thinking that most economics professors would be more likely to agree with me (and basically everyone else) on this, but why listen to their take on economic concepts anyway? In any case, when the contract in question creates a situation where the value is not proportionate to the payments and the contract is in "standard terms" that are systemically forced by the landlords in the market and other mechanisms, then that is rent-seeking.