Viewing profile — ciphol

The areas where the counter-reformation (i.e. theocracy) was strongest had the most secular populations. Do you call that religion or not-religion?

Why would the climate/weather changes stop right at the French border?

Modernization drew a lot of people away from traditional religion. But Hasidim and the Amish etc are "post modern". They have developed various cultural features to "immunize" them…

> how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use…

Presumably a pharaoh who ruled for decades would indeed have lots of kids, if he wanted to and (as most are) was physically able.

The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container…

There aren't many such children, and it's complicated to get them in an ethical way.

USSR was poor, we're talking about rich countries.

That's exactly what I said - "if something other than money is contributed". But not every man (or woman) does these things, and likely their spouse will be doing them as well. If …

Imagine you get home, plug your car in, the car runs your home heating for the remainder of the evening for free, then you go to sleep and the car recharges for cheap. Sounds like …

Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for charg…

If you're no longer going to be contributing income, what will you contribute instead to the family? Nobody respects or appreciates a freeloader as a partner. But if something othe…

You can't become a sovereign entity without territory on which you can enforce your norms. Amazon doesn't and (for the foreseeable future) won't have sovereign territory.

Actually, the biggest roadblock is ChatGPT's hallucinations which mean that any answer it gives to a complex question is highly likely to be completely wrong.

> Haha... Seriously? This is the narrative that was pushed indeed. Now it turns out that many people ravaged their health with these untested mRNA treatments. Search for myocarditi…

> ChatGPT isn't even close to being able to consistently act like a single human being with interests, plenty of long term memory, and a life outside a chat room. Wait until GPT4 c…

Trains have major weather issues much less frequently than planes.

NYT is not the government. It's a private business that looks at profit first, politics second, and impartial justice last if at all. The financial lure of a panel with SBF post-sc…

> We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years Who's "we"? The world as a whole has experienced rapidly growing real earnings throughout the last 5…

That's true in mathematics, but I find for any other subject it's a great reference for anyone intelligent enough to understand the subject. (One might remark that I'm just not int…

Where are people going to keep that second device? In their wallet? The wallet is just as likely to be stolen as the phone.

I've been using a shiny metal dongle to lock my door for my whole life. Why would carrying a different shaped dongle be a problem?

I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy ever…

Colloquially, "dark age" means an age when the people are unenlightened, backwards, etc

None of that is unreadable. You can always download a browser from a few years back and open the page with that. So while there may be some inconvenience with old information, ther…