Viewing profile — flomble

This is the crux: does it count as stealing to accept the offer of a contract which causes the offering party to lose money? My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain …

"Slander" entails making false statements, whereas this was just a statement of fact, free even of condemnation. People who read it make their own value judgments.

> Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensi…

It's strangely refreshing to see this particular criticism of the Enlightenment; I'm much more accustomed to hearing criticisms from the postmodernist direction. I disagree with yo…

> freedom of press and similar rights are a uniquely western phenomenon that are ... derived from christian values This is incorrect. Europe is quite unique in that since the adven…

I think the problem here is that you're not seeing that 'politics' encompasses an incredibly broad spectrum of things, and the only time that something is labeled 'political' is wh…

I find the point about "ugly" syntax interesting, because I'm generally quite indifferent to that sort of thing, but my experience tends to indicate that it's very important to peo…

Yes, absolutely! In particular there's evidence for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...

The idea is that if your sexuality is not innate, then it can be changed. There's long been a desire to prove that homosexuality is genetic in order to counter the claim of bigots …

I read the statement and to me, the future progressive seemed to be the most apt way to phrase it. When I tried to find examples to illustrate why, it occurred to me that the futur…

This sort of construction is reminiscent of topic-prominent languages, e.g. Japanese, but English is a subject-prominent language and phrasing it that way would sound awkward to a …

This and the comments below are missing the source of this disagreement. The way that conditionals are most commonly structured in English has rapidly shifted over the last 10 year…

Sounds like Yes-And ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and... ), accepting the premise and expanding on the joke. Tell your wife you're using a proven comedic technique.

The idea of a system to which causality doesn't apply is interesting. My intuition is that that doesn't make sense, and my secondary intuition is that the first intuition is unjust…

"Empathetic understanding of others." Empathetic understanding of others should make one hesitate to tell them that being primarily focused on doing what they're passionate about i…

OK, so my initial response to the title was anger; the video which is the substance of this post, however, has a much less contentious message. Your "passion" is the intersection o…

I want to jump in because while I agree with the separateness of the ontological from the phenomenological problem of free will, I also want to point out it's not necessary to have…

Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person". You could view C…

> You either like strongly typed object oriented langs or you don't. Sorry, but this argument doesn't pass muster anymore, when there are abundant examples of strongly typed object…

It's confusing to use the hypothetical of 100% in one sentence and in the next acknowledge that the optimal rate of taxation for maximising revenues is not at 100%. The question is…

It's not circular because "freedom" can't really be used to refer to price (e.g. "freedom of beer"), so it actually disambiguates. I wouldn't personally default to assuming a polit…

Good question. If the recognition of others is a deciding factor, then Taiwan was previously a nation (when its government was internationally recognised) but no longer is, which i…

With respect to Taiwan: what is it that constitutes a nation, if not the common belief of its people that they are a nation, combined with the reality that they are under the contr…

I apologise for the generalisation. That was too broadly and absolutely worded. But I would stand by the idea that "people on the spectrum are more likely to have difficulty intuit…

> No wonder people leaning towards the Asperger/autistic spectrum of brutal honesty would state that; such is their nature. Actually, it is not "their nature". The nature of people…