Viewing profile — wat10000

The problem with the US is not the regime, it's the people. We elected Trump a second time with ~50% of the vote after seeing four years of his complete buffoonery. His approval ra…

Plenty of us in the second group don't think the world will go back to business as usual.

Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or…

A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.…

Most of the responses here are negative. Seems consistent.

It's more subtle than that, to the point that I have some trouble putting it into words. It's a real belief, but it's a different kind of belief. A rationalist belief has structure…

Which is it, is it unknowable, or is it certain that it can't be?

Just look at a graph from the last few years. It bounces up and down a lot, but there's a pretty clear downward trend line, and it's been around zero for over a year, with many ind…

I think a large number of people don't "believe" things in the same way that the typical commenter here would understand it. Your average rationalist techie would consider a "belie…

Gotta love the complaining about cookie banners while also showing a cookie banner.

Nuance is another way of saying complex. All you’re really saying here is that our big brains are sufficiently capable to make sense of the complexity, which I mostly won’t argue w…

I'm not paying more money plus an extra monthly subscription for a cellular smart watch when my phone does the job perfectly well.

And some of the roads have a toll only at certain times of day, but they're treated as tolled 24/7. Some are free if you have 3+ people in the car, but there's no way to say "I hav…

That's my point. It's a lot more complicated than "stand to the right on an escalator." You have to learn through observation, read the atmosphere, and engage with context. There a…

Is this some confusion over the meaning of “pointless”? It’s all well and good that you and various other people see these reasons for the war. But “pointless” doesn’t mean there’s…

That’s not it. There are plenty of industrialists who have killed far more than any serial killer just for profit and they don’t get anything like the opprobrium given to serial ki…

I was talking about the war with Iran. Is that what you're referring to here? Just making sure, because this is a pretty wild thing to say about that particular war. Sure, I can do…

It's funny how retail versus wholesale death is seen so differently. Kill a few dozen people with your own hands and people are (rightfully) horrified. Run a business that enables …

Come out and say what you want to say. Don't give me this nonsense about how I have no idea what's going on and you won't even deign to explain where you disagree.

We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks…

Do I really have to stand to the right on an escalator? I think the nearest one is a mile away, that seems really inconvenient and unnecessary, and it's going to be hard to get my …

"Conform to the expected behavior of the situation" is incredibly complicated. What is the situation? How do you determine what the expected behavior is? What exactly does conformi…

No it isn't. The median household income in California is over $100,000/year. The 20th percentile household income in California is still over $16,000/year, higher than the per-cap…

It's brief but it's not simple. "Manners" is an extremely complicated concept.

Many US states don’t allow gift cards to expire. Companies still sell gift cards there. It may be an accounting problem but clearly it can be dealt with. Of course they’d rather st…