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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • I have a bunch. I think the biggest one is that some people are naturally dumber than other people and can’t be fixed by education. I don’t think this broadly applies to any specific ethnic group or anything, but I do think that there is likely a genetic component to intelligence. I also don’t think that we should prevent these people from breeding or treat them as inferior, but I also think that sending these people to college is a waste of time and expecting them to do well on college either waters down the college education experience or puts unfair expectations on them. I worry a lot about how these people will fare in an increasingly automated world and the answer is not good at all.





  • I mean he literally murdered someone in the middle of midtown Manhattan (I know Lemmy is really into the “Luigi is Innocent” conspiracy theories but I legit think he did it). Even if you think what he did was justified, that doesn’t mean it’s legal. We can’t have a functioning society where you can just extra-judiciously kill people and get away with it even if they’re doing something bad. He knew what he was getting into when he did this, and knew that he’d probably get arrested and convicted. If he gets convicted it will be justified, even though I completely understand why he did it and don’t feel bad for the victim. If he is found not guilty, then the prosecution really fucked up and that’s good for him.



  • Even within the perspective of religious philosophy, the existence of ghosts in the sense of a spirit that stays on Earth and causes noticeable effects is difficult. Mainly- ghosts would not be made of matter, but could interact with matter. Within the realm of religious philosophy there are all sorts of explanations for the “mundane” version of this question of how a spirit attaches itself to the matter of the body in the first place, but all of those explanations kind of go out the window when the spirit sticks around and starts interacting with other matter. If ghosts only appear in sensory visions and do not truly interact with matter (I believe this was the view of Aquinas), then you have a major problem in proof and then ghosts effectively do not exist for practical purposes. The Catholic Church believes that the dead can appear to the living in visions but takes no stance on physical manifestations.

    Within science, of course, there has never been a scientific observation of any supernatural being such as a ghost or effects it might have. But that doesn’t disprove the idea of purely spiritual apparitions. Then again, it also doesn’t disprove that Zorlon the Gorilla God appeared to me in a dream either. I think we can pretty conclusively say that you can live your life under the assumption that ghosts don’t exist and be completely 100% fine.


  • I am an engineer and it’s just legitimately hard to build any kind of sensor that lasts and stays accurate longer than like 10 years especially without maintenance. They do intentionally design them so that they don’t last longer, but that’s because a design that would last longer would costs like 10x as much and require a lot of maintenance and calibration that your average homeowner is simply not going to do. It’s honestly surprising you can make an accurate smoke detector that even lasts 10 years as cheap as they are.






  • The past few months have really made it clear just how much bigotry is literally the only thing that the Republican base cares about. States rights? Gun rights? Free trade? Stopping interventionism? “Protecting children?” Turns out none of that actually matters to Republican voters after all when they can beat up and murder minorities or have other people do that on their behalf. I must admit I have been shocked at just how much of what they claimed were long held beliefs they have been willing to give up to fuck over other people they see as lesser.





  • It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can’t move yourself. It’s not that you can’t be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure it out very quickly.

    These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional “unskilled labor” required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.


  • Eh. There are definitely jobs that you can grab random guys off the street for and they will be okay enough at them to get started right away or will be able to be trained to do them in an afternoon. Think of any time you’ve done a volunteering project - you don’t get any specialized training to do this type of work, but you can go ahead and get started with maybe like a short explanation of how it works. Sure you won’t be as good as a pro, but you could get up to speed quite quickly if it was all you were doing. These types of jobs are becoming less and less common as they get automated, but they do still exist. That is what is meant by “unskilled labor.” It’s not a dig at the people who do these types of jobs, but rather that you don’t need specialized training to do them.