Nah I dont see a bait and switch. I see people thinking electricity goes down wires while the underlying real world is fields propagating through space.

It really is a difference if you have the lightbulb 1 meter away or 1 light second away. We have a tendency to think abstractly of these situations, freely giving things ideal properties that they dont have and taking away the properties we dont like to use in our petty examples.

If you had enough voltage to overcome the drop in "ideal" 1 light second long cables they sure as hell would induce enough current in parallel cables 1 m away to light a bulb :-)

All that said people do under-appreciate how fast the speed of light is, just as they under appreciate how much a billion of anything, especially money, is.

The speed of light is getting to your destination instantly from your own point of view.

Bob,

"as else mentioned" Evidence wise though, it looks like self defense, after breaking many laws and putting himself in harms way, is still factually part of the night."

This is completely correct; however, it is not a viable defense. You cannot go "looking for trouble" (trust me, I know this one).

Here's a link to a counter-argument, out of fairness sake:

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/looking-trouble-framing-and-dignitary-interest-law-self-defense

This part is what will send Baby Rambo to Fed for the next billion years:

"This means that any lawful intent or behavior that may have contributed to the confrontation should not be used to undermine the claim of self-defense."

Please note the "lawful intent or behavior" part. Everything Rittenhouse did was illegal up until the point when he went postal on innocent, if rowdy, protestors. The prosecution is going to nail him to the cross and he won't be coming back in three days.

I don't often say this, but fuck this video.

If you're 25, the end of your life is an abstraction and the whole "there's time to change things!" is a nice balm. When you're 55, your death isn't an abstraction, it's a fact of life that dominates more and more of what remaining time you have left. The awareness of impending mortality is insidious once you're passed 50. It creeps into every part of your life and every decision you make.

Let me teach you one of those amazing words the Germans come up with for describing various forms of existential agony: weltschmerz. Loosely, this is a form of sadness when one realizes what is versus what could have been. This is the compound interest of regrets and choices not made, or made poorly. Not only does weltschmerz grow with each year, its very presence amplifies itself because the more you know what could have been, the more you see what the cost of that absence is. Then, if that's not evil enough, that knowledge focuses the mind on the time remaining and how little you can do to negate the harm done, which then re-amplifies the weltschmerz.

You can slap whatever Hallmark bullshit you need on this to get through the day, but weltscmerz never goes away. It's always there. It's there at 3:00am when you wake up in a silent house and look at everything around you as consolation prizes for races not won. It's there when you see your friends succeeding in a million different ways that you didn't. It's there when you look at 6 million lines of text you wrote and realize you're not going to be Hemingway after all.

So fuck this video. I don't need a cutesy animated memento mori, I've already got a wall clock in my death row cell.

Here endth the rant.

(Nick Drake nailed weltschmerz perfectly in "When The Day Is Done". Here's the video to that song:

https://youtu.be/Y2jxjv0HkwM)

Steak is definitely optional. I choose steak.

Killing only stops if there are no cows. If there are living cows they will die one day. In the wild pretty quickly if you apply your morals to wolves also.

A cow has no abstract concept of the fear of being eaten (only a general fear and instincts) so unless you purposefully go out of your way to hurt it there is nothing philosophically wrong with eating one, unless you get all emotional and make a complicated moral choice. Which is your choice to make.

Cavemen is a pretty wide term. I am probably smarter than most cavemen. But from the time they got organized and hunted large animals until now man has not really changed much - a couple of tens of thousands of years. We probably tend to remember less and be more depressed and weaker and use our senses less well. Can type faster though.

@bobknight33

Where's the wall Mexico is paying for? It's not abstract, it's not a fence, it's a big concrete wall. If you call it a fence, that's "fake news."

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4745712/fence

I'm not really worried, because ITS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. So keep living in your diluted fantasy.

There is a generally held belief that consciousness is a mystery of science or a miracle of faith; that consciousness was attained instantly (or granted by god), and that one has either attained self awareness or has not.

I don't believe any of that. I believe like all things in biology, consciousness evolved to maximise a benefit, and occurred gradually, without any magic or mystery. The closest exurb1a gets to that is when he says at 6:28:

"Maybe evolution accidentally made some higher mammals on Earth self-aware because it's better for problem solving or something"

We need to know what other people are thinking and this is the problem that consciousness solves. If a neighbouring tribe enters your territory then predicting whether they come to trade, mate, steal or attack is beneficial to survival.

Initially this may be done through simulation - imagining the future based on past experience. A flood approaching your cave is bad news. Being surrounded by lions is not good. Surrounding a lone bison is dinner. Being charged by a screaming tribe is an upcoming fight.

We could only simulate another person's actions, but we had no experience that allows us to simulate another person's thoughts. You may predict that giving your hungry neighbour a meal may suppress their urge to raid your supplies but you still can't simply open their head and see what they are thinking.

Then for the benefit of cooperation and coordination, we started to talk, and everything changed.

Communication not only allows us to speak our mind, but allows us to model the minds of others. We can gain an understanding of another person's motivations long before they act upon them. The need to simulate another person's thoughts becomes more nuanced and complex. Do they want to trade, or do they want to cheat?

Yet still we cannot look into the minds of others and verify our models of them. If we had access to an actual working brain we could gradually strengthen that model with reference to how an actual brain works, and we happen to have access to such a brain, our own!

If we monitored ourselves then we could validate a general model of thought against real urges, real experiences, real problem solving and real motivations. Once we apply our own selves to a model of thought we become much better at modelling the thoughts of others.

And what better way to render that model than with speech itself? To use all of our existing cognitive skills and simply simulate others sharing their thoughts with us.

At 3:15 exurb1a referenced a famous experiment that showed that we make decisions before we become aware of them. This lends evidence to suppose that our consciousness is not the driver of our thoughts, but a monitor - an interpretation of our subconscious that feeds our model of how people think.

Not everybody is the same. We all have different temperaments. Some of us are less predictable than others, and we tend to avoid such people. Some are more amenable to co-operation, others are stubborn. To understand the temperament of one we must compare them to another. If we are to compare the model of another's mind to our own, and we simulate their mind as speech, then we must also simulate our own mind as speech. Then not only are we conscious, we are self-aware.

Add in a feedback loop of social norms, etiquette, acceptable behaviour, expected behaviour, cooperation and co-dependence, game theory and sustainable societies and this conscious model eventually becomes a lot more nuanced than it first started - allowing for abstract concepts such as empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, contempt, kinship, friendship, nurture, pride, and love.

Consciousness is magical, but not magic.

Your talking about it historically though. Historical abuse and mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Canada has been acceptable to discuss for at least a generation or two now, up to formal apologies and enormous numbers of court cases and cash settlements around the myriad past injustices.

The trouble is, even while addressing all the historical problems, there still exist new ones right now.

Typical conditions on Aboriginal reserves in Canada are unacceptably awful. You can have a thriving municipality right neighbouring an aboriginal reserve that is a mess of dilapidated homes, boiled water and grossly increased rates of unemployment, substance abuse and suicide. Small wonder then that increased crime rates also come along with all that.

Even that you can talk about, though the increased crime rate will get you in trouble for flirting with being racist against aboriginals.

What you can't talk about is many of the causes of the disparity.

Aboriginal reserves operate under a different legal framework than the neighbouring municipality. They operate under a different framework of governance. They operate under a different system of taxation. Organisation of all related government services like education, healthcare, policing and civil works like roads, water and sanitation are ALL different if you're on a reserve.

Talking about all that you need to be very careful how you say it, because if your not careful my above observations are a statement that coloniser systems are superior to aboriginal ones.

Private property rights are IMO an even hotter topic. The dilapidated housing on a reserve 10 minutes away from the municipality with everything in order is a direct result of who is responsible for maintaining them. In the municipality if a roof is missing shingles, the owner replaces them. If a window is broken, the owner replaces it. On the reserve though, the community is the owner. Unsurprisingly, that abstraction means maintenance on the homes is worse. If the mayor was responsible for using tax dollars to maintain all the homes in the neighbouring municipality it'd be a mess too. This leads to the poor aboriginal family stuck in a destroyed and overcrowded home and a chief saying sorry, the Canadian colonisers didn't give us enough money to fix your place, go yell at them. This just stirs up the Winnipeg citizens I mentioned earlier to respond with wonderment at why you don't fix your own home up yourself instead of protesting hopelessly for the government to hand out the money to do it for you.

The differential treatment still in place now, today is a cancer and needs to be fixed but calling it out like that would get me in trouble.

*ban self link. In description... Digital Promotions: Abstract Synergies Entertainment

1) The resurrection is absolutely not historical. Jesus the man MIGHT be.

There is a lot of scholarly research that says it is historical, especially in the last 80 years or so. There are volumes upon volumes of work, and there are a lot of things that deserve an honest and indepth discussion.

Almost all skeptical scholars affirm that Jesus was a historical person and that His disciples had an experience which convinced them that He was raised from the dead. Many agree that a group of women discovered the empty tomb. The origin of Christianity is something which must be accounted for, historically. You can't just wave your hand over it and say its all nonsense.

2) I know Christianity is a joke religion invented for political control by Constantine. That is a verifiable, historical fact.

On what do you base that conclusion?

3) mythos cannot verify mythos. You say Satan created other religions (many before Chritianity existed) to trick them out of worshiping Yahweh....why isn't that likely true of Christianity?

Because of the person of Jesus Christ, who is verified to be the Messiah from many lines of evidence. Some of these would include the fulfillment of dozens of prophecies, His life and ministry, and His resurrection from the dead.

4) not true. Verified truth can be proven and defended against being twisted with fact and evidence, at least to those willing to examine actual evidence and not rely on only propaganda and myth. God (if he existed) should have more backbone, and a clear, unambiguous word/voice. ( Your position seems to be he's not willing to stand behind his word and prefers most people burn in hell for their God given inability to distinguish which is which.)
How is it different from politicians? They aren't empowered by all powerful, vengeful gods....clearly neither are clergy.

I'm not sure why you think you are holding the keys of facts and evidence in your hand, first of all. Can your worldview account for these things? You would need to establish that before we can talk about what "verified truth" is. What is your worldview, by the way? I am assuming it is scientific materialism. Have you ever looked into whether it is correct or not?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-scientific-materialism-almost-certainly-false/

5) ...you shall stone them to death.....thou shalt not kill. Not so clear.

I think that is easily explained. The laws you are looking at were civil laws which governed the nation of Israel. Consider that our society has a law against murder, yet we execute criminals. Same concept.

6) only those who believe are saved...so clearly the sin of disbelief is not erased and is worse than all others. If it's not automatic, he didn't die for MY sins or yours, he's trading being saved (from something he told you exists with zero evidence) for belief and obedience.

None of your sins would be erased if you reject Christ. You would be paying not only for unbelief, but for all of the other ones too. Unbelief is like any other sin execept that the consequence of the sin prevents you from receiving forgiveness. It is exactly like expecting your cancer to be cured without taking the cure.

Jesus died for the sins of the world, including mine and yours, but you cannot partake of the atonement unless you receive Him as Lord and Savior.

My evidence is not just what we are discussing. Jesus Christ is alive and He is with me every single day of my life. He comforts me in my distress. He encourages me when I feel stuck. He gives me strength to overcome things I otherwise couldn't. He gives me wisdom for every problem and situation. He gives me love for those I find difficult to love. He fills my heart with generosity when I want to be stringy. He helps me do the right thing when I am going to fall short. This is not abstract, but a living reality in my life that grows more and more. He has utterly changed me and made me into a completely different person just like He said He would.

7) things that only work if you believe are hokum or placebo, things that only exist if you believe enough are pure fantasy.

Without buying your system, I have no sin to repent so I should go straight to heaven and collect my $200.

That's kind of like saying you don't believe in the law so you think you won't be punished when you break it. You have to account for your sin whatever you believe you have any or not. Your conscience, however, tells you that you have done wrong things.

9) You have cancer and some guy tells you God sent a car (he just needs $50 for telling you about it), it's invisible, and will take you to the cure, but you must believe the car exists, and when you die sitting in the freezing street he says it's your fault for not believing enough in God's magic cars. Duh. I'll buy my own plane ticket and get myself there, not wait for ethereal magic cars.

Let's say that you got a sign that the car was legitimate, but you still stubbornly chose not to go. For instance, you had a dream that a green car with a florida license plate drove up to your house, and a middle age woman got out and came up to your door and told you she was sent by God to take you to the cancer cure, and then it really happened. Does that change anything for you?

Mostly the questions are for you, in hope you might see the contradiction and self reinforcing mythos, but your answers do offer insight to your (and other people's) intractable mindsets. Thanks

God had revealed Himself to me, personally, and verified the scripture in my as true. I know that He loves me, personally, and I know that He loves you too. My hearts desire is that you would know that love. That is my mindset, primarily.

That is a legit question. Ignoring that they used a segment of another video, the question is how quickly it used that video segment to render this. The keyword in the paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01497) is "Towards Real Time", which I guess means it may have been delayed a bit from the original video, but I didn't read past the abstract, and that paper is just the bases for the video.

To be of any real value, say in a car to help it self-drive, is how fast it can do it, and read street signs.

I'm going to guess the reason it doesn't do billboards is it is trained, for whatever reasons to only look so high. Then again, they took another video, then sent that video through the processor, so why ignore them? Also, can it recognize "storefront" "billboard" etc... reading those and translating in real time probably would be a bit advanced for now, but still...

Earlier today, I was sent a link to an article in Bloomberg titled Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists. Marx in Bloomberg? Impossibru!

But nevermind Marx. That opinion piece is 800 words, give or take, on labour's share of income. Yet it doesn't mention policy once. Not a single time. It's automation, it's globalisation, it's Gremlins. But not a single peep on policy.

Nothing on union busting. Nothing on taxes on capital vs taxes on labour. Nothing on minimum wages. Nothing on welfare. Nothing on the public sector.

If you read about inequality and related issues in these papers, there's rarely any agency. It's always something abstract like market forces, globalisation, innovation, etc. Nothing on decisions made by people in power, parliament first and foremost, that often had the explicit aim of reducing wages to "increase competitiveness".

Your missing the point though.

They start in grade 1/2 teaching you that 2+2=4 is incorrect. Instead you were supposed to write down:
2 is 1+1 and 1+1+1+1=4.

Then by grade 3/4 they are asked to solve 2+2. They now answer:
2 is 1+1 and 1+1+1+1=4

and are told incorrect. They are now supposed to use two different methods to solve the same problem and the correct answer is:
2 is the same as 1+1 so 1+1+1+1=4.
Alternately, 2 is 1 more than 1. I know 1+2 is 3, so If I add 1 that's 4.

Those aren't proofs. The addition operator isn't even a theorem to be proven, it's a definition.

I'm on board with teaching more advanced and abstract concepts in grade school. However, actually DO THAT. The stupidity of our provincial system is that they aren't doing that at all. They are performing all this mental masturbation to make basic arithmetic into some bastardised thing that kinda resembles proofs. You know, except the part where your 'proof' is worthless because solving 2+2 by replacing 2 with 1+1 is just substituting one axiom for another.

Teach kids the arithmetic and then teach them actual MATH proper, ideally easing them into the abstract aspect through algebra and not stupid tricks that fail to give them a good understanding of the actual concepts.

The point I underlined about Grade 11 still covering it is important. The students are being left so confused about what they are expected to give as an answer that so many still don't know basic arithmetic by Grade 11 that they still include it as part of the basic curriculum.

The human species measures elevation relative to sea level, as they are both a terrestrial and a single-planet species. So to adopt the common parlance of this species one must accept that Mount Everest is indeed the tallest mountain on Earth. To vocally argue against this point amongst the humans would either clue these clothed-primates to your extraterrestrial origins, or may otherwise cause them to view you as the most haughty of pedants, and cast aspersions on you who revels in the intentional abstrusity of abstract technicality.