And yet some moderators said it was "Insightful"? Slashdot has become part of the precipitate. Definitely not part of the solution.

Mod parent Funny rather than Insightful.

You were going for Funny, right? If you have a working crystal ball then the future is even bleaker than I think, and I think it looks quite bleak.

Let me check with my latest AI-generated noddie:

FTFY

But I didn't get the Funny I was going for...

Anyway, I'm really enjoying Nexus and his extended epistemology says a lot about how the YOB functions.

Well, gee, thanks for defining the facts so now it's clear that everyone who disagrees with you can be nothing but wrong.

Facts have a way of existing and being right whether you like it or not. Trans people literally exist. This is a demonstrable fact. It's not a matter of opinion. You can think it's stupid, which is a matter of opinion, you can wish they didn't exist (also a matter of opinion), and you can wish harm on them (again a matter of opinion), you can wish they were excluded from society and denied rights (also an opinion), but none of those change the fact that such people exist.

Likewise being gay is not a choice. Conversion therapy has been proven to be ineffective. You can choose to hate gay people, wish they didn't exist, want to force them into hiding, advocate to ban relationships etc etc, those are all opinions. But the fact, one for which there is no counter evidence, is that it is not a choice.

And so on.

It is opinion culture like yours that makes the world dislike lefties

Reality has a well know liberal bias. Disliking reality will naturally make you right wing.

about how epically f*cked the UK is.

Trust me, as a Brit, I'm surprised about quite hoe fucked we are. I mean Brexit was obviously going to be a disaster. But somehow given the choice at every point we have ended up with the worst decisions. And we have a PM with zero moral compass who's completely shit scared of even mentioning the elephant in the room. Instead he thinks pandering to the obvious racists will somehow help.

It's not that the they had nothing, there's plenty of evidence. It's just it turns out voter suppression isn't illegal.

Gerrymandering? Legal. Closing polling booths in predominantly-other-party areas, causing immense lines? Also perfectly legal. And so on and so forth. If you are for democracy, you ought to be against anything that biases the vote.

I'm just pondering what kind of university would not teach physics.

Not in in good shape that's for sure.

If there is any kind of medical instruction, like nurses and dentists, then they'd need some kind of physics education. Right?

That's not how it works in the uk system: here departments are responsible for their own teaching. For example, I did engineering and all courses were taught by the department.

We didn't go to math(s) to get math(s) classes, we were taught engineering maths by professors from the engineering department. Mathmos got their groups and semi rings and whatnot, we got a lot on second order systems, and spectral techniques, etc. We learned programming in C, MATLAB, and some FPGA one I can't recall, computer scientists learned Haskell and how to prove properties of binary heap trees on paper.

Would not even a law school, business school, teaching school, seminary, or whatever need to have physics classes for things like meeting degree requirements for accreditation?

We don't have minor options. You go to uni to do the subject you signed up for, and do that, and the department is basically responsible for it.

Because Amazon has some excellent applied psychologists with mountains of your juiciest personal data, and they are working hard and even diabolically to make sure you shop at Amazon.

My second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. I saw what they were doing with my personal data and knew I didn't want any part of that. Nothing I've seen in the decades since then has improved my opinion of the company.

While I agree with Doctorow that Amazon is abusing its leverage over suppliers, from the sales side I suspect the primary abuse involves manipulating the search results in favor of products with the highest profit margins for Amazon. But of course that can't be proven without access to the algorithms.

Equilibrium status for each couple is actually more than four children but only the luckiest two (on average) survive to reproduce into the next generation. Ma Nature is big on equilibrium and small on exponential growth.

I think Musk deserves the top prize for destroying the lives of children. Literally starving them to death.

However on your main theme, you didn't mention bribery of politicians to rig the rules in their favor and to legalize their earlier crimes. Bribery has been the top investment for some years based on RoI analyses.

There are a lot of social truths that are subject to manipulation, and I think the "reality distortion field" goes beyond dismissing Jobs as "just a salesman". Mostly I think you should sell what the customer needs, but there are times when the customers don't yet know what they need.

I think the jury is still out on whether we need smartphones as much as we think we do. But funny anecdote from my ongoing battle with Rakuten Mobile. I used to hope for RM's success, but now I'm reduced to hoping that "There's no such thing as bad publicity"? I think I'm on my fifth RM device. Wanted to replace this lemon a year ago, but wound up spending a year trying to scrape the facts out of RM. So a few weeks ago I finally got enough "reality" data to decide on a new phone. Several shops were sold out, but the latest shop just couldn't help me without an appointment. Seems like a rather amazing way to run a business. Into the ground?

Returning to reality distortion, interesting relevant material in Nexus where Harari is talking about most communication as not related to reality. Also "levels of abstraction" that I need to remap to "reference frames" in the modern lingo of A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins...

"This is the joke you were looking for."

In Japan the announcement of the prize triggered interruptions in the regular program as the headline was shown at the top of the screen, and on the evening news it was the top story. The Japanese are real big on these things, though I can't say why.

And the FP was for what? Well, I guess there is a YOB angle, but that will be way down the pipeline and still speculative. Something like "And this Nobel-winning researcher left America when this research was defunded and cancelled back in 2025..." Correlation is not causation. Perhaps part of the cause of winning that hypothetical Nobel prize will be the mental stimulation of leaving?

Good one, though the moderators didn't agree. And I already confessed I can't write funny much.

On the other hand, Boo-Boo had principles and should be embarrassed or even angered by the comparison to VP Beardo.