These days I increasingly feel like it's not so much that people aren't taught those skills but they actively don't want to learn them.

This is gross generalisation, but back in the Middle Ages the prevailing paradigm (at least in Europe, Middle East and a few other places) was that the holy book of your religion held the answers to all the life's questions. I'm not preaching atheism here, but whatever religious beliefs you may hold, should not stop you from figuring things out for yourself. Starting with Renaissance, this was replaced by the paradigm that there is objective truth out there, and if you use reason and honesty in discovering that objective truth, you can use that to your advantage. This way of thinking eventually gave us the modern world, with the Internet, cars, airplanes, skyscrapers and stuff.

Now I feel that for reasons I don't understand very well it seems like that belief is being increasingly undermined. People treat reality as annoying and inconvenient, and instead choose to believe things they feel like believing, and just discard any evidence to the contrary. It feels like there is no longer any belief in there being one objective truth, just your truth and other people's truth. The Internet and especially social media are partly to blame of course, you can always find enough material out there to support whatever you want to believe, however insane that belief may be.

And no, this is not tied to the Republican-Democrat dichotomy. Not everything revolves around that. This sickness is much more widespread, though I'd say it's definitely worse in the West. But it's incredibly dangerous. Like I said, the modern world was built on the commitment to finding out the objective truth. If that commitment goes, the modern world may just go along with it.

And to keep this somewhat on topic, free access to and exchange of information is very important to the paradigm of discovering the truth about the world, so CCP with its obsessive censorship definitely isn't helping.

That's just a PR stunt clearly. As tempting as it would be to imagine these men being made to clean latrines with toothbrushes or moving their middle aged overweight posteriors through a military obstacle course, the ranks are obviously purely symbolic. They're not going to give up any of their work or golf time to this supposed military role.

As to what the purpose of this PR stunt is, I'm not completely sure. The stated goal is

If the Army is hoping this will inspire tech graduates to enlist, they may misunderstand the reputation these execs have. The effect of this may be very different from what they were hoping for. But pehaps the real goal is to build more of a relationship with the Silicon Valley, with a view of giving them more military contracts, something I'm sure the firms in question would be very happy with.

If this program was intended to recruit breeders they wouldn't be trying to recruit academics - those are not exactly known for being prolific breeders. If Japan wanted to solve their demographic problems through immigration they could very easily do so. They are very geographically close to a number of South-East Asian nations which have very high populations, a far lower standard of living (there is an actual war going on in Myanmar), a cultural predisposition to having large families and a lot of people who would be extremely happy to move to Japan. They could allow entire families with a number of young children to move there.

Part of the problem would be accomodating this number of migrants. Japan is already a very overcrowded country, as you can see here. Japan is number 39 in the list, but most places at the top of the list are small city state and island nations, and a lot of Japan's territory is mountains. Japan's problem is not so much that the population is falling, but that it is getting older. Still, I believe if they really wanted to increase birthrate through migrants they could overcome these logistical issues. I'm guessing most of the resistance to doing that is for cultural reasons.

One thing is clear at least, if Japanese government wants to increase birthrates of the local population they'll need to do a hell of a lot more than they are doing now. Pretty much all of the western countries are barely above replacement, and they all have high immigration and no Japan-specific cultural issues like people working ridiculously long hours. To compare moden industrialised countries without high immigration you could look at Eastern Europe and a lot of places there are having major demographic problems themselves. And that's even considering the fact that many of those countries are not as urbanised as Japan, and Poland even outlaws abortions. In modern first world countries it is very difficult to have high birthrates.

I keep hearing this "X has always been woke" and I wonder if this is gaslighting or if people saying this geniunely have this totally black and white view of the world. For, I'd say, most people out there, there are shades of grey with respect to the amount of "messaging" in a given work of entertainment, and those make a lot of difference.

The best entertainment has no deliberate metaphors outside of the setting. Like Tolkien said back in the day, I don't remember the quote, but, applicability over metaphors. If the setting is deep and complex and realistic enough and the characters are real enough, then any plot you write will resemble real historical situations because at the end of the day, people are people (or fantasy races that in their psychology somewhat resemble people). But that way you don't have to compromise the quality of your plot and your characters in order to awkwardly force them into your metaphor, it'll happen naturally.

For me, if there is a bit of a metaphor going on, I go "ok, I see what they're doing, but whatever". If the messaging starts getting really obvious, "yeah, that's really on the nose but there's still some value in this". I appreciate that some people will have a much lower tolerance than me here. However if the actual plot and characterisation is given about as much thought as a plot in a porn movie, and the main goal is clearly to get to political preaching, I just nope out and do something more worthwhile or at least more fun with my time.

TLDR, people don't watch movies to watch someone

That shit is like ads, it may be tolerated by some if there is very little of it, but nobody actually enjoys it in their entertainment. If people want to read or watch propaganda, they'll go and read Karl Marx or maybe Mein Kampf if that's what they're into. People watch entertainment in order to be entertained.

Back before a few recent years, entertainment industry may have shown some political bias one way or another but they were still producing entertainment. Recently, it's been producing propaganda (although that may be changing now). That's what defines 'woke' to me.

To me, the difference is very obvious. So that makes me curious, have the minds of those people saying "X has always been woke" really become so warped that they see anything that looks like an endorsement of their values as the same kind of propaganda they're determined to push on everyone else?

This would be a valid point if there was such a thing as "the modern audience". It doesn't exist though and never has. What you have instead are various demographics, such as "young children", "40-60 year old males", "15-25 year old females" etc etc, however you decide to measure them, which tend to prefer different things. Amongst these demographics is "old farts who have seen the original and liked it, and/or are somewhat nostalgic for that time", which may or may not be large enough to make this movie profitable.

Now this is clearly a part of the recent trend where entertainment industry execs desperately search for ips that were somewhat popular in resonably recent past and then do sequels, prequels, sidequels, remakes, reimaginings, etc etc. As such it probably won't be great, but it may at least be better than other sequels and remakes that are being made. At least they aren't genderswapping the main characters, which is a little encouraging.

... In the end it probably still ends up being just a pointless gimmick. The idea is probably to match people based on their shared interests, and possibly sexual kinks, which will be revealed through browsing histories. But without any context and with probably very dumb algorithms it'll likely not work well. Like, one evening going down a rabbithole of looking at cat pictures after being sent a link by someone, and then getting matched with a cat lady who has 12 cats living in her house. Or researching home repairs because you can't afford a plumber and then being matched with a massive diy enthusiast.

With sexual kinks, this also may not work well. To begin with, people may feel more self-conscious and self-censor their browsing knowing it's all getting recorded. Also, similar interests don't always match well - e.g. it can match two people who are both into bdsm, but both want to be, not sure what it's called, the dominant partner. In that respect, your browing history can show what you want, but not what you have. He may be looking for huge knockers, while she is flat as a pancake, whereas she is looking for muscles and he is a noodly couch potato.

There's also the whole 'opposites attract' thing which this idea totally disregards.

In the end though, joining this site may or may not get a person matched with someone, but it will definitely give the site access to a substantial amount of their browing history, probably with all kinds of personal data, either way definitely something the advertisers will be very interested in. I suspect that it may even be the whole point of the excercise.

That all seems a bit questionable. I remember some years ago US military budget was higher than the military budget of the rest of the world combined. That's no longer true, probably due to increase in Russian and especially Chinese military spending, but US still spends more on its military than the next IIRC eight nations in the list combined. And you're telling us the US army can't afford to set up recruiting offices in more rural areas of the country? How much does it cost to staff and maintain a simple recruitment office compared to paying through the nose to some military contractor for some high-tech doohickey to put on the next model of fighter jet (or tank, whatever)? I suspect a lot less. Could it instead be that US army actually has all the recruitment offices it needs and it isn't meeting its recruitment goals because people don't want to join the army, for a number of very obvious reasons?

Even if that were true, this would be a classic example of equality of opportunity. By maintaining recruiting offices in Nebraska, US army offers Nebraskans an opportunity to enlist. If it turns out that Nebraskans aren't interested in serving in the military, no one will come to the recruitment offices there and US army won't have any Nebraskans in it. But Nebraskans still have an equal opportunity to serve. This would be like providing facilities for wheelchair users in company offices. You're now offering any suitably-qualified wheelchair users an opportunity to work for your company. If it turns out there are no wheelchair users who have the necessary qualifications, or none of them are interested in joining your company, you won't have any on your staff, but the opportunity is there.

Unless you're saying, the army sets up a recruitment office in rural Montana instead of an extra office in Texas where they would recruit more people. In which case, I'm not buying it. That makes no sense, they can surely afford both. And if they were doing it, it would be very dumb.

Quotas are different. This would be like, some general sends instructions to the Montana recruitment office that it must have at least 10% of recruits from Montana. Get disabled people, amputees, mentally ill, morbidly obese, 15 year olds and any other otherwise unsuitable people recruited, or just get some people drunk and press gang them into the army, we must get that 10%.

So, sometimes you may need to expend some effort to provide equality of opportunity, but the difference between providing equal opportunity and forcing equal adoption should be obvious. A university offering assistance with travelling expenses, or offering a scolarship to a student who is academically up to standard but can't afford the tuition fees - that is good. Accepting a black student ahead of a better qualified asian student or a woman ahead of a better qualified man - that is forcing equality, and that is not good.

Um, while it's true that all the Republican presidents since the 1970s have failed to update the system, there have also been a number of Democrat presidents in that time period, and they've done just as little as the republicans about it.

There's quite a few things like this. You have a system in place, which is of critical importance and while generally everyone takes for granted that it always works there would be severe problems if it stopped working. So updating it is potentially expensive and difficult, and there's a risk something will fail during the update with catastrophic consequences, while just leaving it alone costs nothing, and everything still works as expected. So the politicians just take the easy option.

Where I live there are many things like this, public infrastructure including railways, public utilities, industrial software, banking systems, software that runs hospital equipment etc etc. From what I've heard it's very similar in most other places in Europe and probably in the world. While things are working they're just left alone, up until they stop working or are about to, at which point everyone starts running around in panic. See Y2K for example. So it's a good thing they're at least updating this system now.

To begin with, what does "the human brain" mean exactly? A brain of a person with average IQ? A genius? A moron? A brain of someone who's a vegetable on life support?

And what does 'exceed the power' mean exactly? Computers already do some things better than humans, like arithmetic calculations or chess. That's why computers exist. Does it mean it would do every single thing a human brain can do better? In which case, exactly how do you get an exhaustive list of all things a human brain can do? Our understanding of our own intelligence is so poor that we don't have any means to measure it effectively, except very crude tools like IQ.

So it's typical marketing BS, declaring something that sounds impressive but doesn't mean anything. In the end they'll probably rig up some test, making sure all the right answers are in the training data, get their 'AI' to 100% it (or at least get a very high score), declare 'superintelligence' achieved and then start plugging their AI as the most intelligent.

Even more likely, some bright corporate spark decided that Cobol programmers that can maintain the old code are too rare and too expensive. So instead they can use the magic of AI to give them a complete translation of what the old code does, then hire a bunch of much cheaper Javascript programmers, give them the AI-generated specs and boom, everything works just like before, but is now much cheaper to maintain. Profit! Some way down the line they'll realise that nothing actually works, but they probably won't publicise that bit.

I'm guessing that what they claim they're doing is vastly exaggerated. AI can't possibly magically provide an accurate 'decompile' of code back into specs of what this code is supposed to do. If nothing else, the code may have bugs and oversights that mean that original specs weren't correctly implemented in the code - in which case there may be absolutely no way to figure out what the code was supposed to do as opposed to what it actually does. More likely, the spec is 'make X do Y', and the programmer went 'OK, I'll add block A to function B and as a side effect it will make X do Y'. Making this kind of link can be very nontrivial, at best the AI can tell you that what the code does is it adds block A to function B. It's quite possible that this simply doesn't translate to a different programming language, in order to make X do Y in C++ as opposed to Cobol you need to do something completely different.

More likely, they have a bunch of old code that no one has any clue what it does, it may as well be written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, but if anyone tries to mess with it even a little bit everything breaks. So they're hoping that AI can at least give them a rough idea of what this code does.

Dementia isn't caused by cancer though, so why would this have any impact? Reduction in people smoking seems to be a more likely cause but given how limited our understanding of dementia seems to be at this point, it's all just wild guessing anyhow.

Being pedantic, yes. Although it's obviously very much an exception.

One of many problems of communism is "governed by society as a whole" or "governed by proletariat" or "governed by the people" sounds great but is meaningless. There's no such thing as people 'governing themselves' unless you mean a completely direct democracy for every single decision, which outside of a small tribe is not really possible. There has to be an actual person or a group of people making decisions. So then you still have the question of how this person / these people end up in that position. Democracy, has a decent, while definitely not foolproof means of selecting the decision-makers, and also some mechanisms of removing them if they go bad. A hypothetical utopian communist government would have to come up with a better way of selecting the decision-makers.

This, people filling surveys for a pittance because presumably they really need money, are worried about financial security, what a strange coincidence.