I get what you're saying. I turned my back officially on Christianity as well after seeing that so many people who claim to be Christians seem to have never read the Bible. And they do a lot of the things that Christ opposed claiming that Christ would have wanted it.

They're essentially the Pharisees that the Bible warns of. But they do hold so much power and influence that they've practically become the establishment in many places and are the defacto iconic Christian.

Sure there are also many Christians out there who follow the teaching of Jesus. But they usually keep that to themselves and don't have to announce it as some kind of personal virtue that excuses them from all the un-Christian things they're doing in the name of Christ.

Yes, it's just a deflection and thus a fallacy that does not need to be discussed within the context to begin with.

Though I see that the particular user I thought about has not appeared here. Maybe you have seen it before, it was someone who thought that the Burden of Proof can be side stepped by Goedel's Incompleteness, not understanding that it only applies to mathematics and can't be applied in fields where empirical evidence is mandatory as a kind of proof.

But still, trusting children into the hands of religious institutions seems like a profoundly ignorant (at best) thing to do given the many exemptions to laws they get based on their "religious freedom".

Take this ruling of the AZ Supreme Court for example https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapnews.com%2Farticle%2Fmor...
It exempts the LDS Church from the duty of reporting child abuse that otherwise applies to everyone else. There's some dangerous precedent potential in there.

Yes, seems like a safe place for children to learn basic moral values of our Western societies. Schools on the other hand, they're just grooming children by teaching them history and science. (beware of sarcasm)

You can throw in what you want. It all leads up to entertaining a fallacious argument anyway. It's not even an issue worth discussing all in all because like you said yourself, it's too vague to be useful because "it's all been...".

But if someone claims moral superiority of religion and insinuates that the well must be poisoned by filling children's minds with self-righteous religious doctrine, then they opened up that door on themselves, and perhaps we should be discussing what else there is to such an approach given all the historic revisionism that's been going on lately.

Yes. But that's the usual apologist knee-jerk when the crimes that are committed in the name of some God and the involvement of organized religion are discussed here. I've seen it often enough and I expect it to pop up here as well. So I'm trying to get ahead of that particular curve.

People who use that bad faith argument usually then also do not realize that by this logic, anyone who is somehow religious and commits a crime would be counted towards "Religion". And if you summed up all that throughout history, then all the horrible atrocities of Stalin and Mao would still be just noise in the signal.

Careful there. I'm already smelling a "what about Stalin and Mao?"

People seem to be under the impression that all those crimes against humanity happened in the name of atheism, trying to create some equivalence, while ignoring that both Stalin and Mao have had their cults of personality that were more or less the same things as organized religious cults with respectively Stalin and Mao as their living deities.

Different assholes, same shit.

Unless the type of office work also involves frequent interaction with some more expensive equipment*, remote work can be an option. This includes data entry jobs like filing out forms. I don't see why that couldn't be done from home unless perhaps the data is classified in a way where it can't be taken home by an employee for security reasons.

Now of course it still depends a lot on the individual. There are people that do benefit from an office environment, where they're removed from the distractions that may effect them in their homes. And they may benefit from the more direct social interactions such an office culture can offer to them. Thus I don't think such people should be forced to work from home.

But doesn't mean data entry must happen in an office. And that's still no reason to discredit people's work that do want to work from home (you didn't do that). Especially not so if they're willing to take a pay cut in exchange for the ability to work from home.


*Expensive equipment like that which some of the R&D engineers around here do need in order to build and test their prototypes. That kind of equipment stays in their lab and requires attendance, disregarding security issues for a moment, simply because recreating the relevant parts of the lab in their home is just not feasible.

The entry barrier will rise.

I tried ChatGPT for fun, asking it question about some stuff that came up in the projects I'm currently working on (non classified stuff). It's not useful when it comes to anything that's close to original work, that can't be just copied off someone else, but requires analytical thinking and insight to come up with a feasible solution. Sure, it'll be giving you some vague, generalized answers, that if I want to be generous, represent some black box schematic. You can improve upon that by going more into details by asking the right questions. At that point you're more or less doing all the work yourself already because asking the right questions requires insight that someone who has little to no expertise in the field does not possess and also isn't likely to attain without having spent a considerable amount of time actually working in that field. Essentially I can do the same thing via rubber duck debugging in a mere text editor, having a monologue with myself, questioning my own thought processes and the results a regular search engine comes up with.

For standard problems it's good enough, which would put people jobs at peril who are paid to do standard work.

A lot of office work can be done from home well enough.

I don't need to drive and sit in an office to write some C++ code in Visual Studio. I get the licences I need from my work place to run the necessary software locally at home. And the rest can be done via remote access.

I also don't need to sit in an office to do math. When I went to university we were even trained to do (analytical) math without a calculator at all. For numeric math there's stuff like MATLAB, for which I also get a license from my work place and can run it locally.

But you don't seem to regard intellectual work, which constitutes a lot of work that happens in offices, as work in the first place. That's the underlying problem. Of course not all work can be done from home. But the fact that some work can be done from pretty much any place, including your home, does not invalidate it as work.

If you have difficulties to wrap your head around that, you try develop algorithms using higher mathematics and implement it in efficient C++ for money for a couple of years as your only source of income. Then you tell us again that it's not real work.

Technicalities. You are allowed to have and operate such a TV as much as you can afford to pay your electricity bills.

It's a regulation for official sales on the market. So you can't officially buy it on the EU market. But if you get it from elsewhere you can, there's your loophole.

Yes, 100 Watt on an incandescent light bulb were not a lot. But I think it's very easy to forget that incandescent light bulbs only emit about 2% of the used energy as light in the visible spectrum.

To get a better perspective people should try to compare that with an LED light that uses 100W. By that I mean an actual 100W load and not it just being rated the equivalent of a 100W incandescent light bulb. Then see how much light can be produced if a light source of this century is used instead of a space heater that incidentally also produces a bit of light in the visible spectrum.

Incandescent light bulbs were great for their time. But in places like the EU, that don't want continue their reliance on the genocidal fascists in Russia, which they so stupidly made themselves a bitch of for a couple of decades, believing in some kind of peace if just enough money is blown into Putin's ass, looking for energy efficient solutions until seems like a reasonable stop gap solution.

If this regulation in itself is a reasonable measure towards this goal is a different topic.

People with more money than sense. People who care about status symbols. Closet aristocrats who believe that paying some extra money is setting them apart from the plebeians.

"AI" like ChatGPT bears the same kind of risk that traditional media, social media, and people like Musk himself bear towards people who either don't want to think critically, because that does take time and effort for example, or lack the ability to do so, but instead take most things as a fact if it's voiced by a person (or AI) they came to trust.

I'd say that Musk isn't necessarily trying to be edgy, although of course that would fit as well, but that Musk is primarily afraid that his (uncritically)-tech-worshiping followers will at some point replace their current messiah (Musk himself) with an algorithmic god, that is "programmed to be correct" (somewhat popular logical fallacy trope in science fiction), born out of technology that he has no control over.

But other than that, there's that risk of course which is not negligible given how uncritical many people's thinking appears to be. A question that remains though is if people will come to trust "AI" the same way they came to trust people like Musk.

That is mainly Musk's attempt at damage control.

If that was really their motivation they could have been upfront about it to generate a foundation of trust, and not do it as a justification of a massive product recall which happened to coincide with a lot of legal pressure piling up.

Reminds me of the dumb kids I used to play with as a child shooting sling shots where we aimed at bottles and then they hit a tree 10 meters off to the side, telling me that's exactly where they aimed at. Nope, you announce the target which you intend to hit before you take the shot, not afterwards.

And Musk paid a lot of money to control part of one of those and make it a safe-space for himself where he touted "vox populi" until polls started to no longer agree with him.

As much potential for harm there is in AI, AI has to do a lot of catching up given all the harm social media has already done and keeps doing while making a lot of money from the misery it helps create.