Lebanon is a beautiful country and Beirut is a fun city, but man their government bungled things for so long that everything is falling apart and all the money is leaving the country.
Humanitarian technologist & big data wrangler, on a quest for evidence-based policy. Rational optimist, post-statist, contemplative humanist, mystery enthusiast, bardo tourist.
Lebanon is a beautiful country and Beirut is a fun city, but man their government bungled things for so long that everything is falling apart and all the money is leaving the country.
American in Italy here! I am not justifying this, just explaining it from an Italian perspective. First, the paper is not mixing up her Indian heritage here with Native American. They took the idea that she is seeking a white male VP running mate and wrote “hunting for a white man”, which conjured up a “funny” homage to native Americans in spaghetti westerns, while giving a nod and a wink to the racism inherent in making the VP pick race-based. Second, this paper is a sensationalist rag sold in grocery store checkout lanes, with no expectation for the stories to be good, or free of any number of unsavory isms.
Short answer: Yes! Partially!
Long answer: Belief is a feature that humans have that can give you confidence both in proven outcomes and in the unknown. It stems from our prefrontal cortex survival capabilities to remember past experiences and simulate future experiences. Aka imagination. We can believe in anything we choose to.
Yes belief is psychologically comforting. Certainly a lot more than worrying about the unknown. It’s even more comforting if the belief is shared by a social group, reinforcing it to each other.
Other aspects of religion make life easier too. Rituals, traditions, stories and social ties.
Those things can help with depression! Depression is a cognitive-affective response to a body that isn’t living the way our bodies were evolved to live. Key factors of that include: Daily socialization, getting the right nutrients, sleeping well, getting enough exercise, getting enough sunlight and having strategies to keep our minds from worrying. Belief can do the last one, as can meditation, or triggering flow states by engaging in activities. Religion can also help with the socializing one.
Hope this helps!
I don’t understand how letting players pay money to avoid grinding for items isn’t a douchy move. It either means they think you will have less fun if you pay less (otherwise people wouldn’t be motivated to buy shortcuts) or that they are making you pay extra for an easy mode.
Is this Winamp for Finns or a financial amplification device?
Switched away to Vivaldi and Opera on desktop years ago due to better design and ability to swap between workspaces. Trying to migrate back to Firefox for ethical reasons. Desktop design still lags behind but privacy is great.
The main problems I have with it now are sometimes there are still issues with loading between browser and apps. Like it might open multiple tabs trying to open an app, and it leaves the app redirect pages open in your tabs list. Additionally, sometimes (like 3% of the time) website scaling doesn’t always work, especially on older sites or those made with janky CMS’s, and I’ve also rarely had problems with some dynamic content like inline forms and graphs.
I recently made the switch. Make sure to install whatever add-ons you need, turn on the “open links in apps” setting, and turn on the “pull to refresh” setting. Import your bookmarks and you can still use the Android password manager. It’s not 100% as smooth, but it’s pretty close.
Yup, and in my case they started sending door-to-door salespeople. They’re spending all the money to kill Google Fiber where I’m at.
Two male apes park next to each other:
“You don’t fit into the sociocultural group I’m a part of, AKA THE BEST GROUP, because you are not sending the right social signals! Therefore YOU ARE NOT A VERILE MATE FOR THE HOMINID FEMALES!”
“NO! CLEARLY IT IS YOU WHO WILL NOT SEED THE NEXT GENERATION OF OFFSPRING! Based on all the information I’ve gotten about appropriate social signals for my gender, age, ethnicity, cult, location and socioeconomic status, I am displaying the appropriate signals! So I shall point at you and say WEIRD!”
I agree, I think we could even go further and make vehicles of a certain size use cargo lanes on the highway.
My wife is European and lives in the US and she thinks the fact that giant SUVs and trucks can have such a vast size differential to compact cars, so that she is eye-level with their bumper, and that both use the same license and same lanes, is incredibly dangerous.
This shouldn’t happen unless you overcook your pasta. When the water starts boiling, toss in some salt and then the pasta. Wait for length of time on the pasta package. Then remove from heat and drain. If it still gets sticky, buy a better quality pasta.
This happened to me too, except my L5/S1 disc is permanently bulged now. If I don’t keep my core strong, and my hips and thighs flexible, I get debilitating sciatic pain down my right leg.
Stay in shape lads! Stay strong, but don’t lift hard. Stay flexible, but don’t stretch too far. Get some cardio, but low impact.
If only they taught us in school how to take care of our bodies, our feelings, our minds, our relationships, our communities and our environment… sadlolz
Having continuous population growth leads to continuous economic growth. But…
You can also achieve that by squeezing more economic productivity out of fewer people, by continuously improving education, diversity of thought, legally protecting creativity, fostering small businesses through seed money and tax incentives, and lots of other stuff.
We have already been scaling the amount of productivity that comes out of a population since the invention of the steam engine and the factory line. Digital automation, AI and robotics are expected to keep that trend going for a long time.
Not to mention, that it’s easier now to operate productively in areas of less dense population. Previously small towns would die, but with clever infrastructure that supports broadband everywhere, public transportation, self-driving vehicles, drone delivery, additive manufacturing (3d printing), virtual presence through XR, and so on, you can operate a rural population like a big productive city, and get the benefits of both.
And at the end of the day, if your economy doesn’t grow, it just means that wealth in the country doesn’t grow.You can maintain that indefinitely. Or if an economy shrinks, society doesn’t come collapsing down until everyone gets poor enough that bribery and corruption overcome lawfulness. But if the society was already wealthy, that will take a long time, and you can mitigate it by doing things like spreading out concentrations of wealth among the population (taxing the rich), increasing immigration, and adopting socioeconomic sustainability planning approaches.
Not necessarily. Also this is already happening in many countries, and they don’t collapse into ruin. They just stagnate for a few generations.
It doesn’t necessarily reduce population density though, because often what happens is that young people leave small towns and villages that have fewer opportunities and move to the big city, causing those little towns to die. That’s usually bad for maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity across a country’s landscape, but good for biodiversity, because as people go, the environment recovers.
Also as population declines, land and resources tend to consolidate more and more into the hands of fewer oligarchs. But the oligarchs all own us already anyway, so NBD.
Very cool, thanks! Link for those too lazy to type.
Here is an interactive map that shows current ongoing conflicts around the world.
This was my first thought. VC’s always expect 4 out of 5 projects they invest in to fail and always have. But it still makes them money because the successes pay off big. Is the money and resources wasted? Welcome to modern capitalism.