Thank god for this comment! Reading these comments is like: “Genocide is good sometimes” “People have too many rights” “We should stop trying to make this better” “Man, this Pokémon game is good!”
This is definitely an opinion, and definitely unpopular, so kudos on staying on topic. But I have to ask, why do you care about what the media says and not the science? Also, did I miss scientific studies being published about this? What are the other species of humans called?
Science says we’re all blended into Homo Sapiens now.
But as a spouse to a biologist my understanding is there is no agreement in science what is a species. Defining species is more art than science and often political.
That said. In such cases, whether or not two communities are different sources i or just Su populations of one species - matters little in practical sense. It’s just naming exercise.
The media does not determine that science does. The scientists reject your notion completely and I suspect it is because you have zero idea how classification works.
the military is a cult that tricks children into dying for the wealth of the owner class. they tell you you’re defending “freedom” but you’re defending the gravest enemies of freedom that currently exist.
The military is also the only path to free college & free healthcare in the United States. I have a friend who’s getting his second college degree that’s entirely paid for by being a veteran
Nevermind the potential PTSD and/or poisoning from their time in the military and the very poor state of the VA yet our military budget has never been higher.
What if I told you that after the second World War The Netherlands did not have enough people left to work and rebuild so they actively put policies in place to get more migrant workers.
Those countries “rose again” because of massive investments in them. If the USA let Germany or Japan settle their debts and rebuild on their own they would be third world nations still. The same is true for Korea.
The greatness is money from foreign sources not some racist bullshit notion of inherent greatness.
By your “logic” the actual “greatness” is entirely American. That is of course a moronic notion as America had the money because European and Asian economies were devastated by WWI & WWII.
Your unpopular opinion is unpopular because it is just racist.
Women choosing violent troubled partners yet decide to have kids/stay with them only to then complain about them when they have to become a single parent. Bîtch please, I dont go around blaming society for my bad decisions.
Python is just as bad if not worse then JavaScript. The fact that if you misspell a variable name, instead of giving an error like any sane language, Python code will still run, but do something different then it looks like it does, creating a hard to spot bug is just awful. The amount of time I have spent debugging python code only to find a tiny typo that any sane language would have caught before the code even ran is several weeks now, I can’t imagine how much collective time has been lost over this, and a few other, horrible languages.
I love Python, it’s probably my favourite language, but I’ll be the first to admit that its fast-and-loose style can make certain kinds of errors easier to make and harder to notice/fix. Glad this can help a little!
Huh? That’s not what happens at all. Python doesn’t just mahically create variables for you, you get an undefined reference error like any other sane language.
Ah, ok sure. Every dynamically typed language does that with assignments though, that’s kinda the point of dynamic typing. You can use linters to easily catch that kinda stuff though.
Do you use a linter? I switched to Ruff several months ago and it is amazing, it finds many defects and runs very quickly (even on huge disgusting legacy files)
I think having children when the world is already overflowing with unwanted children is pretty fucking selfish. how about you do humanity a favor and stop for a round or two, eh? maybe pick up all the lost and forgotten children society has strewn across the way.
(only child unwanted by both parents, dont know who my father is. left my mother at 18, but she made sure to remind me how much her life got fucked up because she had me…Currently married to my lovely wife going on 10 years at 2024 and 12 years together total. and we have considered a child. but…i cant stop thinking about the ones already here, unloved. but as a bastard only child with no real parents, i could be bias.)
I considered it seriously even though I am fertile. The process is so complex, long and uncertain in my country (western Europe) that we chose to make new ones. Still considering to adopt when we get a bit older.
I think having children when the world is already overflowing with unwanted children is pretty fucking selfish.
Well it is, but it’s also hard wired into every living creature. As in, “I want food security and will pursue that at the expense of others” is definitely selfish but it’s the expected position.
It’s true that we’re the only species with the ability to reason about the social cost of this position, but it’s also true that every single one of my ancestors has of course been able to fulfil this fundamental contract of life without impediment.
One problem you may not have considered is that raising an adopted child is a very, very different prospect to raising your own child. Usually people wanting to adopt prefer a newborn, because this is more of a “blank slate” if you will, but the vast majority of children available to adopt are not given up by their parents immediately after birth. Many children have been neglected and have on going social and medical problems. Another problem is the prevalence of issues like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome which causes physical and neurodevelopmental problems.
On the contrary, your experience is an excellent example of why having children is a horrible idea unless you’re ready for what parenthood involves, which almost no one is.
(I would argue that having children is still a horrible idea because the world’s falling apart, but that’s another story.)
I mean, if you qualified this remark by explaining that intelligence doesn’t guarantee success, that would be fine. But you just said the intellect is overrated and that’s idiotic. Which… Could be your point?
I can see where you are coming from but heck, after a criminal is caught, it’s not in state’s interest to punish him except for making an example out of him so other people won’t think of committing the crime.
I do sympathise with that argument but I would argue that loss of freedom is a powerful disincentive. For some crimes disincentive’s don’t work anyway. If the goal is smaller recidivism rates I reckon you’d get better results treating them well as opposed to poorly. If you don’t treat them like people you can’t expect them to act like people.
Deterence is not a great strategy for preventing crime. Criminals don’t actually do much cost benefit analysis before committing a crime; they will consider the chances they have of getting caught, but not the severity of the punishment. Rehabilitation programs are worth considering over punitive justice so long as they are more effective at preventing recidivism, which is certainly an interest for a state.
The first is a deterrence. This is quite a yes/no thing however. Longer sentences, or worse conditions don’t increase its effect.
Second is re-education. This is where most effort should be focused. You need to simultaneously break the bad habits causing issues, and implant good ones (in the form of skills, and improved social situations). The aim is to make them a productive member of society again.
Last is containment. Some people either cannot or will not function safely in society. These people either need to be contained indefinitely, or killed. Given the unreliability of the justice system, the latter is a dangerous route to walk, and often more expensive.
I’m personally of the view that we should all have free (tax funded), access to retraining courses and resources, along with physical, mental, and social health systems. Prison should mostly be focused on the enforced use of these. They are contained while they retrain and get the help they need. They are then released in a better state than they went in. It’s the most cost efficient option. The Scandinavian countries already use something similar (for convicts), and it seems highly effective.
I guess alot of the stuff we already do e.g Community service, mandatory classes, bans, fines but I would add dissolution of your company if you own one or confiscation of luxury items such as yachts of private jets if you own them. Ultimately I think its a case by case thing like shoplifting for essentials should go unpunished but people making lots of money shoplifting high value items should be compelled to pay it back
I have quite a few. I don’t believe in copyright laws or IP in general. I think it holds back innovation and exists solely to benefit megacorps like Disney or pharmaceutical companies.
For example - you develop a new drug that really helps some people. You charge $50 a pill even though it costs you $5 to produce. Without the government protecting IP, another company will come around and produce it and sell it for $6 a pill, providing cheaper access to healthcare.
People will say “what would give someone the incentive to make new things?” Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades… one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.
Another unpopular opinion is I’m pretty absolutist with free speech. I think certain things like calls to violence or intentional defamation of character should be restricted. But pretty much everything else should be fair game.
I believe in open borders and think the US should return to the late 1800s style of immigration. We’re gonna need the population to compete with China in the coming century.
I also think that the primary investment into climate change at this point should be preparing for the inevitable changes instead of trying to prevent the inevitable.
I disagree with your view on IP, at least for pharmaceuticals. For most drugs, the exclusivity period is only 5 years, after which generic companies reverse engineer the product with ease and create a low-cost alternative. Without this period allowing pharma companies to make their money, there’d be no reason to invest the billions upon billions of dollars into R&D to discover and develop the drug in the first place. Most drug candidates fail, and the wins are what prop up the whole industry.
I’m not defending price gouging and I think all governments should control pricing, preferably with a single payer system (looking at you USA), but we would be so much further behind without patent protection. Especially for orphan diseases.
Don’t really agree with you on IP for most creative purposes either. There should be a reasonable length of time you get exclusive rights to something you create. But this doesn’t excuse Disney’s stranglehold on the mouse.
Yeah with pharma in particular you need that initial profitability, as you say.
Additionally…
People will say “what would give someone the incentive to make new things?” Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades… one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.
This doesn’t really make sense. Shenzen company’s might have copied products developed by other companies, but surely you still need another company to invest the R & D initially in order to have something to copy.
Consumer products don’t “evolve”. Developing and producing are two different processes. If there’s no IP then there’s only an incentive to produce things, and no incentive to develop them. I think this is especially true of pharmaceuticals given that there’s no incremental / evolutionary pathway to discovering new drugs and the costs of conducting trials et cetera is preclusive.
IP has many many flaws, have to disagree with you on the r&d though. That simply costs upfront money and we don’t do a lot of it anymore anyways.
To some degree companies don’t even patent their stuff, so that they don’t have to publish the inner workings for their competitors. This is especially a problem with china since they pretty notoriously don’t give a damn about patents and just copy it anyway. Your Shenzhen example makes no sense to me.
There is enough about ip to dislike anyways:
It is mainly used as a way to sue each other in the corporate world. This is why they patent everything usually.
Patents don’t even really have to explain how the technique works (or if it really works) in much detail.
there is little to no recourse if the patent office does not want to grant your patent. On the other hand if they feel like it, they can grant complete shit.
patents are prohibitively expensive for private people, in granting and upkeep.
You have to keep some kind of a compensation mechanism in place that guarantees worldly rewards to inventors, researchers or creators for innovation or art. Otherwise why would they work?
Intellectual “ownership”, as ridiculously bullshit as it currently sounds, is the mechanism in place currently. Is there anything else you can suggest?
Developing new drugs costs millions and can lasts decades, especially because of clinical trials. Without IP protection, the company making the effort to find new drugs would go bankrupt (the price of newly found drugs must also pay for other drug research that did not succeed). I don’t know how it works in the USA, in France the system is that that the IP protection lasts 10 years after releasing the drug on the market, then other companies can copy it. And during this 10 years period, the price is regulated by the government.
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