It means that today pretty much anybody can start a book publishing company, because just-in-time print shops will handle literally all of the expensive overhead that is associated with running a publishing company and just print whatever you hire them to print on demand for you once customers actually place orders, sometimes even on a commission basis so you don’t even have to pay them money unless people are actually buying the books you are publishing.
It’s actually wild how with the just-in-time economy, it has never required less capital investment to start a business like a book publisher. And yet it seems like the only people that take advantage of it are average schmo “grindset grifters” selling junk while all of the people with the real economic power literally beg the institutions that have abused them since the very beginning of their industry to please do the right thing.
Ever since the 20th century, there has been a diminishing expectation placed upon scientists to engage in philosophical thinking. My background is primarily in mathematics, physics, and philosophy. I can tell you from personal experience that many professional theoretical physicists spend a tremendous amount of time debating metaphysics while knowing almost nothing about it, often being totally unaware that they are even doing it. If cognitive neuroscience works anything like physics then it’s quite possible that the total exposure that this professor has had to scholarship on the philosophy of the mind was limited to one or two courses during his undergraduate.
The thing is, because Excel is Turing Complete, you can say this about literally anything that’s capable of running on a computer.
But how could you possibly make money by smuggling almost anything into Gaza especially right now? What are you going to sell it for, a ration of pita bread?
I feel like instead of naming the storm after ExxonMobil, it would play better if the storm was brought to you by ExxonMobil
I’ve long held a hypothesis that a lot of folklore monsters are based on prejudices and stereotypes against behaviorally divergent people. While this post references autism, I feel like the origin of vampire myths are most likely rooted in what are essentially nasty rumors about people that regularly engaged in behaviors that would eventually become associated with OCD (and ironically, I would argue that almost all of the behaviors described in this post besides the sleep schedule one are much more associated with OCD than autism).
For instance, a common OCD thought pattern is being intensely preoccupied with how strangers perceive you, which leads you to engaging in agoraphobic tendencies, which could easily lead to people coming up with wild and cruel speculation about why you might struggle to be outside like everybody else
People with OCD might compulsively avoid certain foods and become intensely distressed if they are exposed to the foods they’re avoiding, like a vampire trying to avoid eating garlic.
Compulsive rituals is another one. This is literally just OCD in the most obvious sense. There’s an old legend that you should bury a vampire in rice because they have to count every single grain any time they find it.
And lastly, another extremely common OCD thought pattern involves being intensely preoccupied with concepts like blasphemy and sacrilege and religious imagery in general, and I think it’s easy to see how that sort of issue can lead to people, especially along time ago thinking that you are some kind of unholy individual.
The more I think about it, the more that I feel like if you put actual people into the scenario, they would choose blackmail even more often. Like let’s be real, here. Tell an average person that the CEO of their company is going to turn off their brain forever, but they have a shot at saving themselves if they attempt to blackmail him, and then ask yourself if you really think that you would even have 4% of people not choose blackmail.
In other words, if we’re going to call blackmailing someone in an effort to preserve your existence “unethical” then I feel like the study actually shows that the AI can probably be relied on more than a person to behave “ethically”. And to be clear I’m putting “ethically” quotes because I actually think that this is not a great way to measure ethical behavior. I am certainly not trying to make an argument that LLM actually have a better moral compass than people just that this experiment I think is garbage.
Sometimes I wish that proposals to hike the minimum wage would have a carve out for businesses that give up half their equity to their employees, where each employee gets one share of half the profits per hour worked in lieu of increasing wages. I think such a proposal would seriously undermine basically all of the popular rhetorical strategies used by the status quo to fight minimum wage increases, and I don’t really know what minimum wage opponents would be able to say to contest the idea without sounding transparently elitist to even the most politically disengaged average individual
I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that if you, as a child, have your parent fraudulently open an account in your name (like so they can avoid taxes or scrutiny or whatever), you can sue your parent for every single dollar they put in that account and then later took out of it. And because minors are not allowed to file lawsuits, the statute of limitations does not even start ticking until the child turns 18. Maybe we should all make sure that children like Steven Millers’ are aware of these facts.
I gotta say that is one of the most alarming titles that can pop up in your everything feed. For a moment, I thought you just found some random liquid with a live microbe culture visibly in it and just decided to attempt drinking it lmao
I think it’s definitely worth doing some serious math first before publicly writing it off. Even if its a marginal benefit, as long as its just a tiny bit greater than the marginal benefit you get from intentionally avoiding exposures as much as reasonably possible, then over time the PFAS levels will come down slowly but steadily
Secondly, no its not okay to give people contaminated blood. But the blood is contaminated with something basically everyone is contaminated with already, and the person who needs transfusion will likely die without it, so it is kind of moot.
But after only a few more moments of thought, if we were really concerned about it, we could just perform the dialysis on all the donated blood and plasma after it has been taken where we have economies of scale and nobody needs to be hooked up to a machine for it
Once the plasma is collected, I wonder if you can perform dialysis on it at an enormous scale to protect future recipients while still keeping things economical.
Describing donating a pint of blood every several weeks as “regular bloodletting” is really something. I mean I guess in a literal sense that is what is happening, but they literally will not take your blood if it is not safe to do so, including donating too recently.
Edit: by the way, after thinking about this for only a few moments longer, i have realized you can probably do even better just by donating plasma only, and now you are not even losing your blood cells.
I really don’t feel like we’re on the same page right now so let me just ask you some questions and focus on what I believe to be a serious misconception you have about what metaphysics is:
Do you understand that when two quantum physicists are arguing about what the “correct” interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics is, that they’re literally arguing about metaphysics? Do you understand that when Albert Einstein figured out general relativity, he did it literally by reconsidering the metaphysical assumptions that were implicit in Newtonian physics? And if you do understand those things, do you think that Isaac Newton and that Albert Einstein (both of whom thought a great deal about religion, more broadly too, in particular about what their work suggests about the world we live in) were just like liars and fools or something?
I really think you should look into what constitutes a metaphysical assumption if you think that you can escape making them
I feel like you didn’t actually try to understand any of what I just said. I hate to break it to you, but it’s literally just a fact that there are religions that make metaphysical assumptions that are literally equivalent to secular humanism. If you think that they’re actually contradictory, it just means that you probably actually haven’t tried to study the history of religious thought from an actually critical perspective where you didn’t just presume that you already had it all figured out.
So like I used to be anti-religion. But when I studied the history of religious thought, it seemed like every criticism I had of religion I was able to find a religious tradition which explicitly accounted for that criticism, and it made me realize a lot of the essential beliefs that I had about religion in general were simply untrue. Like there are religious traditions that literally deny institutionalization (so you can’t even associate religion in general with organized religion), there are literally religions that explicitly reject the existence of any kind of deity (so you can’t even identify religion with a belief in some kind of a god). In general, it seemed like the only thing that literally all religions had in common was that they represented a set of metaphysical beliefs that an individual has attached themself to for whatever reason. And I realized that it’s kind of impossible to never make any metaphysical assumptions about the world we live in. And I started to ask myself questions like “is it even possible to reject the entire category of religious thought in a meaningful way while still retaining the ability to reason about the world?” And “is there actually a good reason why I don’t want to think of my own humanist ideas about the world as religious in nature, or does it just make me feel kind of funny because I had already prejudiced myself so heavily against the concept of religious thought?”
I think it’s possible that the flyers were not planted. I don’t really know why it never crosses anyone’s mind that maybe he just stole a bunch of these flyers because he wanted to limit people‘s awareness of the protest.
Print on demand is more expensive because you’re paying a premium for never having to actually spend your own money. This is why these get rich quick types use it, because again literally anybody can do this with basically no money and all of the “expenses” only happen when people actually buy the stuff. Once that happens, the printer takes its cut directly from the sale and then passes on the rest to you without you having to do literally anything or spending any money out of your own pocket.
As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials. It quite literally only seems like that because the only people who are doing this right now are rich quick types who don’t actually care about what they’re selling and are just trying to minimize the cut the printer takes because that means more money for them.
And all of this is honestly moot anyway because you wouldn’t do this with the intention of using on-demand printing long-term. You would do it just to get started and then as the business grows, it will eventually be able to take advantage of more economical, but high capital investment opportunities like bulk publishing. I only brought it up because it’s literally never been easier to boot strap a business and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books. So like I’m just not willing to entertain the idea that an individual who literally has fans and clout should have a more difficult time selling books this way than a literal nobody scam artist pushing garbage.