Whether or not you're "really" a real person, or a brain in a jar, or a butterfly dreaming you're Zhuangzi, you and me and everyone else are still "people" we should respect.
Wrestling with the unfalsifiable nature of reality is something all thought traditions have dealt with, and I'd argue that you're not really an adult in 2025 if you haven't contemplated that all you know could be a hallucination.
The screwier question always becomes "if this is a dream , what if you're not the dreamer?"
Was there any reported reduction in training time needed for subsequent words?
Just getting a computer to understand anything from the implanted wires is progress, but it's "spend hours training for each single word" we're still at a 1970s scifi level of interaction.
No, we absolutely should not mark the records of known transgender athletes in any way. Because once you start down that road you wind up asterisking cisgender athletes whose development is outside the norm.
We could get into a long discussion of transgender persons who do or do not undergo HRT, or how there are already rules against transgender women competing professionally if they aren't on HRT, or whether or not such rules or gendered sports at all are justifiable.
But all of that is just a distraction. The elite in any competitive sport are ALREADY several orders of magnitude beyond the norm, to the point where any advantage a trans woman might have for going through male puberty is essentially a wash with "are you just naturally well-formed for this sport".
It's worth noting, by the way, that there ISNT broadly an athletic benefit to having gone through wrong-gender puberty before medically transitioning. Plenty of athletes have done exactly that, and as far as I know exactly none of them wound up being relatively better among their true gender peers post-HRT than their standing among birth-gendeR peers pre-HRT.
And there have been more instances of cisgender women being wrongly accused of being trans than there are transgender women athletes at all.
In order to justify their own bigotry, they seem to be literally abandoning the central teachings of the key teacher in Christianity.
When Jesus was asked "what is the most important part of the law", the two part response was love . To love God wholly, and to love others as we love ourselves.
When later asked how Christians would be judged, Jesus said that we would be judged as if we had done to Jesus whatever we do to the least among us.
I don't see how it is possible to reconcile bigotry with either of these teachings. I guess they can twist themselves into rhetorical knots and try, but it seems way easier to just decide to love everyone and leave it to God to judge us for whatever our sins may be.
Not everything is a spectrum. You are either actually pregnant or not-pregnsnt. You're either free to go when the officet is talking to you or you are being detained. You either had consent for sex or you didn't.
For example, if the example you provide to bolster your argument is "Hitler had admirable qualities", then you've jumped all the way past Godwin's law and there's no use talking to you.
"most people" are (1) a much smaller group that you think and (2) wrong.
If your behavior can at all be described as sexist, then you're not a feminist. That includes both Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobes like JK Rowling.and outright sex pests like Andrew Cuomo.
So, your line from "capitalism" to "nuclear family bias" starts at "line must always go up" and passes through a "more adults is less efficient" principle. Ok, I can understand that picture.
I think you're wrong about what "capitalism* means, but not in a way that matters for this discussion.
What I'm confused about is who is asserting that a multi-adult household is less efficient. You aren't, and I'm not, but that sounds like a economic paper trying to smuggle in "christian family values" in the way that creationism tries to smuggle religion into other fields of science.
I honestly just don't get that argument, as multi-adult households are the norm in a lot of nations and a big reason for the shift towards multi-generational households in western societies is the increased wealth gap, where the rich support their extended families and entourages while the poor make do with less. Stable households with more than three adults are literally more efficient by any measure anyone cares to name.
My opinion is that the bias against them comes in large part from America's "middle class" myth, (with working men each having their own fiefdoms), and partly from a belief that they are either inherently less stable or cause instability elsewhere.
How does the prioritization of investment over labor make a non-nuclear family lifestyle difficult?
Nuclear-family bias in law and custom is a real thing all on its own. I'm not sure what capitalism has to do with it, but I'd be fascinated to hear you expound on that if you feel like rambling.
From a purely secular-civil standpoint, an important function of religion is to offer solace and comfort regarding the finite nature of life.
Folk who repeat the phrase with sincerity are professing a belief in the God alluded to in the phrase, who watches over each human specifically. For those believers any obstacle which occurs is either a challenge they are meant to overcome or a fate they should accept the way Jesus of Nazareth accepted crucifixion.
For those who don't believe in Jesus, the God of Abraham, or that They are micromanaging our lives, the phrase is an annoying thought terminating cliche and dismissive platitude.
I'm not sure slapping them is necessarily appropriate, though.
It sounds like your training course needs to be updated. The skillsets taught in school are substantially different today than they were 20 years ago.
Just be glad you don't work in IT. It's even worse when the ignorance of older generations has been replaced by brand new ignorance of younger generations.
There was exactly one generation of students who used floppy disks in school.
That's a hell of a lot of words that aren't either "of course we should vote in every election for the best possible candidate" or "no, we should withhold our votes in the general if the Dems don't nominate someone sufficiently progressive."
If you mean the latter, say it. If you don't, then say that, too.
So, you are in favor of "my guy or the Nazi" voting? I didn't hear a "no", there.
It isn't "loser talk" to recognize the rules that elections run by, or to push back against the "both sides" rhetoric that lets the Overton window drift ever rightward.
Either you show up and vote in every election for the least bad candidate, be they good or great or only "not as bad", or you are doing more harm than good.
What does that fight look like, in your mind? Standing and shouting for Bernie and then sitting out the general when Clinton wins? Or arguing for Bernie in the primary since he's the best choice and then arguing just as hard for Clinton in the general since she's the best choice then?
Primary-only voting doesn't force anyone to do anything but ignore us harder in the primary.
And if that isn't what you mean by your objection to framing all elections as choices for "least bad", then why are you echoing the rhetoric of those who do?
I don't know how you square the circle of asserting that 'both sided are bad' is what got us here and still echoing "less bad" to buttress their thesis
Waiting for the left to be "good" instead of "less bad" is what makes "both sides are bad" such an effective demobilization tactic.
Because too many of us who had selfish political actions, and for decades kept saying "both sides are bad" while the side nearest facism kept acting in bad faith.
Democratic elections have always in the end been about picking the least-bad option. And, like it or not, elections and their consequences shape the rest of the world.
"President barely passes budget despite his party holding both chambers of Congress" isn't a major anything.
It is a despicable continuation of the November 2024 disaster, but this isn't anything worse than what anyone with any wisdom at all saw coming seven months ago.
(It is less-bad than it could have been, in the way that food soaked in piss is less-bad than food smeared with feces. Small victories, though...)
Whether or not you're "really" a real person, or a brain in a jar, or a butterfly dreaming you're Zhuangzi, you and me and everyone else are still "people" we should respect.
Wrestling with the unfalsifiable nature of reality is something all thought traditions have dealt with, and I'd argue that you're not really an adult in 2025 if you haven't contemplated that all you know could be a hallucination.
The screwier question always becomes "if this is a dream , what if you're not the dreamer?"