Skip Navigation
US supreme court rules against affirmative action in Harvard and UNC cases
  • Colleges give preference to legacies because the admissions department is judged by its yield (the percentage of accepted applicants who actually enroll), and legacy applicants are more likely to enroll if accepted.

    It's not necessarily related to being rich. A legacy is about as likely to be wealthy as other students at the school, because after all their parents were also students at that school.

    Another important reason is that colleges rely on alumni donors, and alumni are less likely to donate if their children are not accepted.

  • US supreme court rules against affirmative action in Harvard and UNC cases
  • This is exactly right. There have been various interviews with college admissions directors over the past year, and they pretty much all said the same thing. To paraphrase, "We expect that AA will be struck down. If we can't directly ask about race on the application, then we will achieve the same result by indirect means".

    AA opponents mistakenly believe that colleges will now be forced to consider only grades and test scores. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  • Human remains thought to be found in Titan sub debris
  • It's the ocean depths, not the surface of the sun.

    Gas is compressible. So if you stepped into the water without any protection at extreme depth, every gas-containing part of your body would be crushed. That includes your nose, mouth, ears, throat, lungs, bowels, and most of the bones of your face.

    Liquids are not very compressible. So the liquid parts of your body, like your eyes, brains, blood, and limbs, would not be affected very much. Maybe they would shrink almost imperceptibly. The same is true of the bones not in your face.

    The final result would be a an oddly-smushed looking corpse, not a cloud of vapor.

    Incidentally, this is why deep sea divers can swim at depth. They breathe very high pressure gas into their gas-containing parts, which thus remain inflated despite the pressure of the water.

  • Human remains thought to be found in Titan sub debris
  • Rich people die all the time, in hospitals. Nobody pays much attention.

    The reason an imploding sub is getting attention is that sub implosions don't happen every day. There were no millionaires aboard the Kursk, but everybody was talking about it after it imploded.

    Tragedies on private subs are even more rare. When non-millionaire Kim Wall was murdered aboard the Nautilus, it got plenty of attention even though plenty of other people were murdered that day.

  • Twitter's new TikTok copycat is filled with animal cruelty videos. Elon calls content "Edgy"
  • Billions of invertebrates and other small animals are killed during tilling before planting, with pest/weed control during the growing season (even with "organic" or "natural" compounds), and of course during harvest.

    This is inevitable, planting requires controlling soil and plants, and this will inevitably kill animals that you don't even see. Do you really think you can pull a weed without killing any of the invisible animals living on it?

    Fishing/hunting also kills animals, but you can catch a fish or hunt a deer without restructuring an entire ecosystem. Which means you can feed yourself without killing quite so many animals.

  • Twitter's new TikTok copycat is filled with animal cruelty videos. Elon calls content "Edgy"
  • Billions of animals are killed wherever crops are grown.

    Even if you are entirely vegan, animals have to die if you want to eat.

    In fact, if your food is grown on a farm then you are probably contributing to more animal deaths than someone who obtains food from hunting or fishing.

  • OceanGate CEO Bragged About Using Expired Carbon Fiber to Build Doomed Sub
  • I doubt it was much of an added expense. The search was carried out by Coast Guard and Navy personnel, who would be getting paid regardless.

    If the sub hadn't gone missing, it's quite likely their time and resources would have been spent on practicing some sort of rescue mission.

  • "Debris field" found near Titanic in search for missing sub, U.S. Coast Guard says
  • I mean, the sub had reached Titanic several times, right?

    So even without the design documents, we know it was previously capable of operating at depth.

    Which we means we know the hull wasn't made of cotton candy, we know it wasn't propelled under water by an internal combustion engine, and we know it wasn't controlled by a device that stops working in water.

  • "Debris field" found near Titanic in search for missing sub, U.S. Coast Guard says
  • We know for a fact that wifi signal was not supposed to travel through the water, because the sub successfully reached Titanic several times before it was destroyed.

    If someone had designed the sub in the bizarre way that you suggested, then it would never have completed a single mission.

  • Wagner Group 300 km from Moscow edit Sorry yall I am an American and typed miles out of muscle memory
  • I think it's pretty simple.

    • Wagner and the Russian Army are competing for increasingly limited supplies in Ukraine.

    • This led Prigozhin to complain publicly about the Russian Ministry of Defense.

    • In response, Putin was planning to subordinate Wagner to the Russian Army.

    Subordination would limit Prigozhin's power and also reduce or eliminate his personal source of income. Which basically forced the events playing out today.

  • Mods at /r/videos now require all post titles to contain profanity

    They explain:

    > > > Since Reddit Admins in their infinite wisdom, have told us not to mark the subreddit as NSFW under threat of death de-snooment suspension, I guess this shit is up to you guys to figure out if your post is NSFW or not. I mean.. It says in at least one place that profanity should be marked NSFW... But then the admins have been telling people it doesn't.. So who knows.. Admins, if you'd like us to mark the subreddit as NSFW we are more than happy to comply =) > >

    Sadly, videos no longer have to feature John Oliver

    18
    Deleted
  • If you are a simulation, then your choice doesn't matter. You will never get any real benefit from the boxes. It's like saying, "there is also a finite possibility that the machine is lying and all the boxes are empty". In which case, the choice is again irrelevant.

    Situations in which your choice doesn't matter are not worth considering. Only the remaining possibility, that you are not a simulation and the machine is not lying, is worth considering.

  • Deleted
  • But if it's true that the machine can perfectly predict what you will choose, then by definition your choice will be the same its prediction. In which case, you should choose one box.

  • Deleted
  • It's much easier if you reframe the problem:

    Someone says they've built a machine that can perfectly predict what you will do. Do you believe them?

    If so, take one box.
    If not, take both boxes.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FL
    FlowVoid @kbin.social
    Posts 1
    Comments 41