Aceticon

The difference between a sociopath and a murdering sociopath is the belief that they will lose nothing and even stand to gain from murder.

Absolutelly, evil people are to blame from doing evil shit because they chose to do it.

Other people who protect and support the evil people when they do the evil shit are also to blame because without their support and protection the evil people are a lot less likely to do the evil shit fearing the repercussions.

In this specific instance, given that the US has been vetoing UN Security Council resolutions to stop Israel and is by far much more powerful than Israel in the World stage, the theory that they're the "main obstacle to peace in Palestine" makes sense, or in other words, that the murdering sociopath would have to stop murdering due to fear of the consequences if the US stopped supporting it.

Whilst it seems likely that it is, whether the US really is the "main obstable" or not is something that we would only know for sure after the US stopped supporting Israel.

Generally no, probably because many males when they end up in physicality make it some kind of dominance thing (playfully violence that's just a little too much, "higher position" touches like hand on top of shoulder or physically leading other people and even the good old "measuring somebody one the firmeness of their handshake"). It's not casual and friendly when there's measuring and testing of others involved.

Outside close family, the only environment I've been in were things like hugs were normal was the Theatre world.

Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I'm now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I'm using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that's what I really liked to do).

I've also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.

(I've also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)

Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.

So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.

At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you're doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would've been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn't know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn't know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.

And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the "common sense" bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.

Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you'll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.

I never said it was excellence, I said it was being a good salesman: never stated that I think salesmanship is some kind of great human quality, or that it is at all a quality or even that it has any kind of moral value positive or negative.

It was never a value statement about salesmanship as a human practice, it was simply an observation about how in my opinion human intelligence relates to proeficiency in that practice.

I think you unwittingly used the context of Society around you and what it tells you are great qualities, to fill the gaps in what I wrote and hence drew moral conclusions from it rather than from my statements which did not at all include a moral judgment.

Further, the possibility that I somehow "leaked" my opinion on it from a moral standpoint is inconsistent with how, personally, I don't even have a positive opinion about salesmanship in moral terms, though I recognize the rewards it can bring in present day society to be good at it and appreciate a good salesman with the same kind moral-detached respect for expertise as I would appreciate a good conman or a good thief - whether one agrees or disagrees with that kind of job, one cannot but appreciate the smooth elegance of mastery in a complex domain. I can hardly "leak" a positive moral opinion when my opinion on that practice is neutral or slightly below neutral.

(Also, I couldn't care less about what present day Society tells us are great human qualities, except perhaps that, having to live in it, I have to navigate that crap just like everybody else).

I'm thinking more Startup Founders and highly specialized Tech salespeople, rather than run-of-the-mill salespersons.

People with a grifter kind of personality is maybe a better way to describe the kind of people I mean.

The best do think of themselves as highly capable and competent because the best seller there is absolutelly believes in what they're pitching - it's smilar to how in Theatre, the best acting involves the actors literally feeling as if that situation was trully happenning to them.

IMHO the best way to deceive others is to first deceive yourself (though what I've seen more commonly done is avoiding knowing too much about something and in too much detail so that one is not even aware of the risks and pitfalls and only knows the positives) because of how amazingly truthfull that makes one sound.

Before or after looking at all his works?

In my experience, the expectations of most people about "gifted" level intelligence seem to be shaped shaped by things like movies and are wholly unrealistic.

Even a twice as fast CPU is no guarantee that the software running in it is any good or appropriate for any one task.

Oh, man, somebody actually thinks the "excellence" part of the curve isn't plagued by things like how much easier is to spot all the ways things can cause problems down the causality chain (guess what, when it's easy and natural to, for every action being considered, see 3 or more links down the chain of possible consequences, one always finds risks and negatives) and associated tendency for paralysis by analysis or simply the being quite abnormal compared to most people.

In my experience the perfect spot of the curve when it comes to felling good about oneself in this one human characteristic is to be what I call an "entry level genious" - a barelly into the genious IQ, just about intelligent enough to feel more intelligent than th majority of people one encounters but not so intelligent one is aware of the limits of intelligence and how little even genious adds to one's overall capabilities (and example of this would be Elon Musk), or in other words, on what is pretty much the peak Dunning-Krugger point of Intelligence.

(All the best salesperson types I've worked with were at that sweet-spot: intelligent enough to find it easier to outsmart most people and have high self-confidence but not enough to understand the potential problems and limitations of what they're selling)

His support for Israel is so unabashedly racist (it's all about the etnicity of the dominant majority in Israel) that anybody who is against racism really needs to ponder if somebody so profoundly racist (it's harder to be more racist than to, because of their etnicity give weapons to a bunch of people currently committing Genocide ~~against~~ along etnic lines) as Biden in any way form of shape represents them.

Even before the current Genocide, the etnostate of Israel was already as bad or worse than Jim Crow's America.

The minimal or non-existent benefits for most people in most situation of yyyy-mm-dd (no, the brain doesn't need the highest dimensional scale value to come first: that's just your own habit because of how numbers are spoken in the English language and possibly because the kind of situation where you use dates involves many things which are further than a year forwards or backwards in time, which for most people is unusual) - people sorting dates by alphabetical order in computer systems (which is where yyyy-mm-yy is the only one that works well) is just the product of either programmer laziness or people misusing text fields for dates - so don't add to enough to justify the "jarring" for other people due to changing from the date format they're used to, not the mention the costs in anything from having to change existing computer systems to having to redesign and print new paper forms with fill-in data fields with a different order.

In a similar logic, the benefits of dd-mm-yyyy are mainly the ease of shortenning it in spoken language (i.e. just the day, or just the day and month) and depend on knowing the month and year of when a shortenned date was used (which usually doesn't work well for anything but immediate transfer of information as the month and day would still need to be store somewhere if they're not coming from "present date") so they too do not justify the "jarring" for other people due to changing from the date format they're used to.

Frankly even in an imaginary situation were we would be starting from scratch and had to pick one, I don't know which one would be better since they both have flawed advantages - year first only really being advantageous for allowing misusing of text data fields or programmer laziness in computer systems whilst day first only being advantageous in immediate transfer of date information where it gives the possibility of using a shortenned date, something which is but a tiny gain in terms of time or, if in a computers system or written form, storage space.

It's really not a hill worth dying on and I only answered your point because you seemed to be confusing how comfortable it felt for you to use one or the other - a comfort which derives from familiarization - with there being some kind of general cognitive advantage for using any order (which, in my experience, there is not).

You're confusing your own familiarity and experience with a general human rule.

My mother tongue (Portuguese) has the same order when saying numbers as English (i.e. twenty seven) and indeed when I learned Dutch it was jarring that their number order is the reverse (i.e. seven and twenty) until I got used to it, by which point it stopped being jarring.

The brain doesn't really care beyond "this is not how I'm used to parse numbers" and once you get used to do it that way, it works just as well.

As for dates, people using year first is jarring to me, because I grew up hearing day first then month, then year. There is only one advantage for year first, which is very specifically when in text form, sorting by text dates written in year-month-day by alphabetical order will correctly sort by date, which is nice if you're a programmer (and the reason why when I need to have a date as part of a filename I'll user year first). Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don't need to say the rest since if you don't it's implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now "let's have that meeting on the 10th" June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)

Personally I recognize that it's mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don't think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.

"X years, Y months, Z days and 1 second"

"X years, Y months, Z days and 2 seconds"

"X years, Y months, Z days and 3 seconds"

"X years, Y months, Z days and 4 seconds"

"X years, Y months, Z days and 5 seconds"

"X years, Y months, Z days and 6 seconds"

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