Peter-Andre

@somegirl Lol! Reminds me of this one: Edit: Just so it's absolutely clear, this article is a 20 year old satirical article by The Onion.

@Lyubov It might even be this decade if we're lucky.

@mandyjw Ha ha, yeah! It happened to me to, so I wanted to kill the rumor before it got to spread.

I hope this will make them lose a few more elections in the near future. That would be great.

Just for clarification and to avoid misunderstandings: That is not a picture of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I made that mistake earlier. But it's actually Mike Pence and his wife. I'm not sure what his previous banner picture was.

@Nyseto That's just a convenient excuse. They would have done this anyways.

That would be hilarious because it would make Trump the only president in US history to lose the popular vote twice and also get impeached twice.

Really hard to tell sometimes.

There are so many issues with this picture.

@PepperBlossoms By the way, here is a clip of Noam Chomsky that you might be interested in. He talks about how language primarily seems to have evolved for creating and interpreting thought as opposed to being efficient for communication.

@PepperBlossoms Really? Doesn't that get awkward around others? I sometimes start talking out loud to myself when I'm walking outside and sometimes I just notice someone is around me and I immediately shut up and feel embarrassed. I would be happy to talk out loud all the time because that the most natural way for me to think about stuff, but I feel like I would just look like a fool if I did it around others. We live in a society and all that. That's interesting. I wonder if that correlates in any way to people's behavior and interests. How does a person's preferred thinking method affect them? I'm also wondering if this has changed over the past couple of centuries with most people now being educated and literate. Maybe that's had an impact. I should also mention that it's not really either/or for me. I use a little bit of both methods, often at the same time in tandem, but I would say that thinking with words is my predominant thinking method. It varies a bit, usually there is no voice at all, just abstract words and their meanings. The sound of a word is not an essential part of the word so I don't have to bring the sound into mind to think a word. I also don't see words written visually in my mind as I'm thinking them, it's more abstract than that. They usually have no sound or visual appearance. This also applies when I'm reading, particularly when I get into a flow state and immerse myself in the text. But if I start listening for my inner voice, my mind starts giving each word a sound. I'm more likely to hear, or even just feel the sounds of words if I start paying more attention to the individual words, but if I'm more focused on the general message or idea, and focus less on the actual words, there stops being an inner voice. If I want to the words to have sounds, it helps to slow down the rate at which new words appear. So the inner voice is there if I want it to be, but usually it's all silent. And even when it's there, it's often pretty muffled and vague. It's really hard to explain this stuff, so sorry if this is confusing or doesn't make sense to you. I believe this is a pretty hotly debated topic among linguists. I'm not sure if there is a mainstream consensus on it at the moment. I'm pretty sure Noam Chomsky has written extensively on the topic, so you might want to check out some of his works. I doubt we'd be thinking with animalistic sounds if those sounds didn't have specific meanings encoded within them. I think people probably started thinking through language as soon as we developed the capability of using more sophisticated language. Personally, I tend to use a hybrid of many different thinking strategies together for different purposes, but I use language so much of the time that it's difficult to imagine what it would be like if I couldn't think through language at all and had to rely solely on other thinking methods. Keep in mind that not everyone spoke like Shakespeare back in the day, if that were the case, his writings would be completely ordinary and anyone could do what he did. I don't really think language has gotten much simpler since then, in fact, I would argue it's been getting more complex in recent times in the sense that aspects of formal literary language have increasingly made their way into spoken languages. From my own personal experience, it seems that younger people generally use much more abstract concepts in their speech compared to older people, who seem to talk less about abstract philosophical concepts and more about simple everyday things. I think this might be related to the Flynn effect, which has shown that people have generally been scoring higher and higher on IQ tests over time. However, it's not necessarily the case that people are just more intelligent today, but perhaps just more used to thinking in more abstract ways. Here is a quote from an interesting article I just found on the subject: Here is a link to the full article: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FLYNNEFF.html

@aurum I believe they're generally just pushing for a healthier work environment with better working conditions. They focus especially on fighting against harassment and discrimination in the workplace. They also want workers to have more of a say in how the company is run and make sure it behaves more ethically instead of just maximizing profits, particularly when it harms the environment. Here is a link to their official mission statement: https://alphabetworkersunion.org/principles/mission-statement/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employees-union.html This seems like really good news! Do you guys think this will be the start of more unions in the American tech industry? What do you think will be the future of this particular union?

No doubt

@PepperBlossoms This is such an interesting topic, and one that I've been thinking about from a very early age. I've always thought mainly through language, but unlike many others, I've never really had an internal voice that I can hear. I just think the words, not the way they sound. I also assumed that this was the way everyone else thought until I spoke with my mother about this. I asked her if she also thought by thinking words, but she said no and didn't even realize that was possible. I even tried to explain to her how I did it, but she wasn't able to do it, although she didn't really seem to make much of an effort to do it either. Could also just be that I explained it poorly, not sure One of my younger sisters, on the other hand, seems to think the same way I do, so I think it varies a bit from person to person. I remember just intuitively learning to think this way. I don't even remember exactly when I started doing this. I must have been a toddler back then. An interesting little side note is that when I was younger I used to think in Norwegian (my native language), but I later transitioned over to English, for various reasons. I've also gotten into a habit of talking to myself out loud whenever I'm alone, and that is how I do a lot of my thinking and contemplation.

The problem for Democrats is that they have to win both seats, while Republicans only have to win one to keep control of the senate. This means that there are three scenarios where Republicans win control, but only one where Democrats do. However, the Democrats seem to be slightly favored in both races, so I don't know exactly how to calculate their odds with this in mind. Any mathematicians here?

@aurum It seems like it's just a humble start. I believe their intention is to expand the union over time. If I understood things correctly, they wanted to have a robust and loyal base to expand on instead of creating a much larger union without the same level of loyalty and support, so we'll see how that plays out for them. The union is also just a smaller part of a push for more activism within Google. Here is a relevant quote from the article:

Sounds like one for the strange loop thread

@Preety_India I agree. I think the problem is that some people's views are so far on the right that anyone left of a moderate right-winger is seen as being on the far-left. They think that their views are just moderately right-wing, whereas in reality, they are actually quite a bit farther than that, and when people call them out on it, they get surprised. They have a warped perspective.

Sure, people like to make friends with people who they have things in common with, especially if it's something rare, like a mutual interest in polyrhythmic synth jazz. Edit: I looked it up and found a paper on it if you're interested in delving deeper into the subject: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5491604/

@Jodistrict That's well put. I have the same issue with other popular figures like Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones. They're not popular for having profound, groundbreaking knowledge. They're just popular for having people that are willing to listen to them because they want someone who's articulate with good rhetorical skills to validate their preconceived opinions.

Here is a pretty good critique of Jordan Peterson written by Nathan J. Robinson, published by Current Affairs. It's long, but brings up a lot of valid criticisms of Jordan Peterson and his work: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve It's a good explanation for why Jordan Peterson is not really worth taking seriously as an intellectual.

@nitramadas You might not be aware of this, but Leo is actually from Russia originally (but moved to the US with his family at a young age), so I'd be careful with making such assumptions about his family.

Regarding whataboutism: It's actually a pretty useful term for a common phenomenon. It's when someone brings up a non-sequitur as an argument. This is often done to change the subject, shift blame or move the goalposts in a discussion. In this case, the point here was that Trump is largely responsible for the number of Covid deaths in the US as a response to you saying that the Covid deaths weren't really his fault. Now, I agree that he's not responsible for every single death from Covid in the US, but the number of deaths is a lot higher than it should have been because of his incompetent and irresponsible response. It's very easy to point to Trump's handling of the Coronavirus epidemic and find obvious faults, and we should criticize him for it. But that does not mean that we can't also criticize other countries. Of course we can, but we don't need to criticize Sweden every time we criticize Trump.

@PurpleTree That seems like whataboutism to me. There are absolutely things we can blame Trump for, such as downplaying the virus and spreading misinformation about (among other things) mask wearing. There would absolutely have been fewer deaths in the US if he actually handled it responsibly. And me saying that doesn't mean I can't criticize Sweden's response as well. Of course I can, but the point here is that Trump made the US's Covid response far worse than it should have been. Had someone like Hillary Clinton been president now, I would bet that there would have been far fewer deaths in the US.