Totally Human Emdash User

There are so many different competing apps and discord copies that have risen and fallen, it’s hard to really get attached to any that have little movement in fighting the network effect.

In other words, you are saying that there is too much discord in this space?

Some people are just nice by nature.

That seems like an awful lot of work when I can telnet into a public NetHack server from anywhere.

Ah, I was not paying much attention to the distinction; my bad, then.

Building on what you said, I think that the sum is actually pretty significant if you think of it as being roughly $100 million per person, and then multiply by the number of people hurt by the supposed “Autopilot” who now have incentive to sue.

It is not clear to me why archive.today is so important given the continuing existence of archive.org.

The fact that I have to use a more complicated tool than cd.

But how does changing the current directory backup your files???

I prefer to think of it as my carbon supplement—given that I, like my fellow human beings, am made of carbon!

How much success have you had with that approach?

FYI, the article was presumably taken down because many of the quotes turned out to have been fabricated, and they said they were investigating this. (I don’t think that they are trying to cover up anything, just that they have not gotten around to written an official response yet, given that this is a recent development.)

That is so cool! Thank you for sharing this. 🙂

If you live in upstate New York, are you Mohican?

It is worth noting that this paper was submitted in October of 2024, so it predates the current administration.

Something that both Israel and the U.S.A. have in common is that both have been militarily dominant for so long that they have grown to believe that they can use the military as a universal tool to solve all of their problems.

(I feel the need to point out that I once knew some Israeli Buddhists, and they were not at all happy with what their country is doing, so it is important to remember that the country is not a monolith.)

If you live in the U.S.A., are you Native American?

I had already made essentially this point earlier in another comment the day before in this post. The only way in which I have changed my position since then is that I now take the thought experiment a little more seriously as a thought experiment, rather than it merely being a useful vehicle for women to express how unsafe men make them collectively feel.

Perhaps you might consider that you yourself should put a little more thought into your posts, rather than making poor assumptions about other people.

It turns out that modern software supports something called “Copy and Paste” that makes it easy to insert an em-dash whenever—and wherever—you want.

I think that you are reading way too much into my whimsical injection of polar bears into the picture. 😆

Having said that, there was an element of my position that was sincere, which was that it should technically matter what bear you run into. However, MagicShel has changed my mind on this with the following comment above:

Without wading into all the technicalities, could we perhaps agree that if you have to say, “what kind of bear tho’,” that we are already in troubling territory?

Of course, all of this to some extent is beside the point because the important thing is not whether the thought experiment is technically valid or not but why women respond to it the way that they do, because if they feel that a random man is likely to be dangerous enough that they would prefer a random bear—and unfortunately violence against women is prevalent enough that this is not such an unreasonable reaction—then that reveals a societal problem that needs to be addressed.

Oh, wow, that is actually a really good point!

Me bringing polar bears into the thought experiment was intended as a (really stupid) joke, but I had nonetheless taking seriously that technically it should matter what kind of bear we are talking about. You’ve demolished that angle with your comment, though!

The thought experiment already has a random element in it because the risk depends on exactly which man or bear you ran into in the woods, so it is intrinsically statistical. Thus, I am not fundamentally changing the nature of the thought experiment, only extending the distribution of bears to include polar bears.

This is, again, necessary to account for the fact that soon our forests will be invaded by polar bears due to the scourge of global warming. 🙁 Worse, although they rarely attack people now, the times when they do so are usually when they are nutritionally stressed, and that is likely to be increasingly the case as they migrate south in desperation.