Anything can technically kill anything if you are pedantic and creative enough. But at that point every statement becomes useless. Especially when a work of fiction is concerned.

Yeah, approaching these things with stringed logic breaks them usually. Same goes for vampire reproduction for example. If they turn the people they feed on, how come the world isn’t filled with vampires by now? There should be exponential growth in the number of vampires. Or Dracula needing to sleep on sacred home soil. Does it have to be from his exact crypt? How does he know the limits? Could he dig 1000 meters down and the soil would still work? How does a new vampire find their home turf, if they don’t have a family with a crypt?

You can go on endlessly poking holes, but that just takes the fun out of it. A good level of suspense of disbelief is always needed to enjoy those stories.

Dracula cannot be killed by sunlight. At least in the Bram Stoker novel. He’s out and about during the day quite a bit. What sunlight does, is keep him from changing shapes. Same for garlic, crucifixes and holy water. He can’t stand them and they weaken him, but nothing in the text says they would be fatal. Silver isn’t even mentioned.

You’re right and it depends largely on the framing. In a different setting I’d probably be for such a system of trust, in an Ivy League school my cynical view of it just seems more realistic to me.

The people who are studying at Princeton get told they are supposed to be the better than the others, are under constant pressure to perform and in an overall highly competitive environment. This is not an environment that builds trust, in my experience it builds distrust between competitors.

Trust to me should ideally be fostered in a system that encourages a collaborative environment, in which the students don’t surveil each other, but work together to achieve their goal of learning.

Short answer: yes!

This is all new to me and fascinating. If someone knows more, please correct me.

The way I understand it the system relies on students swearing on their honor not to cheat and then a system of self supervision (aka snitching). There is an honor committee that consists of students who make sure no one cheats, and who investigate cases where it is suspected. Additionally there seems to be a culture of snitching on each other, should anybody break code.

I guess this presupposes a culture of immens pressure and a zero sum game where collaboration between students is unthinkable because your peers are made out to be your direct competitors… sounds toxic as hell to me.

Always feel conflicted blocking guys like this… I wanna keep seeing them so I can downvote, but they also are just fucking annoying and toxic.

I hope they are planning on giving the room some sound treatment. Their square box rn is gonna fuck with the sound so much that they won’t even notice the fancy gear that they have.

I feel like there were already plenty of lines crossed. What makes you think they wouldn’t this time?

I personally know a few people who do similar stuff or use it as therapist. It’s anecdotal of course but I don’t think many people using AI for personal connections and interactions is very surprising. Before AI people used chat boards, blogs, social media and google to talk about and commiserate about their problems, now it’s AI. There was an “AI” called Eliza in the late 60s and people already were using that as a therapist and attributed intelligence and real emotions to it.

This whole thing says more about the availability and demand for real human connection and therapy than it does about the individuals who use it.

This is a frequently repeated quote attributed to the late philosopher Frederic Jameson. On its own it doesn’t make a statement about capitalism or what it is at all. (If you wanna know more about Jamesons theories on capitalism you can read about it in his books)

Jameson’s quote points out that people often find it easier to picture possible world ending doomsday scenarios, than it is for them to think about alternatives to living in a capitalist world to try to avoid these scenarios.

You can even test this yourself. Ask people around you about the end of the world and many will point out reasons like climate change, demographic changes, environmental destruction, pollution, world wars, nuclear holocaust, asteroid impacts (shoutout Roland Emmerich) and even biblical scenarios for an eventual end of the world as we know it.

But ask them if they think there are other ways to live, so that those things won’t happen and usually they will just give you a version of “this is just how things are, not much you can do about it” or “the world could be different, but there is no use in trying because this is just a utopia and I have no idea how to change stuff anyways”.

Regarding your last paragraph, imo this kinda misses the point. I agree, there are structures that exist parallel to what most people consider capitalism, but ask people in most self described capitalist societies and they will not really recognise the difference and will just see it as an anomaly at best.

Btw, this is all coming from a European perspective, albeit heavily informed by US media.

Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.

And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…

That is the German name for flea markets. It’s when people sell old stuff they don’t want or need anymore in their garden/some square/the street.

Guess the creators are Germans…

Great image, love the vibe.

The jackdaw I’m really sure about, they are everywhere in that region.

Thanks for the praise and advice, it’s really appreciated! This image is basically not cropped at all, so unfortunately there is not too much I can do to try and reposition the rock (at least if I understand correctly what you mean). I also agree, tho focus is unfortunately a little off, but that’s just how things go sometimes.

Thanks, the compliment means a lot to me. The big one is a jackdaw, the small one I’m not too sure about…

Edit: On second look it’s probably a finch ;)

You inspired me to post my own image that I took there last year ;)

Shot this on a Canon R7 with a 70-200 Lens at Piz Pordoi. There were quite a few birds around and those two lined up almost perfectly.

Happy to hear some criticism or advice if you got any ;)

Sasso Pordoi? It’s such a beautiful area!

I agree with your comment, even though I have no idea on the technical aspects. What I can weigh in on is crisis management, especially communication.

Boeing needs to take control of the situation and actively start communicating and showing that they are working on fixing this thing. In Situational Crisis Communication Theory you would call it a rebuild approach. They tried denial, they tried downplaying, it’s not working. A rebuild strategy is usually the last resort, as things like admitting your mistakes and fixing them are rarely appreciated by investors. Furthermore it’s usually a huuuuge cost to do a recall on that scale. But Boeing need to show the public that they are actively working on improving the situation, to earn back their trust. So at least a partial recall should be considered.

You’re exactly right in your first paragraph about the news. The media and the public are very sensitive to Boeing quality issues rn. These articles won’t stop unless one of three things happen. Either Boeing gets their shit together and gets some effective crisis management and communication done, the company goes bust, or something else turns up in the news that replaces this. The third option will be the most likely, but it will also haunt them forever. It’s like that exploding galaxy note 7 situation. There were articles about that for every new generation of Galaxy Note, despite Samsung doing pretty well in investigating the issues. And while the following Note phones sold alright, the whole thing was a significant loss of trust and money for Samsung and enabled competitors like Huawai to catch up.

What they do right is having a duopoly with Airbus, and great military contracts. So investors know that even if things are shit rn, they will probably get better again.

Furthermore, while I agree that Boeing probably will not go bankrupt over this, the valuation sometimes is not a great indicator of what’s going on internally. Enron was worth over 60 billion. Half a year later they were at zero. Now I’m not saying Boeing is nearly that bad, but they are in some trouble for sure.