Zompist Bboard Again

We're all carbon based here, right? we're, for the most part, water, sugars, aminoacids and lipids put together all fancy like. This is because carbon, unlike many other molecules, is great at polymerizing: that's what we call it when atoms get into these big, long chains that can all sorts of atoms...

Other way round. They have [s] but not [z].

lmao you're right.

yeah, I don't think there is *any* variety of spanish that has /z/ as a distinct phoneme from /z/, and I've only ever heard [z] from young colombian women.

at the risk of sounding all philosophical, dear noob, ask yuorself: what does it mean to have z but not s? right? cause there's a phoneme that you have that you want to call z, but also you know that you have no s phoneme: this means that the phoneme in question is typically [z], no? but since there...

sure, but there's perfectly good systems to do that (hawala or gold) that don't require thousands of GPUs solving pointless math puzzles so hard they output the energy of a small meteor impact every week. no, really, a single transaction takes as much energy these days as cooking a bowl of soup. muc...

It seems likely she would have starte done, yes. the americans start a new war every couple of years: I don't think there's been any us president who has not started a new military adventure in a while since Carter. Clinton was, iirc, pretty hawkish... moreso than Obama, according to npr. I don't th...

make it design your powerpoint presentations. come to think of it, I should do that. it's true that, between blockchain and genererative language / image / whatever models, only one of the two has actually proven to be useful. I've heard of people automating their job with AI, I've not heard of bloc...

but does obamacare like... make it so healthcare is accessible? I've heard healthcare costs in the us, even with insurance, can easily go into the tens or hundreds of thousands of usd.

But I wonder if in practice it doesn't just make it so the two big players end up being the same. Not that you need dhondt for that, look at the yanks. Well, from an anti-Capitalist view Dems and Reps may look like the same, but if I had to choose between De Trumpis or whoever the Dems will come up...

Yeah, this is probably more of a problem in parliamentary systems <or in systems like Peru, where parliament can shut down the government and the government can shut down parliament... I mean, have you seen what's going on up there?>. But I wonder if in practice it doesn't just make it so the two bi...

Oh, absolutely, my half-imagined future polity is something i'd definitely not want... but we paint blizzards even when we'd rather walk under the cool autumn sun, don't we?

....the four major parties in the legislature are the Socialist Worker's Party, the Conservatives, the Libertarian Party and the Aryan Brotherhood, all within a percentage point of each other? (Though of course an exaggeration, it's not that far removed from the political landscape here in Europe.)...

The idea is to arrange matters so there's a majority. In practical terms I get the point of having strong majorities and stable government. Though on philosophical grounds I object to the idea of giving a government a strong mandate when there's clearly no consensus on what should be done. But havi...

Computer programming never really felt like talking to a machine to me, rather like building a machine or conducting a chemical experiment. absolutely, I have this same feeling: much more like plotting up a big rube goldberg machine, much less like a conversation. then again, jupyter notebooks feel...

So I've got to wondering... well, the title of this thread: on the one hand, sure, programming languages use english lexicon, right? it's print, not imprima or imprimir. I know a few <not many> programming languages and I've noticed they're all very similar, if not in syntax, in some deeper structur...

Well, I deliberately left out the Rights section, so in the parts that I did write, there's nothing mandating capitalism, or preventing the Assembly of Groups from passing a law instituting some form of socialism. If I had written the Rights section, I very definitely wouldn't have included a blank...

it's very much the constitution of a liberal, capitalistic, western nation state, formally speaking. and, on the one hand, this is probably by design but I have the feeling that something as big, ambitious and novel the UE would be like a new type of polity? or is this just America conquers the worl...

the civil registry of spain -country i am legally a citizen of- got my name right, and my papers are in the name of my father. I recently asked for a spanish passport [for many reasons, but mostly the economy here is going to shit, my own economic situation has been deteriorating, though i'm not in ...

True... i guess it's good utilitarianism: what happens as a result of the policy? then it's not such a good policy... either way, in favour of it, it's better the least influence any religion gets, seems to me.

Gives me contradictory feels, man. Like, on the one hand, just let people wear the rag on the head if they want to, right? but, on the other hand, in my own country religion getting its dirty little paws in politics is a big problem, and we even have weird traditions such as the president giving a y...

The liberal approach sounds good, but I think it's not controversial to say that we wouldn't take that approach towards, say, genital mutilation, right? cause social pressure, familiar coercion and so on are certainly things that happen... but, ultimately, wearing a cloth over one's hair isn't so se...