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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • We won’t have a clear winner. No matter which candidate “wins”, there will be widespread allegations of voter fraud. There will be protests. Biden will declare a national emergency. What happens after that? I don’t know. But I am prepared for major social unrest.

    A large number of people from both major parties are absolutely unwilling to accept a win by the opposing candidate. I’ve never seen the country so divided.


  • There are plenty of companies that will sell your name, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, marital status, and relative’s names. They obtain the information from publicly sold databases. I had access to one that had all that, plus the registration info for the car I drive, my estimated income, my military record, my driving record, my political party preference, and pictures of my home that had been on the realtor’s website.

    The scary one was when a phone center employee in the Philippines stole my wife’s debit card number and then did two big Western Union MoneyGram transfers to a couple of Filipino men. That means bad actors have access to the credit companies’ databases from which Western Union draws their proof of identity questions, like who holds your mortgage, where you lived when you were 10, and the make/model of your first vehicle.

    If you’re well-off enough to be a financial fraud target, paying a company for identity theft protection is probably well worth it. Put fraud alerts in with all the major credit bureaus too. That usually stops identity thieves from accessing your credit. If you use 2FA with your phone, make sure your telecom provider will not transfer your number to a new device without in-person authorization and authentication.







  • It wasn’t any particular scientific discovery that weakened religion. It was the popularity of science fiction that did it. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” People can now imagine how miracles are done without invoking anything supernatural. We might not have the tech to do it yet, but we have a pretty good idea of potential methods. That has placed a lot of “creator god” religions under pressure. Create life? Tech will eventually do it. Create a world? Sure, tech again. Given enough tech, a solar system can be spawned. Water into wine? We’re halfway there with Kool-Aid. We already have vimanas (those ancient Hindu flying vehicles). We call them airplanes or helicopters. We can destroy a whole city with a single weapon. So why should we worship a supreme being who supposedly did those things?

    Assuming we can conquer poverty, religions that survive will be centered around improving the human condition. Worshipping dieties will eventually fall by the wayside. It will still be a long process. You can’t dispel faith with reason and facts. And people in poverty tend to embrace religion because it gives them comfort and hope that things will be better in the afterlife.


  • Animals were doing it long before humans even existed. Some birds will “bathe” in an ant nest because the formic acid excreted by the ants rids them of parasites. There’s even a word for it - zoopharmacognosy.

    Long before recorded history, people knew what plants were helpful to treat or cure various maladies. Who knows what possessed the first human to chew on willow bark to relieve pain or reduce a fever? The earliest documentation of it was 400 BCE by Hippocrates, but it was probably common knowledge for much longer than that. The Chinese have been using various herbs to treat disease for at least 3000 years.


  • Every time I do a search, the bot usually provides enough info. The problem is that I don’t trust the bot because it’s been wrong before. So I still need to continue the search to find an authoritative answer.

    That’s the problem with bots. If you trust their answers and they’re wrong, it can be a real problem. There was a story a while ago about an Air Canada customer service bot that was giving out bad info about bereavement travel. When a customer tried to get the promised refund, the airline admitted the advice was wrong, but claimed the bot was a separate legal entity, therefore they were not responsible for the advice it gave.