Solved or not, computers already smoke even the best chess players in the world. It feels like both of them think people can still compete with computers at chess? What a weird argument.

Your original comment is, “Artificial sweeteners are arguibly often worse than sugar.” Literal copy and paste.

I suppose you could be pedantic and say “arguably” is doing a ton of heavy lifting (the same way that it would be in “vaccines arguably cause autism”), but I hope you’ll forgive me for reiterating that it’s a braindead take.

Was my initial stance of “never found anything” a hyperbole? Sure. Not much of one though.

But your stance of “there are a hundred studies saying X for every one saying Y, but because there are a small handful saying Y we shouldn’t rule Y out” probably isn’t the hard scientific truth you think it is. It’s basically the same logic as being anti-vax.

And much like being anti-vax, it’s examining aspartame in a vacuum, ignoring the fact that it’s an alternative product to something that is factually shown to be more harmful, even in the best case scenario.

E.g.: Are vapes bad for you? Sure. Are they worse than cigarettes? Absolutely not. So even though the ideal is to probably use neither, I’d much rather somebody vape.

So this idea that “aspartame has, in a handful of studies (that go against the grain of the majority of studies) sometimes been shown to have negative effects, therefore artificial sweeteners are worse than sugar,” is a braindead take.

I usually don’t bother answering a Gish Gallop, but…

1 - They didn’t complete the study, it was only 13 people with an existing history of mental disorders

2 - They basically said it’s so within the tolerances that it’s probably just chance, and that regular soda did as bad or worse

3 - Could only get the abstract, and it says nothing about their findings

4 - Combines aspartame and acesulfame-K, so it’s hard to tell from the abstract. The methodology doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope for it though.

5 - Seems to be the same study as 4 (same group of French people, same author), but for cardiovascular disease instead of cancer? Which, yeah, fat people drink diet soda, have heart disease, and get cancer more than thin people. I’m not sold on their methodology

6 - It’s a rat study. Again, I can’t see anything but the abstract, so it’s hard to say. But any study that doesn’t do a comparative analysis against regular sugar is suspect in my book

7 - Like 2, this one says that it’s probably just chance in the conclusion.

And look, if this was some new chemical on the block, maybe I’d agree that it should have some more testing. But it’s aspartame. It’s been being actively studied since 1965. It’s had a lot of negative PR backed by Domino (et al), which has created a huge amount of public concern. And will all of that, the studies still come out a hundred to one that there’s not really any link to anything.

Yes, you can find studies that say “aspartame scary.” But they’re basically like all the ones you linked above. Dubious. Most even admit they’re dubious (as seen above). And almost none of the ones that push the “scary” rhetoric compare the effects against regular table sugar, which is also heavily linked to increased cancer/heart disease risk. So it’s not even intellectually honest, even when their numbers happen to random out to slightly agreeing with them.

Not all artificial sweeteners are the same, so it’s borderline meaningless to say we “know so little” about them.

Hell, aspartame is literally the most studied food additive in the history of the FDA, and has never been shown to have any adverse effects in any reputable study.

Ah, fair. I didn’t catch it was median. I just assumed average.

Goes to show I probably shouldn’t comment after midnight, lol.

It does seem like 1 white billionaire living in Massachusetts might account for a good bit of this disparity.

I agree that we should have empathy. Is also agree that society has made it difficult for poor parents to properly parent. I also agree that the way kids act is often a product of their environment in a myriad of ways, and that should be taken into account when working with them.

However, just because I understand why little Timmy stabbed his teacher in the eye with a pencil doesn’t mean that the teacher just has to shut up and take it. It doesn’t mean that little Timmy doesn’t need to be removed from the general population for the betterment of the group. I can feel bad that circumstances have lead little Timmy to where he is without removing the consequences of his actions.

Just because the child molester was molested himself as a child doesn’t mean we have to let him off the hook for molesting other kids. He should go to jail. Even if we 100% understand how and why he ended up the way he did.

Should we improve societal safety nets and norms such that people have better home lives and less kids are acting out their traumas at school? Absolutely. But that can be true at the same time as the absolute need to strictly enforce discipline in schools and remove those people who are a danger to themselves or others. If you try to fix the disease by simply ignoring the symptoms, it only gets worse not better.

Agreed that we largely probably aren’t going to come to an agreement as we just have fundamentally different opinions on this.

I do think your first point here about this enabling corporate espionage is a bit nonsensical. That’s so far afield as to be borderline unrelated. It’s very “if we let gay people get married what’s next? People marrying horses???” Like, it doesn’t make sense on its face. (And to be clear, so that I’m not misinterpreted again. I’m not saying that gay marriage is bad because then people would marry horses. I am again using this as a parallel example to the point you made, as it makes just as much sense.)

Vis-a-vis birtherism. Do you know how many people I had tell me that, “if Obama was actually a citizen, all he would have to do is share his long form birth certificate. The fact that he won’t do that one tiny simple thing is clear evidence that it doesn’t exist. The fact that you can’t see that is absolutely asinine, and the only reason I think you might deny it is that you are being willfully obtuse and arguing in bad faith.”? It was a lot. I’m from a red area. There are a lot of morons. But you can see how that maybe has some parallels to the people who are saying, “all he has to do to prove he’s not dead is share a photo (oh, wait, he did, it’s probably shopped)… I mean video, yeah, that’s what I said. And the fact that he doesn’t put out a response to every moved goalpost is a clear indication he’s actually a corpse.”

For the last part, I will say, you’re conflating a lot of things here that aren’t the same. It’s a very shallow understanding of how the cyber field works. It’s like saying “Trump gutted the Navy’s budget, and now people wonder why they’re not able to catch any murders in Miami? Come on! Don’t you see how these are related?” Yeah, I mean, they are both related to use of force. They are both kind of water related. But they really don’t have anything to do with one another.

Our country doesn’t have any capability right now to fight online scammers. We have military cyber. We have DoD cyber personnel. But that isn’t their mission set. They aren’t working it. FBI cyber is the closest thing we have to this, and they are woefully unequipped to go after international organized cyber crime. They deal more with online drug and CSAM trafficking. We need to address this issue.

And as I say, recruitment drives to bring in cyber professionals as government employees have failed miserably. The government can’t pay enough, and there’s no real way to fix that.

My cherry pick was federal (non-military) employees. Which he raised by 4.6%, in line with Biden. The first three links you picked were about private sector workers, which as nothing to do with the EO in question. The last is for military personnel, who are handled differently. But the raise for federal employees was a good thing. Just like it was a good thing every time Biden did it. He could have chosen to say eff’em, and not given them their raise, but he didn’t. And that’s a good thing. All the links you posted I fully agree are bad things. But unrelated bad things.

My point (to reiterate for the 50th time) isn’t that he is good or does good things generally. Just that if you kneejerk react with “that’s a bad thing,” even when he’s just doing things that are traditionally viewed as good under better leadership, then you’re just playing team sport politics, not actually paying attention to the reality of what’s going on. And if someone’s not paying attention, it’s hard to take them seriously.

ETA: You also seem reasonable. I think you may be a bit in the tribalism weeds, but I appreciate that you’re willing to engage. As for down votes, I looked back through and I’m pretty even. My worst spread is on the first post at +4/-13, which isn’t too bad. Especially when I’m taking a stance that goes against the group think. I’m not sad about it. I’ve got plenty of net positive comments elsewhere to balance it out, lol.

I realize this answer is probably super unpopular, but I do think some sort of mandated national service would help a lot.

Not military, but similarly structured. Required two year tour building roads, fighting fires, caring for the elderly, etc. You get moved away from your hometown and you get put with a group of people from all across the nation. You lose some of your rights and freedoms for a time. You are compelled to work and disobedience can be directly dealt with.

I think a lot of the problems of the modern age are due to a rise of cultural hyper-individualism and a breakdown of a unifying cultural identity. And while this doesn’t immediately fix the current problem in our schools today, I think it’s the first step towards rebuilding society writ large, and addressing some of the more fundamental issues driving these problems.

Yeah, basically. I mean, I think there’s some version of a easier pipeline to alternative schooling with work based learning or something.

But honestly, I think the bigger thing is the ability to enforce in-class discipline.

Corporeal punishment is obviously not great, but I will say that back when the teacher could hit you with a stick, people were a little quicker to behave.

That’s hyperbole obviously, but like, teachers now are told to only use positive reinforcement. No negative feedback whatsoever. You can’t meaningfully enforce boundaries or consequences. Is it any surprise that kids are going off the rails?

I think it’s also more symptomatic of a collapse in home life. I’m not arguing for, like, “a traditional model of the family,” or something, but kids these days are lacking structure in the home. Kids aren’t being parented, and as such, are basically feral. Which isn’t a new issue obviously. The Simpsons made the “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” joke over 30yrs ago. But it’s getting worse.

I don’t know what the solution to any of that is. I don’t think the government should criminalize bad parenting I guess. But I think it starts with empowering teachers to make disciplinary decisions without fear of breaking the law or being sued.

I mean, I’m happy to take a gentleman’s bet that this will be a net good. I agree it depends on implementation, and we’ll see what that looks like. Honestly, the realist interpretation is that 5yrs from now it’s tied up in the courts and has gone nowhere. That’s really the most likely outcome.

I brought up birtherism as an example of obvious nonsense that Obama handled in the right way by not engaging with. I, in fact, brought it up because it obviously had no truth, and the fact that you could read what I said in any other way speaks to either intentional bad faith or exceptionally poor reading comprehension. My point was that McConnell was following Obama’s lead in not engaging with conspiracy theories, as it only hurts to do so.

You keep not engaging with the example good thing I gave. Again pointing to bad faith engagement with my argument. The example “good thing” is raising the wages of federal employees. That is good. That has been my one example of a good thing. You say experts disagree with me? Find one expert saying that raising the federal pay scale was bad.

I said that the new cyber EO could be good, depending on implementation, but that I’m tentatively hopeful.

And everything in the bottom of your post is about cyber warfare, which is wholly irrelevant to the conversation at hand by any metric. The military should not be going after scammers. The military is not for hunting criminals. The war in Iran has nothing to do with scamming grandmas. These are completely separate parts of the government that have nothing to do with one another. This is an FBI program to hire cyber bounty hunters.

And I’m not saying private industry is inherently better. The government just has trouble hiring technical experts across the board because the governmental pay scale is very rigid. Top cyber experts can easily charge $250k+/yr. What GS level do you offer to make it where you hire competent people? There isn’t one that matches industry. If you are a government employee you are on a G scale (or are an executive level appointee), no exceptions. The government doesn’t have the flexibility to pay experts enough to fill these roles.

Would I welcome a sweeping change that allows the government more flexibility in how much they pay people? Absolutely. But that’s a major overhaul of how federal employment works writ large. The current solution is butts in seats contractors who work for private companies doing the work. That’s happening now. This is just an extension of that.

This is obviously bad, but I do think it’s reflective of a bigger problem that needs addressing.

10% of teachers in large school districts report having been the victim of a physical assault. 25% report being the victim of a theft: https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/student-violence-against-teachers-large-us-school-districts-prevalence-and-0

Violence against teachers is very much on the rise, and while I don’t think shock gloves are the answer, I do think we can’t just close our eyes to the fact that there is a problem this is trying to address.

We need to empower school districts to get students who are a danger to themselves or others out of the classroom, and empower teachers to actually maintain classroom discipline. There’s been a trend away from accountability and consequences in public schooling that has engendered chaos, prompting escalations among security staff like this.

There’s a difference between being morally against the Nazis and being the kind of person who refuses to drive on the Autobahn because the Nazis built it. You can say the Autobahn is a good road system without endorsing the group that made it or the methods used to do so.

I don’t think they’ve been especially hiding him any more than Obama was hiding his long form birth certificate. He’s been discharged to his home. He’s had multiple communications at this point. But every time he sends a message or uploads a picture, people call it AI or his handlers doing it. There’s no point in engaging with conspiracy theories because every time you jump through a demanded hoop they just demand another one.

I didn’t say Trump increasing the federal salaries made up for anything. And we agree that he’s a disaster. I in no way am saying that the administration is good just because they did one good thing. I’m just also willing to acknowledge the evidence of my eyes. They did a good thing. It in no way diminishes all the evil they’ve done. But if you can’t be honest about when they do a good thing, you’re not engaging with reality.

With regards to the actual bill at hand, I’d like to see the government scale up its in house cyber capabilities as well. That is something they have a poor track record of however.

Congress is broken at this point. You can’t get it to pass a bill that says the sky is blue. That doesn’t excuse all the executive orders, but there’s a reason every president since Obama has leaned so heavily on them. Congress can’t figure out how to pass even the most broad appeal bills anymore. That’s a whole separate problem that needs fixing.

And to be clear, these are not military operations. These are not valid military targets. We don’t mobilize the army to target theives. We don’t send in aircraft carriers in response to fraud. These are criminal investigative proceedings. This is the same as a police department hiring bounty hunters. Maybe a little scummy. Maybe something that I’d in general be against. But in this case, where we have a known criminal element that the police aren’t equipped to deal with it, maybe hiring some bounty hunters is the best solution. It’s certainly better than continuing to do nothing.

You want to read through this thread and see what percentage of people think it’s a joke? https://vger.to/piefed.social/c/politicalhumor@lemmy.world/p/2235683/10-more-days-until-mitch-mcconnell-is-allowed-to-die

Some do certainly, but there’s a preponderance of people who are very much convinced we were gonna get an announcement on 8/3 that he was dead or in a coma.

My point with that wasn’t to defend McConnell. It was that people wanted him to be dead/braindead so badly that it made them accept things at face value that were almost certainly not true.

He’s 84. Regardless of any official statement or anything, the wildly most likely thing that happened was that he fell. That’s what 84 year olds do. They fall. That’s what I assumed happened before we had literally any information, and then every single piece of information since then has pointed to that being the most likely explanation. The only evidence for stroke/dead/vegetable has been “because I really want it to be true.”

So you think it was a bad thing when Trump signed an executive order raising the salaries of all the federal government employees by 3.8%?

Look man, maybe you missed the literal hundreds of posts a few weeks ago saying that they’re secretly hiding the fact that he’s dead and that they’re going to announce it at 12:01 on August 3rd. It was “established fact” that the pictures of him were photoshopped, and that his wife was writing all of his messages for him, and that he was either already dead or in a vegetative state. None of that was true.

Should he retire? Obviously. Is he able to do his job right now? Obviously not. Is he gonna return after the summer is over anyway? Probably. He’s been going blank on camera for years now. He’s been unfit for years now.

But that’s not what people were claiming or what I was referring to. People were spreading obvious conspiracy theories that they were “weekend at bernies”-ing him to get past some imagined deadline. If need be, I’ll happily scroll back a few weeks in any politics related community and get you a few hundred people saying exactly that.

I don’t think it’s defending the man to say he’s not dead or a vegetable. He’s an abhorrent human being, but so are a lot of people who aren’t dead or vegetables. And denying reality by saying they are isn’t exactly the flex you seem to think it is.

Sure, it’s a misleading label, but lets not pretend anyone is gonna accidentally eat 100+ calories of it.

Let’s make a liberal estimate. Lest say it’s actually 3cal/serving as listed. Let’s say you spray it for 5s (way more than I’ve ever sprayed a bottle of PAM). That’s 60cal for the entire sheet pan of whatever it is you’re making. If you’re gonna eat the full sheet pan of cookies you are baking I hate to break it to you, but the 60cal of cooking spray probably isn’t moving the needle. And that’s the most liberal application I can think of.

Have you used aerosol cooking spray before? Are you using enough to make a puddle in your frying pan? Cause if so you’re using it wrong my guy.

This is a spray oil though. You wouldn’t use it for salad or frying. You’d do a brief spray on a waffle iron or cookie sheet to stop stuff from sticking.

I agree 1500 servings seems like too many, but not wildly too many. I doubt I spray more than half a second of oil on a cookie sheet before dropping cookies on it. 800+ sprays seems perfectly reasonable. And at that scale, the actual amount of calories is a little immaterial.

No one is layering this into their food. Aerosol spray oil is more cooking tool than food you eat.

Look man, you sound like one of those people who for weeks assured me that Mitch McConnell was a dead man. Fully a vegetable. No question, and that I was an utter fool for saying it probably wasn’t true. That of course it had to be true. Just look at the track record of this administration. They lie all the time. Of course he’s a vegetable.

Turns out, it was all conspiracy theory nonsense.

I literally linked an executive order at the top of my last post which was this administration doing the right thing. You didn’t engage with it because it was unimpeachably good. His track record isn’t 0% unless you want to refute the one I linked literally last message in this thread.

It’s not good. This administration has been overwhelmingly bad. But if your desire to hate this administration makes you engage in doublethink where you have to call things evil that in literally any other circumstance you would call good, you probably need to take a step back.

I’m not saying not to be wary. I’m not saying not to have a critical eye. But this isn’t bad on its face. Maybe it will be later, but as a first step, it’s one in the right direction. Nothing about it so far is something to hate on. Maybe that will come later, and if so I’ll gladly jump on the dogpile.

But as written, so far, it’s good. And even in a worst case, it will survive into a new administration who will administer it better. That’s still something good to be looked forward to. So far little to no action has been taken against this issue, so I look to any positive motion as a net good, even if it’s helmed by crooks for now.