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[–] 127 points 1 year ago
[–] 97 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Young earth creationism and flat earth

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Young earth creationism

    What I hate so much about that, is all the "evidence" just points to some near extinction level event that humans worldwide suffered.

    And obviously for that to have happened, it means there had to be a lot more people.

    Like, entire cities/tribes/whatever were wiped out everywhere, but some had individuals survive. Which explains how "the last two people" could have kids who just happen to later have spouses and kids of their own without any explanation for where the new people came from.

    They were just outside of walking distance.

    Over the 300,000 plus years anatomically modern humans have been on Earth, that's probably happened a bunch. Hell, we've had 2-3 actual ice ages over that span.

    We don't know shit about 250k of those years.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    From what I understand (and as a Christian), it's those Christians that take a literal reading of the Bible, not understanding that those parts of the Bible aren't meant to be read literally but are about the WHY of creation rather than the HOW. It's about WHO God is rather than how He did things.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Either that or Genesis is just an explanation made up by a people group that had little to no idea how anything in the natural world works lol

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    If you squint real hard, Genesis is a tale of stellar and planetary formation. Then comes evolution. Give the first bits a read! Yeah, evolution is mixed up a little, still surprisingly on point for a bunch of Bronze Age sheep herders.

    Then there's a second tale, in the same short book. What a clusterfuck. But I can still see some real history in it. If I squint real hard.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Squint so hard your eyes are closed, maybe. Any overlap between biblical verse (translated through at least two languages) and modern scientific understanding is coincidental.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    What's weird is the young Earth thing is relatively new. Before the 1850s or so, you would be laughed out of the room. As ignorant as we were, naturalists were having a hard time trying to figure a world that was millions, or 10s of millions, of years old. Churches, of any stripe, sure as hell wasn't preaching it.

    And here we are, with the flat Earth idea being even newer.

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  • [–] 92 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Child labor.

    Despite progress, child labour still affects nearly 138 million children worldwide

    https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-protection/child-labour/>

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Affects is such a strange way to put it. Like, "they caught a case of child labor."

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    I get you, but how would you phrase it? I expect, BTW, that it might be intended to cover both the extreme of children forced to work in a sweatshop 12/7 and children who have to help their parents with some subsistence tasks.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Those two should not be counted in the same category.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Maybe not, but the boundaries can be fuzzy, and statistics tend to get built on technical language that may not treat the fuzziness the way you or I would agree with. So I get the urge to use vague language like 'affects' or the difficulty in finding language that is general enough without sounding mealy mouthed.

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  • [–] 65 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Tips. How ridiculous is it that restaurant owners guilt us into paying their employees salaries because they are too cheap to pay them a living wage? How unjust is it that we chose to tip the people who bring our food from the kitchen to our table and leave the hundreds of other service workers without tips?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    A better understanding will flow from knowing that federal minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.13 per hour.

    So there is specific legislation in place to abuse restaurant workers, restaurant owners take full advantage of this.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Here, the minimum wage for servers is $17.20, same as any other worker.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Billionaires, government officials owning stock, private campaign finance, the two party system, racism, sexism, health insurance, private equity, for profit prisons, for life Supreme Court appointments, Nazis, Zionism, Wall Street, unregulated banking,jobs that don’t pay a living wage, unaffordable housing, student debt, the police state and lobbyists

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  • [+] 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    The complication is mostly determining what actually counts as income and the insane amount of deductions and credits you might be eligible for.

    For most people a simple standard deduction is very easy to file, and can be done on paper in 15-30 minutes. But I agree that this is still too complicated.

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  • [–] 60 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Racism, but here we are in 2025 it being more prevalent than ever.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Racism will never die as we evolved to be tribal. Best we can do as a society is make it unacceptable. Which was happening when I grew up in 70s/80s America. Now we've backtracked and gone all-in with dog whistles.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    That's not true. Sure, we have tribalism, but there's no reason it has to be about race. It could be about religion, politics, country of origin, and countless other things

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Sports. Watch the crowds in some European soccer or basketball matches and you'll see how we managed to keep tribalism alive and well, but (mostly) harmless.

    (You need stadiums that can handle tens of thousands of people bouncing on the stands for ninety minutes without collapsing, though.)

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    In reality, it's not purely about race. Most racism isn't between groups that are culturally identical, it is between groups with significant cultural differences. Race is just the most obvious attribute used to identify the other group.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Lol

    Speak of the devil and the ones equating skin color with culture will appear

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Bring any nuance to a charged topic and the ones who think in black and white terms will come to misinterpret what you said in the least charitable way.

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  • equating skin colour with culture

    Not equating. They said that people of an ethnicity are often also of a culture common among those of that ethnicity.

    I'm in Costa Rica, and people are likely to (correctly) assume that I'm a foreigner here because I'm white.

    It's not equating. It is, however, a way to tell what is likely.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    the republican party in the us.

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    [–] 23 points 1 year ago
    [–] 21 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Kinda surprised we eradicated smallpox, yet polio still exists.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It’s only a handful of people in the mountains of Afghanistan; there’s a lot of fear around letting westerners in with needles.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Don't worry, the anti-vaxxers are going to give it a comeback.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago

    Private health insurance.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Every single fucking isp (at least in the states): nah

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Really? Both my home internet and my mobile phone internet give me ipv6 addresses.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    My cellular yeah, though I don't consider them an isp since most throttle or deprioritize data after ~50 gigs. But both isps I've had, and all of the friends who I've helped with networking stuff (basically all of them), IPv4. Sometimes, some janky 'conversion' at the modem that leaves them with just v4 anyway. That was with their isp-supplied hardware...

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago
    [–] 19 points 1 year ago
    [–] 78 points 1 year ago (15 children)
  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Easy to say, but I'd argue it's baked in.

    “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

    ― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Religion isn't necessarily the problem, people (as usual) are.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    All religion is baseless bullshit, so yes, it is problematic in itself.
    It is divisive by nature/design.
    And it is made worse by people abusing it for power over others or discrimination.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say it’s all baseless. It could just as easily be the passing down of allegorical tales — stories seeded by some guiding or controlling force countless generations ago in our collective development. There are even arguments for things like a collective consciousness or sub-atomic networks, suggesting that our linear experience of time might just be a way of processing information.

    Honestly, who really knows? But speaking as someone who has oscillated between Christianity, Buddhism, and atheism in my youth, I’ve come to see atheism as just as much of a limiting dogma as any other belief system.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    After posting my comment, I figured the baseless part might get some critique, but I decided to leave it. I meant it as 'not based in realty or not based on facts', if that helps clarifying.
    Also, if you heap in atheism with Christianity and Buddhism, you don't understand what atheism is.
    Christianity and Buddhism are actual systems of belief, while atheism is simply a lack of belief in any god or deity.
    Anyone who does not believe in some god/deity/greater power, is an atheist. Whether they like it or not, that's what it is. A simple definition about a persons lack of belief. It does not come with any other rules or dogma. No rituals or leadership at all, so it can't be a system.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I wouldn't say I heap them in together. At times in my life I have rejected a belief in anything 'higher', which fits your definition of atheism, although perhaps my mindset was closer to an agnostic atheist stance, which to me is more along the lines of 'I don't believe, but I can't be certain as there's a limit to my knowledge', as opposed to being a strong proponent of the belief that there is nothing beyond death.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Fair point. No one can be sure about there being anything after death. For me it's like the safest and most logical bet that there won't be anything. All other 'options' come across a lot like wishful thinking. No one is going to believe in anything that doesn't fit their own narrative.
    Personally, I would not be able to believe Santa Claus is real, so why would I believe in anything supernatural? I'd rather find answers in science.
    Also, the idea of there being eternal life after death would just terrify me. It would be the most boring and useless way to spend time. It is the notion of my time being limited that gives it value. When time is unlimited, everything loses meaning.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I hear you. But then does the existence of some sort of higher purpose/unknown science necessarily imply everlasting life?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    No not necessarily, but it is the selling point of most religions that I'm aware of. Either eternal life itself or in the form of reincarnation.
    Dying again in any way after our initial death doesn't make very much sense to me and doesn't have much selling power, I'd imagine...
    Anything existing after death just brings way too much fantasy/wishful thinking for me to be comfortable with. I love these concepts in movies or books, but they go straight into the horror or fantasy genres for me.
    There's simply no evidence for anything existing after death. If that changes at some point, then I'd be willing to look into that and change my point of view on it. But I'd be surprised if that happens before my time is up...

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    Coal power plants.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    The oldest two mechanisms of authenticating on credit cards.

    From oldest to newest, they are:

    1. Printed data on card.

    2. Magstrip (which basically has the same data in machine-readable form).

    3. Smartcard chip with contacts.

    4. Wireless.

    The first two mechanisms hand over all the data required to impersonate the cardholder whenever used, which isn't very secure. Yes, there's value to keeping a mechanism around for a while to permit transition time, but we should have had tap-to-pay hardware on PCs and phones and the like a long time ago.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I disagree that we should have a card reader on our computers for payments.

    That is just a way too big of a security concern.

    I prefer something like the Swedish system Swish, you have a separate app on your phone where you can send money to friends and family as well as pay for stuff online.

    Sadly, while Klarna supports Swish, they require the use of a Klarna account to use it, and since most internet shops in Sweden uses Klarna it limits the ability to use it as I want to.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    and with that you need a smartphone, with a google-approved operating system and with it half of the factory bloatware, or otherwise you are barred from paying online, right? that sounds such a good idea.

    no.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I said nothing about the OS on the phone, why would you assume that I like Android?

    I am an iPhone user, but that is beside the point, if Swish and BankID could run on an open mobile plattform, I'd be happy with that.

    My point it to separate the main computer from the payment system while still being convenient.

    I am a bit confused as how you missed that...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I said nothing about the OS on the phone, why would you assume that I like Android?

    that's not what I assumed. I assume that this app would only support the 2 most popular mobile platforms, and that on android, as is tradition with payment related apps, it would refuse to work when it detects that your phone's software has been changed in any significant way.

    if Swish and BankID could run on an open mobile plattform, I'd be happy with that.

    current trend is to make these apps OWASP compliant, which dictates that all apps should at least be an undecipherable, obfuscated black box, and better even make use of the OS's integrity checking system, like play integrity on android.

    My point it to separate the main computer from the payment system while still being convenient.

    I am a bit confused as how you missed that...

    I did not miss that. I was commenting on this, why it would be harmful in today's world.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Something attached to the main computer, but with its own firmware/controls is still far better than having no device at all, and relying on external code for verification. Would a discrete box separate from everything else be better (independent of mobile phones as well)? Sure. But a great step that would be progress compared to the current status quo is what the other poster describes, with logic and chip verification running on a device attached to the device or computer with which you wish to pay.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Does smartcard and wireless actually have an encryption layer of some kind?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'd assume so, but more importantly, for both, there's a cryptographic signature being performed by the card. The credentials never leave the card


    there's a private key on the card, and what goes out is a signature on the transaction, which is useless for doing other transactions.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    On that note, Ben Shapiro as well.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Andrew Tate, though that may be dangerous as he'll probably turn into a martyr.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    There's a good list forming here.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You know, I actually don't think it'll be a good idea to kill people who are only powerful because they can talk. The more I think about it, the more I think they'll be turned into martyrs by their followers. It'll only embolden them.

    So, something that really upsets the world in a tangible way would be...

    Shooting more CEOs. And bankers.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    😬🫥

    I would be inclined to believe you, looking at these protests and manifestations that happened in London after the Kirk shooting. Scary works right now.

    I still want to believe we live in a world where there are more welcoming people than there are hostile people. Otherwise the world is truly lost.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago
    [–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I thought phone numbers and traditional telephone service would be dead by now. Instead, purely internet-based communication services often use them as an identifier.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    telephony only uses a subset of internet things so building just telephone lines is cheaper, which matters especially in the global south

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm no expert on the subject, but it's my understanding that mobile networks are being deployed much more widely in the global south than wired telephone lines, and they're usually internet-capable.

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