flomble

5 ms·

1.
by flomble 6y ago
This is the crux: does it count as stealing to accept the offer of a contract which causes the offering party to lose money? My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not
2.
by flomble 6y ago
"Slander" entails making false statements, whereas this was just a statement of fact, free even of condemnation. People who read it make their own value judgments.
3.
by flomble 7y ago
> Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verb
4.
by flomble 7y ago
It's strangely refreshing to see this particular criticism of the Enlightenment; I'm much more accustomed to hearing criticisms from the postmodernist direction. I disagree with your statement in a previous post that their argumen
5.
by flomble 7y ago
> freedom of press and similar rights are a uniquely western phenomenon that are ... derived from christian values This is incorrect. Europe is quite unique in that since the advent of Christianity there has always existed a church separ
6.
by flomble 7y ago
I think the problem here is that you're not seeing that 'politics' encompasses an incredibly broad spectrum of things, and the only time that something is labeled 'political' is when it reaches a certain level of co
7.
by flomble 7y ago
I find the point about "ugly" syntax interesting, because I'm generally quite indifferent to that sort of thing, but my experience tends to indicate that it's very important to people. Facebook created ReasonML, which is
8.
by flomble 7y ago
Yes, absolutely! In particular there's evidence for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...
9.
by flomble 7y ago
The idea is that if your sexuality is not innate, then it can be changed. There's long been a desire to prove that homosexuality is genetic in order to counter the claim of bigots that they can turn people straight through shame and ab
10.
by flomble 7y ago
I read the statement and to me, the future progressive seemed to be the most apt way to phrase it. When I tried to find examples to illustrate why, it occurred to me that the future progressive predominates when delivering bad news. For exa
11.
by flomble 7y ago
This sort of construction is reminiscent of topic-prominent languages, e.g. Japanese, but English is a subject-prominent language and phrasing it that way would sound awkward to a native speaker.
12.
by flomble 7y ago
This and the comments below are missing the source of this disagreement. The way that conditionals are most commonly structured in English has rapidly shifted over the last 10 years. The simplest way to explain is with examples. Old style:
13.
by flomble 7y ago
Sounds like Yes-And ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and... ), accepting the premise and expanding on the joke. Tell your wife you're using a proven comedic technique.
14.
by flomble 7y ago
The idea of a system to which causality doesn't apply is interesting. My intuition is that that doesn't make sense, and my secondary intuition is that the first intuition is unjustified. I'd say that the way I conceived of it
15.
by flomble 7y ago
"Empathetic understanding of others." Empathetic understanding of others should make one hesitate to tell them that being primarily focused on doing what they're passionate about is "self-centred crap", rather than
16.
by flomble 7y ago
OK, so my initial response to the title was anger; the video which is the substance of this post, however, has a much less contentious message. Your "passion" is the intersection of what you love and are great at. The concept of &
17.
by flomble 7y ago
I want to jump in because while I agree with the separateness of the ontological from the phenomenological problem of free will, I also want to point out it's not necessary to have a determinist stance to point out that ontologically,
18.
by flomble 8y ago
Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person". You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass
19.
by flomble 8y ago
> You either like strongly typed object oriented langs or you don't. Sorry, but this argument doesn't pass muster anymore, when there are abundant examples of strongly typed object oriented langs which don't exhibit these
20.
by flomble 8y ago
It's confusing to use the hypothetical of 100% in one sentence and in the next acknowledge that the optimal rate of taxation for maximising revenues is not at 100%. The question is whether tax revenues could be raised by raising tax ra
21.
by flomble 8y ago
It's not circular because "freedom" can't really be used to refer to price (e.g. "freedom of beer"), so it actually disambiguates. I wouldn't personally default to assuming a political motivation for the w
22.
by flomble 8y ago
Good question. If the recognition of others is a deciding factor, then Taiwan was previously a nation (when its government was internationally recognised) but no longer is, which is a strange conclusion. Partly, it depends on whether the de
23.
by flomble 8y ago
With respect to Taiwan: what is it that constitutes a nation, if not the common belief of its people that they are a nation, combined with the reality that they are under the control of a government which they recognise as their own?
24.
by flomble 8y ago
I apologise for the generalisation. That was too broadly and absolutely worded. But I would stand by the idea that "people on the spectrum are more likely to have difficulty intuitively learning social conventions". Is that still
25.
by flomble 8y ago
> No wonder people leaning towards the Asperger/autistic spectrum of brutal honesty would state that; such is their nature. Actually, it is not "their nature". The nature of people on the spectrum is to have difficulty und
26.
by flomble 8y ago
When I picture a person in tech successfully running for office, I imagine precisely someone who has excelled at "profitably dismantling what's left of the old paradigm". Unfortunately, technical ability, business savvy, abil
27.
by flomble 8y ago
>nebulous Delightful. I think you get right to the reason for the distinction in language. The two things weren't unified in your conception until you were inside a cloud, which until recently was impossible except by climbing to hi
28.
by flomble 8y ago
Portugal is constrained by international conventions on drug policy (largely pushed by the United States). Legalizing the production or distribution of drugs would engender serious adverse consequences, so they've tiptoed as far up to
29.
by flomble 8y ago
The interesting thing is that in Haskell, the equivalents of Python's `A(B,C)` and `A(B)(C)` are identical: `a b c`. This is because of currying: you're allowed to supply one argument to a function at a time, and you get back a fu
30.
by flomble 8y ago
The implication being that the only reason I could disagree with the idea that there is no human nature is that I have never encountered critical theory, structuralism, or postmodernism. Actually, one can acknowledge that we are all immerse

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