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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • I understand where you’re coming from, and it wouldn’t apply in this specific context (where locals had rejected the poor boy), but in a general sense, the idea is to partner or invest in such a way to enable locals to lead the change efforts, or at least have a significant stake and voice.

    In the business world, there are often silent investors who back entrepreneurs. Their financial input make a business possible, but leave the operations to the entrepreneur. The investor backs the entrepreneur, and they both profit.

    It’s a different model and it takes more time and effort to find local partners to build up their capacity over time, but enabling locals will get stronger long-term results for the recipients of charity. It’s the difference between providing food packages to people and giving people agricultural tools to provide food for themselves in the long run. Obviously, in a situation of dire need, providing food is an immediate need, but only providing food instead of also providing tools keeps the recipients in a dependent situation. If they’re dependent on foreign charity forever, it’s just another form of control and colonialism.

    What this woman had done, by caring for this poor boy, was long-term investing in him. Now he has an education and will be able to work and care for himself.








  • If I know someone is a terrible person, I can’t enjoy their work. Besides not wanting to financially support them, I like to put myself in an author’s, actor’s, writer’s shoes when I watch/read stuff.

    That said, I don’t purposefully look into people’s lives; I’m not into celebrity gossip. But sometimes a person is such an outlier or just so vocal about it that it’s unavoidable.






  • These people would be surprised how many people have preserved multiple portraits of Hitler and hidden away in their homes and shops. I’m talking about stamp collectors. There were very many stamps issued with Hitler’s gave on them, and very many casual to dedicated collectors own at least one.

    Having a shrine to Hitler is not fine. Owning historical items in context is totally fine. Authentication and appraisal is a normal part of insuring any kind of collection.

    The real issue is not that a politician has one Hitler-related item amidst a wider collection of rare, historical items, but that someone who is independently wealthy and can spend millions of disposable dollars on a hobby is representing “the people” in a time of rising unemployment, affordability crisis, housing crisis, cuts to essential services, etc.





  • Truly, I don’t understand why, but there are fully grown adults who believe that anything an LLM says is true. Maybe they think computers are unbiased (which is only as true as programmers and data are unbiased); maybe its the confidence with which LLMs deliver information; maybe they believe the program actually searches and verified information; maybe it’s all of the above and more.

    I know a guy who routinely says, “I asked ChatGPT…”, and even after having explained how LLMs are complex word predictors and are not programmed for factual truth, he still goes to ChatGPT for everything. It’s a total refusal to believe otherwise, but I can’t fathom why.



  • To be pedantic, Ake was there, too. (She said the Doctor and Sam were not the only ones who spent 17 years on Kasq.)

    But to be not pedantic, I thought the exact same thing. What kind of resilience building experiences could she have had in that environment? Falling and hurting her knee? I feel that one is the biggest tantrums (some) kids have are over food, and Sam doesn’t even eat. Reading does increase people capacity for empathy, so there is that opportunity for her, but even so, there’s a vast difference between sympathy and resilience.

    I hope they actually fill this in in a reasonable way. Even though this episode was beautiful in some ways it still had some glaring problems.