AbouBenAdhem

Couldn’t you theoretically do the same thing by tracking someone’s eye movements while they’re typing on video chat (if they look at the keyboard while typing)?

I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)

It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.

Instead of an invisible fact-checking team, give them each a laptop (or phone) so they can do their own fact checks, and make the screens visible so we can see what sources they use.

What about a vice-presidential debate—is that still in the works?

They don’t mention any kind of control—I guess an appropriate one would be having a human interact with the participants one-on-one to see if they were as effective. (Although even if they were, the chatbots would likely be easier to implement in practice.)

The underlying fallacy, IMO, is that people think the purpose of elections is to send a message to the government, instead of choosing the government (and that all political problems can be solved by sending the right message).

The best way to approach an election is to determine the most likely scenario in which your vote would actually decide the outcome (which in practice means a choice between the two frontrunners in a FPTP system), and then consider what difference that would make in terms of actual policy (rather than symbolism).

And recognize that this alone won’t fix all the problems with government—that will require other types of involvement beyond voting.

I think the fear that their children might end up like Elon is the thing persuading many people not to have kids to he first place.

Homer’s Odyssey.

Most modern adaptations present the stories Odysseus tells while visiting the Phaeacians as if they were the actual plot—but Homer’s audience would have known Odysseus as a notorious liar and trickster and wouldn’t necessarily have regarded his stories as true even within the context of the frame narrative. Homer’s epic focuses as much on the parallel stories of Telemachus and Penelope—I read the underlying story as their struggle to untangle Odysseus from his own web of deceptions and fantasies and bring him back to reality.

Morocco is currently the only African nation with an operational high-speed rail system.

I would have thought Egypt would be the perfect country for high-speed rail, with practically all of its population living along one line.

I think there’s a part of our brains that treats these stories as fiction—in particular, the kind of folk fiction used to reinforce community mores. The strength of our reaction to such stories signals how strongly we support the standards, not necessarily what we think should be done in real life to those who violate them.

They’ve been overstepping enough on a regular basis for the last fifty years—the real problem is that they’ve subverted the “reform” process so that reforms that seem adequate to the general public get neutralized or twisted to work in their favor.

That’s why you have more-experienced reform advocates eventually pushing things like “defund the police”—they may be shooting themselves in the foot in terms of popular perception, but it comes from a long history of frustration with lesser reform efforts.