Same moneys, fancier tools.

One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and being a monster wasn’t even his choice.

Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.

The only “The Onion” rather than “Not The Onion” part of this is the idea that they would announce it.

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

Little kid: “Why is there a bright ball of light in the sky?”

Me (thinking): “Oh, shit…”

Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.

I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.

I live in a 10 million people European country which is the leading cork producer in the World

Also the first European country to explicitly decriminalise drug consumption.

Those two things are unrelated.

That’s about as strong an “argument” as saying that the NAZIs were socialists because their party name included the word Socialist.

That’s a good point.

Ever since I’ve became more aware of those I’ve found myself doing similar kind of “disarming” of such falacies when I notice I’m using them.

My point it’s that it generally feels like swimming against the current.

I’d say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.

It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy) because they reduce the time and energy expediture, sometimes massivelly so.

Personally I try to “balance” shortcuts vs actual research (in a day to day sense, rather than Research) by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I’ll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it’s not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it’s well worth investing days into researching it when you’re buying a brand new car or a house.

What’s interesting is how, even when knowing these biases, one has a tendency to often have and display at least some of them.

(At least, that’s the case for me)

Any process unless specifically adjusted to compensate for it (and the adjustment itself is a distortion of it and has secondary effects) will be affected by the environment it is working in.

So specifically for Capitalism and the practice of Science under it, funding and the societal pressure on everybody including scientists to have more money - as wealth is a status symbol in that environment - are he main pathways via which Capitalism influences the practice of Science.

It’s incredibly Reductionist and even anti-Scientific to start from the axiom that environment does not at all influence the way Science is practiced (hence Capitalism is unrelated to Science) and then just make an entire argument on top of such a deeply flawed assumption

You had a cardboard box?!

Luxury!

When I was young …

You’re supposed to use baby talk with them from about 15 years old and until they’re 18, to really piss them off.

Germany, Britain and the US supporting a White Colonist State mass murdering the locals whose land they’ve been stealing and who they claim are violent and savage.

We’re basically back in the late 1800s.

Having run out of convicts, Russia had to turn to the inferior option of using North Koreans for its cannon fodder needs.

It’s called Stockholm Syndrome: people without options often end up genuinelly believing that the guy who tortures them only twice a week rather than daily is “deep down a good guy” and even “is our friend”.

Yeah, but unlike Biden who is a Fascist-just-not-at-home-(yet), she’s an actual Leftie, which comes with the whole “Nobody deserves to be murdered because of their race (even if they’re non-White Muslims and the killers are White Jews)” mindset.

Capitalism is the Sociopath’s Ideology and hence it will always promote the use of any power advantages to exploit the less powerful, with no consideration for the fellings of others or harm done to them, for fairness or for morality.

Which is why it had to be something outside Capitalism to push for fairer treatment of POC and even then every single day in America it’s an uphill fight for those amongst them who remain disadvantaged: that previous exploitation of them as powerless due to their ethnicity meant that when the discriminatory treatment on the color of their skin was reduced (not eliminated, but certainly comparativelly much reduced), they ended up poor people and hence still the victims of discrimination and exploitation, because the poor too are less powerful than most and hence exploited to the max under Capitalism, and as an overexploited group it’s incredibly harder for them to pull themselves out of poverty or help their children do so, which means that situation is entrenched.

In my own experience learning Dutch when living in The Netherlands (were, like in Denmark, almost everybody speaks good English) you learn very little and very slow with formal lessons and a lot very fast in situations were you have to manage with the local language (basically sink or swim).

I spent years living there with only basic Dutch and then ended up in a small company were I was the only non-Dutch person and the meetings were conducted in Dutch and within 1 to 2 months my Dutch language skills had taken a massive leap forward.

I also get similar effects with other languages I speak when I go visit those countries: persist in talking to the locals in the local language and that will push your language knowledge up.

That said, at the very beginning language lessons will give you the basic structure for the language, but for going beyond the basics I find that just being forced to use it yields the fastest improvements.

(Might wanna try to start watching local TV at some point too)

By the way, if the Danish are anything like the Dutch, they’ll pick up from the accent that a person is American and switch to English. Do not follow them! Keep talking in Danish even if it feels like it’s pretty bad and hard to use. When I lived in The Netherlands most of my British acquaintances had really poor dutch speaking skills even after over a decade there because of this effect of people picking up their accent and switching to English.