Last weekend I finished off a carton 3 weeks past the "best by" date. They were still good, and tasted the same as any other normal egg. Not farm fresh, but fine. They last a lot longer than the date on the carton says.

I think it works pretty well. Any tool will have good aspects and bad aspects, and its functionality will only be as good as our ability to make use of the good aspects while limiting the bad ones.

Humans benefit from fire because the good aspects of warmth, light, and cooking all vastly outweigh the bad aspect of the danger of catching on fire, which can be mitigated relatively easily by not bringing flammable things near it. If we ourselves were highly flammable, fire would be far too dangerous to be useful.

The obvious AI metaphor points out how, just like paper beings covered in gasoline are weak to fire, human beings are weak to a friendly voice speaking with confidence, and will succumb to it just as quickly if exposed. Any benefit it might have otherwise been able to give is outweighed by the danger of our natural affinity for believing what is told to us by a trusted figure and stubbornly treating it as undeniable fact for the rest of our lives.

I'm saying the bad aspects of AI outweigh the good. I left out listing any good aspects of AI because I don't know any. The comic's version of Prometheus is a metaphor for the tech billionaire, claiming that he's done this amazing thing for the benefit of the people, but from his action of plugging his ears, we can see that he knew how his "gift" would be received; he, like the tech billionaire, clearly has his own motivations that he's passing off as charity.

It's left ambiguous about whether he's evil or just ignorant, which is itself a good mirror of real life, where we can't tell if our overlords are stupid, or are actively planning out the downfall of civilization as we know it. Do they think AI is just a tool, and it's our fault for being so susceptible to its bad aspects, or was it purposefully designed to exploit them, and the "just a tool" excuse is just them passing the blame? Are we being purposefully led off a cliff, or are we simply following a blind leader to the edge?

The gasoline is ambiguous as well - are these people naturally covered in gasoline, as we may be naturally susceptible to AI and its hallucinations, or were they covered on purpose by someone to prepare them for the fire, as we may have been prepared to accept misinformation online well before AI hit the scene? The comic leaves off any mention of punishment from the gods, maybe to indicate that, like the tech billionaire, the governing body meant to keep them in line is in on the scheme. The very fact that both this comic and the real-life situation it's parodying have the same questions is indicative of the quality of the metaphor.

Well, the story of the ugly duckling is significantly older than Hollywood. The "looks don't matter" archetype has always been "it's okay if you look ugly now so long as you become beautiful in the end."

I've never applied for a job on linkedin, but when I'm looking for work I'll get all my experience and education info in there for recruiters to see turn the "Open to contact" banner on. I usually get a bunch of people contacting me, and secure a position from there. My job does work with a very specific program, though, so I might just get a lot of people contacting me because it's easy to search for that one keyword.

Bud, what? Women constantly have to find relevancy in posts about men. It's been the default for nearly every culture since the beginning of human history. The only double standard is the universal double standard that people like you couldn't see this whole time, and is only just slightly starting to close.

Any post you see without a woman complaining that it's fallen on them to once again find relevancy in a post that isn't about them is an example of them utilizing their own lived experience, rather than being outlined as the intended audience by the poster. So, yes, they're following the mentality I described for most posts.

Yes, our world is constructed in certain ways, but that's only because we decided to construct it that way. If we as individuals within that world decide to build a new construct, or to view the current construct in a different way, we can make bubbles that aren't constructed in the same ways. Eventually those bubbles can coalesce into something large enough to rival the default construction. There's no point in only seeing the world as we built it without also seeing that it can always be renovated.

Most of your post centers around the question you posed: "what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half?" The simple answer is that we often only know our own experience and the experience of those we're intimately familiar with. I'm a man, and I know many other men, as I spend most of my time around friends of the same gender. Like most men, I'm less close to women outside of those who are in my family and those I've dated. I can speak confidently about men in society in ways I simply can't about women. Therefore, if I talk about something that I can tell affects many men, but I can't reliably extrapolate that effect to women, I word my remark along the lines of "this affects men" not to exclude women, but to leave the discussion open for women to impart their own experiences that I'm unaware of.

I pose my own question to you: why assume mentioning one party excludes the other when we have perfectly good language to do just that? If we want to exclude women, we can use words to exclude women. We would say "this affects men, not women" or "this affects men more than women." I wholeheartedly believe that someone who doesn't include women in their comment is doing so because they're simply deciding not to comment on women. It need not be more complicated than that.

I'm a guy, but I was born with a hand anomaly that I was mercilessly teased about when I was a kid. I had this realization when I was in kindergarten, and it gave me the confidence to be who I want to be for the rest of my life. It is indeed a powerful mindset if you can actually believe it, though it does make you a bit of an outcast when the other kids realize teasing doesn't work on you. Even the kids that don't tease their peers will think you're weird for not reacting to it.

It's illegal to claim they consented because it's impossible by the current societal understanding of what it means to consent for them to have consented. A 14 year old can understand what they want, which used to be good enough to be considered consent, but now that we know their brains aren't finished developing yet, we don't consider their ability to understand the repercussions of the decision to be on the same level as someone who's fully an adult, and thus they are incapable of consent.

It's like how a 2 year old will want candy all the time, but you shouldn't let them have it every time they want it because their brains aren't developed enough for them to fully understand that it's not good for them. You have to be capable of understanding the long-term implications of eating nothing but candy, and a 2 year old literally can't do that. They might know it causes tooth decay and weight problems, but they don't know exactly what that means because they lack the brain power to process the amount of background knowledge they would need to understand it.

On the same note, a 14 year old might want to have sex, but they don't understand all of the implications of it, even if they think they do. An 18 year old might not know the implications either, but we have to make a cutoff, and by 18 we assume enough people should be capable of consenting that we give the right to everybody. At 14, though, it's likely that nobody that age can truly understand it enough to be considered capable of consent by the modern definition, and even if some can, the effort to parse it out just so some rock star can fuck the few that are capable of consenting is obviously not worth the effort.

Just so we're clear, I'm not saying that we need to somehow prevent 14 year olds from having sex with one another - while they still aren't capable of understanding the implications of their actions, we can at least be reasonably certain that they both consent to the same lesser degree as one another. The issue is when one person has the higher mental capacity and the desire to take advantage of the lower capacity of their target to convince them to have sex, otherwise known as statutory rape, the topic of this discussion.

People acting in bad faith will misinterpret even well-specified statements if they think it will benefit their stance - we shouldn't assume that being more specific in our language will allow us to win debates against people who have already decided that their own opinions are correct, and won't listen to anyone saying otherwise. Those discussions will always devolve into the nonsensical associations you described. Instead, we need to be as specific as possible about what we know, while simultaneously leaving our statements open when there is information left to be gathered and added in, and we need to teach those who interact with us in good faith that that is the reason for leaving things unspecified.

To use your example, we have red cups and blue cups. Nobody knows anything about them, but then my friends and I all grab several blue cups and find that they're all hot. We say "careful, the blue cups are hot" not because anyone should assume the red cups aren't, but because we don't currently know anything about the red cups. You can infer that the red cups are hot because they're alongside the hot blue cups, or you can infer that the red cups aren't hot because they're a different color, both of which would be informed, potentially correct assumptions, but until someone touches a red cup, nobody knows one way or another. That is the point of using a combination of specificity and ambiguity - it allows people to quickly understand what you know, as well as what you don't currently know, and allows space for new information to be added as we work together to figure out the truth of the situation.

Bad actors will misinterpret statements regardless of their specificity, but our behavior is not focused on them; our behavior is intended to work well together with the good actors. Tailoring your statements to address people who have decided to be antagonistic doesn't work, because people will always find ways to be antagonistic. Instead, tailor your statements so that people who have decided to listen with the intent to work together to come to an understanding will be able to do so most effectively.

Making a post about women doesn't - and shouldn't - mean you're excluding men. I feel like excluding should only be defined as an active attempt to prevent people from associating with the post, rather then a failure to include men and enbies and every other gender in existence in the body of the post.

I feel like leftist spaces have gotten a bit too expectant that everything relevant to an individual must be explicitly stated to be as such, rather than encouraging people to simply find relevancy even in things that are not explicitly made for them. I'm a guy, and when I read this I felt a connection with it - I didn't even think about how it only mentioned women, as if that should mean it can't apply to me.

I would rather instill a mindset in all people that would allow for situations where, for example, a man can find relevancy in a post about women, rather then try to get all people to only share content that specifically addresses who all is intended to be able to relate to it. A woman saying things are hard for women isn't making any comments about whether or not it's hard for men, just like a black guy saying black lives matter isn't making any comments about whether or not all lives matter.

Reports say your bank account may be emptier after blowing all your money at the strip club.

I got a free banana from the store! All I had to do was give them $10 first!

The right one still looks plenty creamy. You could easily just bake it for a bit with some extra cheese and maybe some cracker crumbs on top, and it'd be just as good as the left.

Eh, all it really implies is that the US has no idea how wars work, regardless of whether they result in a win or loss. Assuming we know anything at all is giving us too much credit.

No, no, if we just keep talking about the Epstein files they'll release them in their own for some reason! There's no need to get violent, that doesn't solve anything! Ignore the fact that our country was founded through violent revolution, and has a constitution specifically amended to allow another with the understanding that it would be necessary one day!

Gotta stave off scurvy, though lemons and limes are more effective.

Forgot to tape one of those big box fans to the side.

I mean, I got everything I wanted, and now I don't want anything, and it's great. Now I can pick out any transient want that comes my way, from something small like baking a cake to something larger like starting a new hobby, and I never have to worry that its getting in the way of me pursuing my actual life goals, since they're already achieved. Seems to me that the pursual of ever higher goals is why we have the problem of the rich hoarding wealth - because it's never enough for them to have "enough" and be done.

Not really "turns out;" even our founding fathers understood that democracy isn't flawless, and that one day we'd need another revolution. This is why the second amendment was added in the first place, they just didn't anticipate how pacified we'd become as a people in 250 years. Not entirely our fault, of course - there's a reason "violence is never the answer" was repeated to us ad nauseam for generations. I imagine many parties were held in various mansions when they realized we actually believed it.