GET THE ROUNDIE!

The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

The issue with online voting, no matter what you do, is that someone can force you under threat of violence to vote for a specific candidate, and watch to make sure you do it. Complete privacy in the voting booth is paramount to ensuring that everyone can vote freely.

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.

So what you’re saying is: We have a small sample of unreliable evidence that this thing may be absolutely detrimental to the developing brain. Thus, we should assume it’s fine until we have more reliable evidence. Did I get that right?

I’ve found chatgpt reasonably good for one thing: Generating regex-patterns. I don’t know regex for shit, but if I ask for a pattern described with words, I get a working pattern 9/10 times. It’s also a very easy use-case to double check.

I believe there’s a quote by “Taco” in"Better call Saul" along the lines of “I love robbing criminals, because they never go to the cops”

I actually hadn’t realised that yet, thanks for pointing it out, I thought I was going crazy with the amount of people suddenly supporting Russian invaders

Lol at the people downvoting this like that isn’t exactly what happened: NATO had wanted Finland to join for years, but they didn’t want to join, for fear of provoking Russia. Putin shows the world that appeasement doesn’t work, and Finland joins in a heartbeat.

Yeah, the famous fascists that are actively working hard to join the EU, which we’ve seen so clearly the past decade just loves having fascist states in its ranks. You know, the fascist government that had an actual election as late as 2019 where southern and eastern regions largely voted for the person that won.

Notice how there was actually a change of power in that election - a known hallmark of fascist states.

Yup, who would have though that Russia invading their neighbour suddenly caused the entirety of western Europe to start the largest investments in military and weapons manufacturing since the cold war?

Looking at the results of this war so far (major expansion of NATO in the North, massively increased military spending in all of NATO, massively increased size of the Ukrainian military), you would almost think Putins goal was something completely different than preventing NATO expansion and “de-militarizing” Ukraine.

It’s almost like the best way of preventing your neighbours from building huge militaries and joining alliances is by cooperating with them and helping them feel safe, rather than threatening, coercing and bombing them.

It’s sad, but countries like Russia show us very clearly why nations that want peace need to prepare for war.

I would love to not need to spend a cent on our military, or weapons manufacturing, but the hard reality is very clearly that if we aren’t capable of mass producing weapons, we’ll likely be invaded and killed.

That’s a major part of the issue Europe is facing now: We’ve scaled down weapons production since the 90’s, and now that we suddenly need millions of artillery shells it takes time to rebuild production capacity.

Hopefully Russia gets the picture soon, that we’ll keep scaling up until every Russian invader is gone, and we can go back to not spending money on war…

Wow, I Wonder why everyone that’s left in the regime that deports and persecutes dissenters says they are in support of that regime?

Ukraine never invaded anybody. Giving them weapons so they can throw out the people invading them, taking their land and molesting their people is a good thing. Russia has clearly shown that the only way to get rid of the plague that is Russian soldiers on foreign soil is to kill them. That’s why we have this war that Russia has chosen to engage in, and which Russia can choose to withdraw from at any time. That’s why Russians are dying by the hundreds of thousands.