I see this as an energy problem. We have 'unlimited' water from the Oceans, and distillation technology exists, it's just not economically viable (enough) because of the high energy costs of distillation. Elon's solution to this is solar panels everywhere, since they're so incredibly scalable (imagine an automated solar factory). Hopefully this comes to fruition sooner rather than later.
Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?
I heard a water district manager for a southwestern US city once say: "it's easier to move water than people." What if we adapted your statement for what the law actually allows?
> A whole lot of it is water being in stupid places feeling entitled to continue being in a place without the people nearby to drink it.
This implies we should move water to where people need it which is both legal and reflects reality even if it sounds very silly. Physics is even on our side here: water is deposited as snow on mountains where there are few people. It flows downward under the force of gravity to where people actually live. It's a pretty nice natural system to take advantage of!
The details here matter a lot: should we socialize the costs of moving water among people who do not directly need that water? Should people in Seattle pay for people in Yakima to get water? Irrigating dry unpopulated areas is a great way to produce food that is uneconomical to produce in or near cities!
Water management is a complex problem since it's needed for sustaining not just people, but the food people eat. There's no easy switch to flip here and just solve the thing.
>Are you suggesting people are not entitled to live on land they own and should be forced to relocate? Since you've made their land worthless, how are they paying for this new place to live?
Yes.
Or more specifically, owning a piece of land somewhere doesn't entitle you to water and resources from somewhere else. Particularly new development in underresourced areas shouldn't be permitted. But resources ought to be priced inaccessibly high for places where those resources don't exist and certain methods of delivering resources to those places should be prevented.
You want to live in the desert? Fine if you can figure it out. But you're not entitled to the rest of the world delivering food and water to you at unfairly low prices just because you want to live there.
I think you'll find that while those locations are bad, they don't compare to places in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Jordan. There are places easily 100x worse.
Far more fossil fuel is burned in Northern climates (needlessly!) for winter heating than is done for just living in the Southern climates, including A/C.
In California the problem is irrigating water-hungry cattle feed (alfalfa) in the desert. That just grows in the Midwest from rain. But "water rights" means they don't have to pay market price for water, so they waste it on alfalfa because it's a slightly better deal for them.
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry:
"There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."
They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted.
The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.
Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
> Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation?
That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those sources reliable in your opinion?
My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are assuming everyone shares it.
Filtering content for children is not 'banning books'.
By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country, even though it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
This continuous doublespeak is even more humorous considering the site has actual shopping links to every 'banned book'.
Filtering content sounds like doublespeak for banning to me. The title is Top 52 Banned Books: The Most Banned Books in U.S. Schools, how is it that inaccurate?
because that would suggest something very bad is happening in the US and the HN party line is "this is nothing unusual, typical woke [1] panic attack over nothing, now please get back to your HN job of trying to win VC money"
At least in my mind it's unfair because the books are not in any way banned. Anyone can get them. They're more available than perhaps any time in history. The school's decision not to stock them may merit criticism, but the books are hardly "banned" in the traditional sense of the word.
99.99% of all books ever are not going to be available at your local library. But we don't consider those to be "banned" either. Here, the difference is that these books were selected and stocked in the past, but were removed due to political pressure - or these books weren't available, but a ruling from up above blanket banned their libraries from being able to consider them in the first place. It's frustrating to see so many people in this comment section equate these two.
Just because you can find those books online or elsewhere doesn't mean that the rulings to ban them from school libraries isn't about trying to restrict access to that information.
Yes, there a selection, it reflected the previous political power sensibilities, now the current power doesn't like them that much, so they are not selected.
As far as I'm concerned, if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.
> it reflected the previous political power sensibilities
It reflected the sensibilities of the people who were actually running the libraries and whose entire jobs was comprehending and choosing books based on what they know about their field. Now, it reflects the sensibilities of politicians from up above who are likely to know less than nothing about literature, but are important enough to scream "Nonono, you can't just do that!" and be obeyed. It's not exactly a fair trade.
> if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.
Thinking that all politics is categorically bad is a very strange viewpoint that I could never wrap my head around. It's especially prevalent in the US. Politics, the methods of organizing and running society, impacts absolutely every facet of our lives. Not understanding politics and not being exposed to it leaves one with an incomplete view of how humans work, and how to maneuver around human irrationality to get things done. What's worse is that giving people nothing but century-old books will just teach them about what was "current politics" a hundred years ago, leaving people with heaps of knowledge on how people lived and thought in a completely alien world, and no real objective information on how radically different the current day is, and why.
The sensibilities of the people running the librairies are extremely political.
One could argue that since their employment largely lies outside of market forces, they get chosen or self-select for political reasons.
Having the power to chose what should be read and influence children in the direction you prefer is very much a political endeavor, a power that shouldn't be left to anyone else but the parents and whoever they chose can have that power. This should be true until people become fully formed adult, they are not properties/projects of the state, but very much the result of an alliance between two individuals, it seems that people that are pro-governement forget that a bit too easily.
Politics is the realm of feminity, it brings only chaos, bad strategies and poor decision making. Much of the western world is in a bad spot because they have embraced too much politics.
It doesn't look too bad because there are still structures (business, army) that try to tone done politics as much as possible in order to be achieve their goals.
Yes, politics affect life too much and that is precisely the problem, it hilarious that you advocate for it, instead of requiring a system to become less political and more grounded in reality so that it can thrive. There is no functional system on earth that works because of politics, in fact, politics is the cancer that tries to bring down working system for power and gains to be distributed according to the sensibilites of the rulers.
Old books survive because they are ever-green content. They describe human nature and what works/fails. They are usefull precisely because if you read them carefully, you can understand all the problematic behaviors that lead to failure.
Just because we are a more technologically advanced society, doesn't mean we have transcended the bad parts of human behavior. In fact, pretty much everything that makes modern life confortable, happened despite politics.
And now we are falling back into the old ways, with war, unsustainable debts and all kinds of disruptions because we gave in to much into the politics.
The point the OP made was specifically to call out what they deemed as doublespeak of the word ban. I made no comment on why any given book is justifiably banned or "filtered".
> I certainly wouldn’t want my children getting exposed to books that normalise trans ideology, for example.
fortunately "trans ideology" is a nonexistent boogeyman made up by whatever vile youtube videos or FOX news you're watching, so there's no worry about such books existing
The problem is that the definition of "things that are inappropriate for kids" brought up by book-banners is almost always heavily inspired by religion. A book containing graphical violence and sex, like the Bible? Totally okay! A book containing casual day-to-day life, like mentioning in passing that little Johnny next door has two dads? Somehow completely inappropriate.
They never said that. They just pointed out the hypocrisy of the situation, where certain topics normally deemed extremely controversial by those very figures become totally fine if they're brought up along the lines of their ideology. The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
I've got to interject. Clearly religious texts are of a different nature than gay kids books and teen romance novels. There may be some milquetoast books targetted by the religious but many of them are legitimately in the category of erotica. I've never seen a religious scripture that fell into the category of erotica, besides perhaps the Kama Sutra lol.
>The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
Let's be real. The types of people who bother to bring up the supposed hypocrisy of it are very much in favor of keeping the erotica, and may very well be in favor of pushing out religious texts because of "the science" or some shit. I know some people have said that they had trouble finding a bible in their library on YouTube. Somehow I doubt it was merely a case of them all being checked out either. If you ever catch a video of the people at the top of the American Library Association talking about these "book ban" issues it will all start to make sense.
> There may be some milquetoast books targeted by the religious but many of them are legitimately in the category of erotica
How much erotica are you seeing in the list linked above? Maybe a few could be kind of misconstrued for it, if someone was interpreting them with active hostility, but the far more obvious theme that ties them together is dealing with "heavy" themes in general - mental illness, discrimination, abuse, prostitution, suicide. Especially books that are overt in their themes and/or make the "wrong" conclusions in the eyes of the censors. You just set the rules for the argument by just filing all of that away as erotica, while most of it is anything but.
> I've never seen a religious scripture that fell into the category of erotica
That's because the hypocrisy that people argue about tends to concern things way worse than just some plain erotica. With their millennia-old standards for morality, religious texts from most religions often feature and endorse horrific acts and social standards that would without a doubt be instantly censored in schools much like the books above, if they weren't religious.
> Let's be real. The types of people who bother to bring up the supposed hypocrisy of it are very much in favor of keeping the erotica, and may very well be in favor of pushing out religious texts because of "the science" or some shit
"Being real" in this case seems to be a way of making a leading argument. I am on the side of those "types of people", and I know many more like that. The vast majority of people hold the stance of minimum book censorship, if at all possible. While I disagree with many religious books on most levels, censoring them would be equally misguided and pointless. At this point, they're important historical texts that frame a lot of how our society works. Anyone who wishes to access them should be able to do so, as should be the case with most other information.
> I know some people have said that they had trouble finding a bible in their library on YouTube
I don't know if YouTube content, especially from people who no doubt were looking for this specific conclusion, is enough to convince me that the most printed document in existence is suddenly impossible to find nowadays.
> Somehow I doubt it was merely a case of them all being checked out either
This is the crux of your argument, and you leave it up to subjective doubting? How many libraries have banned religious books as policy, rather than just having them vaguely be unavailable at some specific point in time?
Every day, hundreds if not thousands of these books are given away for free, on a range of anything from charity to forcing them down people's throats. The argument for this extreme of a level of anti-Christian persecution and censorship in the most religious country in the West isn't looking very good.
>How much erotica are you seeing in the list linked above?
I honestly don't have time to go do a bunch of research on 52 random books I'm definitely not going to read. All I can tell you for sure is that many of these books are inappropriate for children, and I'd object to any book with sex scenes being in any public school library. I have seen people give damning reviews, including quotes and photos of graphic content, from books they wanted removed from school libraries, and I was inclined to agree with them. I'm not even a Christian, but I want to pay for that even less than copies of random religious texts.
>I am on the side of those "types of people", and I know many more like that.
I am not going to give a blanket endorsement to LGBT in this way. I believe in live and let live, more or less, but I believe many of these people are more evangelical than any religion at this point. Anyway, on the subject of injecting their "representation" into everything, even content for prepubescent children, I am very opposed.
>The vast majority of people hold the stance of minimum book censorship, if at all possible.
I hope this is true, but I am not so sure these days.
>Anyone who wishes to access them should be able to do so, as should be the case with most other information.
At risk of going off on a tangent: As much as I love libraries and books, I don't believe in "information wants to be free" type rhetoric. People need to be paid for their work one way or another.
>I don't know if YouTube content, especially from people who no doubt were looking for this specific conclusion, is enough to convince me that the most printed document in existence is suddenly impossible to find nowadays.
I never said that it was hard to find in general. I said that some people reported that their libraries did not have these bog standard books.
>How many libraries have banned religious books as policy, rather than just having them vaguely be unavailable at some specific point in time?
As I said, I only heard some anecdotes. I believe this is still probably a rare occurrence but I can't prove one way or another. I mention it mainly so people can look out for it, not to prove anything.
>Every day, hundreds if not thousands of these books are given away for free, on a range of anything from charity to forcing them down people's throats.
Nobody is actually forced to own and read a bible, unless they are trying to do it to fit in with the religious folk. I consider that voluntary.
>The argument for this extreme of a level of anti-Christian persecution and censorship in the most religious country in the West isn't looking very good.
I personally witnessed some normal inoffensive Christian content censored on Facebook a couple of years ago as if it was gore. There is definitely a sizeable group of people which openly detests Christians and hopes to see the religion die, even though most Christians are very nice people and the religion is very important for Western values. Meanwhile, we have Islamic apologists hoping to excuse terrorism and continue importing millions of highly fertile, culturally incompatible invaders. The same people talking shit about Christian views on abortion will stick up for Muslims who hate all of us and want to take over, and LGBT, which the Muslims especially hate. Sometimes the absurdity of it all makes me suspect we live in a simulation.
Agreed, this is very politically charged. The method for qualifying a "banned book" is not described in detail and seems to only include those with a political lean, when there are obviously other books that aren't shown to kids that didn't make the list.
The system they're using is in their faq, in detail. Basically it is books that were previously available but have been removed due to external pressure.
I have absolutely no problem saying that bigots who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries are bad people while also thinking that The Turner Diaries shouldn't be in public schools.
> who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries
Is this a common stance? I thought it was more like, no books glorifying LGBT lifestyle or teaching it as if it’s not controversial and it’s just a fact of life (as proponents sincerely believe, of course, not saying no one is thinks it is a fact of life, that’s just the part that is controversial). I understand disagreeing with that, but it isn’t the same as opponents pushing for zero gay/etc characters period, right?
I haven’t been following this topic too closely though so I might be missing what people are screeching about on the right today.
My aunt is a Republican lobbyist. She believes that nobody is actually gay and that it is a mental illness where people are tricked into thinking it is possible to be gay and that this can originate from being exposed to gay people.
She has a bisexual daughter who has attempted suicide twice. She has told her daughter that she’d be better off dead than bi.
Also I’m very sorry if there are books that contain gay characters where there aren’t constant asides reminding the reader that these people are going to hell. The “gay lifestyle” is just gay people existing.
My life before and after discovering the nature of my queerness is remarkably similar, though with a fair few more relationships and a lot less anguish afterwards.
Weasel words like those are usually used by people to distance themselves from outright hatred of the people they dislike. "Oh, I don't hate you for being LGBT, I just hate and disagree with your lifestyle, which is something that you chose." See, totally different!
The implication of "lifestyle" usually being "ability to exist in a society without any major obstacles due to being LGBT", "ability to receive true healthcare related to being LGBT", "ability to be legally recognized and accommodated as a result of it" or "ability to express your queerness in public without being seen as the villain".
Maybe then you can be much more specific about "books glorifying LGBT lifestyle", because you are using the same exact words as bigots who think that two gay people in a book being happy is the same as showing children hardcore pornography.
Can someone have a golf lifestyle? Like, they go to golf courses, they own golf clubs, they socialize with other golfers? I mean it in that sense. You seem defensive.
And this is what I find funny about the term "LGBT lifestyle." Most definitions of the term, including yours, could just as easily apply to cohorts of straight people if you just swap the gender of one of the subjects.
Imagine somebody getting upset for glorifying a straight lifestyle. Funny stuff.
I am just trying to actually understand why some people are upset. It seems wise for others to do the same, rather than simply dismiss the concerns. If the concerned are in the majority and they are dismissed consistently for years, then good luck to their opponents. I don’t have a dog in this fight, I just think most of society is regarded at this point and I feel like an alien trying to understand humans.
A very commonly banned book here in the United States - at least historically - is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's a specific chapter that my mind has returned to, again and again, in situations where anonymous cowards issue threats from behind the veil of anonymity:
The older I get, the more I think that there is wisdom in the words of Col. Sherburn on the cowardice of the average person.
By the way, I wonder if HN is aware of whose alt account this is. If they are, I wonder if they would punish the original poster for issuing threats on an anonymous account. I...admit that I don't have high hopes, but I live to be surprised.
I don't know, I didn't come in here with particularly strong feelings about what "ban" means or should mean re books but people keep coming at me extremely hot for saying not much about it at all.
Personally I think using banned for "actively prevented from accessing in ways other books are not" makes plenty of sense even if you can effectively circumvent those attempts somehow.
The strict meaning that people seem to want to apply in here does not seem particularly useful to me. Almost no books have ever been banned by that standard, but there is a clearly organized movement in the US to remove all reference to queerness from public life. Flexible on nomenclature here but that context is very important.
It may seem like an attack on queer books, but as far as I can tell none of the straight books seem to be trying to explain how minors should get access to adult dating apps to meet older men, or showing obscene graphical depictions of sodomy involving children.
I think if librarians were buying "straight" books with the same explicit and adult content and putting them in elementary, middle, and high schools, the same parents would be complaining about those too.
I suspect that whatever example they had in mind, it's a passage that is descriptive of someone's personal experience while not being prescriptive in telling the reader step-by-step how to follow in their footsteps.
In my state (South Carolina) this is exactly how they handled it. If a parent or activist wishes see a book banned it goes through reviewed based on school-level appropriateness. A book like The Kite Runner with its deprecations of Bacha Bazi are a bit rough for a 5th grader but considered acceptable for a High Schooler given the cultural significance of the work.
As cryptically referred to by the villain in the perhaps most famous of American novels. Credit Wikipedia:
> Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. In the book, the character Tom Buchanan reads a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Grant and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard. ...
> ... "Everybody ought to read it", the character said. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
Without the banning method this is just click bait to sell books. Every book on a ban list is still easily available. It would be weird for something as explicit as a kama sutra book to be found in an elementary school library. It might be appropriate at a high school library. But any kid at any time can go to a public library or book store and find just such a book. The parents get to decide when sexually explicit material is appropriate for their children. Schools do the same by proxy. There is nothing wrong with this setup.
The most targeted book in america is Looking For Alaska. You and I have a very different understanding of what "sexually explicit material" means if you think that this book is erotica.
Remember that the parents are deciding for other parents what appears in libraries.
Apparently I made my point poorly. Kama sutra was an example that I think everybody could agree shouldn't be in a children's library. My point was that everybody gets to decide what is in their children's library. Most of the people in that area probably agree. But, everybody can still go to any bookstore and find the same books. They are not banned in any way. As the OP said, without criteria on why a book is "banned" lists like this are pointless. A library or school district deciding they don't want a book doesn't make it banned. The problem is that people thousands of miles away think that those people far away are too restrictive or liberal in their book selections presented to children.
My second point was that since all these "banned" books are still available for sale; getting on a banned book list is just a tactic to sell more books. This list even has affiliate links to the books. Which make the whole page click bait.
Bigoted parents forcing librarians to remove books that they feel have educational merit because they offend the sensibilities of bigoted parents is bad.
You can call it a different word if you want I guess. But I'm absolutely baffled that people are spending their time worrying about the word "banned" here. This shit is awful.
every parent that is “pro” book banning is a shitty parent, period. I am kind of glad this book banning has spread as it helped me weed out some people from my life. life is to short to spend around shitty parents. I can pretty much live with any flaw (I have 100’s) but being a shitty parent is not one I am willing to be around
Conversations like these are so immensely frustrating to have on Hacker News.
This thread is full of people falling over themselves trying to convince you that a book ban isn't actually a book ban, and whatever it happens to be isn't that big of a deal.
If the banning of books from libraries isn't a big deal - why is it being done in the first place? Is it just virtue signaling, or does it have a specific objective? If it has a specific objective, isn't that objective worth interrogating instead of brushing off as not a big deal because the book is still available through other means?
The objective is a foothold in culture war stuff, largely around LGBT people but about other things too. The ultimate goal is to re-establish a culture where gay people are unable to be out in public, especially in places where there are children. This means no gay teachers. No gay characters in media. Websites with LGBT content being treated as pornographic and requiring age verification.
The narrative is "look at these liberals forcing sex on children." Parents go to school board meetings and read passages ripped from context as lurid eroticism to rile up their neighbors. If normies go along with this "think of the children" stuff then it becomes a foothold to the next steps. We've seen this trans people, where bigots have successfully converted "this is about girl's sports" into policies banning healthcare and safe bathroom use.
At this point it's extremely clear - objectively, by counting criminal convictions - which demographic is a real danger to kids, not just sexually but in many other ways.
And it's very much not the writers of books with LGBT content.
I can understand why the real culprits might want to deflect attention from their moral failings onto others, and why pointing out the facts might make them very, very angry.
Not sure what your point is. 1984 is available at my middle school, high school and public libraries and every book store. Not available at elementary schools because it is generally above grade level.
The purpose of the ministry of truth was to redact and rewrite history. Shape peoples thoughts, their vocabulary and show them how good they have it compared to their primitive ancestors. (Those naked bare foot people who build all those megalithic structures, castles and cathedrals) History should of course have a carefully engineered list of banned books.
The work is never done, after removing the books with practical tutorials, blue prints and historical revisionism you always continue to have a candidate at the top of the list. The work that remains now are all fictional books that portray an uncomfortable reality.
After those are all gone the new reality will again have a most terrible book. The work is never done.
Separation of church and state, especially when schools don’t allow alternative books (eg in some Bible Belt areas). Also, the bible does have violence, sex (including rape and incest), etc.
I understand there are reasons it could be banned, but I'm saying that in reality it is not. It is widely available in elementary and middle school libraries.
There have been many attempts to ban it, but a backlash usually results in its reinstatement. IIRC there are often cases where questionable verses are blotted out or it's only the new testament (which is in general less "graphic"), but it really depends on the jurisdiction.
Except for one case in Texas that made a splash in the news last year, I didn't find other cases of the Bible being banned from school libraries. Did I miss something?
If not, it would make sense that Texas made the news because it's out of the ordinary.
Yeah this is a strange way to define "banned books". I would think Hustler has to be universally "banned" in all US schools, it has to be in the top 10 most banned books. Or maybe because it's a magazine Hustler doesn't count so the author left it out...
The only books I can think of that are actually banned, as in it's against the law to obtain, in the US would be like a B2 bomber capability manual or some other classified documentation.
But if they don't carry it, it can't have been removed from the libraries, and therefore couldn't qualify for this list. Weird insight into someone's mind that they would bring up Hustler in a discussion about school libraries.
Well, you chose to completely ignore the part about "in U.S. schools." I immediately knew what the title meant. Do you lack the form of common sense that allows understanding implication?
If you look at their definition, it's when the book is "missing" from the book selection, so it's essentially filtered out from a curated list, not an outright ban.
The school won't kick you out for having the book, but they won't buy it.
Your quotes around the missing do a lot of work here. From the FAQ:
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal. Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library, or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content.
In particular it's when the decisions of the professionals are being overruled for political purposes.
It is particularly clear when reading the list, many of these books are children/young adults books which have won highest national and international awards, but somehow they are "age inappropriate"?
> The Bible ... it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
Even if you really dial in your definition of "consequential", ie. the amount of stagnated technological and societal progress and murder as a result of the Bible's adherents' efforts, this seems an absurd claim.
Most consequential piece of literature is likely the Plimpton 322 or Euclid's Elements or The Epic Of Gilgamesh. The Bible is an embarrassing footnote.
Assuming we take the statement "more free market equals more efficient outcome" as always and absolutely true, it raises the question: Are the healthcare-related needs of a society aligned with the most efficient outcome that a free market can deliver? I don't think they necessarily are.
Gemini is still the best oracle/planner by a mile. It's just a bad agent. Give it a bundle of your repo and get it to plan your changes, then hand it off to codex to implement.
The question to ask is why supply of energy hasn't kept up with demand. Regulations (primarily in Democratic states) is most likely the answer. When you use government incentives to pick winners and losers with energy sources, it throws the entire energy market out of sync.
- ChatGPT still lags for me daily and I'm on a PRO subscription.
- SORA is usable but extremely slow and constrained.
- Image gen same thing, but getting a bit quicker and less constrained.
This is with agents not having taken off yet, and the vast portion of the world economy not interacting with LLM Ai? Agents alone will require ungodly amounts of compute.
What exactly are you referring to? Their UI seems to have troubles to load the list of conversations since like a week back, otherwise it seems fine? I mean, UX could be a lot better, but I'm experiencing anything I'd describe as "lag".
Yeah, especially considering it's only fetching ~10 items at a time :) I'm guessing some index somewhere is wrong or something, as I probably have a couple of conversations through the years of using it almost daily...
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