Ah yes, as we saw in the US the best thing to do when a left-leaning leader isn't as harsh on Israel as we'd like is to swing our support over to the right-leaning leader.

If your execution equipment is wearing out from overuse then that raises further questions that a society should probably think about.

It can be faked.

so things last longer.

Sadism is a negative, not a positive.

The risk I try to avoid with this sort of wording is the religious connotations of "belief." When people believe in a religion they generally do intend that to mean "with no chance I'm mistaken" so I don't want anyone to mistake me as having a religious belief in an objective reality. It's not like that.

So do you believe in an objective reality, or not? You said a couple of opposite things there.

I don't think I did say opposite things. I don't believe in an objective reality because there's no way to prove it. But it does seem like a very useful concept, and well supported. I generally behave as if there is an objective reality and I'm not sure how I'd manage if there wasn't one.

It's the same as how one shouldn't say the "believe in" any particular scientific law, because it's always possible that evidence will come along later that disproves it. I suppose you could say I believe it's the best idea I know of, but I don't like getting that sloppy with terms like this when actually discussing the concept of "objective reality."

My understanding is that this isn't quite how it is. Shareholders don't demand profits as much as they demand that their share value go up.

I read some time back that this is because of tax law. Dividends are taxed as income, but growth in share value is capital gains and so isn't taxed nearly as much or in the same ways. It does unfortunately make some sense, if share value repeatedly goes up and down I wouldn't want each "up" to be taxed as if you'd accumulated that much additional money. You'd have to be constantly selling shares to pay your taxes on them. But as a result, it means that when a company winds up making a profit and having a big pile of cash they need to decide what to do with, shareholders will usually prefer that the company invest that cash into making the company bigger and more valuable rather than simply giving it back to them as a dividend. So you get companies always trying to grow, because the shareholders demand it for reasons that make perfect sense to each one individually.

I'm not sure what a good solution to this is. Economics is one of those fields that seems simple on the surface but has a ton of gotchas hidden at every variable. It's a special case of game theory.

That happened to Conservapedia too. It's a poster child for Poe's Law, none of the editors over there really knows whether any of the other editors are true believer lunatics or highly creative trolls making up nonsense in the style of true believer lunatics. For all we know the true believers are a minority at this point and the whole thing is mostly trolling, there's no way to tell it apart from genuine lunacy.

Reminds me of various old sayings, such as: "The truth is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." And "if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

I don't necessarily believe in a purely objective reality, personally. I don't know for sure that there is some kind of platonic ideal structure of all things that exists apart from observers and always has and always will, it's a hard thing to figure out how to even start to prove. But there sure does seem like there is one, some kind of underlying pattern to reality that everyone who makes honest rigorous measurements seems to be measuring the same way. So if you just do straightforward science it seems like you automatically end up participating in a single common shared worldview.

Whereas if you just make shit up based on your beliefs, you end up with a worldview that's divergent from everyone else who's also making shit up based on their beliefs.

It gives an inherent advantage to the reality-based people. They end up working together and supporting each other even if they have absolutely no way to communicate with each other. Physicists doing experiments on opposite sides of the planet with no awareness of each other can produce results that, when they're later brought together, click into place as if the two of them had directly collaborated all their lives. It's awesome.

By which do you mean "nothing but vibes?" I'm not trying to support a particular position here, I'm just challenging yours. If you've got nothing to back it up then you're just throwing your own personal opinion into the ring and that's not really worth much.

I'm going to call bullshit on your bullshit unless you've got some data to back it up. Why do you think most people "reflexively hate it"?

Surely there are only so many demands he can make before he's fully satisfied, right?