I think it is plausible that this piece by Chomsky's wife is honest. However, I have one problem with it. This is that it does not say what they did when they learned the truth about Epstein in 2019. Did they cut off all relations?
I am a listening trainer, and have taken over 1,500 people through a basic session in active listening. But that said, I agree with you that what matters is having a good relationship, and that involves using different communication skills at different times.
I listen as part of my life and work, too. I've been training people since 1995. I am also a psychology and social science enthusiast.
The listening class I took in 1988 was one of the most helpful classes I have ever taken. I appreciate and use active listening. But listening is a complex process that goes far beyond mere absorption of information.
Instead of demonizing the ego, which is a tired and reductionist trope, let's appreciate the roles that self-image, self-care, and self-sharing play in that process.
(1) can you point to some large important positive uses of Bitcoin at present, or are you just saying that at some point in the future we will see them?
(2) are you saying all the bad things like Ponzi scams, hacking, drug money monitoring, buying csam and ransomware, have stopped, or that at some point in the future they will?
> (1) can you point to some large important positive uses of Bitcoin at present
No, not at present - but there will be in the future. Bitcoin is faily new, hard to understand for laymen, and government regulation and the existing financial industry is actively fighting it (with some extend changing in the US right now). The properties bitcoin has allow for lots of benefits and use cases that are superior to our existing financial systems, but they depent on adoption. I am bullish on the bitcoin, the same way I was bullish on the internet in 1994. The internet is great, but not so great if only a couple of thousand people in the world use it. That is the same adoption problem, not an issue with the underlying technology.
> (2) are you saying all the bad things
All the bad things existed before bitcoin, and will exist for eternity. The internet in the early 90s and 00s was also a place full of scams, ponzi scheme emails, phishing, fraud etc. Most crime money today is fiat cash. Some people (especially in the EU) claim a total surveillance state and the removal of cash paired with total money control is needed for a safe and secure society. I am in team liberal democracy, where the freedom of cash and lack of government total control is a benefit to society, ensures perpetual democracy and freedom to the individual. The fact that bitcoin and crypto is used by criminals just as cash is, shouldn't be a reason to not have it. Just as removing cash to prevent illegal activity should not be goal in a free society.
"No, not at present - but there will be in the future" That seems to imply that until that future arrives, people should mostly stay away from cybercurrencies.
I am bringing all this up because when cybercurrencies were getting started, the people boosting them assured us that they would soon be doing all sorts of wonderful things, and nothing bad would happen. That prediction turned out to be wildly mistaken. And instead of considering that maybe the idea itself is just basically bad, in the years since they keep insisting that soon it will all be fixed.
Can you understand why, given this long history, I would be dubious? Or is it your view that I am under some sort of moral obligation to believe that the approaches to fixing it being worked on at present are absolutely certain to work?
> "No, not at present - but there will be in the future" That seems to imply that until that future arrives, people should mostly stay away from cybercurrencies.
No it does not. See my internet analogy. Asume it is the year 1993, and the WWW is just invented but there are hardly any websites. At that time, you wouldn't say that "No, there are not websites at present - but there will be in the future. Until then, stay away from the Internet". This is of course non-sensical. It is: "There is this new technology that will revolutionize everything, better get started with it early and familiarize yourself with it, the earlier the better". And yes, some people thought the internet is just a temporal phenomenon that will pass by and refused to familiarize themselves with it even after the iPhone came along.
Regarding cybercurrencies: I am myself a "bitcoin only" guy - meaining in my opinion there is bitcoin, and there is the all the rest which is shitcoin. Stay away from all the shitcoins.
I see what you are saying, but not publishing the materials is not going to solve the problem. That's because the people who are attacking the professors will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.
Remember, the attackers are not a few oddballs. The are members of a vast MAGA movement that has enough member to elect the present president and that encourages this sort of behavior. And they have tons of money behind them.
> will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.
Not really, they don't have sufficient time budget and a network of agents to do that as comprehensively as with a simple "google search" some bureaucrat/activist can perform in a few minutes
A heat pump gets more heat from a given amount of electricity than if the electricity is use for resistive heating. So the ideal design is solar cell + sodium battery + heat pump.
Also when the temperature differential is lower, so ideal might be solar -> battery (to time shift to warmest outdoor temperature) -> heat pump -> thermal battery (to time shift to when you need heat).
Does seem like a lot of added complexity (and likely machinery cost) though.
The question is would it cost less over the long term than any other solution. My intuition is it would, at least for a lot of use cases, but it would need to be put into practice and studied to see if this is actually true.
Actually for most trucking batteries are already practical. Most trucks travel only one or two hundred miles a day, like doing deliveries or going from a port to a warehouse, or a warehouse to a location like a factory or store. And even long-range trucking is mostly with loads that are volume constrained, not weight, so the additional weight of batteries is not a big problem. The big advantage of batteries is lower cost per mile
It is possible to strongly disapprove of both Israel's policies in Gaza and the present regime in Iran. Or is it the case that you support the present regime?
Of course that’s possible — but the context matters doesn’t it? You know - the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Iran because it wasn’t sufficiently pro-west? The installation of a brutal shah who eventually got overthrown in a popular revolution and all the subsequent attempts to attack Iran and overthrow its government (by the CIA and Mossad) — this is all important context.
We can all have our ideological preferences (democracy, socialism, free-market capitalism, etc) but geopolitics does not operate in the world of ideals — there are adversarial relationships that force governments to act in a certain way in order to remain sovereign.
Zionists want to rewrite history so we can all ignore the long list of grievances the Iranians have with the west (Israel in particular) and instead operate in a false reality where the only criminals are the Iranian. The bottom line is you can’t spend decades savagely attacking a nation to undermine its government (because you don’t like their policies ) and then expect to easily paint the government as the evil ones as they fight for survival with the kind of brutality you can expect from a government that has its back to the wall. We all saw you wage economic war with sanctions. We saw you block medicine and food. We saw you assassinate their intellectuals and academics. We saw you bomb their embassies and assassinate their leaders. We can dislike the brutal Islamic dictatorship but we know who is the greater evil — the Zionist hypocrisy doesn’t go far with the free people in this world.
This is one reason why artificial general intelligence is impossible. It is because most of the knowledge needed would require knowledge that does not already exist in text form.
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