True. I believe the celibacy thing is to prevent bishops from accruing wealth and leaving it to their sons. The church wanted the money. Similar to how Henry the 8th created the Anglican Church to get a divorce, plus all the church properties and tithes.

As usual, religious conflicts are based on earthly concerns.

Not like that. A server name that can be authenticated. Like when you receive an email from your bank (in the metadata), you know it’s legitimate. Each organization can set up their own server to host things they vouch for. With ActivityPub it can be viewed elsewhere with the guarantee that it’s from a trusted source.

It’s called a “name”.

Why would anyone pay for the service? Having a “name” is free, and that dumb worldcoin only works for people. It can’t work for governments or businesses.

ActivityPub is actually a good way to authenticate things. If an organization vouches for something they can post it on their server and it can be viewed elsewhere.

generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos.

And? There’s already way too much data online to read or watch all of it. We could just move to a “watermark” system where everyone takes credit for their contributions. Things without watermarks could just be dismissed, since they have as much authority as an anonymous comment.

You think that high interest rates keep real estate prices high? That’s the opposite of what happens with high interest rates. People can’t afford to pay as much when interest rates are high (like they are now).

I’m judging solely based on your comments. You are using big words incorrectly. You clearly don’t understand what you’re talking about if you think high interest rates keep real estate prices high. Also, your description of Japan’s economic problems are disjointed and confused, not correct.

It’s not a “failed model”. Japan has issues because banks committed fraud and disguised non-performing loans. There are strict rules in the US about when assets must be “marked to market”. Plus the US has a growing population because we let in immigrants, which supports a growing economy. We are not close to having problems like Japan.

There are also many levers the Federal Reserve can pull to keep banks in check. As I said, they can raise and lower the reserve requirement and raise and lower the overnight lending rate. This can prevent banks from going nuts with lending, but obviously can’t prevent all asset bubbles. Sometimes people are just irrational.

Frankly you seem to be using a bunch of big words and implying that they make a point. Using “ex nihilo” instead of “from nowhere” clinched it for me. Also, you spelled “keiretsu” wrong.

Yes, they still have it. It’s just not in cash.

Fractional reserve banking works because most people don’t need all their money as soon as they get paid. Most businesses keep some money in the bank too. Banks have a required percent of deposits that they must keep on hand to allow these withdrawals. And if they run low on cash, they just borrow money for a day from other banks (literally just one day). The US government can adjust the percent of required reserves or the overnight lending rate to keep banks from lending too much money out.

Banks use this money to loan to businesses or people buying houses. It works well because whenever the money is loaned out it is used for a purchase and just redeposited in another bank. A percentage of that money is retained by the bank and the rest is loaned out again. And again and again. This way money is “created” when people buy things in the economy.

Your brain isn’t what “collapses the wave function”, it’s the measuring device that you use. You can do a double slit experiment and watch it with your eyes the whole time. Light will still act as a wave until you interact with it experimentally.

You are reading too much Deepak Chopra. Your brain is just a computer made out of meat. It’s not magic.

Why would they eliminate the competition if it was way behind in technology? Do we eliminate uncontacted tribes because they might be “competition”?

If aliens exist they probably have rules against interfering with primitive species. We are more like a band of chimps than an uncontacted tribe.

conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function

That’s not how any of this works. Your brain is made out of regular matter, not special fancy matter.

Ehhh, I say just get more actual exercise. What does standing all day do for you?

Standing desks are for people who have never worked a physical job. Did you know that you can just stand up from a normal desk at any time? Now imagine a job where you can’t sit down.

Exercise your choice and stand up when you want to. Sit down when you want to. Don’t do one thing all day long.

This is probably mostly laziness. Organizing a march is hard and requires people organizing skills. Spray painting some books takes only one or two people.

If anything, this just emphasizes how small this group is and how bad they are at organization. It’s simple: get a lot of people who agree with you and march to the capitol. That’s all you need to do but it’s hard.

Clever Hans (German: der Kluge Hans; c. 1895 – c. 1916) was a horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer. He discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Supply of homes is not dynamic like a factory, it can’t respond quickly to prices. Investors will grumble about whatever they want, but the alternative is a time consuming and expensive sale.

Even then those homes don’t disappear . If they are removed from the rental market they will just end up sold to the very group of people who were renting them, thus reducing demand. Rents would not move much, although there will probably be more real estate sales than usual as the rental market sheds the lazier real estate investors.

There are already many restrictions on rental agreements. Things that were “normal” before are clearly illegal now.

You are assuming that market rent is not already as high as demand allows. That’s not true. It is. That’s the definition of market rent.

Rent depends on the rental market, but most likely yes. That’s not different from now though. If you improve your rental property, you get more money from it.

You might not know this, but a mortgage being higher than the rent isn’t abnormal. In the past, when interest rates were 8% and rents were lower, you lost money on a rental property for the first few years. Property is not a license to print money. It’s an investment with costs and payoffs.

The property owner can pay off the mortgage early with the money. Or they can buy another place to rent out. Or diversify into other kinds of investments. No one is banned from anything.