Petter Häggholm
minor encyclopedia poorly disguised as a human computer programmer.
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Given things tend to get more chaotic over time (ie Second Law of Thermodynamics), and given all the asymmetries in our universe, how is it possible that the Big Bang, cosmic inflation and an expanding universe created our unique and complex planet?
Hello, Eric Willens ! Get a latte. In a glass. I’ll wait. No, I’m serious. You see, a latte is a very good way to illustrate how entropy actually works. It starts off in a low-entropy state with the hot coffee at the bottom and the cold milk at the top. Then, as entropy increases, you get complex curr…
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Which country should own the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands?
Whoever the islanders wish them to be owned by. At present, that’s the UK. If you think that Argentina should own the Falklands - a territory they have never owned in the past - just because they are 400 miles away then the UK should own the Faroes and Venezuela should own Puerto Rico.…
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Supreme Court narrows voting law, lifting GOP odds of keeping House The Supreme Court limited a key provision of the Voting Rights Act Wednesday, handing a loss to civil rights groups. Why it matters: The ruling could reshape voting all across the South and could boost the Republican majority in the H…
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What makes the US unable to overcome Iran?
Not so much ‘unable’ as ‘unwilling’. The US would be able to ‘overcome Iran’ if it was willing to take enormous numbers of casualties. A constant stream of bodybags and caskets on the evening news. Footage of burning warships and wrecked aircraft live at 6. Grinding forwards through the mountains to T…
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Will Democrats vote for Kamala Harris again in the next election?
Democrats will vote for whomever the Democratic candidate is. The Republican Party is destroying the US regulatory structure built up over the last hundred years to protect citizens from predatory capitalists. Those who aren’t participating are standing by silently while corporations regain the righ…
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Why are people so snobbish about Olive Garden restaurant?
In my case, because better options are available for the exact same price. Food that’s made fresh to order, and which is a lot more exciting to my palate. I don’t have an issue with cheap, filling food, so long as the price is right. But it’s not like Olive Garden is cheap. They’re charging the same…
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Why do beginners quit OnlyFans so fast?
I produced and ‘acted’ in OF content with a girl I was dating, and she made about $1500/month. Pretty solid income. Some of her other friends wanted to get in on it, but most didn’t last more than a year. They made $200/month for a while, then quit. Because: They weren’t willing to produce the conten…
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What do you think of Hungary saying their government will no longer fund CPAC with their taxpayers’ money?
Good. Hungary is way poorer than it should be and needs to invest more heavily in its own country, not toss public cash away to cement the buddy buddy relationship between the worst people in both countries.
What do you think about Fetterman calling on Democrats to 'drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom' after the shooting?
It’s silly. The perimeter held. That ballroom wouldn’t be a heck of a lot more secure, given the numbers of people being cleared into it, and out of it, and working there, and all of the chaos of a major event. Yes, the WH has more security ordinarily than the conference center does ordinarily. So, yo…
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If there's actually no such thing as 'free healthcare' (someone's got to pay for it), doesn't that imply that those who pay but get the least of it get cheated?
It’s the story of a guy, who lived not far from a public park, let’s call him Bob. Bob really loved that park, he went there every day, it helped him relax as he listened to the birds. One day though, as he was taking a nap in the shade, he noticed something: Someone who left the park, and then came ba…
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Somebody call the rapture …
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It turns out that USAID gave $27 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Taxpayer funded racism, woohoo! How did USAID become so corrupt?
A quick search I just did finds no allegation that SPLC got more than $8k in speakers fees from USAID. No major grants, and nothing remotely close to $100,000 let alone $27,000,000. Can you show me your source for that claim? And did you read the indictment against SPLC? …
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Why did Leslie Nielsen go from playing dramatic roles ("Forbidden Planet" comes to mind) to doing mostly comedy movies while Tom Hanks made a reasonably smooth transition from comedy to drama?
When the Zucker brothers made "Airplane," they had a great idea: instead of hiring comedians, they'd hire the kind of ultra serious B movie stars who normally appeared in real disaster movies. Leslie Nielsen, for instance, had played the captain in "The Poseidon Adventure." And it turned out that Ni…
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Why does it seem that those who decry a "tyranny of the majority" don't seem to care about a "tyranny of the minority"?
When you want a regular tyranny, with all the power in the hands of one person, or just a tiny group, and you come out and say that…
Often, it makes you look bad. Like a tyrant. So first, you have to deride and ridicule the idea of regular people ever having any power. That’s where the tyranny of the…
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Why did Putin think he could win in Ukraine in just 3 days?
When Putin started the first phase of the war (the one everyone forgets about, in 2014) and took over Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine (parts of Donbas and Luhansk), it was a walk in the park for the Russians. There are stories of Russian Special Forces troops appearing at various military and gov…
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The Bible clearly states that if you dont believe in God you'll go to hell. Are atheists scared of going to hell?
The Bible clearly states that if you dont believe in God you'll go to hell. No, it doesn’t. Are atheists scared of going to hell? Most of us aren’t, since it doesn’t exist. Some atheists are scared of Hell, because they were emotionally abused by Christianity as children and fear is not rational; it’s…
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Would Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan cause corporations to re-domicile overseas to avoid taxation?
Corporations would actually pay less in extra taxes than they currently pay for healthcare for their employees. It would be a net win. The only industry that would suffer would be the healthcare insurance industry. Those greedy vultures can die for all I care.…
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Is Iran going to win this war?
Going to win? No. In every important way, they have already won. Trump has destroyed the mechanism stopping them from developing nukes, eased the economic sanctions against them, handed the Iranian regime vast amounts of new money, destroyed the protest movement in Iran, catastrophically lost the pr…
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Now that we know leftist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have been actively funding the KKK to artificially inflate their statistics on far-right extremist groups, do Democrats tell the truth about anything?
The OP has already been banned. However, I want to clarify the half-truths in this question. The SPLC has been indicted for fraud because they were not transparent about using donations to hire paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups on both ends of the political spectrum. The group claims the…
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Why aren't they cloning humans?
Is there any particular need? Besides, human clones already walk among us. All identical twins are in fact clones: Being an identical twin doesn’t really confer much of an advantage, so there’s no particular reason to do it artificially. Cloning individual body parts could be incredibly useful though,…
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What is your review of Life of Brian (1979)?
What if “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” had a budget? You would get “Life of Brian”, a spectacular production that hammers the history of Christianity while fully respecting it. Made for the staggering sum of $4 million, generally put up by their friend George Harrison (whose cameo was cut in editi…
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If the historical Yeshua was an anti-Roman insurgent, why do the Gospels depict him as telling people to pay taxes to Caesar?
Because the early Christian movement needed to demonstrate that it wasn’t threatening to the Roman empire. This is why Pontius Pilate’s depiction and the whole narrative of Jesus’ execution seems to fly in the face of everything that we know about Pontius Pilate and Roman governance. The narrative ma…
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Should Virginia vote yes today on redistricting to save democracy?
If you asked a year and a half ago, my answer on this would have been a resounding “no.” Right now, I still do not consider Virginia's or California’s votes on Redistricting to be “wins.” More on that later. I find gerrymandering a repulsive process, no matter who does it. I believe the way districts…
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