Rottcodd

I don't have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: "hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability."

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it's not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it's likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands outside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.

If the US had a caste system, and it was a legitimate reflection of individual worth, drug company executives would be at the bottom.

Oh look - bullshit from the NYT.

There are no meaningful "hopes" for a cease-fire, because everyone who's actually involved or even just honestly paying attention knows full well that Israel is never going to agree to one - that their one and only goal from the beginning was and is the annexation of the entirety of Gaza, and they're not going to stop murdering Gazans until they achieve that goal (if they ever atop at all).

This is just shallow propaganda to try to distract from the fact of Israel's malevolence and the complicity of its western allies, and most notably of the US.

The death of a civilization is inevitable just as the death of an individual is inevitable. Just like individuals, civilizations have a life span - they're born, then they live, then they die.

And there's a significant fact about civilizations nearing collapse that the cited author apparently neglects to note, and that unfortunately completely negates the "we need dramatic social and technological changes" prescription: due to the concentration of wealth and power in a relatively few hands (which the author does note, though only in passing), the populations of terminally ill civilizations can be roughly divided into two groups - the poor and powerless many who would make changes but can't, and the rich and powerful few who could make changes but won't.

Yes.

The goal - and this was already obvious long before the election to anyone with a functioning brain and a speck of intellectual integrity - was and is to destroy the last vestiges of American representative democracy and institute a kleptocratic oligarchy.

Is NBC News actually just now catching on?

So my only question really is whether these people are deliberate agents provocateur who are now feebly trying to hide the fact that they were working for the benefit of Trump all along or if they're blithering idiots who are genuinely so fucking stupid that they didn't see this coming

I see no third option - it's one or the other

They're going to have to get in line.

At every level.

And even just a cursory examination of the history of civilizations would reveal that that's par for the course, and that the US is only really notable for the speed with which it's reached this point.

Huh.

Israel's whole schtick is to foment hostility then point to that hostility as an excuse for the violent conquest that's the actual goal all along.

So Syria refusing to hand them the antagonism they so desperately want so they can use it as an excuse for their imperialistic desires is actually a potentially good strategy. And a cynically amusing one.

The whole concept that governments can make or lose money is stultifyingly stupid and part of the problem.

Governments spend money. That's their job. They take in revenue from the people, then spend it on things to benefit the people. If they can manage to save some along the way or even gain some along the way, that's great, but it is not and never should be thought to be the point. The point is and always has been and always should be to simply identify things that the people need, then spend money on those things.

So no - Elon Musk doesn't need to teach the government how to lose money. Elon Musk needs to get the fuck out of the way and let the actual professionals - the people that every single government agency not coincidentally already has on staff whise jobs are to identify needs of rhe people then spend money to meet those needs - get on with the jobs they've been hired to do, and are most qualified to do (certainly MUCH more qualified than a South African shithead whose only actial qualification for anything is that he's happened to amass enough money to indulge his gargantuan ego).

It means that either the test is flawed, the results are bogus or the report is a lie.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability.

Current AIs have been designed to produce content that (optimally) mimics the products of reason, but they do not in fact reason at all, so they cannot possess measurable intelligence.

Much more to the point, current AIs have been designed to make enormous piles of money for corporations and venture capitalists, and I would pretty much guarantee that that has more to do with this story than anything else.

I really shouldn't like it, since games in which you die repeatedly generally just irritate me, but something about it keeps me coming back. And dying.