A controversial take from this is that, aside from the health benefits, you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat.

I remember interviewing when I was chubbier post-COVID thinking that the only evidence the interviewer has of my self-control and drive is that I have none. Best case scenario, you are interviewing a temporarily embarrassed skinny person.

Noble prize winner James Watson, famous bluntly tell it like it is-er, said he didn't hire fat people for this reason.

(This has since been rectified by reinstating strength training and dietary controls, which I recommend.)

> …you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat.

As an overweight person, I don't think it's controversial. You'll also accrue personal and professional benefits from being a tall man and/or good-looking.

However, "fat people have no self-control" is still fatphobia and ignores the interplay of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors that contribute to obesity. There are countless fat people who are incredibly smart and hard-working, and have exquisite discipline in most areas of their life.

As a former obese person, the culture of America is excusing people for being fat is disgusting. I'm not saying you have to be supermodel thin, but being fat is literally bad in every single possible metric (Except for possibly surviving longer in a survival situation, which I presume most fat people will never be in)

Being fat is bad. Being a normal weight is better in every metric

It also makes you feel like something as trivial as taking out your garbage out to the curb is a monumental physical task.

The quality of life improvement from not being obese is obscene.

I have never met a fat person with "exquisite discipline". They had other positive qualities, but discipline was not over of them.

Also, I prefer to associate with people who are not fat. Is that a bad thing?

>fatphobia

First of all, I really find this term to be gross. You should be afraid of being unhealthy.

Second of all, are you posting that you have individual metabolic differences that substantially alter your caloric expenditure?

FYI most studies show very little innate caloric expenditure differences between human beings outside of what can be predicted based on their body mass. Ironically, heavier people burn more calories, not less, innately.

This makes sense because metabolic machinery is complex and so fundamental to life that it would obviously be very tightly tuned genetically.

> First of all, I really find this term to be gross.

Lodge a complaint with dictionaries, I guess? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatph...

You can't agree with "you will accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat" and then pretend fat-scrimination (is that better?) doesn't exist.

Being negatively predisposed to bad things is both normal and healthy behavior.

Also, using heuristics to make judgments about situations is how intelligence works.

That was his original inspiration but he has matured far beyond that.

He is. Patrick Shyu.

War-gaming this, what if it were legal to pay out bounties with the ransom amount as a war-chest to collect scalps of hacking groups, or damage their reputation or operation in some way?

This tit for tat type response would seem to be more consistent with how governments respond to terrorism, so I'm assuming it would be better to deter future hacks.

Attribution is easily deflected. You really don't want to recruit mercenary vigilantes to respond to a false flag operation.

> This tit for tat type response would seem to be more consistent with how governments respond to terrorism

Lol. Not a selling point these days.

The US has always had a very strange policy of criminalizing hacking, regardless of intent.

Places like Russia and Israel look the other way as long as the target is foreign, and we outsource our own phone forensics to the latter (Cellebrite). Thus, Israel has a better understanding of our own vulnerabilities than we do.

So you never know who you're up against given some ambiguous heuristics. As retribution, you might end up inadvertently attacking an "ally." It's safest to keep us disadvantaged.

It's either easy and common to protect data or easy and common to steal it. Reality keeps providing evidence of the latter. Can't have it both ways.

I can't imagine how. Please tell me.

This isn't quite right.

You don't need to decrypt the entire payload at any time.

You decrypt parts of the data.

They literally created weapons of mass destruction.

Do you think they thought they were good guys because you watched a Hollywood movie?

Hmm do you have some sources? That sounds interesting. Obviously there’s always doubt, but yeah I was under the impression everyone at the Manhattan project truly believed that the Axis powers were objectively evil, so any action is justified. Obviously that sorta thinking falls apart on deeper analysis, but it’s very common during full war, no?

EDIT: tried to take the onus off you, but as usual history is more complicated than I expected. Clearly I know nothing because I had no idea of the scope:

  At its peak, it employed over 125,000 direct staff members, and probably a larger number of additional people were involved through the subcontracted labor that fed raw resources into the project. Because of the high rate of labor turnover on the project, some 500,000 Americans worked on some aspect of the sprawling Manhattan Project, almost 1% of the entire US civilian labor force during World War II.

Sooo unless you choose an arbitrary group of scientists, it seems hard. I haven’t seen Oppenheimer but I understand it carries on the narrative that he “focused on the science” until the end of the war when his conscience took over. I’ll mostly look into that…

If you really think you're fighting evil in a war for global domination, it's easy to justify to yourself that it's important you have the weapons before they do. Even if you don't think you're fighting evil; you'd still want to develop the weapons before your enemies so it won't be used against you and threaten your way of life.

I'm not taking a stance here, but it's easy to see why many Americans believed developing the atomic bomb was a net positive at least for Americans, and depending on how you interpret it even the world.

The war against Germany was over before the bomb was finished. And it was clear long before then that Germany was not building a bomb.

The scientists who continued after that (not all did) must have had some other motivation at that point.

I kind of understand that motivation, it is a once in a lifetime project, you are part of it, you want to finish it.

Morals are hard in real life, and sometimes really fuzzy.

In this note: HIGHLY recommend “Rigor of Angels”, which (in part) details Heisenbergs life and his moral qualms about building a bomb. He just wanted to be left alone and perfect his science, and it’s really interesting to see how such a laudable motivation can be turned to such deplorable, unforgivable (IMO) ends.

Long story short they claim they thought the bomb was impossible, but it was still a large matter of concern for him as he worked on nuclear power. The most interesting tidbit was that Heisenberg was in a small way responsible for (west) Germany’s ongoing ban on nuclear weapons, which is a slight redemption arc.

Heisenberg makes you think, doesn't he? As the developer of Hitler's bomb, which never was a realistic thing to begin with, he never employed slave labour for example. Nor was any of his stuff used during warfare. And still, he is seen by some as some tragic figure, at worst as man behind Hitler's bomb.

Wernher vin Braun on the other hand got lauded for his contribution to space exploration. His development of the V2 and his use of slave labour in building them was somehow just a minor disgression for the, ultimately under US leadership, greater good.

To be reductionist - history is written by the victors.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/status-2

Charitably I think most would see it as an appropriate if unexpected metaphor.

I think they thought it would be far better that America developed the bomb than Nazis Germany, and the Allies needed to do whatever it too to stop Hitler, even if that did mean using nuclear bombs.

Japan and the Soviet Union were more complicated issues for some of the scientists. But that's what happens with warfare. You develop new weapons, and they aren't just used for one enemy.

What did Lehrer (?) sing about von Braun? "I make rockets go up, where they come down is not my department".

Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

That's the one, thank you!

Selectively editing material you release to libel a public figure is highly duplicitous.

They redacted parts of these emails.

Did they publish all of the emails?

Or are we literally being fed a curated collection?

Very gross.

These saccharine moral statements aren't really productive IMO.

Nature doesn't care about any of this stuff.

You might as well lament the wind that blows over a house.

It's also a bit of a cognitive hijack because morality is a mechanism that existed in a very specific context because it outcompeted other genes. Applying these blueprints to this amended context is kind of an unintentional self-cuckoo.

I more or less trust that it's true, or at least I think mostly true.

If they wanted bad results, chatbots already existed.