jsomae

Why is BC moderate risk? Over what span of time? We have an NDP majority for the next 4 years. We've got some of the best transgender protection laws and transgender health care in the world.

[edit: y'know what, this was a stupid post. Ignore this.]

As an egalitarian, I also inherently dislike divisions in competition based on demographic. Here's my understanding of why they exist (though my stating the justification here doesn't mean I tacitly agree):

Chess: currently, only about 40 of the 1600 grandmasters are women. To attain a balance, we ought to be encouraging women to play chess. Women-only competitions are a great way to do this. (There are almost no transgender chess grand/masters, so the same logic ought to apply here -- I don't understand any reason other than bigotry to exclude transgender women from such tournaments)

Sports: I think it comes down to a Schelling division. Now sure, there are other genetic advantages, perhaps race or leg length or height or other aspects influence one's athletic ability too -- top basketball players are generally many standard deviations above average height. However, those are spectra -- ranges -- so there's no obvious place to split into two categories. There are basically only two obvious, bright-line, ostensibly binary dichotomies that people tend to believe categorize humans: (a) sex, and (b) disabled status (see: paralympics).

Now, imagine there was a genetic allele that causes humans to be 9 feet tall. About half of humans get this allele. Then obviously we'd add a new category for these super-tall humans, just so that less-tall humans would have the option to compete in sports.

Some sports make divisions on a spectrum, like heavy-weight, medium-weight, light-weight boxing and so on. But these are pretty arbitrary, certainly not Schelling points, so it's less common for sports to use these divisions.

Now, I often find myself thinking, shouldn't those certain cis men who happen by nature to be less able than a typical woman be permitted in the women's category? My gut answer is yes -- but the problem here is that there's just no way to measure someone's natural capacity for ability. There's no bright-line, Schelling-point way to sort out these less-capable cis men. It sucks.

ottawa

I'd like to point out that the dialect-language-family distinction is really a continuum. As dialects drift apart from each other, there is no point where God comes in and declares a dialect has graduated into its own language. Mutual intelligibility simply decreases continuously.

For instance, Portuguese and Spanish are widely considered to be different languages, although they are partially mutually intelligible, particularly in written form. Cantonese and Mandarin are less so, but still a bit. My uncle-in-law speaks Canto but can still understand my Mandarin (however, he can't respond). I won't deny that there is a political reason to want to refer to the Chinese/中文 languages as a single "language," but the classification is honestly quite arbitrary. My understanding is that linguists generally place the category of "Chinese" somewhere between "language" and "family."

Is Scots a different language than English? I don't think I could understand someone speaking Scots without incredible concentration. (However, it's still considered a "linguistic variety" of middle english.)

explaining the etymology doesn't really change anything. I don't know why you thought that would make me stop associating it with the bible belt.

Half-life is good -- I played it recently -- but I think it relies on having a bit of skill already, it's not a great choice for a beginner in my opinion. I would suggest Minecraft (if you're creative) or Portal (if you like puzzles) instead, to learn the ropes of how to control a game in first-person perspective.

Y'all reminds me of the bible belt. I'm not transgender but I am queer and now and then it makes me uncomfortable.

Twitter is evil Mastodon has bad UX BlueSky is fresh

Then you did not prove that there is no discontiguous mapping which maps [1, 2] to the natural numbers. You must show that no mapping exists, continugous or otherwise.

But then a simple comeback would be, "well perhaps there is a non-continuous mapping." (There isn't one, of course.)

"It still works if you don't" -- how does red's argument work if you don't? Red is not using cantor's diagonal proof.

Crack your knuckles, solve your problems your own way, stop comparing yourself to other people, ditch the drugs, and turn your life around. You're the main character; this has been episode 1, now let's do episode 2.