recovering_rationaleist
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User ID: 1768
You really want a digital seismometer network. Google cache indicates that digital seismometers used to be advertised on Amazon for $8999 each. Which is a steal for defense technology, but the real engineering costs probably come from setting up the network and the analysis software to detect tunnelling without triggering on nearby trucks or nearby uses of bunker-busting munitions.
The Joint Direct Attack Munition is a guidance kit that converts unguided bombs, or "dumb bombs", into all-weather precision-guided munitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition)
What's this about a "JDAM missile" sound from the video? I heard something that sounded a lot like a missile launching, but JDAMs don't have engines.
The bottom link in this comment is a pretty good match for the sound: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/149933?context=8#context
Just to play devil's advocate on both sides:
- The hospital is in Northern Gaza, dead center of the region that was given a "24 hour" evacuation notice a few days ago now. The evacuation notice specified that hospitals should also be evacuated. If this was Israel, they might be "softening up" northern Gaza for their ground offensive, or they might have been returning counterbattery fire without restrictions, since civilians are to have left the area.
- With Biden visiting Israel tomorrow (in ~12 h?), presumably to talk Israel down from a ground invasion, leadership on the Israeli side might benefit from a rapid escalation of violence, and leadership on the Hama side would benefit from a rapid escalation in civilian casualties. Good for both sides no matter who did it.
- The fact that there does not seem to be a clear video makes it less likely to me that it was an Israeli strike. Israel tends to either record its own strikes, or provide enough warning that journalists are already pointing their stabilized camera tripods in the right direction from a safe distance. In contrast, Hamas strikes and false flags like yesterday's "airstrike" on the evacuation routes tend to come without warning, and videos tend to show only the aftermath. But it is also possible Israel has gunsight footage of the whole thing and it will be released 5 to 10 years from now.
- All the casualty numbers are claimed by Gazan authorities, who are probably exaggerating. Yesterday's Israeli hit on a UN school where 4000 people were sheltering only killed four people, and we're supposed to believe that 800 people died when a bomb hit a courtyard? I guess it is possible the bomb was fragmentary and there was no cover, but something seems off. I'm not sure if high casualty numbers would shift the blame toward Israel (more likely to have large bombs) or Hamas (not Israeli MO).
Edit: Wikipedia says the summit with Joe Biden has been cancelled, but Manifold is 98% pretty confident that Biden is still going to Israel.
Act 3 of the Hamas' ideal outcome involves international condemnation of Israeli human rights violations, televised slaughter of Arabs, and the hardliners within Saudi Arabia vetoing a normalizing of Israeli-Saudi relations. The beginnings of this were already visible in the Asian news tonight: the official Korean national broadcaster (KBS) had a segment focused on the blockade of humanitarian resources (with mention that fuel cuts impact hospitals) which segued into a report that Israel has dropped white phosphorous bombs. (The NYT reported one day ago that "the Israeli army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares." Footage was from broad daylight, so either the footage is old/repurposed, the denial is out of date, someone is lying and it was white phosphorous, or it was actually anti-SAM flares.)
Korea has a "National Pension System" much like Social Security, except that the fund is invested in the domestic stock market. This has a number of negative consequences:
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The fund has immense power over private businesses due to its size. Via its minority share, it has even vetoed restructurings of the Samsung group (remember that the Samsung group accounts for roughly 20% of Korea's GDP).
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The fund is not invested well. It gets put in places for political as well as economic reasons, and in theory a purely economic fund would perform better.
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The fund makes transparent financial decisions. This means everyone with assets who pay attention to the news has a chance at front-running the fund.
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There are going to be issues in liquidating the fund when it is needed. This to me is the biggest issue - that selling off the assets of an entire generation is going to devalue those assets, and I'm not sure that anyone realistically accounts for this when determining the present value of such a huge fund.
All that said, NPS is currently in surplus by an amount corresponding to 1~5% of Korean GDP, and is expected to remain solvent until 2055. So perhaps there really is an argument for "privatization" (at least until the end of this stock market bubble).
In Korea, Uber was kicked out of the entire country, and only foreigners complained, because domestic app companies worked with taxi companies to come up with non-shitty ride hailing services of their own. I think they might have a Korean service now, having miraculously discovered how to work within the confines of existing taxi regulations.
@sodiummuffin and greyenlightenment's points below are correct: underpaid "essential workers" only have low wages because there are so many people able and willing to do their jobs at low wages, relative to the "need" for those jobs.
Several years ago I saw a cleaners strike happen at a university. (The cause was dissatisfaction with a middleman temp firm which was taking a large cut of the budget allocated for cleaners' salaries). The hallways and lecture halls were messy after only 2~3 days, and after two weeks they were full of trash. At which point graduate students were paid extra to clean up the hallways and lecture pits. To have graduate students cleaning the hallways was much more expensive than having the cleaners do it, but the labor market was suddenly artificially tight, and the department feared that having trashy lecture halls would result in undergrad enrollment dropping.
In labor markets flush with workers, salaries are completely unrelated to the infrastructure that makes it possible for jobs to be done, as well as completely unrelated to the upper limit of what people would pay for that job to be done (i.e. what would be paid if there were absolutely no workers), despite the net value of their jobs to other people in society being several orders of magnitude larger than the prevailing salary. They cannot negotiate higher salaries because if they do then someone else will come in and replace them, getting the job by undercutting their wage.
The same is true in reverse: if there were only one person able and willing to do plumbing in the entire country, that person would be paid millions of dollars per hour servicing nuclear reactors. If there were only one person able to clean in the entire country, they would be paid handsomely to work in a semiconductor fab.
Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now.
Are you sure? Another thing associated with the Gilded Age is machine politics, which is supposedly just fading out in Chicago as of 2021: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan-chicago-machine-politics-illinois-progressives-20210305-cmh33nn2svbajlkk7ma6omo4ee-htmlstory.html
Given how the incentives are skewed, I predict that it will only take a few election cycles of widespread mail-in voting for coercion and bribery to become commonplace again. It will be implemented with plausible deniability a la Wells Fargo: swing-state campaigns tell their campaign workers to get out the vote, and pay them per ballot in their precinct of responsibility, multiplied by the percentage of the vote they win on election day. Campaign workers in turn will do the rest quietly and of their own free will, and will also have plausible deniability: "gift cards" for votes, no matter who you vote for, but we'll love you more if you vote for X. (The few campaign workers who step over the line and get caught will be prosecuted, but there will be no evidence of systemic fraud.) Frankly, I think we already had gift cards for votes in 2020.
many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company
This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.
This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood
You repeatedly call this a lack of adult company, but the problem you describe is not leaving the company of adults, but one of changing from socializing with non-parents to socializing with other parents. As a SAHM after the first year or so your free time is mostly during the workday, while non-SAHMs mostly have time to socialize after the work day ends (which for parents corresponds to mealtime and bedtime). To put it another way, motherhood comes with all the social detriments of a long-distance move. (But people still move all the time.)
Having experienced a modern society where SAHMs are normal, the first year of the first child is all about baby all the time, but the moms still socialize: they have support groups with other moms of their age group, call friends, use social media, and get a lot of emotional, logistical support, and time off via their parents and parents-in-law. Then once the kid socializes well with other kids they start meeting other moms almost daily, chatting while the kids play. The conversation is mostly centered on parenting, but that's mostly because, as you note, intellectuals aren't having kids.
As soon as the kids go to school (or usually preschool) then these SAHMs either gradually start working part-time or spend large portions of their days with their friends. I used to work in cafes a lot. There were many groups of SAHMs who would come into the cafe after lunch and spend roughly 1 PM to 5 PM hanging out. Book clubs, sports clubs, investment clubs. Of course, this society is almost invisible to non-SAHMs, because non-SAHMs are confined to the workplace during the day in places far away from where people live and where toddlers are raised. To the extent that non-mothers are ignorant of how much adult interaction SAHMs can get, I guess one might steelman your precise wording, but the true core of the issue here is that it's a change in social groups, not completely isolating. Unless you are in the top 5% of IQ, in which case you probably moved away from your parents and none of your friends who share your interests have had kids yet. Which I guess describes the average person in the Bay Area rational community as well as the average Mottizen.
A lot of the discussion about shame in the US revolves around fat-shaming, but I think we would be better served to directly shame unhealthy eating and unnecessary lethargy. As far as I see it, the difference between culture in the US and Asia is threefold: (1) It's acceptable in Asia to tell someone if they gained/lost weight. (2) People in Asia don't drive everywhere, but walk / bike / public transport more. (3) People in Asia eat a lot more vegetables and a lot less carbs / refined sugars.
When I see a comment like this, my instinct is to ask "How?" We just traded a personal-level problem for a politics-level solution, which means it will happen approximately never. Not only is the morass of US politics highly illogical, it is supported by a whole ecosystem of bad decisions and incentives which work against change, from zoning laws which benefit existing suburban homeowners to subsidized housing requirements which force new developments to be low-status places to live.
I guess the personal solution is to just buy a home for yourself in a nice urban space. Not only can you become part of a community which walks everywhere, but your neighbors will share your values (Hopefully), and if land values go up, other landlords will be motivated to make more places like your urban space.
The College Board could just be skipping ahead in the script.
Important to note that classes start in about 25 calendar days, so it is important to the Florida schools (the College Board's clients) to figure out whether to offer the class now, rather than in December.
Traditionally, stories of UFOs were planted in the population by undercover members of the intelligence community [1], who needed to provide chaff to distract from civilian observations of advanced spy balloons [2], U-2s, SR-71s [3], and later stealth fighter/bombers. I see no reason to believe this is any different: USAF is researching drones, next-gen missiles, and maybe next-generation fighters/bombers, and needs to get the public excited about UFOs. We'll learn the truth about this in about 40 years.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men,
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul#Roswell_incident,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_balloon#Skyhook_as_UFO,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB7/nsaebb7.htm
[3] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517742.pdf : "According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. (45)"
You're failing the intellectual turing test. They see themselves as saving children who were born trans. It isn't obviously mutilation if the child is born trans and the diagnosis is accurate. Thus the phrase "coming for the children" has a relatively innocent interpretation here.
On the other hand, nobody has yet performed a randomized controlled trial on outcomes for different treatments for (or diagnostics of) trans children. (I looked very hard for papers on this last year. The only RCTs are on adults, and in non-RCTs measuring suicide rates in teenagers the effect sizes for surgery and for social transition were about the same. A trans rights activist I was conversing with argued that to perform an RCT would be unethical.)
I'm not going to read your link. It's 50 to 60 printed pages long. I skimmed the first 2500 words, and the gist of it seems to be that the neoconservative movement was an academic movement supported by majority-Jewish media, and took a pro-Israel foreign policy stance. That's fair, and I will concedie that the most prominent neoconservatives on that list were intellectuals of Jewish ancestry. However, looking on Wikiepedia it seems that most of the prominent American neoliberals on Wikipedia are also Jewish. Can we name an American political movement from the past 20 years which was not dominated by Jewish intellectuals? Do Jewish intellectuals just originate all (American) political movements?
Also, you still need to make the very important causal link from this academic movement to the actual war in Iraq. From the unfinished Gulf War, it is likely that Rumsfeld and Bush had a vendetta against Sadam from 1991, and from the Bush/Cheney oil business it is likely that the war was motivated by the capture of oil fields. Did these neocons originate the invasion, or were they merely providing a convenient rationalization for it? (And why was the supermajority of the American public in support of the Iraq war, when the American public is not Jewish?) You (and Kevin McDonald) admit that the "frontmen" were not Jewish, so you don't get to strip them of agency and culpability for what happened without a very well-articulated causal model.
A hallmark of jewish controlled movements is non-jewish frontmen
In absence of detail, this statement disproves your argument by making the hypothesis unfalsifiable. It is also a statement with the implication that every single political movement ever was controlled by the jews. That's not a reasonable argument, a high-effort argument, or even a functional argument.
Rov_Scam named a bunch of individuals who are broadly regarded as having pushed the US into the second Iraq War by making public (fallacious) claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of Iraq in 9/11. I think a reasonable refutation would require naming a bunch of jewish individuals who are behind the alleged "non-jewish frontmen", and describing how they pushed the US into war. If you can't do that, then either you need to rethink the assumptions that led you into thinking the war was orchestrated by a jewish conspiracy, or you need to stop trolling.
The deadline set by the Covid Origin Act of 2023 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text) to release names, symptoms, hospital visits, and roles of WIV researchers who had Covid-like symptoms in fall 2019 has come and gone. A Google News search for "Covid Origin Act" results in a single article released over the weekend:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/covid-was-not-developed-as-a-bioweapon-dni-finds/
This source is not mainstream. It suggests that the legally mandated report has been released, but puts a spin on the results of the report (Covid not likely an intentional bioweapon) without revealing the full text. Most importantly, it doesn't name any of the names that the Act required. So I went to the website of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence. Crickets. Twitter? There has been a post, but it is about Juneteenth.
Edit: I suppose it is possible that the DNI has made their mandated report to Congress, and that no congresspeople have leaked it yet. In which case one would expect articles in a few hours to days?
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right. I wonder how the disclosure of Covid origins information became right-coded.
Turns out there is another paper. Will try to send you a link by the weekend.
Oh thanks! I don't know if that's the paper that they were describing, but it sounds similar. Great find!
Unfortunately I don't think theism is required to explain that. The evolution of cooperation, predation, parasitism, communication, etc ("social behavior") is expected in any sufficiently complex resource-contrained environment, just as a result of game theory combined with selection. Once cells land on strategies of cooperation where they are sacrificing their own reproduction to provide resources for their siblings (in the style of the selfish gene), it isn't a big jump to multicellular organisms. According to Wikipedia, multicellularity has evolved independently at least 31 times, and complex multicellularity at least 6 times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism). Since it has happened so many times, two things must be true: (1) it wasn't spectacularly improbable and (2) the genetic lines of each of those mutations has remained competitive enough to survive to this day.
I'll admit that the evolution of sexual reproduction has me stumped, though. I'm sure someone has written papers on it, and there's probably a Wiki on it, but I kind of want to puzzle over it first.
Your first bullet point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.
No it doesn't depend on a multiverse at all. (Does all statistical reasoning require multiverses to exist?) It only requires a belief that the universe we see is one example of the set of all possible (imaginable) universes.
It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived.
You don't seem to be understanding the implications of the anthropic principle. For every human that is conceived, there are billions of sperm which are thrown out, and there are even more (billions upon billions upon billions(*A)) of potential genetic combinations which could happen but don't. Had the sperm which became you not fertilized the egg which became you, you would just not exist to have this conversation. Full stop. The probability that you in particular would exist is just too small. The number of possible humans is of similar magnitude to the number of atoms in the universe.
(A) The human genome has 3,054,815,472 base pairs, and two random humans might differ by up to 0.6% of their genome, so we can say that two random humans are separated by about 18M base pairs, whereas the rate of mutation in human DNA is ~2.5×10^(−8) per base per generation, so each human will have about 76 new mutations. To simplify a bit (assuming mutations are evenly distributed, which they are not, but you will see that it doesn't matter), this means the possible range of single mutations that are still considered human is bounded between 4^76 = 5.7 x 10^45 (all mutations between humans occur on the same 76 nucleobases) and 18M choose 764 (any of 76 mutations could occur anywhere in the genome). Either way, the number of possible humans is really big, so if you were not born when you were born, you would never have been, at least not in our light cone.
Your second bullet point calls for some subject matter expertise that I obviously don’t have. You mention that RNA can be self-catalyzing. I suppose this raises the question of “just how hard would it be to create RNA by chance circumstances.” How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?
This was addressed by ResoluteRaven below. The answer appears to be "not very hard", and that was also the gist of the paper I linked above about combining HCN and H2O to make amino acids.
if it was impossible for an organism to live in such an environment, it would be impossible for them to be created in them. But anyway, I’m not sure this is a strong item of evidence in favor of abiogenesis and don’t weight it very heavily.
This is poor logic, because it can be continued ad infinitem to explain anything inconvenient for your position, and makes your position unfalsifiable. (You might say it proves too much. If your position is unfalsifiable, then it is not testable. To put it another way, suppose that 50 years from now scientists were to demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab. You could still argue that they merely discovered the method by which God created life. How convenient, considering it would also the method by which life could have arisen without a God at all.
In the modern day, I've heard creationists arguing on behalf of the position that the earth is only 6,000 years old. When confronted with the fact that fossils can be dated to millions of years ago, they fall back to the argument that if fossils appear to have been buried for millions of years, they must have been placed in the rock formation by an intelligent designer to appear that way, so as to trick modern-day humans. This argument can of course be extended to argue that everything before any arbitrary moment in the past has been retconned, and God just created a world to look convincingly old. If your Designer is all-powerful, I guess that might make sense to you, but it is equally valid to suppose that the Designer didn't do much more than set some parameters on the Big Bang and press a button to see what would happen.
What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?
I hate to be trite, but another commenter below has explained this already. I may suggest that if this topic matters to you (or is truly critical to maintaining your faith), then you try reading the first few chapters of a textbook on molecular biology for the relevant background. You don't have to read very far. I got to chapter 3.
I would love to chat with your friend, please consider giving me a point of contact.
I'm really sorry, but my friend has spent an inordinate amount of their career arguing against intelligent design. Probably about as much time as they have spent doing biological research. Given that the return to humanity is much higher if they spend their time doing research, I really don't want to provide them access to more ideas from intelligent design.
A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?
A self-propagating reaction which manages to become more efficient, propagate, then split into multiple (identical) reactions in different locations, each of which propagates itself, is for all intents and purposes the metabolism of a self-replicating organism. The molecules and structures involved in that reaction are called an organism. As an example, the simplest organisms we know of (biological viruses) are nothing but molecules which propagate themselves by hijacking the machinery (reactions) of existing cells to do their replication.
I have connections to people doing research into the origins of life, and frankly the probabilisty-based arguments against natural biogenesis are very weak.
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Cosmological fine-tuning isn't an argument against natural (or at least materialistic) origin because it runs into the anthropic paradox. If the universe were fine-tuned to create life, the same arguments must hold to show that it was fine-tuned to create humanity, and to create you. After all, just as a universe supporting life like us is improbable, so is your specific combination of genes and experience fantastically improbable. Any number of chance encounters (even a half-second delay in your father's ejaculation) could have resulted in a different sperm meeting that egg, and you simply not existing. Nonetheless, we also know that no fine-tuning of sperm selection was involved in the process, and God was not necessary: we can choose sperm in the lab and force a baby to happen. We can even tune the genetics of nonhuman individuals for appearance, health, and personality, and it is only ethics that keeps us from doing that to humans.
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If you look at a specific origin of life it looks fantastically improbable, but there are a lot of demonstrations that the "minimal replicating natural system" is probably a lot smaller than a protein, let alone a full cell. All that would be required is a set of amino-acids that are stable at the temperature and pressure of oceanic vents, and which catalyze the creation of themselves. (The technical term for this is an autocatalytic set.) It has been shown that proteins are unnecessary: RNA can catalyze its own replication (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1371-4), and peptides (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1371-4) and amino acids (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00520) can arise from chemical environments with very simple precursors (HCN and H2O are all you need for amino acids to arise). The search for a minimal amino acid set with the ability for self-replication is ongoing, but if any such set occured even once in the billion-year history of oceanic vents, then it would have become the primary chemical makeup of its environment. Such a set would not even need to be very efficient at first; in an environment without RNAase it only needs to self-catalyze faster than its thermal breakdown, and evolution does the rest. FOOM.
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There is also circumstantial evidence to suggest this happened. The synthesis of amino acids and sugars is more favorable at 85C in the environment of certain porous and hydrogen-rich rocks, and this environment is preferred by certain extant microorganisms (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JG006436). Most recently, I heard about a manuscript showing that of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents. (Unfortunately, I can't find it. Edit: Maybe ThenElection finds it below.)
Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:
Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.
The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.
Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.
This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.
[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad
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