That takes something from being completely unreasonable to be understandable.

Why would taxing a gross income of above a billion US$ by ~66% be “completely unreasonable”? Imo taxes for such incomes should generally be higher if anything.

Alle tot

“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion”

As a non colorblind person, I would like to understand how this image could have been modified to include our colorblind brethren.

In general it is a good idea to use colour gradients that monotonically increase (or decrease) in brightness in addition to (or instead of) hue (see here for an in-depth comparison of different colour maps. It’s from a Python package, but it shows some interesting plots comparing different colour maps when it comes to brightness vs. hue). This isn’t just useful for colour blind people, but also helpful when printing in black-and-white.

If you absolutely have to use a diverging colour map, you might reach most people by using blue as a major component of one, but only one of the two branches (the map in the OP uses blue as a major component of both branches, which is why red/green colour blind people can have a problem with it). That way most colour blind people should be able to distinguish the branches, since blue colour blindness (Tritanopia/Tritanomaly) is much rarer than red (Protanopia/Protanomaly) or green (Deuteranopia/Deuteranomaly) colour blindness.

Apart from that it is also possible to mark information visually in other ways than by colour, e.g. by shapes and patterns, like dotted or dashed lines for line graphs, shaded or dotted areas for bar and area graphs, or different geometric shapes like crosses, diamonds, and circles when plotting individual data points, but that is probably more useful when different sets of data are plotted in the same graph.

In what world is a country with billionaires and an autocratic ruling class in which the workers decidedly do not control the means of production, “socialist”?

It’s from a longer quote in “A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” about the language Haskell:

1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?”

Some other languages like e.g. Rust also use monads. The point I was trying to make humorously was that many programming languages sometimes do use math concepts, sometimes even very abstract maths (like monads), and while it’s not maths per se, programming and computer science in general can have quite a bit to do with maths sometimes.

coding has nothing to do with math

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?

i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us

Do you have a source for that? Intuitively 1/3 of all species extinctions (keep in mind this in general includes plants and other kingdoms of life, not just animals) sounds far too high imo. Maybe you have read that number in a slightly different context, like bird deaths in urban areas, or perhaps in a more specific context similar to the one in your link? Don’t get me wrong, like your link shows, (house) cats can easily have a devastating effect on the local wildlife, in particular birds and small mammals or reptiles (wikipedia has an article on the topic, although I didn’t find anything like your numbers in it). But as far as I know the major ways in which humans have caused extinctions are historically overhunting (mostly affecting large birds and mammals), habitat loss in particular since the advent of agriculture, and more recently of course the effects of the climate crisis since the industrial revolution.

they are not sentient

Science disagrees with you here. Most of the animals being used for meat are in fact not just sentient, but also conscious:

Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

– From the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

Humans have put multiple species on the verge of extinction.

That is a slight understatement:

The Holocene extinction is mainly caused by human activities. […] the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.