According to one survey I found[0], around ~20% of Americans (25% of Christian adults) say the bible is the literal word of god. Not exactly a huge amount of people, but a very considerable number nonetheless. I didn't find any numbers for other regions, but maybe it would help to see number of followers by denomination and try to derive some data from that. The official stance of the Catholic Church e.g. is that the bible should not be taken literally. Most protestants in Europe also don't practice much fundamentalism, but there are an estimated 25 million Evangelicals in Europe, around 2.5% to 3% of the population. There's probably more people preaching biblicism than only fundamental evangelicals, but I just wanted to look up two examples real quick.

[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word...

First, the argument of your garden-variety nerd atheist don't always map so cleanly to negative theology. I've seen plenty of arguments in the realm of "The bible contradicts itself, so you're stupid if you believe in it. Checkmate", etc. You get the idea. Just some of the arguments map well to negative theology.

Secondly, the context is missing. In my original comment, I was talking about how being very literal is seen as poor social adaptation because subtext, inaccuracies etc are part of social communication. Pretending to not understand that, or not understanding that, does not make one a logical being, it just makes you look like a dork.

Your argument is applying a very literal take of the hypothetical garden variety atheist we've brewed up. This is the same as taking the bible very literal and then calling people stupid when they believe in it. It's not arguing the main point, but picking out something that's easy to criticize and building your argument around it. My point is that taking something very literal is exactly a sign of poor social adaptation when there is a relatively big agreement on not taking it literally by society.

Now, your garden-variety nerd's arguments hold up very well against people who actually do take the bible literally, but I'm getting to a point where I want to get off the religion debate, because that's not really what I wanted to point out originally.

Circling back to my original: Logic and reasoning is not against social norms. Being a dork who pretends to not understand or actually doesn't understand social norms just to make a point is. Being hurtful just to feel superior is against social norms. Pretending you're interested in "truth" and that's why you are not conforming to social norms is also a pretty stupid take, imo. Yeah, social norms aren't always great, and they certainly don't work for everyone and a lot of people are left out being the "weird" ones, it sucks. But the reason these people are the "weird" ones is not because they're on a noble crusade for truth and logic.

I'm pointing this out even though you're not the original commenter I was responding to because we kind of got derailed into the details of this thing that was more meant as an example than really the main argument.

> I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.

There will always be people falling off on one side of the spectrum or the other. Personally, I haven't met anyone who takes the bible literally, and I know a _lot_ of Christians, including pastors and priests. Some people simply just believe that there is something more, others have a feeling that you can sense that, some just need this believe to feel safe, etc. I guess it depends on where you're from, I believe biblicism is more common in North America, or at least more visible.

Additionally, the "everyone understands religion is not literal" was citing my parent. Usually, "everyone" is kind of understood not to mean "exactly 100%". It's a device to communicate intent.

> You could just as sensibly flip the argument and argue that the garden-variety 'nerdy' atheist is talking literally about atheism but really doing negative theology ("your idea of God is totally wrong and does not exist, because the true God is necessarily inaccessible to human reason") but that would be silly and make you look like a dork too.

Yeah, it'd make you look like a dork because it'd be obviously incorrect. The intentions of your garden-variety nerd talking about atheism are pretty clear, and it's not to make some greater theological point. When you talk to people who talk down on religion and believers, it's usually really easy to tell whether it's because only they themselves understand the True Intention Of God or whether they just think Christians are stupid and if you're smart you have to be an atheist. Said garden-variety nerd is the latter.

I don't think nerds are/were seen as poorly social because logic and reasoning go against social norms. I'll bite on the religion focus. If everyone understands religion is not literal, being smirk about taking it literally is not logical or reasoning or making anyone look smarter. It just makes you look like a dork. Subtext and not being meant to read literally are a core part of social interaction.

I see the same in school, when some overly literal students argue about the interpretation of a book they are assigned to read. "the author can't possible mean that" or "show me where it says that on the page" is a common lazy criticism with little value. Some people are just like that, and (warning: personal observation) nerds tend to be a bit more like that. But the arguments I hear from that corner against religion are seldom great, they are just some minor gotchas.

I don't want to get into the whole religion debate, and I'll admit that there are also groups of Christians that take the bible very literally, as I'm sure there are for other religions as well. From what I can see, these don't make up the canon of religion, and I kind of believe they're mostly concentrated in North America, but that might be my skewed perspective.

It's quite sad that social mechanics in our society don't work well for some people, but that doesn't mean they don't exist and it doesn't make everyone except nerds "illogical".

Even in winter, electricity from the grid is greener than burning diesel. I didn't find specific numbers for winter, but wind is about 30% of Germany's (just picking the biggest country out of DACH to support the point, not trying to come up with exact numbers) electricity production year-round, and wind doesn't tank in winter like solar does.

So, in short. Installing a heat pump and just taking electricity from the grid is still better for the environment. Of course, having your own solar is great if you live in a house, but you don't need it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353972

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

It is always humbling to read things like these!

The problem here is that the simple past "He went" uses an auxiliary verb for negations "He didn't go". In this case, "go" is not participated.

  Additionally, applying the curve to each color channel accidentally desaturated the highlights. This effect looks rather good — and is what we’ve come to expect from film — but it’s has de-yellowed the star. It’s possible to separate the luminance and curve it while preserving color. On it’s own, this would make the LED Christmas lights into an overstaturated mess, but combining both methods can produce nice results.

Reconstructing overexposed areas nicely or achieving certain visual effects is luck, same with getting the colors I'd like.

There is a ton of material out there, but I have the feeling I can't judge what is good and what is just blogspam, slop or low effort content.

I don't mind using commercial tools, but apart from learning the tool I also would like to learn and understand the underlying process.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415225

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419526

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

> Surprisingly, the table is just as big as with the enum type above, even though an enum uses four bytes. The reason is that each table row is aligned at a memory address divisible by eight, so PostgreSQL will add six padding bytes after the smallint. If we had more columns and could arrange them carefully, we could see a difference.

This could be the explanation. If the row is padded to 8, bigint is 8, then smallint or enum also use 8. The entries in the string table will be 8 or 16 due to the string length. So one row in person_e and person_l is 16, one row in person_s could be about 20 on average, that is a bit closer to the reality than my intuition, although the storage savings are still less than what I would have expected.

edit:

I did also try out the test and dropped the primary key on the table to compare only enum and string size:

  SELECT PG_SIZE_PRETTY(PG_RELATION_SIZE('person_e')), PG_SIZE_PRETTY(PG_RELATION_SIZE('person_s'))

  277 MB,330 MB

I also specifically said I don't have a problem with anyone coming. You're welcome. I expect people that come to to a country to pay income tax there (as is usually required by law), but I'm in no way arguing to "cut off demand".

Arguing that someone who would want to close borders and stop immigration (both of which policies I don't support at all, btw) is socialist is a bit far fetched. As I said, I welcome immigrants. Immigration brings with it a whole class of problems that need be addressed, but that doesn't mean it should be forbidden.

And lastly, there's also a big difference between housing a vintage cars. One is an essential need, the other is not. You getting priced out of vintage cars, a luxury item, is not nearly as bad as you getting priced out of housing. That is a real problem that is actually happening in a lot of places, not some weird fantasy.

It's exactly my point that mist people can't afford to live their because they're being priced out by foreigners. Most people native to such an area see that as a net negative, regardless of how much you want to dress it up as people coming and spending their money.

Places relying on tourism as economic activity are very susceptible to economic crisis and it can even go as far as suppressing generation of jobs in other sectors and people leaving because you only find jobs in tourism or you can't afford to live in the city because Digital Nomads live there already. This is obviously exaggerated to make a point, but I think the point still stands in smaller scale.

Foreign money flowing in does not need to be a bonus. DN have the potential to change the microeconomy and in ways that affect your macroeconomy much more than just money flowing in.

Take a place like Barcelona, a famous example for people not being able to live there anymore due to high prices. On top of that, a lot of digital nomads don't interact much with local culture. When people start leaving, is the influx of DN money really still a net positive? Especially considering some of them don't even pay income tax?

I don't want to demonize immigration, but people moving somewhere and treating it like a cheaper version of their hometown is not a positive in any way, culturally or economically.

I am not arguing for socialism by saying that people coming and spending some money (not even that much) is not a sustainable way to do economy. I've got no problem with foreign investors building things that are actually valuable to the economy by building up industry, creating jobs or whatever. Cuba, Venezuela and Argentina have a whole lot of different problems and the reasons they are in the positions they are are much more nuanced than "socialism bad".

And the tax thing is not a bogus argument. When people only pay taxes indirectly, they are tourists. Digital nomads pay _much_ less tax overall than other people, because people who pay income tax pay indirect taxes as well. If the digital nomads don't come, they also wouldn't raise rent and café prices for everyone around them. You come here, register yourself as a freelancer and pay income tax? You're very welcome in my book. But if you come to the country to leech off its cheap prices but don't pay income tax, you can go back where you came from.

We bring in millions of poor immigrants for various reasons: It's the human thing to do, these immigrants do cheap and hard labor that a lot of natives won't do (think construction, food delivery, etc.) and as such even provide benefits to us.

Digital Nomads mostly aren't immigrants. They come for a limited time, don't provide much to the local economy outside spending some money (and even then it's not that much because a lot of them come to cheap countries to live for cheap and save money) and then leave again. It's not really comparable.

I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."

Good writing goes a long way