Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
Jesus very probably did exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus
I don't know if the historicity of any of the other figures listed has been established. I mean, Jesus had a mother, for example, but I don't know if there's any reason to believe that she was anything like Mary as the Bible describes her.
I'd guess that most of the Biblical figures with established historical existence are gonna be major figures like Pontius Pilate.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biblical_figures_identified_in_extra-biblical_sources
Chat With Jesus, Mary, The Apostles — And Even Satan
Most of those people were likely illiterate, and wouldn't have been able to write the chat messages. You're gonna get about as much out of Jesus on the other end of a chat program as you would a cat walking across the keyboard.
I didn't follow that story, but if it was over some suit over bone chips, I'd donlt think that it'd be analogous. Normally, "boneless wings" are less-desirable than regular wings. Boneless wings are just reconstituted chicken, so you can use scraps and stuff for them. It's kind of like the relationship between steak and hamburger.
But with hamburger, you can occasionally have a bone chip make it in.
That's in contrast to a window seat, where a window seat is often considered to be preferable, and someone not getting one would feel like they're being mislead as to the actual value of what they're getting.
Like, I wouldn't expect truth-in-advertising issues to come up with boneless chicken; you wouldn't likely wouldn't get boneless chicken wings because of an aversion to bone or something, where that's your main goal.
kagis
Yeah:
It doesn't sound like it's a false advertising case with the chicken, but a product safety one.
The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
I mean, we definitely didn't even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver's ed --- an elective course --- where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
People need to work on their susceptibility to this.
I'm not saying you're wrong, and that's gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don't get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn't a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren't doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I'm not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you'd kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I'd say that that's relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it's on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
EDIT2:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/
This one doesn't go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
EDIT4: One more fun chart:
EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:
https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses
the COL also varies wildly. I could move 1.5 hours away from where I live now and pay like 1/3 of what I do now for rent/mortgage.
Part of that high city housing cost is zoning and other planning constraints on building upwards. Have to increase supply if you want to bring the cost down.
I post this occasionally:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/
If it were possible to reduce the cost-of-living bar to letting more people move to cities, it'd be possible to increase productivity for a lot of people.
I remember the "The Rent is Too Damn High" guy running for mayor of New York City a few years back. The guy had a point.
Like, policymakers have not done a great job on that.
life is easy if you live on a budget.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
While I share some frustration on the matter, I'd also point out:
It's not as if we're taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that's it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.
We live in an environment where the risks aren't, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don't disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But...think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
I think that it's a Ford Taurus-based Ford Police Interceptor Sedan.
The shooting appears to be accidental, but police said they are still investigating the incident.
"On any occasion prior to this, had your dog exhibited hostility towards you, sir?"
Also known as the All United for the Union of Populist Movements party, the Trump party is seemingly a successor to far-right Wallonian parties Chez Nous and the Belgian National Front (NF).
Trump is pretty big on licensing fees for use of his brand. I suspect that this won't end well.
Eh, I mean, I wouldn't buy it, but then I wouldn't buy Apple products in general, as they're all gonna carry a premium. They sell into kinda a low-end luxury market. I dunno how many people remember back when Apple introduced the white earbuds with the iPod and had a marketing campaign focusing on their color, at a time when headphones were pretty universally a more-subtle black, to make it very obvious that what someone had in their pocket was an iPod.
For some luxury goods, the point is to visibly show the item to others, to demonstrate that you can afford the item, engage in conspicious consumption. Then you get Veblen goods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve.
The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
So people can prefer a higher-priced item, specifically because it lets them show off that they can afford it.
And if you figure that the closest thing to the "phone pocket" is women's purses, well...that's historically been a product category that sees a fair number of members that are Veblen goods, a lot of pricey items designed to show that their wearer can afford them. Like, a designer handbag isn't really any more functional than a far-less-expensive equivalent, yet lots of people buy them.
https://www.hermes.com/us/en/category/women/bags-and-small-leather-goods/bags-and-clutches/
Those are pretty hefty prices for the functionality you're getting.
If you figure that a phone pocket probably fills more-or-less the same fashion role, then I wouldn't be surprised if the potential to sell luxury phone pockets is comparable to that to selling luxury handbags.
Apple already kinda sells towards a low-end luxury market, so I expect that Apple's probably making a not-unreasonable move in trying to feel out whether there's potential for that among their customer base.
I wouldn't pay much for a luxury container for a phone, but that's me. My pockets fit my phone just fine, so I'm not even in the market in the first place. But...doesn't mean that Apple isn't making the right move from a business standpoint for them, I think.
EDIT: A quick kagi later, it sounds like the proper industry term is "affordable luxury" rather than "low-end luxury":
The iPhone 17 was launched in September 2025, during Apple’s traditional event in Cupertino, California. Tim Cook, in turn, emphasized that the model reinforces the company’s strategy of transforming smartphones into symbols of affordable luxury in the global market. Although the price is high for most people, the iPhone 17 is still priced lower than other traditional luxury goods, including designer handbags, sports cars, and Swiss watches.
Since 2007, Apple has established its brand as a benchmark for innovation and prestige. However, in September 2025, the company once again reinforced the idea that the iPhone is the “cheapest rich-people’s item” available on the market. According to Bloomberg, the device has therefore become a gateway for consumers looking to flaunt a globally recognized status item. Thus, it has come to be seen as an affordable alternative to prestige.
I mean, I like the Lara Croft thigh holster route, but that might chafe.
And if you're wearing it the way the male model is, you can probably add an outer shirt or jacket and wear it like an underarm money belt in less-secure environments. I have one of those that I repurposed for carrying a tablet. Looks very similar to this, though not the same brand or type of fabric:
https://www.amazon.com/Multi-Purpose-Anti-Thief-Security-Underarm-Messenger/dp/B077GD5C27
Kind of like a very thin purse with a padded, short strap that's intended to optionally hide under one's clothes.
You don't need something that large to carry a phone, though. The sort of smaller thing that they're doing here is big enough for that.
I've commented on here before how women's clothing generally doesn't have large-enough pockets for smartphones. A lot of modern women's clothing is form-fitting, and has small pockets.
So either you revise the clothing or add some kind of wearable bag/pocket.
Used to be that women wore dresses, had slits in the skirts that they could reach through, and then had sorta wearable pockets on beneath them. But full skirts are pretty dead now, so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket
By the 17th century, pockets were sewn into men's clothing, while women's remained as separate tie-on pouches hidden beneath skirts.[5][6]
In the 17th to 19th centuries, women's tie-on pockets—mentioned in the rhyme Lucy Locket—often carried everyday tools like scissors, pins, needles, and keys.[7][8]: 113
In modern fashion, men's clothing usually includes pockets, whereas women's clothing often has smaller or even fake ones, sometimes called Potemkin pockets after the concept of a Potemkin village. A 2018 study by the Pudding found that fewer than half of women's front pockets could fit a thin wallet, let alone a phone or keys.[9]
When I first ran into this, I thought "well, put the phone in your purse then, dammit, you're already carrying that for feminine hygiene products". Problem is that women don't haul (bulky) purses everywhere --- walk into the office, say, set down the purse at the desk, and it's mostly staying at the desk. I don't know any women who wear their purses around the house. But they do want to keep the phone available all the time.
And the smartphone is a pretty ubiquitous item to want to carry around now.
So unless women's clothing changes to have large pockets and somehow deals with not messing up the body's silhouette or whatever makes that a problem or the smartphone form factor changes ("big smartwatch?"), I expect that people have to wind up with some kind of mini, wearable container. Like this.
the passing grade is 43/50,
They might just be randomly guessing and hoping that they'll eventually get it, and thinking that their chances are better than they are.
I think that that'd be...let's see. Say there are four possible answers for each question. So he's got a 75% chance of failing any individual question.
$ maxima -q (%i1) load("distrib")$ (%i2) cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75); (%o2) 1.8188415357867314E-19That should give the probability of failing at most 7 answers out of 50 if there's a 75% chance of failing any one.
So he's got something like a 0.000000000000000018188% chance of passing the test by randomly guessing.
His chance of failing a single instance of that test:
(%i3) 1-cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75); (%o3) 1.0Ah. He has such a ludicrously small chance of passing that Maxima can't represent it with the current floating point precision.
kagis a bit to figure out how to do this
Okay, apparently Maxima has bigfloats, but they default to only 16 digits of precision; not enough for this. This should give us 200 digits of floating point precision with bigfloats.
(%i4) fpprec:200; (%o4) 200 (%i5) 1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)); (%o5) 9.999999999999999998181158464213268688894671703526026636336767389444876177016785501194817697978578507900238037109375b-1Okay, so now chance of failing 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:
(%i6) (1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128; (%o6) 9.9999999999999997671882834192983948674103659072385593201782461674117226992783470289641501110105148249790638571335177402867593272110042747272666144926576839664587182158166580514670324207313719393913737b-1So then his chance of managing to get at least one success out of 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:
(%i7) 1-(1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128; (%o7) 2.328117165807016051325896340927614406798217538325882773007216529710358498889894851750209361428664822597132406727889957252727333855073423160335412817841833419485329675792686280606086263120236298536839b-17So he's got about a 0.0000000000000023% chance of passing at least once in a 128 random-guess-based series of test attempts (assuming, again, that each question has four multiple choice answers). That is, he could keep doing this for the rest of his life and he's virtually certain not to pass.
Strong words for a man who travels by personal aircraft even when he's not President and whose priority in holding patterns is up to the discretion of air traffic controllers.
Harper's Pub
All of the parties involved in the argument were said to have been drinking.
For God's sake, the British developed technology to deal with this some time back. The Guinness Book of World Records was originally designed to resolve disputes between bar patrons. Just put one in the bar instead of resolving them via homicide.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/70781-most-prolific-chicken
Most prolific chicken
White Leghorn (No. 2988)
United States
The highest authenticated rate of egg-laying is 371 in 364 days, laid by a White Leghorn (No. 2988) in an official test conducted by Prof. Harold V. Biellier ending on 29 August 1979 at the College of Agriculture, University of Missouri, USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records
Guinness World Records, known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as The Guinness Book of Records and in previous United States editions as The Guinness Book of World Records, is a British reference book published annually, listing world records both of human achievements and the extremes of the natural world. Sir Hugh Beaver created the concept in order to settle arguments debated in pubs, and twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter co-founded the book in London in August 1955.[3]
https://gwrstore.com/en-us/collections/guinness-world-records-books
$21 per copy from their own store.
https://www.amazon.com/Guinness-World-Records-2025/dp/1913484564
$23 on Amazon.
he has not played Kerbel Space Program.
"Kerbal"
“We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry,” he wrote.
In a follow-up post, he added, “Have I mentioned my repeated call for civic education.”
Ehh...you could establish a residence in New York City and also in Kentucky and switch your domicile back and forth based on which place you want to vote in a given year.
EDIT: It looks like the bar for both is whether you spend at least 183 days a year, with part days counting. So technically, if you spend about half the year in each place, so some of those days are partly in each, you probably could just choose, since you could meet the bar for domicile in both places concurrently (though you can't actually have a domicile in both places simultaneously). I don't know how frequently you can switch, though, like whether there's a delay in voter registration taking effect or whatever.
saying he’s “never felt so free and fulfilled.”
From another article, his role at the IRS is in writing tax law regulations for pension funds. I mean...it's gotta be done, but I kinda suspect that sometimes, it's not very exciting.
Honestly, I'm kinda impressed that he took his furlough and decided to knock something off his bucket list. I mean, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade and all that.
EDIT: Oh, they apparently also mentioned it in this article as well.
https://biblehub.com/q/was_jesus_omniscient.htm
I suppose that establishes it. Jesus is presumably also fluent in Cockney rhyming slang.