Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.

This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!

The issue with the high-paying medical profession is that it attracts 2 kinds of people: nice people who want to do good and help people, and self-centered people who want to feel powerful and in-control while making a bunch of money. The latter are the reason for shit like this. I’d bet that she doesn’t care about children at all, and just wants to feel powerful, while raking in the cash from rich people looking to use her license to validate their terrible behavior.

You’d think so, right?

Negative change worms it’s way in through small defeats. The first DLC’s were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what’s 3 seconds? What’s 4, 5, 6? What’s 30 seconds? What’s 2 minutes? We’ve seen examples of this all throughout capitalism’s history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.

Yeah, if anything, I expect people to book whatever flights they were already going to book, and just crack jokes like “I hope I make it!”

I haven’t heard anyone irl talking about Boeing recently, and barely even saw anything online a week after the initial death. While it pisses me off to no end, this incident will blow over just as easily for Boeing.

Nobody needs a friend so badly that they’re justified in making friends with a genocidal maniac. I understand that Israel has been a long-term investment, but the amount of human suffering going on right now vastly outweighs any lamentations about sunk cost. What this country needs is a president willing to show that he cares about preventing suffering above all else. Doctors take an oath to both do good and do no harm - it’s time for our presidents to do the same, and be held to it to the same degree.

I’m all for kicking both jammed doors and walls.

You know the sound right when it starts to rain?

There’s a tap on the roof or the window, then a few more, and you think “Oh, is that…?” and, sure enough, the taps continue, getting more and more frequent until they blend together into the soothing patter of rainfall. Now imagine that, but instead of light taps, it’s a dull “phomp.”

I imagine someone in an alternate universe hearing that first phomp, and running to grab a cup of tea before sitting by the window to watch the manfall.

The thing to focus on is that there are many different kinds of people in the world. I grew up with a disability, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that there are people you’ll meet who just hate you for not being what they consider to be “normal.” There’s nothing you can do - they’re just going to hate you. But, I eventually found that there are also people who would never dream of doing such a thing, and will treat you neutrally until they get to know you, and will treat you well after that if you treat them well.

Yes, the assholes of the world will always be there, and they’ll make you feel like shit, but the more you can dismiss them as simply being judgemental assholes who know nothing about you, the more you’ll be able to see all the people who will treat you fairly. Sure, if you’ve got a terrible personality, then even those people will want to have nothing to do with you, but if you control the things you can control, there are a lot of people in the world who will see that and think well of you for it.

As soon as I saw this I thought “Get this man some iodine, stat! Or, conversely, stop giving this man so much iodine!”

This is a great point. The results of an IQ test aren’t really measuring a person, they’re measuring a byproduct of that person, which is significantly less informative.

It’s important to define was “equal” is in this context. Some people hear “equal” and think they must measure exactly the same in every test, but that’s not how the word is being used in this context. It’s more that people are so varied from one person to another that no test can truly judge them well enough to differentiate them when it comes to inherent worth.

One person might measure above another in one test, but there are surely many others where the results would be flipped. There are so many different things you could test a person on that in the end none of them really matter; any one measurement is like trying to figure out what an extinct animal looked like from a single tiny piece of a fossil.

That’s what the IQ test is doing - it’s taking one tiny piece of human intelligence, which itself is one tiny piece of what might be said to make up a person’s value, and trying to use that to extrapolate information about them that simply can’t be taken from such a 1-dimensional test. It’s not worthless, but it needs to be paired with a bunch of other tests before it can really say anything, and even then it wouldn’t say much.

Well, once the lease is over people have to sign a new one anyway, so even existing tenants can only lock in rates for so long. And when one landlord ups rent, it’s usually because all the other landlords are doing it too - it seems like they do it in unison, I imagine because they don’t want to have to worry about people leaving for somewhere cheaper. I’m not sure if it’s illegal like price fixing or not, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference in the end.

Essentially. They can’t freely change rent for current tenants since they need to stay within the confines of whatever lease was agreed upon, but they can make rent whatever they want for new tenants, so it’s not an uncommon occurrence for them to simply stop fixing things in a timely manner so that current tenants feel compelled to leave, and then they can fill the space, charging whatever they feel someone will pay for rent after that. It’s scummy, and it’s technically illegal, but everyone knows they won’t really get in trouble for it.

I understand that there are solutions that could fix this, I just don’t think the US government as it is now would be willing to enact or enforce them even if it went ahead with UBI. That’s why my initial post said we need to figure out these things before UBI, or else we’ll enact it without things like taxes for vacant units or rent control between renters, and it’ll fail, killing any enthusiasm for another attempt following potential law changes to fix the issues.

Doesn’t that just further validate my concerns? Prices are going up to gouge people even when a lot of people don’t have the cash to pay for it. I see no reason why a landlord charging $15,000 a year won’t just up it to $25,000 a year when everyone gets a $10k UBI. The government seems to care very little about preventing things like that.

I certainly hope you’re right. All I picture is the dollar stores suddenly becoming $2 stores as everything just shifts to be more expensive with very few people improving their financial situation at all.