With some caveats, particularly ensuring a baseline level of competence, in a way that is somehow not overly discriminatory, I agree. The challenge then is to train the representatives sufficiently, but I think it could be done. And naturally I think there are significant benefits to this scheme, particularly having fresh faces (and ideas!) and not making the reelection-popularity/wealth-contest constantly reoccur.
I think it is interesting because similar % GDP seems to be treated steady state function of government, not one that inherently expansive.
For those of us that have been around for a while, it seems shocking that real, inflation controlled government taxes and spending per capitia is >2x that of the 80's, because experientially, many of the services seems no different, if not in decline.
I also think it is interesting to think about what government duties become more and less difficult to maintain with growth, and the implications for what types of objectives the government is well and poorly suited to achieve.
I think the Baumol effect is a helpful lens for exploring this, so I think you.
I should be very clear here that I am a gay man, so I don't really have exposure to much of what is talked about here even if I have heard about it.
What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route.
Personally I feel like much of the issues with Porn, particularly in the US, stem from being uncomfortable talking about sex. Instead of feeling like we need to hide and be ashamed that we watch porn, it should be talked about so from a younger age we know its fantasy. We know that these positions, angles, noises, the perfection, isn't normal.
Sex is messy.
This shame about sex, our bodies, leads to many of these problems with how we view porn.
I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with consuming porn, casually, with your partner(s), regularly, whatever. It is just another way to explore your sexuality and we should not demonize that. We should however address the problems with the industry, but without demonizing its existence.
You're starting from an unverified assumption (the presumed ineffectiveness of immigration enforcement), that's why it feels off to you. How is it ineffective, and why?
And manipulators love to pretend they have no idea what someone is talking about, so they can get outraged when they explain what they already know to them, eh?
> If you don't want to tip, don't dine at full-service restaurants in America.
Whenever I dine at such a place, I give a 100% tip because it’s easier math and it incentivizes me not to patronize such businesses. (I only go with friends and I never make the suggestion.) Just saying that because I disagree with this perspective; do go to these restaurants and don’t tip if that is your choice.
Tipping used to be a gratuity. It’s a way to say, “Your effort was exceptional and I want to show you how grateful I am for it.” Tips are no longer exceptions, nor gratuitous: they have become an obligation, as you say. I reject this; I am not responsible for the wage of someone I did not hire. I’m not even responsible for the success of the business, except that I owe them what I agreed to pay when I ordered. It’s like every restaurant prices their menu incorrectly and they expect their customers to correct them.
(There is a Prisoner’s Dilemma for the restaurants: if I start paying my staff well, I have to raise (advertised) prices but people still think tipping is necessary so they’ll see my increased prices in that context, so they will go to my competitors. I don’t mean to say restaurant owners have an easy out, just that the answer to patronize these businesses regularly, while also tipping generously, perpetuates the situation.)
Is it wrong for someone to order carryout from such a full-service restaurant and not tip? If so, what would they be tipping for? If not, how does the wait staff get paid from the order when they’re primarily paid with tips?
That does look interesting. I could search through it for a lat & long, but it looks like it only gives a name (e.g. "Silicon Oasis") without a corresponding country. Food for thought though.
Interest rates have gone up and housing prices haven't changed much. The average monthly mortgage payment for 20% down 30 year fixed mortgages have shot up though. Something makes me feel like it's not just interest rates.
US infrastructure is increasingly terrible, true. But high-speed rail isn't probably what I'd point to as the most glaring problem. No doubt the TGV and Shinkansen are impressive, but the longest route in Japan (Tokyo-Aomori) is 675km compared to 4000km from Los Angeles to NYC (assuming you could it make a straight line, which you couldn't). Not to say I wouldn't be delighted to even have service from San Diego to Seattle, a mere 1800km.
I recognized its pernicious effects on me and gave it up after getting married and before having a kid. This was after being exposed to it for decades from a young age through unrestricted access to the internet. I think that’s an all too common story. It’s crazy how normalized it becomes once it worms its way into your life, but having been off of it for some time now, I see clearly what a terrible influence it was on me. It’s also made me aware of the extreme perversions and predatory behaviors out in the world which I’ll use as context to make sure my kids never fall victim to.
Everyone’s brain is built different. Some have more executive function and control then others. Alcoholics, meth addicts, food addiction, gambling, etc.
On the Altair Basic, good achievement; but giving how fast Forth was, I'd guess that using a fixed point and a optional floating point for a 8800 machine it would send Basic to NUL.
Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point.
The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
The word has different meanings in different contexts. In Social Media context calling Nostr decentralized is in every way accurate. But this will be my only post with you debating the definition of words. Hope you enjoyed it.
You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2.
Please, do not compare an engineer working on something built by humans with publicly available documentation, and a scientist working on something built by nature without event a single hint of documentation, nor assurance of any logic behind.
They work in different contexts, with wildly different constraints and wildly different expected outcomes.
To clarify: When I said 'I unwittingly summoned demons,' I was referring specifically to dang's post in the linked thread. I realized I had accidentally stumbled onto a topic with such a controversial history on this site that it was almost blacklisted. My comment wasn't about the people replying in the current thread, but about unintentionally unearthing this site's historical hot-button issue.
In my opinion, people need to learn - and in many things, already know - that things have scale. For example, with "pain": a bruise, cavities in teeth, kidney stones, migraines all hurt, but the level of effect on someone's life is vastly different.
Also, people have no problem minimizing the things as well, where pain again is a good example. In many situations, if it cannot be seen, secondary parties easily disregard it.
So, in conclusion, this confusion with the autism levels should not be a problem.
Partly why this is an apples-oranges comparison is that Italy's federal government stepped in to make it happen (planning, land acquisition, funding, establishing federally-owned corporate structure). In the US, projects like this are governed just as much by states as they are the federal government, and since the 1970s we've had a strong and entrenched culture of not having the federal government step in to exert its will on a system to produce a public good.
There's a reason why Obamacare was so fraught and ultimately led to a political downfall of the democrats: it spit in the face of private and state interests (from their perspective) to undercut what they'd grown to do in the previous 40 years. This good, but ultimately half-hearted measure, is only a fraction of the kind of political willpower needed to transform the federal state into something that can build infrastructure again.
Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.
Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.
