Imagine if jobs weren't tied to survival. Like, imagine people got paid for whatever they did. Raise a kid? Government sends you the wage. Community work? Fill out the wage application, describe what you did, wage. Work some job? Wage. Overpaid? Taxed more. Underpaid? Subsidised. Sat on your ass and charged other people rent? Jail.

Then consider what it would mean for ai to take over a bunch of jobs. More money into the pool to pay the wages of creative work, community work, and say UBI. Tech improvements would be celebrated. The economy would be democratised. We'd all benefit.

Someone should go talk to these cars and try to get them to stop fatality striking people

I don't think enjoying the movie somehow supports eugenics. The premise is about the correlation between education level and demographic trends, which is a real thing. The reproduction rate is well-known to be correlated with women's education specifically. Regarding eugenics, historically, the issue there was forced eugenics. That's a much different thing.

What is the two element set where the first element is the best possible question I could ask and the second element is the answer to that question?

I didn't realise anyone still uses facebook. Like in developed countries I mean.

Commendable. I don't recommend it, but I commend it.

Perhaps, but if everyone is correct and he's a symptom of much bigger issues, then holding out might be a huge waste of time.

At least for the gas this is the start of a better way of thinking about the problem. When I still lived in the US, I heard ppl complain about the price of gas all the time. However, I never heard complaints about our dependency on gas or the economic problem that the cheapest stuff there is per volume felt expensive to buy.

I'd go a step further and require labeling meat as having come from an animal. So the source of food would have to precede the term, such as "cow burger", "pig burger". Can do the same for milk. Make all dairy farmers put "cow milk" rather than just "milk". It's way less confusing that way. Include a warning that the product contains lactose. Instead of a logo to signify vegetarian products, make one to signify animal products. Use the silhouette of a horse or something.

I was wondering the opposite actually. How was that thing flying for any amount of time in the first place? I thought maybe people are desensitized these days, but there's probably a useful distinction to be made between the ones who make a big stink on social media and the ones who take useful action.

It's a Magnus effect sail. It's the force that makes a spinning ball curve. They've made the ball huge (5m diameter) and stretched it into a cylinder. So a crosswind meets the spinning tower and an orthogonal force, forward, is produced. Less fluttery than a sail, but for it to work you need a reliable crosswind. They've therefore been installed on ferries which run north-south in the Baltic Sea.

It's a lot of money for sure, but it doesn't strike me as way off the mark given the size. As a fun exercise, check how much it costs to repave a street in your hometown and make sure you're sitting down first.

Sure, but justified or not, the personality behind the policies is very important to most ppl. She was the least popular candidate in the primaries. She ran a presumptuous half-assed victory lap campaign. She ran to the center and proposed nothing new or inspiring. She avoided difficult topics and fumbled when confronted with them. So, her policies were mostly fine (except of course that big one), but people maybe don't want a non-leader type former cop to spearhead those policies.

Base 10 is nice for crossing regimes of scales, orders of magnitude. But we don't really engage with temperature that way. The problem I have with F-heit on its own, is that it's much too precise. The difference of a degree is meaningless, especially when considering weather. Fahrenheit weather maps are cluttered, dials and buttons on thermostats and in cars are slow, thermometer readings change too frequently, etc. USian shoe sizes have the opposite problem. If you need to use half sizes all the time then FFS just multiply the scale by 2.

There are good lists of alternatives out there. For Germany, I like this one: https://lmaa.space/

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again

Boycotting Amazon is that sweet middle ground you're looking for.

Boycotting Amazon is easy and fun.

That's about where the political vocabulary in the US stands. 10 years ago, supposedly educated journalists were calling Bernie Sanders a democratic socialist. When asked about it I wish so hard that he said "no, I'm a social democrat, but for most people that distinction isn't important right now", but he leaned into it and here we are.

God we really need to produce fewer cars. It's out of control.