So this is why people don’t like your comment:

• It’s vague. You’re not actually taking a specific stance on anything; you’re just vaguely complaining about “things” that the left will not address, and “stubbornness”, so that someone can fill in the gaps with something it would be reasonable to complain about.

• It has the appearance of someone conflating “Leftism” with “The Democratic Party of the United States.” That’s generally bad form.

• The context of this post is a worldwide rise in right-wing views, so the above point is even worse than normal. Whatever issue you’re thinking of (which we don’t know, because you’re not actually taking a position, per the first point), it’s possible it isn’t associated with Leftism outside of the US at all.

No one can tell you that you’re wrong if you never actually make a specific claim, right?

Yeah, but how do you get 10 million dollars?

It doesn’t matter. Investments do not care where the money comes from.

You worked as a surgeon for 20 years while living with parents and not paying bills? $10 million.

Your great great grandfather was a plumber and built up some wealth and your great grandfather was an electrician and built up more wealth, and… your father works in real estate and all of these people set you up with a trust fund and you start out with $2 million, and then you withdraw 100k per year to live on, doing nothig else for 17 years, and your fund slowly climbs to $10 million. Well, that’s also $10 million.

You’re one of Nancy Pelosi’s kids and she gives you a $10 million fund on your 18th birthday? Thats $10 million.

Do you see now how having $10 million doesn’t reward the traits of any of these people? It only rewards having $10 million. It does not matter how you acquired it.

Median salary for a surgeon is $450,000/year.

Someone with $10,000,000 in VOO can withdraw $450,000/year, and still compound their wealth year over year, without working at all. The absolute worst case scenario is that they start doing this at the start of a recession, like mid 2007, in which case, they would STILL be compounding their wealth year over year, with the exception of the short time it took to dip.

Simply having $10,000,000 and sitting on your ass > Being a surgeon.

Oh yeah, and that’s all before taxes.

So yes, to some extent, society rewards skill. But it is FAR more rewarding to the people who already have wealth.

If they were paid $0.01 per hour, would you say they were being paid?

If yes, then clearly, “being paid” is not the dividing line between slavery and freedom, so you should establish how much you think someone should be paid for it to not be slavery.

Decoherence swiftly followed by complete cognitive collapse.

…

I’m going to acknowledge that you responded so that, when I don’t continue this conversation, you’ll know that it wasn’t because I decided to abandon my position.

You could say your response did not have a significant impact.

Did anyone do studies on the homework and exam scores of people using compilers vs people not using compilers?

Did anyone establish that people who used compilers are measurably dumber than the people who didn’t?

No?

Well then obviously it’s not the same situation, now is it?

It’s like you didn’t read the article.

You shouldn’t have to take a class for an operating system…

…So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?

Invalid inference.

I’m immune to propaganda because I’m smart.

That’s not how that works. A smart person would recognize that there are degrees of smartness and degrees of immunity. Even if we accept that smarter people are less susceptible to propaganda, there is no threshold of smartness that grants immunity to propaganda.

The most important service one can provide to a kind-of-smart person is to tell them when they’ve said something stupid. I’m happy to provide this service. Please rate 5 stars.

Well, there’s fairphone. And farmers markets.

Honestly, most of the things people buy are things they don’t even need… housing, cars, and insurance excluded.

Bottled Water by Nestle? ❌

Learning to love the taste of your local tap water? ✅

An individual instance may be driven by some ideology… but as a decentralized collective of instances, there isn’t one governing ideology. It’d be super funny to have a pro-capitalism one… and it’s anyone’s right to create it or contribute to it if they want to.

Surely one of these instances allows videos of cats.

Now that’s what I call Ethos!

Definitely use bread flour if you make it yourself. The higher the protein, the better, because the protein is what you’re getting out of it.

To get 4lbs of gluten (dry weight), you’ll need 30lbs of white flour. You’ll get seitan for about half the price if you make it yourself (assuming flour is $0.50 per pound)… but I honestly think it’s so cheap that it’s worth it to buy the pre-processed gluten powder. Also because I’ve tried making it myself from flour, and I just don’t get good results.

4lbs of gluten is 4lbs of pure protein. If you eat 50 grams per day, it’ll last 36 days.

The best existing phrase I have is, “Dropping your guard.”

It doesn’t necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.

We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I’ll start:

Fumbled the shield

Sure, until next place changes their block function as well. Changing the rules to something that is objectively less safe is a bad thing, even if people are free to leave.

Edit for clarity.

Yes, eat more than one kind of thing, obviously.

I think most of us are on-board with police body cameras. The fundamental difference is that they are recording things in the presence of the police, and that they have the measurable benefit of holding the police accountable to their actions (sometimes).

Rats are good people

$60 per kilo

That’s not bad for a prototype! With lab-growth meat, the initial cost was $2.3 million / kg. It’s come down since then because of process and scale improvements, but when it starts off that high, it’s going to be a while for it to become affordable.

A quick non-AI figure is $0.60 per kilo to recycle plastic… so we just need improvement by a factor of 100 which is quite realistic.