It needs more porn to really take off, just like what happened with the internet.

I read it as a young adult after hearing several others online say it was their favorite book or strongly impacted them. I thought Holden was a whiny kid who did need help, but also really lacked personal accountability for someone who dedicated so much time to calling others phonies. That’s ok, of course. Protagonists should be at least somewhat flawed, and it’s especially reasonable if they are in the process of growing up.

But I mainly hated the narrative structure. I’m just going off of what I remember for all this, but it seemed like Holden just wandered between a series of significant encounters for the entire story without anything going anywhere. Other than >!the sister and a second encounter with the nuns,!< the characters were just discarded shortly after being introduced. Any scene could have been a good foundation for the rest of the story’s development, but he just wanders somewhere else before all but the barest of conflict resolution happens. IIRC the furthest we got was at the end where >!he gets the idea to leave society behind, but his sister says she would miss him and asks him not to, so he just says “ok”!<. It felt like the entire story was the author just pranking the audience about potential character development before yoinking it away with a laugh.

As others have said, we can look to other countries for examples of health insurance being done well. Insurance serves an important function for things that would otherwise create large debt unpredictably. It just doesn’t work well as a for-profit non-utility industry.

I would say the main issue for the US is the actual healthcare providers charging so much. Insurance companies do enable that in a sense by allowing people to get healthcare that otherwise would be unaffordable. Members are insulated from the cost and simply want their desired care approved, so hospitals take advantage of this by charging increasingly ludicrous amounts. And since at minimum 80% of health insurance premium revenue must go to paying member services, this means coverage costs inevitably spiral.

Insurance companies disappearing would eventually lead to lower prices since patients would no longer be able to afford healthcare, but that’s obviously not a good solution. Government regulating the price of healthcare more directly would allow insurance to be both cheaper and more optional.

Williams syndrome is a rare condition in humans that causes them to have particular facial features, a very friendly and extroverted personality, and some intellectual disability. It occurs when a certain chunk of genes are deleted in development.

Dogs have an equivalent region in their DNA, and friendliness in dogs and wolves seems to correspond to which variant they have for one of the relevant genes. So our domestication efforts are kind of like breeding the closest thing we can manage to a disability into them.

https://www.aip.org/inside-science/rare-human-syndrome-may-explain-why-dogs-are-so-friendly

If anything, recognizing and defending claims of ownership primarily benefits those who have hoarded under capitalism. It’s much harder to accumulate wealth when you have to personally dedicate resources to defending all that you have. And so capitalists would be particularly interested in discouraging theft.

I see people hold the door open for strangers all the time, so it doesn’t seem unpopular to me. In fact, I can’t remember ever having someone let the door close on me when they know I’m behind them.

Honestly if I’m more than a couple of steps behind them I’d rather catch the door or just open it myself than feel pressed to hurry while they wait for me. I appreciate that they’re being considerate to me though.

For others, I’ll hold it open if they’ll be at the door in a second or two but not if it means standing around or pressuring them to hurry.

IIRC she said she never specified Hermione’s race, which is technically true. But at one point she did physically describe her to be fair skinned.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny

It’s a kind of natural selection. The most fit pieces of art succeed so much that we see their good traits echo into the future and become the norm. But we iterate on them further and continue to improve until the ancestor would no longer be able to compete with its descendents. Audiences adapt to what was once a trailblazing stroke of genius and it just becomes the standard.

Personally, I’ve found the trend to be very true. There are very few classics that I like nearly as much as the modern popular pieces that were inspired by them. Music might be the exception.

I think every generation sucks in its own special way

I recently read a book called The Most Good You Can Do that explored this. It’s actually about effective altruism, but Peter Singer has written plenty on veganism too. It talks a lot about the effectiveness of charitable causes and organizations, and it noted that there were two general types of donors.

Most are “warm-glow” donors, who give small amounts casually to a wide variety of causes. They tend to be highly motivated by personal stories, and as you pointed out, describing more victims of an issue will actually make them less likely to donate. They donate based on the sympathy they experience with a victim, but the good feeling a donation gives them depends very little on the amount given.

The second type is focused more on measured outcomes, so communicating the severity of the issue being solved does help convince them to donate. They donate less frequently but tend to give much more when they do. Charity evaluators like GiveWell were created to assist these potential donors in finding the charities that are the most effective at actually solving the target problems for people using a more rational approach.

I had similar feelings. I knew I would miss my better, ad-free apps, but I could recognize it would be unreasonable to expect Reddit to pay for competitor access when it uses ads to support itself. I wouldn’t even hold it against them if they removed third party access entirely. But the way they did it was just so slimy.

Lying to developers, then lying to users about their discussions. Then insisting their unviable price was reasonable just so they could claim to not actually be killing them. And during the protests, threatening and replacing mods of subs for literally implementing the rules their communities voted for simply because it hurt their bottom line. They were volunteer workers maintaining the platform for years because they love their communities; until they do something the company doesn’t like, then suddenly they were employees to be fired and replaced. It really was the principle of the thing that disgusted me.

Pierre is worth the upcharge simply because you don’t have to walk all the way across town and back. In real life, grocery stores are unfortunately more convenient than farmer’s markets.

What’s wrong with it? It’s somewhat aggressively worded, but it seems like a reasonable thing to be annoyed about.

It’s been thoroughly trained to interact with people like a person would. I don’t think it’s unusual at all to forget it’s pretend during the conversation. Honestly we probably wouldn’t even be able to tell if it ever goes from acting like it has consciousness to actually having consciousness.

They are liberating creative outlets in the sense that they offer a platform and tools for creative expression (barring some ToS rules) for free. You can post a creative video that may be seen by thousands without needing to sell ownership to some company. They play ads to pay for its associated costs and yes, to turn a profit, while giving a small portion to the creators as an additional incentive. But they are not intended to replace regular income in a meaningful way. I have never heard of anyone suggesting that trying to do so is a good idea, including the big name content creators that by exception do manage to earn a living from it.

If you think it should be a reliable way to make money, I would say you have the unfair expectation for it. I would compare it to complaining that a service that teaches you how to knit is only sufficient for hobbyists and rarely allows one to build a successful company selling clothes. That’s just beyond the scope of what it’s there for.

Ligma balls

It doesn’t fit the community well. It uses the phrase but sarcastically instead of sincerely. It’s also somewhat political. And without trying to be insulting to OP it’s pretty low effort and not particularly funny or insightful. Some people are going to downvote for those reasons even if they agree with the implied sentiment.

It’s why I personally dislike memes that are essentially just a picture of someone’s opinion. People will also upvote them just to agree, so it encourages echo chambers instead of good discussion or learning.

The poverty line is for the nation overall. Using some of the highest cost of living areas to set it doesn’t make sense. Why would you say a family making considerably more than most of their peers is poor because they would struggle to afford living somewhere else entirely?

Well the willing suspension of disbelief is adjusted based on the story being told. If you say there’s a made-up kingdom where animals talk in the exposition, that’s fine. But if you say it takes place in a world that’s basically our own, then one person can randomly shoot lasers from their eyes, you should give some explanation. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly good one, but even in-universe people would be asking about that.