Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!

You can order 3000 3.3V low drop out (LDO) voltage regulators on LCSC for $25.50. That’s less than a penny each.

There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.

Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.

Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.

That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?

No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.

Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.

Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.

That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.

What you’re describing is more like sympathy.

You can’t develop empathy until you break out of the filter bubble. To understand a person you first need to know what their life is like, what motivates them, what values they hold.

Everything I’ve seen tells me that the opacity runs in both directions. Empathizing with someone who holds radically different, diametrically opposed values to your own is very difficult.

Right but OP is talking about a house in Waleska, Georgia, which has a population of 921 (as of 2020 census). Not really on the same level as Toronto or Vancouver!

This video is very long and entertaining and there’s a lot of evidence of the effort he put into it. The one real criticism I have is that it seems like he didn’t do a lot of research on what foods work well with freeze drying, preferring to do his own experiments and getting gnarly results on basically everything that isn’t already a well-known freeze dried product.

Personally I think one of the most useful things to freeze dry would be fresh, home grown herbs. Another big one is homemade soups and stocks.

As for the usefulness of freeze dried food? The big one he missed is camping and hiking. Frozen foods just aren’t going to cut it when you’re away from electricity for a week or more. You need lightweight non perishable food and for that nothing beats freeze dried. Just need to get some water from a lake or river!

The wife changing her name is one of the mildest things inflicted on women in traditional marriage customs. In some cultures when a woman’s husband dies she is forced to marry his younger brother!

Vaginal birth isn’t always excruciatingly painful. It depends on the mother’s body type and health but it can also be improved with a proper birth position. Humans weren’t evolved to give birth laying on our back like in the movies, we were meant to give birth in a squatting position.

Some women have even claimed that their vaginal birth was intensely pleasurable, causing them to achieve orgasm. Of course no one wants to hear this, as clashes with all sorts of taboos against women’s sexuality and giving birth in general!

For those playing at home, try this:

Heat up a frying pan on low heat and throw some water in there. It sizzles and bubbles weakly but evaporates quite quickly.

Now heat up the pan over medium-high heat. Throw water in there and watch it turn into little marbles that dance around the pan. It seems much more violent but notice that the water marbles last way longer because they’re actually floating on a cushion of steam. This is also why they seem to fly around pan so rapidly: the steam cushion removes almost all of the friction.

This is called the Leidenfrost effect. Very high temperature frying pans actually conduct heat into the water more slowly than lower temperature ones because the steam cushion acts as an insulator.

Well it turns out if you put your hand in molten metal the same thing happens! The moisture on your skin flashes to steam and creates a barrier which slows down the conduction of heat into your skin. Of course, if you fall into molten metal you may not be able to get out. The Leidenfrost effect also doesn’t do anything to protect you from the intense thermal radiation being emitted by the molten metal!

Funnily enough, this also happens if you pour some liquid nitrogen into your hands. It dances around just like the water does in the hot frying pan. Your skin is like a hot frying pan compared to liquid nitrogen and the nitrogen gas produced is like steam in this case.

The real joke is that there’s no difference!

That was an example that doesn’t really depend on there being exactly 2 competitors. If there are 20 competitors and they’re all spending a lot of money on advertising then they’re all producing a net negative

I mean there’s probably some small amount of money they could spend on advertising that would be a net positive because it would inform the public of the existence of their product. But beyond that, they’ve moved from informing the public into trying to convince the public to buy their product. There’s simply no limit to the amount of money you can spend trying to convince somebody to buy something and no limit your competitors can spend to convince them not to!

Society does not benefit from advertising. Vast numbers of people hate it and try to block it as much as they can. Others fall victim to it and get manipulated into buying shit they don’t need.

But overall, if 2 competitors are advertising against each other then it can turn into a destructive arms race. They each spend more and more on advertising just to keep taking consumers back and forth from each other! That’s a net negative for society!

Why, mother, you are an odd fellow but you steam a good ham!

These people have a mental illness. They’re being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies. They’re in exactly the same boat as people with gambling addictions. We should feel bad for them, but not (always*) as bad as homeless folks, who are still worse off.

*One of my elementary school teachers was married to a gambling addict. The guy was secretly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy construction equipment to pay off some of his loans. The guy ended up in a police chase and took his own life before he could be arrested. His wife, the teacher, was left massively in debt (he had secretly remortgaged the family house to pay for gambling debts) and grieving the loss of her husband but also in shock at discovering the extent of his crimes and debts. Really awful situation and nothing but profits for the casinos!

They get more viewers when they do. Streamers do exist who don’t use a webcam, don’t talk to viewers at all, and only show gameplay. They get some viewers but not nearly as many as they would otherwise.

People like interacting with streamers. They especially like seeing the streamer get excited when they donate a bunch of subscriptions or send a bunch of money. Popular streamers will even have animations and sound to make a big deal out of this.

The truth is that full time streamers are supported by a small minority of viewers who donate large amounts of money. This makes streaming somewhat akin to prostitution in my view. But there you have it!

Yeah this game is absolutely one of a kind. Nothing else like it. Really funny too, with great voice acting and a wacky story!

The post is by someone named UTJD16. If I had to guess, they’re a UT fan!