I’m guessing they mean like in the absence of energy, right? Because can’t massless photons warp spacetime as the get to higher and higher energies?

He’s doing what all the “everybody could be rich if they just did X” jackasses do: see some people who don’t have money make bad decisions and generalize it to all people who don’t have money.

Middle aged parents with 2-3 kids and jobs in the $40k to $60k range aren’t going out all the time, buying the latest gadget, buying new cars, etc. They’re scraping by.

They could do some “personal development” if they had the time and energy after working full time and caring for children. But they don’t.

Actually I’d like to see a comparison of the number of people in different income groups who “splurge” on the stuff Buffet is accusing them of versus those who have to “splurge” on an unexpected expense like a medical condition or fixing a broken car or an unexpected home repair. I’m betting people actually end up spending money on the latter way more than the former.

And it’s just disgusting hearing him complain about people using credit cards when he and all the other economic vampires in his cohort have been purposefully restricting wage growth since the 1970s when they introduced credit cards as a trap for young people who expected their quality of life to increase with increasing productivity the way it had for decades before.

I’ll let others address the “enshittification” angle but I thought I’d point out that “shareholder value uber allies” is a relatively recent … “innovation” … in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-made-chicago-school-so-influential-antitrust-policy

The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found “religion” (because Nancy’s pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.

Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he “won” the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.

Anyway, Biden’s FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We’ll see after November I guess.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/fact-sheet-ftcs-proposed-final-noncompete-rule

Stopping some guys who are Definitely Not Team Rocket from harassing and capturing some creatures that are Definitely Not Pokemon.

The to level comment here is correct that it’s more dangerous on average for a woman being abused by a man than the other way around, but you’re correct her that Google should just suggest domestic violence help for anyone.

Also these days there are quite a few men out there with husbands…

Did you guys know the brain named itself?

I’m betting it’s not experienced as “yay we’re free from want!” so much as “oh god I think I can breathe again” after decades of being slowly strangled by our wage enslavers.

So, not great but better than it’s been.

Maybe a good analogy is that we’ve been getting punched hard in the face every day for 40+ years but today it was “only” an open hand slap.

A lot of cocoa farmers have never tasted chocolate, so it tracks that in the terminal capitalism of the Galactic Empire, moisture farmers wouldn’t have access to moisture.

https://youtu.be/FwHMDjc7qJ8?si=HKzSDbIVKrI9BzFo

Incorrect. Without intervention by hormone signals, literally every human fetus would develop as a "female" with all the traditional female sex organs and morphology. I believe they'd even be capable of generating eggs and carrying babies, but I'm not as confident on that.

A lot of people think that the XX or XY is determinative or definitional, but it's always the hormones, baby.

It's really sad considering how amazing DOTA was umpty bajillion years ago. Also Enfo's survival.

Light Power! Light Power! Light Power!

I’m sure a lot of the hypotheses here are correct, but history plays a role, too. Heterosexual men have been encouraged to pursue sex and women have been encouraged to eschew it. For centuries if not millennia. So there’s just a significant amount of inertia.

Couple that with some likely real differences in what gets women off that the porn industry is still working out, and there will be differences in the volume of porn targeting each.

You’re kind of arguing against the foundation of human society. If we’re all required to “do our own research” about things, where does that requirement end? How can I buy food if I have to do my own research on what’s healthy or what’s dangerous? What about my tap water? How can I put gas in my car? Use electricity? A computer? A phone?

Somewhere along the way you have to trust the systems that have been built by the people before us to function, and for people who work in those fields who are experts to use their expertise.

Obviously oversight & verification is also important. It’s important that people earn trust and work to maintain that trust and get booted if they violate that trust.

But it’s foolish to just stop trusting experts out of nowhere. It’s extra foolish to stop trusting experts specifically because they say things you don’t like to hear. As far as I can tell, that’s been the accelerating project of the Republican Party since at least the talk radio explosion following the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. Maybe longer if you go back to Moon landing deniers and their ilk.

“Supposed to do” is kind of vague, but many people have answered the “legally required to do” already.

If you or someone you love dearly were in an ambulance heading to the hospital to deal with an emergency medical condition (or waiting for one to arrive & provide transport to the hospital), what would you want everyone in the path to do? Whatever the answer to that is, do that. For me, the answer is, “as quickly and safely as possible make a path for the ambulance.”

Is that pulling over? Stopping? Pulling into a parking lot? Continuing to drive until one of those options is available? Depends. Are you on a crowded road with no way to pull over? Then stopping will impede the ambulance. Don’t impede the ambulance. Are you the only car on the road? Then slow down and move to the right (in the US).

I’m not sure “this was used in a crime” is the sort of thing that can be legislated or sued over, if that makes sense. I think the more reasonable standard for successfully adjudicating criminality is people’s or their constructs (corporations) acting negligently in the production, marketing, sales, and distribution of “things that can be dangerous” or “things that can be used to commit crimes.”

The huge issue most of the responses in this thread have is that they say “you can’t sue someone for making something just because the end user did a bad thing with it” oversimplification of how basically the entire world works.

The only reason manufacturers of anything have plausible deniability on being partially responsible for crimes committed with their wares is the strong likelihood that they could not have known the end user would do that.

If I hand craft a knife on and sell it on the Internet to someone who sends me a message asking “hey is this knife good for stabbing my bitch ex?” there’s a decent chance a good lawyer could get me for negligence at a minimum and possibly accessory to a crime. Because a reasonable person might conclude that knife would be used for a crime.

There’s a reason a Remington settled the lawsuit from the Sandy Hook families for $75 million: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/us/sandy-hook-shooting-settlement-with-remington/index.html

They were never going to be liable for making the gun (particularly since gun manufacturers have a special law protecting them). But they clearly determined there was a decent chance they’d lose in court regarding how they marked, sold, and distributed guns, so they decided shelling out $75,000,000 was a better business decision.

If there’s a company making screwdrivers out there and they’re aware there’s a screwdriver murder problem in a city and they manufacture and distribute their screwdrivers to that city and put up billboards and take out magazine ads glorifying how good their screwdrivers are in a fight… they ought to be liable. Not because a screwdriver can be used to hurt people, but because they should reasonably be aware that in that city their screwdrivers had a good chance to be used to hurt somebody.

There’s no way you can know this.

Which country is this in? Some countries might have more strict rules about posted vs actual salary ranges. In the US (mostly) if there’s a posted salary range, it’s not binding on the employer. Most employers would have the flexibility to adjust the range if a candidate is particularly compelling.

If OP is somewhere like most US states, they might benefit from pointing out that they currently make more, probably before an offer is made. It would be silly to bring it up after the salary range is established.

If posted salary ranges are binding, then it’s moot.

Iraq, not Iran, but yes definitely to “finishing what daddy started.” In 2002-2003 the W’s cabinet was chock full of people who got their leashes yanked on the Kuwait/Iraq border because Daddy Bush respected international laws and norms. They were steam rolling toward Baghdad basically unimpeded. They could taste that sweet sweet oil and a major military victory over an aggressor state that would send a strong message about the sovereignty of international borders.

It sure as shit scared the hell out of Saddam, too. Probably that’s why he got all paranoid.

With hindsight and if we assume that the US was going to invade Iraq either way (in 1991 or 2003), it would’ve been better probably to just do it the early 90s, before the was a robust international terror network to step into the void.

Overall, I think it was justified to invade Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 and depose their government, but stop there. I don’t know what the best “after” would’ve been. Definitely not putting all our focus into Iraq. Perhaps with all our resources and world focus on actually rebuilding Afghanistan instead of pivoting to Iraq, we could’ve helped them succeed instead of running from place to place putting out fires while it smoldered.

Technically all inventions are “unnecessary but convenient.” Our ancestors got by just fine without fire or tools or clothes for much much longer than we’ve been inventing tools and using them.

Don’t get me wrong, today’s humans would almost certainly die out without our tools because we’ve adapted so heavily to having them (especially fire and clothing).

I definitely vote for Democrats in recent elections, but before around 2008 (so basically before the Tea Party) I didn’t.

Trump did the first criminal justice reform, that was good. But it’s incomplete.

I feel like this is just a step toward throwing out the classification and description of individuals in terms of social norms and averages. Like, however it came to be (and I’m skeptical of your assertion that society has somehow been fashioned - presumably on purpose? - “to meet the needs of [so-called] allistics”), the society in which we live has bell curve distributions of many personality traits and capabilities and interests and on and on.

There is such a thing as the middle of the bell curve, the 1 standard deviation from the mean, etc. It’s useful to call that something. We’ve called it “normal” or “typical” or whatever. And so people in the 2 std dev and higher bands are increasing magnitudes of “abnormal” or “atypical.” So what?

Well, since time immemorial, being different could be dangerous to the survival of the group. So being different became pejorative. Only in the past couple hundred years have we began to appreciate that creative genius is almost always associated with “atypical” people. (Destructive genius, too.)

I think we’re going through a time now where we’re acknowledging that maybe more people have always been “atypical” but they concealed it for various reasons. I see my kids’ generation as being particularly open to the variation that’s apparently pretty natural in our species (or driven by microplastics and forever chemicals).

I don’t think doing away with statistical analysis of populations is the way to go, though. A better approach, to my mind, is to do away with the negative connotation that still accompanies the diagnosis of being 2 or more standard deviations away from the mean. Certainly it’s not coming up with a slew of new terms to replace “normal” or “typical.”