Not from USA but the q’s seems strange imo:
1. Is spending as a % of GDP the metric used to determine whether spending is out of control?
If so, 70’s was Vietnam and other things since, is that why the date starts there?
Is all spending the same?
If I had limited money and spent it on luxury cars where as before it was beans for food I haven’t changed spending but it’s not far off to say I’m out of control. The USA govt isn’t necessarily doing that though just an example.
2. If those are the categories, are the $ spent in those categories spent well?
If a $ marked for the elderly category is spent badly, is stopping that taking $ from the elderly?
3. Why should it?
Would I be wrong to expect that theoretical timeline to have 3. instead be something like why should healthcare be first in the chopping block? Kind of like 2. alludes?
The chopping block is t/f sometimes good.
4. National debt isn’t included in 1.
Is locking in CTR as a % of GDP what’s fair?
Seems that you want more taxes instead of spending cuts and to go after health insurance. Maybe that’s the right thing to do I don’t know but the q’s seem loaded.
I go with critical thinking being thinking about thinking, or meta thinking. Which is to say have a thought, doesn’t really matter what, and then analyse it.
Example is throw a dart at the board and then evaluate it compared to your expectations and desires. Feel free to throw a bullseye right away but that’s a different thing.
Which is to say, imo, that critical thinking isn’t about being perfect all the time.
I’ve wondered what it would take to be able to create energy arbitrarily. Gravity and mass and light seem to be suss in that context. I’ve been having a laugh to myself about the aether, a comment in here mentions Hinduism also. But if there’s some big goo of stuff, then could it be that the ‘perfection of the universe’ (sorry I know that’s a loaded phrase but chill) is what can emerge into reality from that goo?
If there wasn’t symmetry or whatever, then it couldn’t get to us. Kind of like the atoms that make us would have remained as mud instead of standing up and looking around?
As someone else says encrypted vs plain space. Figure out some suss things like what’s going on with light and some kind of arbitrary infinity awaits? And those things are suss because they’re operating at the interface/affected by both ‘worlds’, like flying around in atmosphere; suddenly there’s sound barriers and what not. Which is why (I think) we scratch our heads and wonder like, what’s the deal with electrons?
I think I read a lot of these Tesla comments, I don’t know if it’s just people hating Musk but I scratch my head remember a Darwin Award (maybe honorary) from 2000’s of a caravan driver who crashed because they thought cruise control meant it would steer (or FSD in current terminology) and so was having a shower in the back or something.
Everywhere I go there’s some claim I’m not meant to take literally, but I feel only with Tesla things do I hear talk of ‘well if someone believed that at face value’. No where, anywhere, afaict, can I do that and things work out fine. No where at no time do I get to say, I don’t think, ‘I took a personal risk based on a title in your marketing material and ignored all the pop ups saying otherwise’.
For example, a real estate agent can sell you a house with the property boundaries incorrectly marked, pulled from official records, and well, sucks you be you. What do you mean you didn’t look over every bit of small print and made even the slightest assumption of fairness.
I guess it just falls down to whether or not you’re in with lawyers or have an axe to grind.
At this point I feel as though Musk and Trump should be appointed ceo of everything and then everything will be audited with a fine tooth comb. Put everything to the standard we put people we don’t like.
Two puzzling things to me having read most of the comments:
-‘It’s just a minor inconvenience/ why do you care so much?/…’ ~it’s just manipulation and social shaming ritual with questionable outcomes, that we’re going to eventually ramp up for your own good. It’s meant to be annoying so you do what we want and when you get used to it we’re going to make it painful. Why are you annoyed?
And is it so hard to think: maybe there a lot of nudging going on in all directions and someone fed up with ‘one minor thing’ might have had their camels back broken?
One of my aunties goes neurotic over bags, and every other ‘issue’, so much stress brought to her life trying to do the right thing. ‘It’s just a…’ I don’t read all my memos but I think nudging is everywhere, thousands of little ‘it’s just a little’s’. She’s much like a left version of the Fox News watcher trope.
It’d be like trying to follow all the laws, surely impossible, at least a huge strain. Except it’s cultural shaming, largely manufactured, which makes it worse.
Which is all to say: how can it be sincere: we want to annoy you into change, and cannot perceive that you won’t smile and thank us while we’re doing it. You must answer for your insolence.
Second is the plastic industry having skin in the game: it hardly seems surprising, wouldnt we also expect the yes plastic ban studies to be from environmental/other industry? I see less plastic bags, therefore anything not supporting must be industry lies. Like, huh?
A local news story had a ‘speeding’ cyclist run over and kill an old ladies dog on a walk way. So weird, comments were like bike and cars, cept bikes comments were saying car things and ped comments were saying bike things. So many things are just say what ever fits for now. But we’re just meant to go with it.
Straw anecdote: when the ban came into place, walking past a skip (big dumpster?) at work full of unused plastic straw, easily 50 cartons, making way for the new paper ones. The worlds funny.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about, sorry for dumping it under your comment.
Ah, that's a thing I hear in Germany aswell. "they..." Who is they? It is a very dangerous narrative, somehow implying that a small minority controls everything and its only purpose is to undermine "our" freedom. Even worse, everything that is annoying / dangerous / anti freedom is the result of this one group "they".
What a big pile of BS. Yes lobbies exists, but it is not a single entity. Yes, political parties exists but they do not have absolute power. All these annoying things are the result of several parties and lobbies arguing and finding compromise. There is no they. It is the outcome of thousands of people thinking.
The straw anecdote is flawed. It is a one time transition. Why do you not take the plastic straws (which I guess are still sealed) out of the dumpster? We did the same thing. We are using those during private parties since years. When guests come to me asking why we are still using these, the awnser is to save the environment ;).
Tbh I think ‘they’ can still be used to describe what you say. I don’t mean it as a far out thing, just an abstraction. AFAI figure, there’s lot of different people doing lots of different things for lots of different reasons. Rather than the dangerous narrative, is it ok to word it as more like: there are ways to control/direct society, a lot of them have been figured out, various people use them, to various effect. Is that kind of they ok?
For example, there exists people that use addictive strategies such as by casinos to hook people into their app. Leaving at that level of abstraction I feel as though that group can be a ‘they’. It just feels like an easy way to reference a group as long as I’m sincerely not trying to pull a fast one on anyone… which I hope I’m not :s
I would have liked to have taken home the broken escalator too, or the lifetimes of toner from the xerox-Kyocera change, but I worry about becoming a horder always thinking ‘well it’d be a waste to throw it away.’ Poverty trauma I heard it’s called.
I hope the straw thing wasn’t flawed, not as in ‘so why bother’, coz yeah it was a one off thing, more like the priority was to print off a bunch of advertising to get on the straw change goodwill bandwagon. It was just one of those funny such is life moments, walking past all the plastic core-flute signs about doing what’s right for the environment knowing there’s a million straws in the bin out the back you know?
> Yes lobbies exists, but it is not a single entity. Yes, political parties exists but they do not have absolute power. All these annoying things are the result of several parties and lobbies arguing and finding compromise. There is no they. It is the outcome of thousands of people thinking.
Thousands is still a very small number of people to control a country. Yes there are multiple parties and multiple lobbyists. But they're largely from the same handful of cities, the same social class, and representing that class' interests. Politics really has become a lot more centralised, placing a lot more power in the hands of a few people, not necessarily for nefarious reasons (or at least, not any more nefarious than the normal human desire for power), but nevertheless something that urgently needs to be fought against.
My pings roughly 60-80 no matter if I’m going to a friends server down the road or across the world. Before starlink, my rural internet would be lucky to get below 120. For what that’s worth.
Here’s one I remember from the permaculture or market garden ‘scene’ couple years back: There was a relationship where some would teach and provide food and accom and others would learn and work for no or little pay. Assume no one was forced into such arrangement. Then they’d go off later with skills and start their own farm. Yeah?
Later, govt got involved and enforced minimum wage standards. That previous relationship was no longer viable. The students could not return enough income for minimum wage. So, instead, those positions changed and the students had to pay instead, and not a small amount either because now there govt involvement in your training institution etc.
So did the situation get better? I feel as though no, because now, to ‘get into it’, you need a thousand dollars or whatever, where as before you just had to be keen and show up.
Are you arguing for unpaid/reverse paid internships here?
Look, people need to eat. There will always be a need for farmers. We're literally suffering from success. As far back as the 30s we were paying farmers to dump or destroy their produce to prevent racing to the bottom. The supreme court declared that was unconstitutional so they ended up just doing a ton of subsidies instead. We don't want farming to be maximally price efficient. A surplus of food is a good thing, since crops sometimes fail or disaster strikes.
Farming mega Corp domination is a fairly new thing and thanks to this guy
Usually, on those permaculture "internships", you get a roof over your head and food to eat. You don't get any money on top of that, the assumption is that you're being paid in skill acquisition. It's a fair deal for many people.
Does anyone else get reminded of snow crash feds with stuff like this? I know when I’m sent a company document on company servers I behave like Yt’s mum.
I was taught that there was no difference and it was the Dutch that measured nose length and made the classification ‘arbitrarily’. But isn’t that false? In the time since I’ve seen side by side pictures and it seems trivial to tell them apart. So now I don’t know what to think.
Seems that you want more taxes instead of spending cuts and to go after health insurance. Maybe that’s the right thing to do I don’t know but the q’s seem loaded.