90 karma · joined February 9, 2017
This is kind of assuming that the parents have full control over the lives of their children. Which:
a. Isn't true b. Shouldn't be true (because some parents are bad)
As a parent you go to work for 8+ hours per day. During that time your child is in the care of "society" (school / daycare / whatever). And during that time the only thing that protects them is laws and regulations.
In most (or at least a lot of) countries states regulate casinos _so much_ than it becomes almost a technicality that casinos are privately owned.
Also with lotteries you have the scale factor -- in order to have an attractive lottery, you need a ton of ticket buyers, so if you have a national level lottery you can definitely make neighborhood lotteries way less appealing.
Blackjack and poker tables don't scale the same way.
...
But less jokingly, "you're wrong about X"/"you're doing X wrong" is quite clickbaity
imagine a film director directing more movies than they watch.
imagine a software engineer writing more code than they read.
imagine a musician writing more songs than they listen to.
... etc etc
It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.
Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
The non-technical introduction chapter is pretty easy to follow, and I would recommend reading it.
I have a Quest 2 and a Steam Deck. Definitely my Steam Deck is getting more use, though it's initial "wow" factor was smaller.
How do you reconcile this impression of yours with the fact that housing prices are shooting up in all major cities, and have been so for decades? Why is this happening if fewer people are actually interested in owning their own housing?
As a sidenote: in my own personal experience housing is the single major issue of all my close friends and family, but it's only an option for a small minority of them. In fact, I have never met a single person who was in the financial position to buy a house/apartment and didn't do so.
George Bush himself does indeed come from political royalty, which is why he did his best to present himself as the exact opposite, an average person.
Pretty hard to make the argument than in terms of kill count Bush doesn't win this one
But I think that looking at it in context, it was a piece that maybe liberals should have read. During the Bush years everybody liked to point out the gaffes Bush was doing as if intelligent college educated people never messed up a word in a speech.
The fact is that Bush is indeed smarter than the bulk of people who really relished in laughing at his gaffes, and in hindsight all that sniggering did nothing to stop the surge of increasingly radical right wing ideas.
Even from my very left-wing perspective I found the constant mocking of Bush worrying and elitist -- the first thing that should come in people's minds when they think about Bush should not be silly & almost endearing gaffes, but Gitmo, Irak, Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand of corpses he left behind.
It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.
Adoption is considered a noble act in Romania
Meanwhile the country still does the same in international rankings as it did during the time of our dear leader. However more of the egalitarianism we had disappeared, and while some enjoy some semblance of prosperity in the heart of the major cities, the bulk of the nation has no job security and no future prospect but to be a cheap labor source for the west.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen
These folksy wisdom thingies, especially from accomplished people, come off as patronizing to me.
I think it's mostly recommended by people who didn't do all the exercises, or casually browsed through it and all they were left with was the fact that you can write a programming book without mentioning assignments until halfway through or that it's more easy to write a scheme interpreter in scheme than other languages.
But the book is really dense, and you won't be left with much after trying to debug your hundreds line script meant to solve one problem.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/08/24/john-ioannidis-aims-his...
Given the recent 180 degree turn on "eat fat => heart attack", I think some seriously well designed studies are needed for all studies that make a strong statement about what dietary choices one should make, especially for dietary choices made by humans since forever.