cupofpython

I understand that, but he regrets that his decision could not be more influential.

Which is severely undermined by the claim that Nissan makes great cars

Especially when considering the person making the claim has an implied incentive to hate the cars. He's making a genuine claim that "I want to hate their cars but I cant"

which is fantastic advertising for Nissan.

power will succeed, but that is very different than believing anything a greater power is capable of enforcing must be accepted as morally correct just because they are stronger

>(even though the Altima and Maxima were excellent cars)

why advertise for them for free?

I wasnt thinking about the water supply, the dangers there makes sense. The fertilizer issue seems tangential. We can ban / limit the sue of fertilizer without telling people they cant have lawns.

What's the alternative? without a lawn people will likely opt to concrete their property - which I guess would be better for water but kind of depressing

except it isnt functional. it is covered in burnt cheese that will take hours to fix. it's a huge waste of time to clean off burnt cheese from such a tiny piece of material.

collect a bunch of similar materials from the dump and bulk clean them all into workable materials again with a pressure washer in the same amount of time.

Work an extra 2 hours, use the money to buy a new toaster, and spend the rest on food for the homeless.

the moral argument is bullshit. it's a waste of your time, and the only reason you dont think so is because you get personal enjoyment out of fixing things (i do too)

there's a lot of relevant things i could get into on it. in short though, disposable items are cheaper and despite what a lot people think - most of us are broke.

after you adjust to dealing with disposable items a lot.. you kind of grow out of the feeling that every item is special and needs to be repaired to max extent and kept for as long as it can. It feels anthropomorphic / overly sentimental to do that. the moral argument gets the curtain pulled back and there's very little substantiating it. imo, at least. Curious if you can shed better light on your moral stance here tbh. im not die-hard on this subject and would happily update my views if convinced otherwise

I respect that you have a productive hobby interest in repairing items, and for the most part I share that. But I dont see anything wrong with throwing something away that could be salvageable. Once it stops working, it is just parts and material and I now become part of the demand for toasters. What's wrong with letting toaster specialists handle toaster demand? In the time it takes me to repair a toaster, the specialists can produce 100 of them. and thanks to people like me buying from them rather than doing it myself, they remain productive members of society and get to feed themselves. And I get a couple hours back to do something else to potentially improve society or my personal life.

All that said, I do think there is a lot more we can do with waste management to better deal with disposed parts and materials, though. A lot of how we handle disposed goods is definitely wrong. we mix materials with food waste and it makes everything gross and expensive to work with. food waste really should be a hard split from everything else but maybe one day

If you are confident enough in your ability to convey the entire full safety message to your kid and take full responsibility for anything they do as a result of that information, then go for it. I'm just saying for $20 it isnt really worth it. I dont want my kid fucking with electronics outside the designated use-cases it was built for, period. Cheese in the toaster? item needs to be cleared by a professional again. I dont care if I feel personally competent enough to clear it myself. I have very easy and safe alternatives.

Odds are the toaster company doesnt want you mess with it either. This isnt the old days where you can just use some elbow grease and fix everything on your property. Liabilities need to be managed. Electrical items need certifications. Doing it yourself takes hours. It's just a lot of things that are unnecessary to deal with over a toaster.

If I am going to teach my kid anything about fixing electrical items it's that if it isnt working then he (or she) should unplug them and then he shouldnt touch them until certified to do so. It'll encourage them to look at the bigger picture of the problem.

Sure, as an adult we can see through red tape and feel cool about it and want to teach the same to our kid.. but it's really not worth it. Kids that are smart enough to learn the will likely experiment with new things they learn. Just because they safely unplug the item before working on it doesnt mean it's safe to plug back in afterwards.

are lawns really such a problem? I see an ecosystem next to my front door as a risk. Lawns are easily managed, they provide line of sight across my property to the street, it's hard for wild animals to nest next to where i, and my future children, need to walk every day. I really dont see it as a problem.

on the flipside, the greater back half of my yard not near the house i encourage to be an ecosystem. If everyone on the block did so, then the entire middle of the block would be a continuous piece of nature. Front lawns create scattered pockets of nature at best and seem to cause a lot of friction.

I think of the Geese all around the industrial park near me, and how going into and out of your office on the sidewalk can become a problem if theres a mother goose around who thinks youre threatening her family

the learning experience is that the toaster they were familiar with is gone because of what they did. very simple. I guess I am the only one here that doesnt want to fuck with toaster repair. they arent worth it. they can cause fires and give electrical shocks.

honestly, the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster. Which they might do if they see me do it while cleaning

>Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird

Nowhere did I do this, and the claim is confusing because I am a supporter of repair-and-reuse in general. People are extrapolating from me saying specifically that a toaster is not worth it. Toasters cause house fires. I would always sooner replace it for $25 than salvage one.

>And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.

A lack of a toaster for a day or two hardly punishes anyone, and the child sees that other people can be impacted by their recklessness.

> Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense

Yeah, I am one of those people actually. I have an emergency fund that I would happily use for this 1-off incident.

Same for toilet paper but we flush it anyway. Everyone in this thread is suddenly zero-waste zealots.

>The salvaging actually helped the learning experience immensely - shows the kid that carelessness can have lasting consequences.

If the kid was present for it. Otherwise, its very much just another "oopsie" they did that mom and dad clean up behind the scenes and they have no idea what the difference is between ruining a toaster and spilling a glass of milk.

>We had to spend $X to get a new one now!

I would never say this to my kids.

the point is that OP was complaining about the time he didnt need to spend cleaning it

>I'd be very tempted to work with him to help clean it;

how is this being hard on your kid, but you doing it by yourself is totally normal and replacing it a total economic waste? Is it easy to fix or not?

What better way to teach that than have them understand if they dont respect the way something is supposed to be used, they might break it?

Could be fun to sit with them and take apart the toaster and assess it together and see if its worth cleaning or replacing and explaining why. But I wouldnt spend 2+ hours cleaning it by myself and then complaining about it

A shortcut for learning that works for me is that as I listen to someone speak, I mentally put myself in their shoes speaking to me. I notice that it immediately shifts my thoughts to better capture more critical information.

The hard part is that it takes half a second or so to do this mental shift, and they are still speaking, so I have to both listen to what is currently being said while reiterating the previous half second to myself at a lag.

takes a little getting used to, but internally i feel a closer connection to the topic similar to trying to teach it

are you okay?

So drop it off at a salvage location. OP was complaining about salvaging it, like it was necessary. If you want to do is as a fun personal project, go for it, but it is wasteful of human time to salvage something that cheap rather than add it to a scrap pile for a professional salvage company to process in bulk.

As a bonus, the kid learns that if you arent careful with your items they may break and be gone. you dont waste hours of your time on something that should cost about 1 hour of your time at work max.

Edit: Agree to disagree, but my post is still a valid position to hold and im open to conversation. but sure use downvote as a dislike button - we are all familiar with where that gets us.

okay guess im an asshole. go use a salvaged toaster in your kitchen. for $20, id rather not risk burning my house down or teaching my kids to put their hands inside the toaster but to each their own

could be some trauma leftover from a previous time they just moved forward with political goals without fully understanding them.

That said, I am rooting for Germany. It is a relatively young nation overall, and has so many things going for it. I think it has potential to become the biggest European superpower over the next 20 years

I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.

> then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster

Do you have a fancy toaster? I wouldve just replaced mine, although mine is pretty basic

Since I already have the spreadsheet built for my other comment:

30-39 is 2.1%

35-44 is 2.5%

40-49 is 3.3%

---------

30-49 is 5.3%

Ranges are inclusive of entire year. 30-39 is 30th bday to 40th bday

Thomas Sowell seems very considerate of the opinions he forms, I'll check it out. I do already agree in general that centralized power is typically a bad idea. We cannot avoid it, however. For example, the Police force exists as a phenomenon. Without them, a group of people will naturally form privately and specialize in protection services under self-serving chaotic interests (a "mafia" for short). And since they are responsible for protection, they will be able to enforce their chaotic will upon anyone. This is because human-to-human interaction can be extremely volatile and we are capable of killing each other quickly. So it might not be ideal for economics, but we still exist as part of nature and need to account for that.

We must rely on social contracts to stabilize human interaction enough for an economic system to even be possible. Buying and Selling is meaningless when Looting and Destruction are nonpunishable. A social contract is meaningless if we do not punish people for breaking them. A government is a collection of such contracts. The US government differentiates these contracts by various types and instills a separation of powers as a public framework for dealing with dangers of centralized power. Mafias have no such considerations

Power still continues to consolidate among "mafia"s. They are less effective directly as a result of public centralized powers. I believe the next evolution in this war is the differentiation between what people need and what people want. They should not operate under the same economic model. If I WANT the food you NEED to eat, I should let you have it and pursue purchasing it from you instead. that should be a social contract.

This should be common sense, but in the world we live in there is no visibility to what is needed vs what is wanted. People would be incentivized to claiming a NEED on as much as possible. "Bad" Public centralized power used to enforce reasonable claims to NEEDs is the only way forward given the nature of our reality. "Only way" sounds limiting, but of course there are a million+ different ways we can go about it.

.001795 for year 30 = .998205 survival this year

.001858 for year 31 = .998142

...

.002482 for year 39 = .997518

---------------------

.998205 x .998142 x ... x .997518 = .978997 survival rate over 10 years

1 - .978997 = .021003 chance of death = 2.1%

this is just called tax evasion

back then you could file your taxes with 6 or 7 kids and no one would check

that is not the same as claiming you have 6 or 7 kids that will be filed on your taxes and then just never filing it. Once filed he would need SSN for those kids, or he would owe taxes

>what's the point of having them in the first place,

to increase company size and keep more people in the world fed. without them, that money just goes into the CEO's pocket anyway.

>paying them more,

this i disagree with as well. Money should be way better allocated to the people keeping the company alive since everyones dinner depends on them.

But overall a company should hire as many people as it can afford. have them work from home and do almost nothing most of the time. pay them the least in the company.

Usually these discussions leave out what happens when people dont have jobs at all, which would happen to a lot of people if companies were run optimally and morons were fired. Do we let them die so that we can buy yachts? I dont think we should all die together if we cant save everyone, but I do think we should be working to maximize the number of "free loaders" our country can support and viewing that as a signal of strength.

I also believe if we remove all these people who are better off as free loaders from the workforce, that companies would become more productive overall, not less. There is this belief that everyone would just stop working if they didnt need to and nothing would get done. I dont buy it. Absolute worst case scenario we could have a draft and use the military to fill the gaps in the workforce lol

>A bureaucrat has never created a solution

>make basic life cheap and efficient

I'm interested in your take on how we exercise total control over the cost of living without any sort of bureaucratic processes being implemented?

If vendors are required to accept UBI credit for certain goods and services and must then collect payment from the government, the government is able to restrict inflation by refusing to pay inflated prices.

A "UBI-like system" has such broad range and flexibility of design and implementation that to dismiss it entirely while suggesting (im not sure exactly what to call your suggestion) market manipulation? is ludicrous.

There is a finite amount of work that needs to be done to sustain the necessities for everyone. basic life IS cheap and efficient, but we arent allowed to pay for what it is. I cant buy a simple small house for cheap, because someone who already has a house can afford to pay more and then rent it to me instead.

There NEEDS to be a centralized power separating out basic needs purchasing from "extra" purchasing. All of the "extra" economic activity should be more expensive and the basic needs purchasing should be cheaper. You cannot accomplish that without government. you need centralized power to enforce it.

Moron or not, I dont want people to starve simply because they dont help a company perform optimally.

If we were to implement some form of a universal basic income there would be no obligation to become a self-serving asshole at whatever company you can get yourself into. The people doing the work would be able to stand up for themselves and tell management to fuck off if they do become moronic or overly self-serving

reminds me of trying to compete with imessage or facetime today

Something I never got around to setting up that you might find interest in if going for a few different "modes" is using NFC tags / stickers to trigger the light change. So you can have a couple stickers on the wall or w.e and tap you phone to work or hobby or normal and have things change automatically.

going into the phone isnt really a big deal, but I always felt setting up a physical trigger would be way smoother mentally

why did you bring your home computer into the mix to begin with? future advice, never do that. For a lot of different reasons.

Why do you think it would look bad on you if a slow computer does computer things slowly? This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge of exactly why a slow computer is a bottleneck.

I would say be specific. Do not say "I am slow because my computer is slow". Have a coworker send you benchmarks from their machine for some processes you use often. Run the same benchmarks on your machine. Talk about it with your manager. Ask him what you need to do to get a better machine.

Managers need details.