earlINmeyerkeg

WWII had a compulsory draft where it was already established by then that congress had the power to initiate a draft. It was also hashed out that it was a federal issue and not a state one.

Which we all know is hot garbage. The government quite literally says, your individual freedoms are not greater than our goal for the country. If you ask me, that sounds NO different than communism! But when you fight for uncle sam, it must mean "the greater good" is good, just because the "greater good" isn't commie red "greater good."

Abusive MEN in particular. Especially radical christians where divorce is stigmatized. It's like they take it as a free pass to just be hateful person. Honestly my dad more than anything made marriage seem worse than it could be that I figured if that's the worst case scenario, hoping for the best isn't even worth the gamble.

I totally agree and don't think I'm idolizing the past. It's just a different world today and the culture has not caught up with reality.

That is probably the one part of the article they really should've made more prominent. Yet they didn't. They hammered it home that videogames and young men not getting married and having 12 kids is the problem.

Maybe culturally getting married is incredibly more time consuming and difficult than it used to be? I mean I'm reading George Orwell's Burmese days and the main character was trying to propose (and the girl wanted him to) within 2 weeks of knowing eachother! Granted it's a book, but that doesn't sound outside the realms of normalcy, especially in Burma during the 1920's where there were like 1/1000 ratio of white person to native.

You know, it'd be nice if they'd look at the cultural aspects of gaming as opposed to just assuming all videogames are bad. It's like being in the 1920's criticizing someone spending time reading as opposed to working in a mill.

But what can you expect from a clearly biased news source that, while possibly not wrong, is likely not going to give any benefit of the doubt to people who live life differently from the "good 'ol christian boy" fashion.

This is what I do and I 100% agree about lazy people that aren't willing to make a halfway decent website. I'm not that old, but sometimes I just want a website with text. I don't need autoplaying videos with a billion slideshow images and shown how fantasmagical your company is.

First off, please don't take anything I'm saying out of context which is in terms of regular people that make enough to pay their bills. Lower income types struggle with these things so I wholly recognize they're in a different type of game.

However, this whole article sounds like some pretentious westerner who thinks because they opened their mind to some sort of zen meditation that their problem became easier to solve. Also this same person chants the praises of writing things down and decrys the usage of software because you can't meditate while typing in stuff. It's literally no different than writing something in your checkbook.

When you have multiple accounts at different financials, have a 401k, and other assets, paper management gets complicated and time consuming incredibly fast, especially if you entered something in wrong. Can you imagine adjusting a ledger for a whole year because you transposed a number? Sure reconciling the difference can fix it, but it's sloppy and isn't right. Software takes all the hard work out of it and turns it into very simply data entry. You can also back it up too.

Budgeting is a problem with the individual. People who inflate their worth with the things they have tend to blow their money away on the latest and greatest or on literally anything they want as soon as they can get it. These people don't adhere to those stupid questions this meditative system says your supposed to adhere to. These people don't associate spending money as a bad thing. It is an instinctive behavioral pattern and not something taught. How many people actually know how to read over loan docs and understand proper debt management? A lot of people know "Pay your bill" which, yes, is very easy. But how many people actually factor in their interest in the cost of the thing they buy? People ignore the incremental costs, and forget the total cost in the end.

Remember that the reason a large majority of the economy works is because of suckers like this. Impulsive people would rather buy something at a quoted low price than risk never having that sale again. They don't look for trends or remember the costs of things down the road. They also don't factor future costs for things they need like car repairs (which is why lots of people max their loan amount for a vehicle, only to end up not being able to repair it when a serious issue occurs).

Honestly in my life, I've just become incredibly apathetic to other peoples financial situation. The few people that actually do know a solid means of budgeting truly know the value of the dollar and time. They aren't perfect, but they learn from their mistakes. They forgo spending $5 on a cup of starbucks and instead opt for $5 of a can of folgers. Instead of Rolex, they get a Seiko. If they see a 50% off sale, they consider the final price, not the fact that it happens to be 50% off. Also impulse buying is a big one. Being able to deny yourself something long term is one I rarely ever see among people without money.

How about ban lawns in general? Their entire inception was devised because the bourgeoisie could flaunt the fact that they could afford to have land not be in use for food production.

Yet the apologists in my area of people who just chant the praises of lawn maintenance is just absurd. It's a complete waste of time. Get a better hobby ffs...

So what. Just because you send a retraction doesn't justify it or make the apology any better. That sounds like they allow some people too much freedom as if they ran this business in their parents garage.

Use noscript. It's possibly one of the best add-ons out there now.

I can jump in on this bandwagon a bit. A cop, not on active duty at the time, took a retired German Shepard police dog as a pet. He lived near a college and had his dog running around in his backyard. An event was going on at the college so there were large crowds. The cop didn't watch the dog and it jumped out of his fenced in yard and started attacking the students. My brother got bit pretty bad and had nerve damage in his arm.

It's been 2 years since this happened and the cop has not admitted fault, hasn't had to put the dog down, hasn't been written up, or had to pay a dime. Although the city has agreed to pay because it was their officers fault, the funny thing was, no lawyer would take the case if my parents wanted to sue simply because they know suing the city is impossible (which is frankly ridiculous), and because it involved a cop not on active duty. I mean the city is still dragging their feet paying for his hospital visit and everything, meanwhile my brother is basically in collections for something he isn't supposed to pay for.

If anything the event has really taught me to despise the US government and cops more than ever. Cops individually may be nice people, but that badge and union suddenly turns them into some of the biggest repressionary forces to regular lower income people.

But like I said about how these wide sweeping reforms, they create instability and also famine. The reason it ended up being good (as your link also shows) was due to land consolidation. Millions of independent farmers does not create a food surplus as much as a few consolidated landmasses that can maximize production. As I stated, the consolidation inevitably occurs and always have in the many times China has performed land redistribution.

The primary reason the growth occurred was because of the land consolidation. Instead of having millions of independent farmers, they consolidated the land and only required hundreds of thousands of laborers to work on the land to maximize production. Thus allowing for a massive labor force that could be utilized for industrial production.

I 100% agree about Sam Harris in particular. I really do enjoy listening to his podcast, but anytime I hear him discuss AI I want to shut him off. He's a neuroscientist/philosopher, not a programmer.

I mean it honestly grinds my gears that people even use the marketing term of "AI" today when what we have is not even close to the actual thing. Intelligence is something that can freely think and make decisions on it's own. A complicated algorithm that can interpret data to do something automatically is not AI. It is confined by the code that it is given and that it is programmed to write for itself. It cannot pause and think "We'll what if I wanted to do more than this? How would I write my own code to do that?"

Free will is something you have the power to act on, regardless of external influences. Just because the fear of punishment exists doesn't mean that a person cannot opt out.

It's the same thing as if an officer during war told you to retreat, however you still defy that order to rescue a fallen comrade in the presence of immediate danger.

I guess I was coming from the philosophy of why it's bad on a liberalism mindset. I totally get why it's good for a governing body to assume control.

I mean we could hash out all hypothetical all day. I'm just saying that the needs of the economy would shift to that where a PhD basically becomes the new High School Diploma. In essence, entry level jobs would be stuff that today would legitimately require a masters or higher.

I'm not saying that 100% of that 50% will be employable in this world. I'm saying that over time that 50% will inevitably become that bare minimum. The way I see it is 150 years ago, your idea would be that we couldn't possibly get all children to become educated at an 8th grade level, yet here we are, even making an HSD the bare minimum.

Eventually your masters thesis will be an area for you to study and pursue to make an attempt at furthering society.

>accept less pay at the top.

For a second there I thought you we're being serious!

>NO taxes till $40k-50k for a family

You're talking about quite literally like 80% of the entire tax revenue generated by the government. Income taxes we're devised because an industrial nation cannot collect property taxes on non land owning tax payers. As the cities grew, governments realized that they could only tax the wealthy and prominent land owners so much before they had to generate it in another way.

Aren't there studies that show the suicide rate among married men is drastically lower than unmarried men? I really don't think it has anything to do with income (or at least to a significant degree) than it does with loneliness. Men's self worth is tied to his friends and wealth. It's hard to share your wealth if everybody else makes the same as you. So making more poor people "less poor" still wouldn't solve the problem among men not acquiring prestige or status that attracts people to them. It makes it incredibly easy to feel like a loser and ponder "whats the point?"

God forbid NIMBY has to deal with a better house than theirs a block away...

Does Europe (more or less as whole) have a philosophy that rental properties are a regulated enterprise that is solely to be managed by a established company?

I mean I really do like the idea but I've heard of incredibly long waiting lists for apartments in places like Germany simply because there just isn't enough supply to meet demand.

Isn't like 90% of the homeless population people with a significant mental illness that they cannot provide for themselves? That's because the normal competent people don't remain homeless long and just need short term temporary assistant. Whereas the large portion of homeless actually are not competent enough to support themselves.

Chinese emperors have done this type of land reform innumerable times and it has always ended up in famine and disaster/regime change. Land consolidation became a thing (as it inevitably does) and baron landlords became commonplace as the consolidation of fields occurred. The positive aspect of land redistribution via the equal field system is that it alters the power structure for the corrupt landlords who should not have power and prevent progressive changes that benefit society. The negative aspect is it's borderline impossible to vet who is "worthy" of being a landlord. The Chinese unfortunately would let "laissez-faire" take over property control.

Eventually someone who knew how to get a leg up on others would take advantage of others financial incompetence, likely mortgage the property, then acquire it, eventually leading up to owning basically a whole province thus becoming basically creating their own landed title and domain. Then suddenly you've got a feudalistic system that has always existed, but the head government now may even have a worse problem they created themselves. It's happened when the south basically broke off after the final rebellion during the Tang dynasty. These landholders eventually had enough power and cultural difference that they could break from the north and retain full autonomy.

I personally believe a lot of that stuff cannot be further studied unless we are able to divert solutions to other problems in our society first. I'm saying that we need to have things like mass quantity sustainable energy, significant automation, global unification and standards, higher minimum education levels.

I'm saying that imagine 50% of the population works in blue collar general labor or semi-skilled labor fields. Now in this hypothetical worlds, all those jobs are managed by autonomous robots. Also we have a green power that is sustainable, storable, sufficient for even double the population, and can be held in high densities at low volumes. So there are now innumerable sectors within the economy that we don't need people themselves to learn. That leaves more time for people to take extended amounts of time to learn and study. I mean quite literally a Star-Trek "post-scaricity world" in a lot of ways. People use time to further themselves and expend time on cultural or scientific endeavors. Life is no longer about struggle and survival since money clearly would have no value if any and everything can be made or consumed for free. I mean it's really interesting to think that the only "conflict" that would exist is between people trying to min-max life in terms of achievement. There would be no achievement in religion, money, or ownership since everybody can do it.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that a lot of our advances are contingent upon other sectors becoming automated and allow for more people to get into academic sectors.

Did a plane carrying a nuke get shot down during the yom kippur war? Or am I getting that confused with Sum of All Fears?

A surveillance state wouldn't be such a burden if the rights we had actually could be enforced on the spot the moment they were infringed by a police force.

The fact that you can be imprisoned (borderline indefinitely it seems at times) as well has basically need a lawyer even though your issue is straight up black and white really shows the failures of a police state. Whats the point in having rights in a surveillance state? The government will just make stuff up against you anyway.

As an American, police in Europe seem to be more like "Beat you with a stick but keep you out of jail type" and treat citizens in a rational way according to how the industrial world works (as well as protecting workers from losing their jobs, especially when innocent until proven guilty). In the US, it's basically the lottery that nobody wants to win. Cause if a cop wants to ruin your day, month, or year, he absolutely can with 0 recourse.

That's why I'll always view the US government's approach to policing as repressionary unless they actually give workers rights preventing them from being fired, and actually funding the legal system to be more efficient. They run it like a business and intend to keep it that way.

And also throw you in jail and keep you there indefinitely regardless of evidence of you committing a crime.

Yeah that was the thing I was most impressed with too. Cops in the US generally don't know anything and they are unsympathetic to any perfectly sound and rational expertise you have simply because they don't know...and frankly don't care.

>and confusion about eligibility

My states health insurance is so ridiculously ambiguous. I mean there is no simple chart that says: Do you fall under this category or this category, etc. etc.? They make you fill out like 15 pages of stuff to just SEE if you qualify. It's not even an official application either. And at the end, it just says "you may be eligible."