searabbit

Until there are enough grassroots progressive candidates to take over the democratic party the same way the tea party movement took over the republican party, and finally some progressive initiatives can pass into law, such as eliminating FPTP.

Please don’t take the “just vote democrats into office” answer to mean “sit tight and do nothing but vote” when voting is really the bare minimum activism you should be doing to preserve a democratic system.

I think that’s just a white person thing…

I think we agree for the most part. I also didn’t mean to imply reading literature = intelligent because I also don’t believe that. The people I described are people in my life who I believe are incredibly intelligent, just not academic.

On my last point, it’s my realist take. I have EDS (excessive daytime sleepiness), so even if I really really believe I will enjoy a tougher read, sometimes I can’t stay awake long enough to get through a page. During those periods, I’ll take the easier self help or scifi book to keep me going. But yeah, challenging ourselves is part of the joy. When I was a struggling college student, I became very depressed for a while, and I distinctly remember picking up a philosophy book at the city library and reading an excerpt about hedonism and eudaimonism which changed my outlook for the better. The idea that we need both short term pleasures and long-term purpose to feel happy/fulfilled helped me work through the challenges, making sure I still went out and had fun in between, which now I look back on with some sense of fondness and pride. I see reading a tough book that interests me in the same way.

for his essays, there is an excellent anthology available from Penguin, ‘The World-Ending Fire’.

Awesome! I’ll add that to my reading list :)

It’s exactly what you’re imagining, yes, even that.

I love this comment and I’ll look into Wendell Berry since I haven’t heard of him before.

To add on, I’ve met a lot of otherwise smart people (smart as in curious and skeptical to not accept things at face value) who frustratingly have no interest in literature to flesh out their own philosophies about the world.

They’ll go on a rant about this or that and I’ll chime in to say, for example, “oh are you talking about prisoners dilemma?” or “you’re basically describing nihilism” or “well, that person likely disagreed with you because you are using different definitions of the same word/concept” and they’ll look at me with an expression of ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t care.’ I’d be so happy to explain things or recommend what to research to engage with topics they’re clearly passionate about, but it’s sad to see the curiosity end so soon when so many people have collectively devoted lifetimes on expanding the ideas they think they just invented.

So I won’t comment on what makes someone intelligent (because you’ll never find me calling the people I described unintelligent), but if you want to improve your own, I emphatically agree on reading literature, even fantasy like Tolkien, whatever you enjoy.

People generally hang out with other people of their general socioeconomic class, so it doesn’t take much guesswork. Usually, they just have nothing in common with poorer people (not the literal poors, upper middle class is poor to them), don’t go to the same places that poorer people go to, and unfortunately, poorer people generally tend to be less attractive than rich people due to lack of access to cosmetic care. The cosmetic care includes skincare, dental work, and I’ve even seen growth hormones as soon as elementary school.

One last point, multimillionaire and billionaire circles are extremely small because, as you can imagine, there’s not that many of them! They tend to know way too much about each other, so if you do happen to be poorer and run in their circles, they’ll either know and/or you’re smart enough to be playing their game.

Lol it was cocaine and he got a visit from the fbi from what I heard but not much more than that. Rich kid of course.

I feel like the 180 he pulled should be considered a form of fraud and his constituents should have a method to recall and prosecute him for it.

Idk about your pile, but mine is precariously balanced on top of a chair so it’s O(1) until a literal tipping point when everything falls and then it’s O(k*n) where k is the time it takes me to put away a piece of clothing in the closet/laundry (or start a new pile elsewhere).

I knew a kid in college who got drugs delivered straight to the dorm mailroom, so people can really be surprisingly brazen…

I think people who grow up middle class in a first world country are so sheltered from suffering that animal cruelty is the first example of it that they can actually empathize with and understand as a black and white issue (to them). Unfortunately, suffering is just a fact of life for everyone but the most privileged. The logical conclusion to “if you can’t give animals the standard of care that I expect as a global top 1%er of wealth, then you shouldn’t own any pets” is a PETA type policy of killing any pet that is living a suboptimal existence. Which, if they were humans, we would consider that genocide. It’s really just not a reasonable stance at all.

The team tethered the crustaceans to posts at varying times of the year and at varying depths of Maryland’s Rhode River, a tidal estuary in Chesapeake Bay. After about 24 hours, the researchers would look for signs of predation—basically, if the crabs were dead or injured.

Sometimes I can’t tell if these animal studies are conceived based on actual scientific necessity or someone’s torture fantasy that happens to provide some useful info.

This feels like the poison scene from the princess bride, so I’ll approach it with that level of intellectual derangement.

Which means the obvious first step is to recognize that the house is a cheater who wants you to stay poor so your choice doesn’t matter. There is poison in both cups and I will lose either way. Money no longer influences my decision.

Next, I flip a coin ten times and note my reaction to the choices. That’s my gut instinct and obviously what the model predicted unless it’s either not smart enough to know my gut or smart enough to predict my double bluff, therefore useless.

Next, I decide which variables are most likely to influence the prediction (gender, age, education level, big 5 personality score) and realize this is the adult marshmallow test. I obviously think I’m smart and want the model to know that, so it obviously predicted that I would take one box because I’m a good little goodie two shoes who delays instant gratification for the potential bigger payoff. Therefore I choose two boxes because the model would never expect someone as smart as I to make such a dumb greedy move. Surely, I have outsmarted the supercomputer with my quadruple bluff and have won.

And then I remember I am dumb and the model knows that, because in my excitement, I forgot that the house is a cheater who always wins (and there was likely never any money in the mystery box because researchers never get that kind of funding). I am forced to believe that the model accurately perceived me to be a greedy idiot who took two boxes against my better judgement, shattering my ego.

But hey, I at least got $1k out of it.

I did it slowly over time. Every time reddit made a site wide change that worsened the user experience (which has been a lot since I joined a decade ago), I’d take one step to distance myself. First it was unsubscribing from major subreddits and engaging less, then staying logged out, then deleting the app but browsing on the web, and finally reddit pissed me off enough to try an alternative. So far I’ve already spent much less time doomscrolling online since this place isn’t filled with rage-baiting bot content.

I’ve never met someone who decided to write a history book as a hobby. Just wanted to say that’s awesome, hopefully you can make it accessible online to other history buffs who may enjoy it!

A 2023 state law prohibited drivers from parking within the 20 feet of curb space approaching an intersection, a practice known in traffic safety circles as “daylighting” the corners.

But the law didn’t come with any funding to mark those spaces off-limits, leaving it up to cities and other local governments to pay for the work out of their own budgets. As a result, many haven’t — Oakland officials said last fall that they don’t have the staff or funding to implement the law, with just two employees responsible for street-painting work throughout the city.

Berkeley has become one of the first cities in California to finish painting its curbs to comply with the law, City Manager Paul Buddenhagen wrote in a memo this week, after public works staff and a contractor applied the treatment at nearly 1,700 intersections.

So California passed this law and Berkeley is patting themselves on the back for actually following through 3 years later when the law actually became enforceable. A lot of CA cities (definitely parts of LA) already had this law in place like decades ago, so Berkeley is just trying to take credit for the party they showed up late to.

What a great incentive to move off oil and towards literally any other energy source that doesn’t rely on the US/Israel not starting dumb wars in the middle east, too bad no one had any other reason at all to stop relying so much on oil half a century ago. It would’ve been completely doable with decades of runway, but oh well, shutting down entire industries in a last minute panic it is.

“Just try to advocate for yourself,” she said. “Stand up for yourself the best that you can … I guess it didn’t go great for me, so — have better luck.”

That made me chuckle. Yeah pretty much. I’ve seen a lot of doctors for chronic issues over the years and it’s just really hard to know when to be pushy and when to shut up and trust them or give up and just get a second opinion. Although this was pretty blatant negligence. The guy didn’t even look at her head ffs.

Lyft already has this feature, it’s called women+

I don’t think this issue is reflective of American gender wars in particular. I can think of dozens of countries I’d be way more terrified of being in a car alone with an unknown man as a woman. I’ve never had a bad encounter with any uber drivers in the US, but I have heard directly from drivers that drunk riders can be a fucking menace, so I don’t mind if female drivers would rather take their chances with drunk women vs drunk men.