well i’ve seen cats breed just fine in “captivity” (i.e. living in a human environment). i think it’s a bit more complicated than that

i think that’s blatantly wrong because people in the US in 1960 had a lot of wealth and also good education yet had a lot of children.

yeah i have been saying the same thing to a friend just yesterday

MANN: In this crowded city, it’s hard to see the scale of depopulation and rapid aging already underway. But Li works in China’s sagging real estate industry, and she says she’s already feeling the change.

LI: Housing prices will fall, and the number of home buyers will decrease as well.

Oh no, what a tragedy. (/s)

relevant:

edit: just to be very fair about this: if you could go back in time by 10 years and tell people who are just about to start studying IT (for the sake of making a lot of money later on in their life) that they’re going to be replaced by AI in a few years, would the people really listen to you and think about that possibility?

Or would they rather go “nah man that’s absurd, a computer program can not write software like a human does, and pay in IT is always good”. (i mean, lots of people are still saying this today)

What i’m saying is that it’s not the future’s fault of happening, but the people’s fault for being infinitely stubborn about the fact that progress does not exist and nothing can ever change. the way the world works today must inherently be how the world will still work in 50 years from now. there is simply no other possibility. and also go fuck yourself for proposing otherwise.

can we have fediverse mirroring of xiaohongshu?

in my opinion the civil war around 1800 did not actually abolish slavery. it just made slavery more efficient.

instead of killing your slaves through hard work (which means you have to buy new ones) you can just work them longer if they live longer, i.e. that’s why working conditions improved. at the same time, slavery got renamed into “prison labor”. it’s essentially the same thing.

It’s crazy how 13% of the world population dominate the social media discourse so much that i basically see no other people’s opinion ever.

yeah same. also i don’t drink alcohol anymore but it would be nice to have more places to hang out.

If such discussion takes place – an increasingly rare thing – there is no need to individually ”differentiate good candidates from bad candidates” and each voter’s intelligence certainly isn’t of consequence. In a functioning democracy, who to vote for, should follow naturally from your participation in public discourse.

yeah that’s what i meant. still, people have to be engaged in a way that i don’t see them being engaged in. And that’s still the central issue, i’d say.

:)

i hate over-engineering as much as cats do

it’s like when you buy a toy for a toddler and the toddler spends more time playing with the cardboard box than the toy. it’s the same spirit: the genius in the simple things is adorable, the over-engineering of complex products is something disgusting.

good article overall, well researched and well written, feels very balanced when reading it.

if you really didn’t see this coming, it’s on you, honestly

We should be emphasizing you should get to know the candidates up and down the ballot

*we should have been

this was probably the last election in a long time

yeah the federal government can essentially print arbitrary amounts of money through the federal reserve bank if it has control of it, yes.

the only way out (to prevent the federal government from having infinite, literally unlimited economic buying power) is to devalue the dollar in such a way that the dollar becomes completely worthless, i.e. its value goes to zero. but this will only happen if people stop accepting the dollar as a valuable currency, i.e. if people switch to using alternative currencies instead, like the euro (€) or something else entirely.

I can’t imagine the people in the US fighting against the government because to have a will to fight, you have to have something worth protecting in your life, and i’m pretty sure that social cohesion has been eroded so much in the USA that people simply won’t care about their neighbours enough to actually fight and risk their lifes for them, but what do i know.

where does the expression “leoparts ate my face” even come from?

fun fact: i think it has nothing to do with it. it’s just that trump is a reality tv star and tv stars and entertainers tend to get elected in democracies (see england, italy, USA) because they know how to present themselves to the people in an “entertaining” way and also because harris refused to focus on the real buying power of people.

this is a disaster for the people affected (and also every society is 3 days without food before violent revolutions and all that) but also IMO these programs should ideally be paid for by the states anyways, not the federal government. i also think that taxes should go to the states instead of the federal government, and the states then forward whatever amount is appropriate to the federal government. that would make the states more resilient against these kinds of federal fraud.