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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’m sure some middle class people can afford to go to burning man. But you’re being wilfully ignorant if you think burning man isn’t catered to the rich. It’s almost purely a status symbol event. It’s definitely where people go to show off their lavish wealth and take pictures for Instagram. I’m pretty sure if they took a survey 80%+ would be wealthy people.

    I’m middle class, and I’m spending a couple hundred dollars on my holiday this week, I almost can’t fathom spending thousands living in a tent in a desert.

    But you’re right, the middle class has been eroded. What was considered middle class in 1970 would be rich today. That’s just because most people are worse off financially.



















  • Obviously not immediately, I never said that. If we had the ability to use sonar for the same amount of time, we’d be better at it and we soon will be better at it in less time than evolution allowed because our creativity and intelligence lets us advance faster than evolution.

    Does the fact we learned how to use sonar without the natural evolved ability prove that we’re smarter?

    Maybe content was the wrong word, animals just don’t care about advancing technology or growing. Most animals only care about reproduction, that’s their lives goal. Salmon literally spend their entire lives, growing up, leaving home, going back home to mate, and dies.

    I’m not sure what your point is anymore, are you still campainging that animals are smarter than us? Because they’re not, they may be better at filling certain niches, but our niche is literally being smart. There are intelligent species but none have come close to what we can achieve with our brains. We sacrificed primate stretch and agility for higher brain power.


  • Because it’s not intelligence. Our apposable thumbs aren’t an indicator of intelligence, what we decide, with our brains, to do with those thumbs is intelligence. Just like brain size isn’t an indicator, sperm whales have the largest brain on the planet yet we are better at applying ours. And a crow’s brain is smaller than a child but it’s commenly understood they’re smarter than a 4 year old.

    Dog’s use of their nose are signs of intelligence but not the nose in and of itself. It shows that they’re intelligent, but clearly not more so than humans, who still have more complex relationships, language, learning ability, etc. The smelling of diseases isn’t intelligence, they don’t learn it, they can just do it. It’s a natural evolved ability, like better hearing. Animals and humans using their brains to learn is a measure of intelligence and it’s faster than evolution. It’s not like we couldn’t use smell to communicate if we had the ability.

    I never said anything other than intelligence is meaningless, but in this case, it’s largely meaningless as a measure of intelligence past the comparitivly simple form of communication smell is used as. I’m not saying animals are unintelligent, we’re just more intelligent. It’s more like;

    Human has ability = what we do with it is a measure of intelligence.

    Animal has ability = what they do with it is a measure of intelligence and we’d do more with it if we had the ability, because our intelligence makes us more curious and inventive. Most animals are content with the natural order, if humans could smell disease we’d use it to advance our medicine.