Supplying people with basic life necessities should not need to garner a profit.

This goes for food, water, shelter, but also electricity, healthcare, public transportation, and internet.

(Coincidentally, most of these are basic human rights.)

Society as a whole experiences net benefit (even am economic one) from those, so society as a whole should fund them.

Yes, this requires taxes.

I actually don’t think their logic is that implausible.

Obviously, it’s not about giving people more time for baby making.

But (just as an arbitrary example) if you’re spending two hours per day driving to and from work, slashing that down to a single hour can massively reduce a family’s overall stress level.

And “Less stressed people have more room in their lives for bigger families” is an equation that doesn’t sound that dumb.

Obviously, there might be better ways to go about this. Or there actually might not.

There’s definitely more impactful ways to improve people’s work-life balance, but most of those aren’t as easily implemented.

In an ideal world, they might have done extensive studies into why people don’t have more babies, and then selected an efficient parameter to tune.

(As a rule, investing into public transportation will usually pay socio-economic dividends either way, as long as it’s done at least halfway decently.)

In a less ideal world, massive lobbying by the very people profiting off this investment first might have been involved.

Overall, this whole affair has decent odds of becoming some sort of net benefit overall.

She appeared there because she really wanted to.

There’s a neat bit of two-part history hidden there:

Part 1:

(Taken from an interview with Michelle Nichols)

Sometime during the original run of ST TOS, Michelle Nichols wanted to step back from playing Uhura. Roddenberry asked her to think about it on the weekend.

During that weekend, she happened to be at some fundraiser, where the host asked her if she could spare a minute for “her biggest fan”.

She said “of course… but hold on, there’s MLK right over there, I’ve got to take the opportunity to talk to him first.”

Host: “Yeah… um, that is your biggest fan. He wants to talk with you.”

MLK told her how much of an impact her role had (for pretty much the same reasons Goldberg mentioned later).

Monday, she rescinded her resignation.

Part 2:

When the staff of TNG heard that Whoopie Goldberg wanted had asked for a minor role, they thought it was joke.

(TNG wasn’t yet the juggernaut it’d become and Goldberg was a top tier Hollywood star.)

But she told them explicitly that she’d been inspired by the Role of Uhura from the start and just wanted to be part of ST.

So they tailored that minor role to her.

To me, she always looks happy as a clam on screen with that.

OK, I’ll bite:

You appreciate civilization because you’ve lived in nature.

What’s the most danger you’ve lived in

People die of starvation in a world that literally has enough food for everyone - because speculating with food is more profitable than feeding them.

People die of diseases that have known cures with low production cost - because the market will only finance medical research if the resulting drug comes with a net gain price tag.

There are literal wars being fought and people being shot for economic gains.

Humanity doesn’t have a resource problem. It has a distribution problem.

And the current method of deciding distribution of goods is capitalism.

that you think getting rich is equivalent to predation?

Genuine question: Where do you believe a millionaire’s millions ultimately come from?

There is only so much net economic gain one can create with their own two hands. Everything beyond that is created by other people’s hands.

The problem isn’t straight-out corruption.

It’s wonky incentivation.

Judges that are not measured by how many people they send to jail will always be, on average, less trigger-happy than cops who are.

Or did we become okay with being ruled by tyrants all of a sudden?

If so, what’s the point of federation?

The point of federation is not to prevent tyrants.

The point is the option to exclude or include any instance due to whatever metric you want.

If you don’t like tyrants, you can defederate your instance from any tyrant-ruled instance.

And, obviously, you can run your own instance as tyrannical or democratic as you want - users who don’t like that are free to leave, instance-owners who don’t like that are free to defecate from you.

If you’re just a user on the relevant instance, all you can do ist petition the people who have that power.

I understand that’s basically what you’re trying to do, but your argument shouldn’t be about federation or lemmy’s inherent structure - the question should be “is anyone else annoyed by that behavior?”

Depending on your definition, this actually is not peak performance.

Subways are.

Obviously, the tunnels are absurdly expensive, but nothing moves as many people as quickly around a city as a subway.

They’re also extremely reliable, meaning people are even more likely to actually use them, and their above-ground footprint is essentially zero.

This isn’t about guys’n’gals.

This is simpky about how people work:

If your peers (friends, colleagues, family) have an opinion (any opinion), their default expectation is that you share that opinion - this is what being a peer is mostly about.

You can demonstrate solidarity by agreeing - this is virtually always the safe option.

You can demonstrate backbone by disagreeing - this can generate respect or animosity.

You can refuse to weigh in - this is mostly a middle ground between the two above.

How it actual shakes out in reality will depend on a myriad of factors, many of which you’re not even consciously aware of.

Thus, this random internet stranger can give you only three pieces of advice:

• Trust your instincts on how to handle this. Your subconscious is very well wired to navigate social situations as best as possible.

• If you ever change your opinion or “change your opinion”, announce it clearly and give/make up a reason. People disrespect people who are inconsistent, but they respect people who can admit to mistakes / learn.

• Sometimes, you can’t win. Sometimes, someone will be pissed off, no matter what you do. It’s no fault of yours, some situations are just not salvageable to begin with.

Telekinesis. It’s not even a context

Telekinesis (especially at the “multiple tons” level) is an extremely flexible tool, a weapon, and a defense. There’s an endless amount of creative stuff you can do with it.

It can also still be used somewhat discreetly which is important.

Flight would probably be the most fun, though.

Question from someone outside the US who’s genuinely curious about why law-abiding citizens feel the need to carry guns to begin with:

If you’re aware of this, how often are you carrying a gun in the first place? When/Why?

Following what you say, there’s obviously the scenario where you have to defend your life (not your property).

On the other hand, as I see it, the victim in the article would not have benefited from a gun in the car and the odds of a shell-shocked BF turning the whole thing into an actual shootout would’ve been >0.

I’m not trying to argue crime statistics or morals here, I’m genuinely interested in a gun owner’s perspective.

Suburbs can’t be a ponzi scheme

Genuine question: Why not?

While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.

The way I understand it:

Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.

Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.

A subjective perspective from outside the US:

If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market’s size.

And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.

This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle’s poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.

Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.

Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.

The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).

Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.

(I’m also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)

Neither is bigger. Even “∞ x ∞” is not bigger than “∞”. Classical mathematics sort of break down in the realm of infinity.

I usually just copy paste historical (flawed) stuff I find interesting.

While I like goofing around with stuff like “modeling functioning government”, I believe it distracts from the PC’s stories (and leads to ideological discussions at the table.)

In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.

I genuinely like this idea, because it would allow to reach both goals.

The problem I see is that this would probably go down the same as the bodycam idea, with inconvenient recordings vanishing due to “technical issues”.

You’d need an independent third party doing life recording and delayed release. Subjectively, the US don’t have a great track record with these.

Easier idea: Just publish last week’s encryption key. Probably won’t happen because some tech supplier will lobby for a more expensive solution.

My comment wasn’t related to sex but more generalized, but, umm - yeah?

People having heterosexual two-person sex (preferably with a single, consistent partner) are the “in-group”.

Everyone else is the out-group.

If anyone ever made i.e. a study to something like police behavior experienced by a “regular” pick-up bar and a gay bar, I’d expect to see some stark differences.

Found the morality relativist.

Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?

(Warning: Might be coded by German extremism culture)

Right-wing extremists burn immigrants. Left-wing extremists burn cars. The latter is worse, because it could be my car while I don’t own any immigrants.

(from the Cangaroo Chronicles)