$25 a week on groceries in 1997 is around $50 today based on currency inflation, not even accounting for purchasing power. That could easily make the difference between a nutritious diet and one that leads to chronic health conditions for people living paycheck to paycheck. In 1997, the average weekly expenditure on food per person in the US was $34. You could probably have survived off of $15/wk for food back then and maybe find an extra 2-3hr of minimum wage to meet your $25 investment, but it wouldn’t have been pretty.

Fun fact, a $25 steak today in the US cost about $8.50 in 1997.

You go back in time to when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and zero financial literacy. You convince yourself to invest $100/month in Amazon no matter what, because it will be worth it. You eat nothing but ramen, forego preventative care, get sick from malnutrition. Your quality is life is horrible because you forego basic necessities to invest in Amazon. The dot com bubble wipes out 90% of Amazon’s value but you continue to invest because your past self told you about this, but if you just endure, Amazon will recover and you will be a millionaire.

In this timeline, Amazon never recovers and goes bankrupt. On Twitter, you read a post about George Shaheen’s wedding, and how he’s entitled to his billions, despite predatory and exploitative practices, because his wealth could have been yours. If you had only invested $100/month since 1996 into WebVan, you’d be a millionaire.

Investing is, at the end of the day, a gamble.

The “Ex-colleague with a liver disease” sent a chill through my spine. Was he an Ex-colleague because he was fired for being sick 👀👀👀? Was he healing himself or was he desperate not to die? There’s a difference.

Work can be meaningful, therapeutic, or simply a useful tool for coping. That doesn’t mean it should be the only tool, nor should it be relied on without clinical guidance, nor should it be the expectation.

Talk-therapy might not be for everyone, work therapy certainly isn’t. The complete lack of empathy and humanization in the post is disgusting.

I know you do.

I am staunchly anti-colonization and support resistance against oppression. I also believe there are people who are innocent and who have no choice in where they’re born or where their parents move them to, who generally go about life fairly normally with all the complexity (and tacit complicity) human life and circumstance brings–civilians. I do not support what Hamas did on Oct 7 and I certainly don’t support what the IDF has done in Gaza over the last year or the ongoing settlement in the West Bank. You and I live on the same planet and I will love your right to life always, but I will not gtfo just because I disagree with unfettered self-righteous bloodlust.

You know, the reason we have sympathy for Palestinian civilians is because they’re not responsible for the actions of Hamas on Oct 7, even if many of them were brainwashed to be happy about the massacre. Please apply the same logic to sympathizing with civilians who are not responsible for Likud’s actions, a large proportion of whom have also been protesting against the party in the past year.

The current Israeli administration is ruthless and bloodthirsty and it’s diminishing the should of it’s people. That being said, I don’t think any major power in the world, including China and Russia are sad to see Iran’s nuclear program get set back.

Wait… I think this helps. Ohhh I think he’s saying that finding women for just sex is easy when you have money like the kings who are the richest among us. But making money is hard, and while you’re struggling to make money or making babies, the kings who already have money are expanding their harems???

I dunno man, interpretation gets weird when you ignore humanity/ethics.

The statement is to set them apart from from you and to display power. So you could go with something like,

“Shit, they still make you buy your uniform when you rich eh. Some things never change.”

But more elegantly. Reassert that they are subject to others’ power/approval and relate to them to assert that they’re no different from you.

Your GF secretly works for openAI. You’re not teaching her, she’s getting you to train chatGPT :O

Starship Troopers, Sergeant Zim

They’re just doing the same thing as the teacher and assuming the two pizzas have to be of equal size and therefore it’s an impossible situation.

The estimate is 130-140 aircraft existed in the entire fleet, so sounds like the former.

You need a bit balance of everything. I used to be snooty about small-talk. Eventually I started noticing that the most personable people, who make someone new feel welcome, included, and who make you feel like you’re noticed and worth remembering through recalling basic personal details–these people have excellent small-talk skills.

I think part of why small-talk often feels pointless is because people don’t enter into it intentionally, with purpose. If you go into it with purpose, like creating a good social experience for others, or building/maintaining 2nd/3rd order social connections in a humanizing way, it feels a lot different. Like anything, it’s still exhausting after a certain amount.

AI bad. But also, video AI started with will Will Smith eating spaghetti just a couple years ago.

We keep talking about AI doing complex tasks right now and it’s limitations, then extrapolating its development linearly. It’s not linear and it’s not in one direction. It’s a exponential and rhizomatic process. Humans always over-estimate (ignoring hard limits) and under-estimate (thinking linearly) how these things go. With rocketships, with internet/social media, and now with AI.

It’s less that it’s bad for her and more that it’s another way the US is dismantling their own soft power. There are long term advantages to having the rich and powerful from around the world get their upper education in your universities.

I would ask ChatGPT to review the source code and optimize it 😈

OP: I want people to think for ourselves.

My understanding of your point: People have never done that because no thought is truly independent. Modern complexity relies on thought that builds upon others.

My point: Sure, but that’s also a narrow and ungenerous interpretation of the term “independent thought” as per OP’s usage. It’s closer to critical thought than silo’d thought developed from the ground up.

Ah, I haven’t looked at others’ responses. I can see how responding to many different people gets messy.

But to answer your question, because I took the time to formulate my thoughts for you, and I responded directly to things you said in your comments. I also asked you directly “How so? What’s your alternative assertion.” Which was a good faith attempt to better understand what you meant.

Well you didn’t respond to my questions and you’re vaguely referencing our other comments instead. It’s not effective communication and leads me to think you didn’t understand my comments. You seem to be into math, so I’ll put it this way,

Be explicit, show your work: premises–>arguments–>conclusion

This has very little to do with the criticism given by the first commenter.

How do? What would your alternative assertion be on the topic?