Hegar

I’m not sure I understand your point so if I’m off base let me know.

Firstly, inheriting $200k - $1M doesn’t keep anyone poor. It doesn’t even stop wealth from concentrating at a level that harms others and warps society - it just prevents that level of wealth from passing down to people who did nothing.

Secondly, if everyone was poor who would be controlling them? You have to keep most people poor and a much smaller group of people unassailably wealthy to control them. That’s exactly the problem that high death taxes address.

Estate taxes is woefully small. There should be a 100% death tax on all assets after $1M, excluding a single home.

Nope.

I know it sounds wrong when you first hear it, but power changes your brain. Sociopaths are more drawn to powerful positions, but getting power makes your brain look more like the brain of a sociopath when it didn’t before:

https://hbr.org/2015/04/becoming-powerful-makes-you-less-empathetic https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-empathy/201909/power-blocks-empathy https://www.npr.org/2013/08/10/210686255/a-sense-of-power-can-do-a-number-on-your-brain https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/how-power-erodes-empathy-and-steps-we-can-take-rebuild-it

Becoming powerful makes you less good, neurologically.

It’s reasonable to assume that people with more status are behaving worse than people with less.

Power - status, fame, privilege, wealth, etc. - causes neurological changes that suppress a human’s ability to excersize empathy. The kind of self-centered behaviour that the nurse describes is typical of a high status inidividual.

Also, I used to work in health insurance and this story just jives well with the little personal experience I have with medical workplaces.

It’s unjust that someone who spends their day goofing off and looking at their phone feels entitled to earn twice what a nurse does, just because they had the privilege to get into college.

Don’t accept it. It’s fundamentally unjust and you’re right to be upset.

I’m still not sure why there is vegetarian Spam

For the same and only reason that there is regular spam, surely? For musubi.

I’m a renter, so I’d throw a brick through each window of my property manager’s tesla.

Are you sure that’s still the case? I know china stopped accepting it ages ago - that’s why most recycling just goes to domestic landfill now.

Our electoral system is just shit.

She’s way more popular and so are her policies, but having the support of the majority of voters doesn’t guarantee victory like it would if we lived in a democracy.

The first iteration had a rules of war/ethics type system where as well as K/D ratios etc. it gave you a rank for how well you obeyed the rules of war. I remember I number of articles talking about how abysmally low all the scores were.

The game was such a realistic representation of the US army that players could just war crime to their hearts content with no repercussions.

I’m of an age where I agree with almost everything on this list. I don’t know that It deserves a place though, and despite extensive media consumption I’ve never heard of The Dollars Trilogy or Child’s Play.

I think you have to ignore large parts of his legacy to consider a genocidal warlord like Caesar “not so bad”.

Pursuing the agenda of the populares may have made him less domestically odious than some of his fellow patricians from the optimates, but he was still a member of the ruling class monopolizing power in his person. On top of the whole brutal genocidal warlord thing.

The people whose deeds reverberate through history are the powerful. The powerful are almost always evil, it’s just how humans work.

Neuroscience shows that as humans get power, our brain’s ability to perform empathy is damaged. So as an organism, a human’s capacity and willingness to inflict misery on others tend to increase in lock step with each other.

Nations joining together in the spirit of the rich lording it over everyone else, I think you mean? Or the spirit of sport-washing dictatorships, maybe?

I was with you up until the /s

It’s a drain on resources intended to boost the prestige of a nation-state and the vile, self-serving elites that control them. The IOC itself is a corrupt bribe-machine that willingly bolsters the reputation of the worst regimes in the world.

It’s the circuses part of ‘bread and circuses’ - a tool of oppressers the world over.

It’s not even a fair competition. How rich a country is and how much they spend on sport and sport science is the largest determining factor in medal count. Just another way for the evil to buy legitimacy.

Difference enthusiast is fun.

As someone who has identified specifically as ‘weird’ or a ‘weirdo’, I’m happy to keep using the term. I don’t think anyone’s going to confuse my queer-esque anti-heirarchical neurodivergency for whatever the fuck is wrong with those fascist assholes.

This is the correct answer.

TBH, I just don’t think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.

Unless something is just obviously bullshit, it will always take some time to develop a sense of how the different sources are treating a new story. Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.

It’s uncomfortable living with that uncertainty until you’ve seen a story from enough angles that you can judge for yourself. But either the story is important enough to me to spend that time, or I just accept that I can’t really know.