If you’re going to write about your uncharitable inner thoughts, you must be careful to make the fact that you’re employing irony visible even to the people in this thread. These people are how the “Just kidding! I’m white” woman lost her career.
This is why I wore a BLM wristband when I lived in suburban Ohio. It didn’t necessarily ward off That Guy, but it kept them from sharing their thoughts.
Whoever is the next Secretary of State is going to have some big shoes to fill.
Very strong Michael-Palin-as-Vyacheslav-Molotov vibes from this most craven of liegemen.
I took a class from Philippa Foot, who devised the trolley problem in the first place, and she used it as a demonstration of exactly why it was stupid to accept Herman Kahn’s bullshit.
“What are you talking about? Crucifixion’s a slow and horrible way to die!”
“At least you’re out in the sun.”
They moved to London to get away from hunger, not labor.
We need a charismatic and ambitious officer - a colonel, say, or maybe just a flight lieutenant - who can lead a quick surprise decapitation strike.
I think we passed the high-water mark 20 years ago.
Huh. I read Appointment in Samarra in the early 1980s and don't remember stumbling over anything. But it was only 50 years old then. I wonder if the now-gone stuff in that book was still around when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s.
This has (for me) the weird distinction of being the only MST3K movie that I saw in the theater.
The equation changes once all the arable land is cultivated.
Direct on-farm labor is about 1.5% of jobs in the US today. In 1900, 40% of workers were agricultural labor. That'd be about 70 million people today.
It is generally much harder to elucidate why something is good than why it is bad. Which is why good examples of the former are generally rarer and more valuable than good examples of the latter. You're _probably_ not Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper.
Automation certainly increases the amount of wealth that we can all create for capital while laboring as serfs. But automation is not why (or how) capital is pushing us back to serfdom.
The only reason any of us has any leisure time is that we're not spending our days gathering enough to eat. Automation brought us that.
Capital is trying to get us to a point where we have to spend our entire day creating wealth for them while they grudgingly pay us just enough to eat.
The Luddites didn't smash weaving frames because they thought automation was bad. They smashed weaving frames because they were at war with capital and destroying capital's equipment hit them where it hurt.
Automation creating industrial surplus and capital assuming all of society's surplus for itself are not the same thing.
Attacking automation is the drunk searching for his missing keys under the lamp post even though he lost them in the bushes because the light's better.
I'm lucky to be alive at a time when a medical condition can be treated. I feel better because I'm suffering less than I was. That's it. Nothing to brag about. But still worthy of note.
As with my other accomplishments, it all comes down to being born in the right place at the right time.
I didn't lose weight because my moral character overcame gluttony. That's how people are supposed to do it. I just took shots.
My moral character also didn't fix my depression. It hasn't brought down my blood pressure or cholesterol, either. It didn't take out my appendix.
I'm not proud of having lost this weight. Going to Walgreens once a month, giving yourself an injection every seven days: not an accomplishment.
There's so much hostility to GLP-1 drugs because the result comes so easily. What society _wants_ is for that to be a struggle.
It is true that, say, having to get a seat belt extender when flying was a pretty humiliating experience. I can pin that on society. But that was never a part of my day to day experience, and climbing up stairs was.
I've thought about it a fair amount, and I don't think the reason I feel so much better now that I'm 80 pounds down is because society wanted me to be thin. I think it's because I can walk up stairs without having to stop and catch my breath. My blood sugar is controllable too.
Someone who's worried about "robots that pick vegetables" can't possibly know how carrots are picked today.
We've been mechanizing agriculture for over a century! We started introducing mechanical harvesters in the 1950s!
People used to do this for Stalin because they were afraid that if they were the first to stop he'd have them shot. That is, to put it mildly, not what is frightening our Republican members of Congress.
a) it's not nonsense. 40% of jobs is a LOT of jobs. Today only about 20% of houses rely on a single income at all, let alone can support a family of four on it.
b) don't forget than when someone like this says "our fathers," whether they know it or not they generally mean "our white fathers."
Somebody had better tell all the kids who are producing music and sharing it with each other in their Discord servers that it's out of their reach.
What's out of reach for the middle class is becoming a highly skilled musician. That takes time, not money, and middle-class people don't have time.
So he _does_ know what asylum means.
s/My two cars/we had two cars/
We didn't go on exotic vacations (my parents went to Jamaica once), and our houses were perpetually in need of repair (neither of my parents were handy in that way), so as best as I can tell we didn't have a ton of surplus money after all the bills were paid. But all the bills were paid.
During all this time my mom played piano, sang in a choir, built two harpsichords, became a fairly good painter and a mediocre sculptor, learned to play the cello, played in multiple chamber quartets, and in general did whatever the hell she wanted to.
