My thought is that if you’re going to give money, don’t wait until you die. The earlier you help someone, the more of their life it can improve. Help your kid buy their first house or something. Then spend everything before you die.

BFD they are the metro, not Indeed

Indeed! Sugar is a chemical!

Your post is unsanitary then because it is making me stupider and that is bad for my mental health, and mental health is health just like dental health is health.

This post is all over the place, conflating plastic leeching with sanitary concerns, throwing out vague concerns and then panicking that there must be NO standards. To really answer it would require giving someone a comprehensive education in food safe materials science, likely fighting though many dearly-held misconceptions along the way. Anyone who thinks that plastic touching food is a health risk must have all their meals brought to them on a plate, and have no idea how food is delivered to stores or packaged for sale.

I’ll point out the way you said that you and 1 of your siblings should be here. Only two, but it definitely includes you. Because you are special. See, everyone thinks this. You can say you meant any 2 of you, but those weren’t the words you chose.

Saying the world has too many people is like saying there’s too damn much traffic. You are the traffic. But everyone always grants himself special status, because they are the main character in their story.

Don’t go too hard on your parents for having 3 kids. As you yourself said, you have to look at things at a global scale. And since some people won’t have any kids, and some kids will die, it’s perfectly fine for many couples to have three children, even in a society on track for mere replacement.

Anyway griping about being over the replacement rate is increasingly irrelevant as developing societies are all dropping below it. There’s a very strong correlation between a society developing and their birth rate slowing, and demographers have done the math to arrive at a probable max of 12 billion. There’s no grounded argument that this number of people can’t be supported sustainably with current technology, and no other argument for their superfluity, except misanthropy. Which, if you’ve sincerely told people to kill themselves, you definitely suffer from. Anyway enjoy that unique, and apparently very sunny life you think you probably shouldn’t be living.

Hey didja hear that it’s no longer cool to demonize evil people as “probably gay too”

Being held accountable to the law is persecution in privileged grifter land.

Yeah for the more ferocious fighters out there this would be extremely difficult to pull off but many house cats can be done this way.

You place the pill on the top of your index finger, right hand. Then you take the thumb and index finger of your left hand, form a C shape pincer with them, and then oinch at their gumline on either side to force their jaw apart. You’ll have a moment when their mouth is open and you can see their tongue - you have to poke that pill as far back on their tongue as you can. They will gag and recoil and lick lick lick the air, but hopefully the pill has gone down in that process.

I think there are diplomatic ways for you to express your preference. You could say: “I don’t mean to be rude, but I prefer to really stay focused at work and socializing can drain my battery or distract me for a while afterward. Is it all right with you if I keep to myself for the most part?”

He’s obviously taking your behavior as a sign that he’s done something wrong, and not just your preference for how you like to be at work. He’s probably trying to fix it or improve relations with you, and this is making it worse. The standoffish behavior you’re showing him is feeding his sense that there’s a problem he needs to address with you, so take a different tack.

Of course no one can negotiate on behalf of Ukraine. Ukraine is holding on thanks to the support of several parties, and those parties do have the right to continue or end that support depending on the conditions they see. I hope this never happens, but If the US says they’re okay with letting Russia keep the territory its gained as long as hostilities end, then they are within their rights to withhold further arms aid on those conditions. Is that the US negotiating as if they are themselves Ukraine? No. Zelensky understands that he is existentially dependent on others. He’s just reminding them not to abuse that.

Be the change you want to see in the world then, and leave it. After all, what do you add? Why even comment here? Do we need more people with more opinions?

I don’t mean any of that. I just say it aloud to show how petty and shitty it is. Of course if people are just numbers on a tablet then you don’t give a shit if it’s 2 billion or 3 billion. But I would hazard to guess that if you got out more, travelled more, talked to more people, saw where they lived, sang for their childrens’ birthdays and spoke at their funerals, held their hands in the ER, that you would appreciate the fact that everyone does add something. And that although there is no shortage of cruelty and stupidity in our world, it is also overflowing with love and ingenuity.

I think it’s beautiful. And I don’t presume to know what the “right” number of people is to make a world. Frankly I find that talk disturbing.

Given that state taxes heavily support higher education, it’s not the craziest idea in the world to give lower tuition to those who’ve been paying those taxes their whole lives.

We’re going to top out around 12 billion according to demographers. And this is not some theory. Most developed countries are already seeing slowing birth rates and in cases like Japan it’s quite far along.

Given how inefficient and self-destructive most of our farming is, I’m quite optimistic that it’s possible to support 12 billion sustainably. I don’t like this talk of “too many people” because it leads us to generally devalue people. If we’re not actively planning for who to remove first then we’re at least shrugging when thousands die in a disaster.

We don’t have to cheapen ourselves this way. We just have to live and work smarter.

Not everything is class and inter generational warfare. This has been building for centuries. The Sumerians compromised their soil and this eventually erased them.

Soil depletion killed the Sumerians. It’s older than billionaires. If we attribute every single problem to class inequality, eventually we’re going to be wrong, because there are other problems in the world. If you think billionaires have power over us, nature is vastly more powerful.

Reduced tillage is a big one. There’s a massive misconception out there that the best thing you can do for your soil is go dig it up and turn it over. Soil is alive, and tilling disrupts microbial and fungal action that contribute to its health - by physical rupture of fungal colonies but also by exposing underground life to more sunlight and oxygen. As you kill the top several inches by physical disruption, it becomes dust much more easily washed away by wind and rain: erosion.

We do it to remove weeds before planting, and loosen soil to ease germination. Planting mixed crops or cooperative cover crops are good alternatives for weeds which are massively underused. And overall we may just need to accept some immediate productivity loss in order to ensure long term survival. Farmers are smart, but not smart enough. Too much emphasis on operating tools and fertilizers to optimize yield like land is a machine you can tune, and not enough focus on reducing the need for all this with a more subtle approach with increasing long term yield but perhaps lower yield next year. With farmers always one season away from bankruptcy, you can see why they make the wrong trade offs.

Soil depletion is at the bottom of a lot of civilization collapses in event history. The whole reason the Egyptians lasted as long as they did is that the annual Nile flooding replenished their soil with minerals brought down from higher ground by the flow of water. It wasn’t just the water itself.

Error correction is also intrinsic to all of computing and telecommunications, though. That’s a loose comparison but I hope we can make progress on this and get it to a manageable state, even if zero is impossible in principle. A lot of things in life only asymptotically approach zero and yet we live.

Gee I wish they had just left Facebook as a way to share photos and updates with friends and family, instead of turning it into a viral content clusterfuck to capture the youth audience. It didn’t even work.

Are you speaking from personal experience? Because this is really easy to say from the outside.