What do you think the death toll of flight attempts was before the Wright brothers finally got it right? Certainly not in the millions.

Whether or not you like communism, “keep trying over and over until it works” is a bad plan when failure has historically cost lives.

It is really dumb to make it a hard cutoff in the first place. Colorado uses a system in which someone who is 15 can consent to sex with someone no older than 18. At 16 you can date consent with someone up to age at 19, and at 17 up to age 20. At age 18, people are considered adults and there is no longer an age limit to consent.

It is wholly necessary to protect children from sexual predators using age of consent laws. At the same time, it is a bit ridiculous to pretend that people in their teens don’t have sexual relationships with one another, and the law ought to reflect that. I certainly don’t feel that an 18-year-old should be considered a criminal for dating a 17-year-old, anyway.

Very true that it needs to be confirmed, but worth mentioning that every paper in history was at one point or another unreviewed and uncooborated. The fact that this isn’t yet doesn’t inherently mean anything bad for the quality of the results.

I’m just a biologist so I can’t weigh in to the credibility of the paper beyond that

I appreciate the recommendation but I don’t see my perspective on this issue as flawed or in need of changing.

I do have a lot of issues with the way wealth is distributed in capitalist societies… our income from work is a downright shitty attempt at approximating people’s value to society. Some people get more than they deserve and others get a lot less.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s wrong that at least a large part of a person’s value and worth should be determined by how they choose to spend their time. I see it as inherently unjust that someone who doesn’t apply themselves in a way that improves or maintains the world should be rewarded the same as someone who does.

The world is full of passions and hobbies that everyone would love to earn money from, but there are a lot of shitty, difficult, and hard jobs that need doing and but won’t get it without some sort of incentive. Thus, inequality, at least to some extent, is an essential feature of human societies that strive to improve over time. Every communist country has been wrought with inequalities under the surface, because they couldn’t motivate people without it!

This is not to say that anyone who honestly tries according to their ability deserve poverty, and I strongly believe in having a social safety net to help those people (I consider myself an Obama/Clinton democrat for reference).

While capitalism is an ultimately bad and inefficient way of rewarding people for their contribution to society, it would be far, far worse to fail to reward those that work extra hard, especially in jobs that are otherwise undesirable.

That’s the perspective I come from, and I think we simply have to agree to disagree.

I guess you’re right. You can say it makes me an asshole if you want, but I don’t think that person deserves the same credit or wealth as a person who got an education and used it to work full time in a specialized field.

I do not see that as a weird or unjust opinion.

I am guessing you are not very familiar with the antiwork community as a whole, but there are plenty of young people who truly no aspirations about contributing to society.

There’s a whole rabbithole to go down on that front. There’s also the term NEET which refers to (usually young) people who are “not in education, employment, or training.”

In other words, people who do not work or better themselves and survive using a combination of welfare and living with their parents or friends.

There’s also a lot to criticize about people who purposely under-employ themselves, like the antiwork moderator who lived with her parents, had no degrees or training, and aspired to be a dogwalker for 10-15 hours a week. She technically worked, but used others as a crutch to avoid doing anything more than the bare minimum.

I never said giving up a job to raise children is not labour, or that it doesn’t count as contributing to society. I was criticizing people who want to give up work to do nothing

Not at all! I think it’s enough for everyone to contribute according to their abilities. You’re making a living using your skills instead of mooching off of others, and that’s more than a lot of people can say.

I also believe that the vast majority of work benefits human society in some way or another, even if it’s sometimes harder to see. As long as there isn’t a scalable alternative to plastic, people need it to meet their daily needs and standards, and you contribute to that directly.

Because my “productivity” as you call it directly benefits the health and happiness of those around me. Likewise, it is impossible for you to eat modern food, live in a house, and go on the internet without directly benefiting from the labor of others.

I think it is, by definition, selfish to benefit from the labor of others without giving anything in return, if it’s at all possible for you to do so. You clearly have the mental and physical capacity to argue with internet strangers, and therefore you have the mental and physical capacity to carry out at least some labor.

I’m a biologist working on increasing the accessibility of pharmaceuticals and it’s totally my dream job!

There are days that I’m not exactly happy to be at work, but I can’t imagine how selfish and lazy I would feel if I gave it all up pursue nothing other than my own comfort.

Scarcity is relative and therefore will always exist. The value of the resources that an average person expects from their economic output is ever-increasing.

The average person living in North America 1,000 years ago would have been most concerned with the scarcity of food resources. 100 years ago North America was less concerned about food scarcity than the prior example, but orders of magnitude more concerned with the scarcity of goods relating to higher level needs: nice clothing, tools, quality living spaces, etc. Today, concern about the latter is partially replaced by even higher level needs: entertainment, technology, education, and luxuries. *(see bottom of comment)

This evolution in scarcity has been a consistently positive trend since at least the European renaissance, but I would personally argue that it started just after the fall of Rome (the last significant “market crash” in advanced civilization). If that continues, people in another 1,000 years could be most concerned about the scarcity of space flight vehicles or quantum computers, for all I know.

*My point here isn’t that nobody in North America is unable to meet their basic needs, just that the average person’s perception of what is scarce has changed over time on a societal scale. People never stopped feeling scarcity because their expectations have changed along with the availability of goods. There is no reason to believe that people will stop expecting better goods as society advances further and further.

Meaningless as long as they continue to use the site/app and give him ad revenue.

I agree completely that Kropotkin is more right than your average social Darwinist or nazi, but all three use “evolution” as a concept to further their political interests, and do not correctly portray the reality or nuance of the Darwinian influences on primates societies. There’s a reason he had a reputation for being a crackpot among evolutionary biologists in the first place.

I’m as much for altruism as anybody else, but as a biologist I can’t pretend that Darwinian evolution promotes unbridled cooperation in groups of primates with no room for selfishness and competition… it is quite the opposite actually. Primate societies tend to be hierarchical and unequal, even within otherwise united groups.

Not to say that Darwinian evolution makes cooperation an impossibility; social conditioning and education overpower evolutionary instincts all over the place in human society. One only needs to look at things like religion and political ideology to understand that evolution and instinct are not the primary movers of human behavior nowadays.

Edit: To be clear, I am not saying that that supposedly Darwinian political beliefs like social Darwinism and naziism are driven by natural human behavior. I just want to point out that Marxist Leninist ideas can’t make that claim either. Almost no human ideas or institutions can. Except for cuckholding. That is a profoundly Darwinian behavior.

Set my phone face-down on my leg for a moment while watching porn… the picture I was looking at was sent to 3 of my Snapchat contacts. I was able to delete 2 of the 3 before they were opened, but the guy who saw it was my ROOMMATE at the time and was IN THE NEXT ROOM.

Hard to live down.

From my perspective in academic science, Covid has stifled the brain drain. For a long time, it was hard for young academic professionals to enter the US, even if they were trying to get an education. My lab has made several hires that proceeded to have to move on because they couldn’t get into the country. It’s a damn shame and a waste of talent.

I’ll quote Steely Dan here: “Unhand that gun, begone. There’s no one to fire upon.”

As infuriating and frustrating it is to live in a world plagued with systemic issues, it’s important to recognize that many of the world’s problems can’t be traced back to a single person, government, organization, or ideology. Some things are just nobody’s fault, and can’t be solved be a mere change of leadership.

Every society in the world today, no matter how it is structured or who it is lead by, will be subject to a list of inevitable problems. Scarcity. Bigotry. Violence. Crime. Incompetence. Selfishness. The uncomfortable fact is that nobody knows how to structure a society such so that all citizens meet their basic needs in exchange for an amount of work that they find tolerable.

This is true of the United States, of Europe, of the Soviet Union, of China under the CCP, and of every other country to ever exist. Some countries are, of course, worse than others. But in many countries you find that people and politicians try in earnest to improve society and simply fall short, sometimes because they misidentify the core issues, and other times because they don’t have good enough ideas for solving them.

I encourage everyone to look at politics as groups of impassioned people with strong opinions about how their lives might be improved. At the end of the day, those of us with kind hearts are trying our best to defeat a common enemy, and merely differ in approach. I think a lot of people would do good to realize that.

Look man I’m as upset about the price of homes as anyone, but let’s not pretend that 2009 was a peachy time to participate in the economy.

Home prices were historically low because of a housing crash that caused the worst global recession since before WWII