And for every 1 monster you remove from society by locking them in an AI mind prison, you’ll ruin the lives of a hundred innocent people.

You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.

But then you would have to lose the pockets on your pants! You would have to replace pants pockets with pass-through holes, so you could actually access the boxer pockets.

There are more US auto workers working for foreign-owned companies than there are for American-owned companies. Eventually the Chinese EV companies will follow the path of Honda, Totota, etc. and just start opening factories in the US. Tariffs don’t apply to US-built cars.

Some professions that were traditionally male dominated and were also called “____ man” can be made gender neutral by replacing “man” with “person.”

This does not work for “garbage man.”

OTH, you can make a flathead screw with a rod, a hammer, and a hacksaw.

Better make it an impact driver, just to be sure.

Hell, I don’t even think canonically he has any kind of official position. The Devil isn’t Hades. Hades has an official position - he’s Lord of the Underworld. He’s just as much a deity as any of the other Greek pantheon.

But the Devil? I imagine Hell as just a giant hole in the ground where God throws things he doesn’t like. As the oldest and most powerful being in Hell, the Devil ends up running the place by default, but it’s not a position of divinely-granted authority. He’s just as much a prisoner there as anyone else. The jail just has no guards, so the prisoners end up running things.

A humility competition.

I’m not the most humble person in the world, far from it. But I think I can (probably) at least beat the Devil in that. I mean, the dude thought he was better than God. He is, literally canonically, the most prideful being in existence.

Mental health diagnoses. I collect 'em like Pokemon!

Has your ability to procreate or the survival of your offspring ever been threatened by burning the roof of your mouth?

There is your answer.

That’s not how unions work. You as one person don’t join a union. You unionize your workplace.

Today the high was 67 and it will top out in the low 80s through the next week.

In the winter months it’s humid. In the summer the Willamette Valley isn’t very humid. Currently it’s 46% humidity as I type this.

<Laughs in Willamette Valley.>

Perhaps you would like to contribute to the conversation.

Only if you confuse security with income.

People have kids when they can reasonably assume that their kids will have the same level of lifestyle they do. People judge wealth relatively. They feel ready to have children when they can provide their children with a similar level of resources and opportunities they had. What barometer do people have other than their own childhood?

That’s not hard to guarantee as a subsistence farmer, as long as they own or otherwise have secure rights to the land. It’s a secure but impoverished existence. Sure you’re not immune from the weather, but that’s true for both parents and children. “Let’s have kids. Sure we don’t live in a big fancy city, but if it’s good enough for us, at worst it can be good enough for them.”

Compare that to wealthy people in developed countries. If you’re a middle class person now and want your kids to have the same lifestyle you do, better be prepared to help them with the down payment on a house.

A lot of what people miss is the importance of safety and security. People don’t have kids when they reach a certain income level. They have kids when they are reasonably confident they can give their children a decent living.

A subsistence farmer in Subsaharan Africa can have a much more secure existence than the working poor of countries like the US. People are poor, but they live on land they own or at least have assured access to through shared community rights. They may not have much money, but they have security. They can have kids, and at the very least, the kids can always take over the farm from their parents. The parents probably want the kids to go get an education and be more successful than themselves, but at the very least, the kids will have no worse a life than the parents do.

Compare that to developed countries. You pay monthly for rent that can skyrocket at any time, paid for with a job that can disappear at any time. And I would say raising kids in a rural African village is probably feels a lot more reasonable than trying to raise kids in a studio apartment built in a car-dependent American suburb.

“A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

It boils down to grifting

That’s literally all of capitalism. The existence of companies at all is dependent on their ability to sell products and services for more than the inputs that go into them. Profit is literally just bullshitting people into paying more for something than it is worth.