I have a bunch. I think the biggest one is that some people are naturally dumber than other people and can’t be fixed by education. I don’t think this broadly applies to any specific ethnic group or anything, but I do think that there is likely a genetic component to intelligence. I also don’t think that we should prevent these people from breeding or treat them as inferior, but I also think that sending these people to college is a waste of time and expecting them to do well on college either waters down the college education experience or puts unfair expectations on them. I worry a lot about how these people will fare in an increasingly automated world and the answer is not good at all.

A term often applied to any mention of LGBT topics.

You’re trying to make a weird semantic distinction that doesn’t really accomplish anything. Unskilled labor doesn’t mean undignified or unworthy of respect, it is just a description of a certain kind of work with essentially no barrier to entry. Again it’s very uncommon in modern advanced economies but in the past (and today in some very poor areas) you’d have people whose job it was to push millstones around in a circle all day, a job that is also done by literal donkeys. That is not skilled labor.

Bro there were people back in the day who would just push a heavy millstone around in a circle, a job that was often also done by literal donkeys. It’s hard to imagine in a modern economy, where truly unskilled labor is rare, but it exists. We often forget how much is done by machines that was done by laborers in the past or still is in poorer countries.

It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can’t move yourself. It’s not that you can’t be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure it out very quickly.

These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional “unskilled labor” required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.

Eh. There are definitely jobs that you can grab random guys off the street for and they will be okay enough at them to get started right away or will be able to be trained to do them in an afternoon. Think of any time you’ve done a volunteering project - you don’t get any specialized training to do this type of work, but you can go ahead and get started with maybe like a short explanation of how it works. Sure you won’t be as good as a pro, but you could get up to speed quite quickly if it was all you were doing. These types of jobs are becoming less and less common as they get automated, but they do still exist. That is what is meant by “unskilled labor.” It’s not a dig at the people who do these types of jobs, but rather that you don’t need specialized training to do them.

They come from a time when heavy machinery didn’t exist. They’re descended from fancy scarves.

Lmao that too. We use kilopounds as well because tons are too easily confused with metric tons

Rankine is used in chemical engineering calcs because a lot of US chemical plants are built in US Customary units and it’s a lot easier to calculate in Rankine and keep everything in that system than try to convert back and forth between K and F.

I wish it were for political reasons but honestly the main reason for me is that reddit just sucks now. It’s way too sterile and predictable.

Well relatively speaking. Up until the Trump era both major parties in the US were essentially liberal parties before the Republicans became a far right party. The right wing nationalists in other countries would probably be moderate Democrats by US standards.

This reminds me of a hilarious side quest in The Witcher 3 where a wizard gets locked out of his tower because he didn’t know it was equipped with a Defensive Regulatory Magicon (DRM) when he bought it and the only way to fix it is with Gottfried’s Omni-opening Grimoire (GOG). GOG is the game store started by CD Projekt to sell DRM free copies of old games.

It’s because Americans don’t give a shit about anything. Europeans actually have the balls to do something if their governments but Americans will just let their government do anything as long as the marvel and Disney slop keeps flowing into their troughs.

I’ll go against the grain and say literally all of it. Every piece of technology that exists is a compromise between what the designer wants to do and the constraints of what is practical or possible to actually pull off. Therefore, all technology “fails” on at least some metric the designer would like it to achieve. Technology is all about improvement and working with imperfection. If we don’t keep trying to make things better, then innovation stops. With your example of VR, I’d say that after having seen multiple versions of VR in my lifetime, the one that we have now is way more successful and impactful, especially in commercial uses rather than consumer products. Engineers can now tour facilities before they are built with VR headsets to see design flaws that they might not have seen just with a traditional model review, for example. Furthermore, what we have now is just an iteration on what we had before. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, people take what came before, look at what worked and what didn’t, and what could be fixed with other technologies that have developed in the meantime. That’s the iteration process.

The reason is because they make so much money off every single patient that even if only a few extra people use their drug it pays for the ad. Most people do just get prescribed what they need

I don’t want to defend AbbVie, the evil corporation that makes Humira, but that drug is a miracle of modern medicine. It’s not “your back pain could be better,” it’s for severe autoimmune inflammatory diseases, mostly arthritis, psoriasis, and Chron’s. You can actually die from Chron’s if it’s untreated. Anyway, I started developing pretty severe arthritis at the age of 10 and the medications at the time didn’t work and had horrible side effects- the main one at the time was a drug called methotrexate which is literally a chemotherapy drug at higher doses and it has chemo-like side effects. Eventually I got prescribed Humira and it was so much better. The worst side effect was pain during injection and it basically cured my symptoms completely. I’ve been on it ever since (well now I’m on the generic version that came out a few years ago) and I would legitimately not be able to walk or live a normal life without it.

The side effects listed on the commercial are far more severe than what is normal for most medications, because they have to report anything that showed up in the clinical trials even if it is very rare or could have been caused by another factor. A lot of these overlap with symptoms of diseases that are treated with the drug or are symptoms that are often comorbid with the diseases treated by the drug. The ones associated with infectious diseases are very real in the case of Humira, but that is because it’s designed to treat diseases caused by an overactive immune system and it’s basically impossible to intentionally reduce the autoimmune response without also reducing the regular immune response as well. The drugs that Humira replaced were even worse in this regard, and basically just supressed the entire immune system without specificity.

I know pharma ads are obnoxious and indicative of an extremely awful system that preys upon sick people, but if you’re seeing an ad for a new drug these days that drug is probably life changing for anyone who gets prescribed it and that’s why they can charge thousands of dollars for it. Humira is one of the most profitable drugs of all time because it’s basically a miracle in a vial compared to anything that came before it, and it’s ridiculously expensive, over $6000 for a month’s supply. The crazy thing is, I’d probably actually pay that if I didn’t have insurance and there weren’t alternatives available like there are today. I’d have to take less of it to afford it, but that’s how necessary it is for me.

I think it’s ultimately negative for everyone involved but it’s proven to be impossible to get rid of so we should legalize and regulate it to prevent the worst abuses that are so common.

TFW people realize Squid Game and Parasite are social commentary and not just fun meme shows

Speed Queen.

Tbh this is also shocking to me as an American. I am not sure if this is only for marketplace plans or a specific kind or what