My recollection is that the comment I replied to was “You’d be lucky to keep a job for 30 years to manage to save enough and not die in poverty!” or something similar.

It seems that there is at least one system that is intended to keep people alive even if they didn’t work much.

Because of low wages and interrupted work history, some workers earn modest incomes during their careers. Many of these workers will reach retirement with small private retirement accounts and notional accounts. To ensure that pension reform does not adversely affect these people, the new pension system guarantees an adequate old-age income for all Swedes.

For a single retiree, the guaranteed pension is about $9,000 per year. A married couple, meanwhile, receives about $16,000. This means-tested benefit is phased out according to the income available from the notional account and the private account. The means-testing rules that govern the guaranteed pension are relatively generous, to the extent that about 40 percent of workers are projected to receive at least some income from the safety net program.

I think they aren’t quite the same: “buy 1 get 1 free” means that you only get a discount if you remove at least 2 units of inventory from the store. If I wanted to encourage people to clear out shelves in order to make space for new inventory (like an entirely new product or the same product but with more distant expiration dates), I might be inclined to use “buy 1 get 1 free” (or something like “buy 3 get 1 free”) rather than just reducing the base price: if someone only gets the discount if they help me clear the shelves it might make our incentives more aligned. A “buy 1 get 1 free” deal might also make it easier to reinterpret statistics: being able to say “we sold 100 units at a price of $2 for each unit (but there was a buy 1 get 1 free deal)” might be more useful than being able to say “we sold 100 units at a price of $1 for each unit”. Also, information about who took advantage of the deal and who didn’t might be interesting (based on what was bought at the same time or tracked with a “loyalty program”), but a constant discount doesn’t make that information available since it applies to everyone equally.

In a way, this has already happened with 401(k) plans. In general, making each person’s retirement income more easily measured is likely a good thing, since it will probably encourage people to behave in a more prosocial way. https://www.heritage.org/social-security/report/pension-reform-sweden-lessons-american-policymakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjHvpiHk3s

I disagree. Inflation affects property (which probably refers to every tangible thing you will interact with other than the currency that is inflating). If the amount of money you need to give up in order to acquire an object increased due to time passing, that is “inflation”. That means that when inflation happens, every person who has at least 1 dollar bill suffers (since they won’t be able to trade it for as much stuff as they could before). A person who is significantly wealthier than someone else probably won’t have a significantly larger amount of money. Elon Musk surely doesn’t have 1 billion $1 bills stored in a basement: they probably have a large amount of money in their wallet and in a bank account, but I would be surprised if less than 90% of their net worth was derived from owning property. A “billionaire” might have 100 times as much “money” as the typical person, but they probably don’t have 10,000 or 100,000 times as much: https://breznikar.com/articles/how-much-cash-on-hand-do-billionaires-have/1781 https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/average-net-worth-by-age This means that when there is inflation, a poor person’s net worth will likely decline more than that of a rich person, since it’s likely that a large amount of a poor person’s net worth will be in the form of cash when compared to a rich person (and the net worth of a rich person will probably increase, since it’s likely that the value of their property will increase more than the amount they lose from the value of their money going down). People who are older are usually wealthier than young people, and people who are wealthier probably derive a larger percentage of their net worth from owning property than someone who is less wealthy, so when inflation happens, the net worth of young people probably decreases more when compared to older people.

Some things that can offset the impact of inflation are having debt and/or income that increases when inflation happens. I intentionally mentioned that property is tangible, but income and an obligation to pay someone using money seem less tangible. If you only own a $100 bill in your pocket, but you have a debt of $100 and your household income is $80,610 each year, if prices double but your income doubles too, that means that your net worth would not really change (you still have $100 and owe $100), but it would be easier to pay your debt (since it would become a smaller proportion of your income). If your income increases faster than inflation does (which is technically a typical situation), that means that you are in a better position as time passes! Moreover, old people typically have less (earned) income and debt than younger people, so in some ways young people have an advantage over old people.

In general, getting more (earned) income and debt is probably the way to overtake someone older than you. Getting a job providing something that old people pay for (like gambling or medical services) is probably an even better way.

It seems that what was available at https://dubvee.org/post/3788765 is available at https://kbin.earth/m/announcements@dubvee.org/t/1605451/Shutting-Down-on-July-31-This-fediverse-experiment-was-a still.

I don’t think that anyone should be “humiliated”. If someone expresses an idea, it’s likely that they are making use of that idea in their life (or that a reader might start using that idea in their life), so if you think their idea is harmful, it’s surely better to provide an alternative idea rather than only question their dignity. Expressing that someone should “come back when they are better educated” makes me think that you want people to stop making comments as frequently and to read comments more often than they did before. I think that reading more comments can be helpful, but suggesting that someone should avoid commenting deprives us of an opportunity to understand that person better, and if we want to cooperate with someone, it would be better to have a better understanding of them (and if we don’t cooperate with someone, we will probably have to compete with them: “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”). The only reason I know of to stop engaging with someone is if they’re acting in bad faith: if someone is trying to distract you by trying to get you to make uninteresting comments instead of allowing your attention to be focused on something more productive, it’d be a help to other people to make that clear. In essence, this is “trolling”. Something like Bluesky lists might be useful in that situation. I don’t see how targeting someone to “dump on” is helpful: that seems like a distraction from more productive activities, which is probably exactly what a “troll” wants. I suspect that the best “consequence” in response to harm is to start ignoring someone and to make it easier for other people to ignore that person.

I haven’t had any notably negative experiences while using the Fediverse. Even in cases when someone makes an “aggressive” reply to a comment of mine, if I ask a follow-up question, most people respond genuinely, so I often end up having a productive and enjoyable conversation. The situation is probably different when someone is really mad at you: if someone makes dozens of accounts to spam messages and downvotes, that would be really annoying and would make it more difficult to use the Fediverse productively, and I’ve seen reports of that happening to several people (and that might be what happened to the maintainer of Tesseract). Handling that situation would probably be harder to deal with than while using a centralized service since someone could use various servers to target one person, so there might not be one person who can handle all the spam. Reddit probably has a system to automatically block ingenuine downvotes and spam messages (especially if a particular person is receiving a lot of them), but I’m not sure that the Fediverse has an automatic system to achieve the same results, so it might be down to an administrator or a group of administrators to manually detect disruptive accounts/users. In consideration of how a typical person would view typical Fediverse comments, they would probably be put off by how they are probably more political and violent in nature when compared to those from other services. I’ve seen several comments that quite explicitly expressed “rich people should be killed”, and I’ve seen that at least one was removed by a moderator/administrator. Such comments surely do more harm than good: most people surely prefer to talk to people who aren’t calling for violence and are generally civil. To help with this, it’s probably good to report comments that are outright violent or that would be of interest to an administrator and to downvote “aggressive” comments so that people are more likely to be able to peruse comments without having a bad experience. In general, it’s surely a good thing to provide comments that engage with a post/comment in good faith so that people have something/someone that they can enjoy interacting with, but I don’t often have a thought that is coherent enough to be worth sharing, so I don’t expect this to happen very often.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91357784/what-is-a-micro-retirement-inside-the-latest-gen-z-trend

I didn’t know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author before I added this comment.

Writers need to be interpreted, because it’s unlikely that they actually understand what they wrote. Therefore, when employing a novel to address a problem, my interpretation is probably more important than the original work.

I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them - thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.

It’s not even clear that Bram Stoker had a good understanding of the word “Dracula”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2467&v=BvFwqVzEsfw

I believe that a vampire is a representation of exploitative forces that you invite into your own life but could avoid if you chose to. A policeman is hard to avoid, especially if they have a warrant. Therefore, a vampire cannot be a policeman in the first place, since the state of being a policeman overwhelms the state of being a vampire.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/pro-palestine-socialist-zohran-mamdani-wins-nyc-mayor-primary Published date: 25 June 2025 10:37 BST

I don’t think criminal law can be useful without punishment.

In criminal law, a sentence forms the final explicit act of a judge-ruled process, and also the symbolic principal act connected to his function. In criminal law, a sentence is the punishment for a crime ordered by a trial court

I did find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_law#Objectives_of_criminal_law interesting.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

The default browser for any operating system that isn’t created by Microsoft or Google is probably suitable for most people.

For real-time communication, the most suitable solutions are probably documented around https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ (note that email is not recommended for person-to-person conversations).

When do you think you should allow a child to have an email address? A Fediverse account is basically an email account, except that the primary inbox is shared with a lot of people rather than only one person (and the same goes for any social media account). If you wouldn’t allow someone to use an email address, you probably shouldn’t allow them to use a Fediverse account either.

At least one person who seems interested in the health of children expressed that “delaying children’s access to smartphones until high school and social media platforms until 16” is a good idea. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/ https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0MXgA2sSn8

I was thinking about this while I was composing my post. I was thinking that I could cite literally every word with a “wiktionary.org” link, but there’s probably a bootstrapping problem where if you don’t already understand a reasonable amount about “wiktionary.org”, you can’t make use of my citations. Also, if the reader normally uses the “dictionary.com” definitions of words, and a definition conflicts with the “wiktionary.org” usage, that could cause problems.

Some states have an official group of people who determine what the “correct” way to speak is. I know that France has or had something like that. That could be useful for legal proceedings so that people who use language inconsistently don’t stay free much more often than people who do.

I think that we just have to assume that everyone who’s not in prison has some way to communicate with the majority of the people they meet, regardless of whether there is a group of people making prescriptive statements about definitions and/or grammar. That means that dictionaries (and any other detailed documentation like citations) don’t need to be used for day-to-day communication.

Note that dictionaries and things like that will probably always be useful for “technical” interactions, like using a legal court, or making engineering plans, or directing time-sensitive operations (like how a pilot should know that someone saying “mayday mayday mayday” means that an emergency is being declared).

Things started earlier than that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dnp7lOObjU&t=3119s&list=PLG1NADbefbENzGtVrh_bh-W6sfSWfopqS

So I’m English. I’m poor, rich, middle; who cares? It doesn’t matter. I get on a ship. I come to Virginia. If I’m free, they will deed me 40 acres of land (40 acres of land they don’t own). There’s a Native American family that owns it. I now have the deed to 40 acres of land that somebody else is using, that is farming. Because, right, we have this double think 1984 thing in our head: the Native Americans didn’t know how to farm, Europeans did; the pilgrims arrive, they don’t know how to farm, so Squanto finds them starving to death; he goes up to them he’s like “dude, what’s happening, why aren’t you growing food” and they’re like “we don’t know how” so Squanto shows them how to do Agriculture, and you may have been in a play about this, and he’s, like, planting fish in the ground to fix the nitrogen into the soil, and at the same time you hold these two contradictory beliefs: first that the Native Americans couldn’t Farm because they’re too dumb, and then second that the Native Americans taught the pilgrims how to farm, and it doesn’t occur to you that they can’t both be true! Anyway, turns out Squanto really did teach the dumb pilgrims how to farm because they were too stupid to grow their own food and were starving to death! So I walk out into Virginia; I got my blunderbuss. I’m walking out, and I see the family of Native Americans farming that land that’s mine, and I take a shot at them. They hear the bang, they run, they fight; doesn’t matter. The land will be mine; I will take it from them. There’s a crop already in the field, which is great cuz then come harvest time I’m already set, and then I just continue to farm the land. Is that amazing? All I need to do is get across the Atlantic; the rest is free (well, except for the ammo). In other words, at some level, the colonial settler project that the British unleash in what will become the United States of America was a wealth transfer scheme. There is no greater asset on the planet than real estate, right? Not Bitcoin, not stamps, not coins, not gold—it’s land! Land you can grow food, land you can build a house, land you can build a factory, land you can find gold, land you can find coal, you can find oil. Land, land, land, land! So to go from having none to suddenly having some with really nothing put into it other than you just happen to be English, and you had to commit a little act of violence, that’s a remarkable, like, leap! That’s a remarkable jump. But then, we added a layer to it. Tobacco is labor intensive. In other words, yeah, I can grow tobacco as a single person not farming, but I’m putting in a lot of hours. Now it turns out tobacco, at the time at least (I don’t know if it’s still true), the tobacco seed was worth more than its weight in gold, so this is going to make me a lot of money, but if I’m a single farmer out there doing this, it’s not really going to make me a lot of money fast. It’s better than growing yams, it’s better than growing wheat, it’s better than raising chickens for sure, but it’s hard. As soon as I have enough money, what I’ll do is I’ll put in for a mail-order bride; once she comes over, she becomes part of my labor team. Now I’m producing even more tobacco, and then she’ll incubate my next generation of labor; by the time it’s 8 or 10 years old, I’ll probably be able to get some work out of my children, and then once I have enough money, I’ll buy a mule or ox or a horse or something, and then once I have enough money, I’ll bring over an indentured servant, three, five year, seven-year contract. I have a conflict of interest with my indentured servant. In three, five, or seven years they’re going to get their freedom; I have to give them a gift as I let them go. They have every incentive not to work hard for the time they’re working for me, but I want to squeeze every ounce of labor out of them, so it’s kind of a violent event, and eventually they just start to run away (becomes a nuisance), but once we’ve developed the level of sophistication that we can support this, we start bringing over slaves (which is almost right away; it did not take long before we’re bringing over slaves).

This one is new to me! https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=imba