saas_sam

The only way to avoid shutting down would be to raise prices, right? What if the owner knew customers wouldn't pay higher prices because he has tried to raise prices many times before and knows that it turns customers away?

I don't think you read his post very closely. His first point was that the government has the ability to print money to pay for what it needs which is effectively "taxing" everyone equally across the board (which we feel as inflation).

I volunteer to make the replacement human hair belt.

My stomach dropped reading this. How horrible.

"Playing with toys" is a really dismissive way to describe the combined effort of 1000s of engineers and blue collar workers who innovated on a scale existing space companies haven't in decades to produce a service that will be utilized by millions in the near future for a fraction of the cost it once was.

PyWhat only uses one inventory slot vs. 2 for Tome. That's one extra SoJ!

I remember reading on a different post (can't find it) that productivity went up sharply at the beginning of the pandemic-induced WFH trend, but then subsided over time. The thinking was that people were on their toes early on for fear of being viewed as a slacker, but then once they adjusted to WFH they relaxed. Maybe someone else saw this study...

Thank you <3

Mom's on social security she doesn't hasn't paid for any medical procedure in years. Have you heard of Medicare? Medicaid? You don't know what you're talking about at all selectodude.

I'm close to multiple people with Alzheimer's. I think the worst thing you can give them is nothing as their personality evaporates and they become a husk of who they once were and a burden on everyone around them.

I can walk 5 minutes down the block and buy an eight ball of fentanyl from a guy named TJ but I can't get Alzheimer's treatment made by a team of scientists in a cutting-edge lab because it doesn't meet some government worker's idea of "good enough"?

I don't care what your bureaucratic panel thinks about how inconclusive the data is. My mother is dying.

You know what's weird? I spent part of my morning thinking about "time is a flat circle" today. I swear, the serendipity sometimes in daily life is wild.

I wish I did. A city that is so incompetent as to let this situation arise in the first place cannot be trusted to honestly & accurately account for the root cause of the problem. I want a good source for data that doesn't come in the form of a far-left/right propaganda piece. And if I am wrong I will be HAPPY as hell to be wrong.

The interesting thing about your comment is it doesn't actually contradict what I said unless you are claiming your friends represent the majority of those experiencing homelessness. Is that what you're claiming?

There are three kinds of people experiencing homelessness in SF:

Drug addicts, who settle in the Bay Area because it is Paradise On Earth for drug addiction. Drugs are cheap and plentiful. Dealers transact unmolested in broad daylight in front of apathetic cops. Needles are provided by the government free of charge. Tents can be pitched on just about any sidewalk. Drug use does not even need to be discreet -- anyone who walks in SF for more than a few hours will run across someone injecting or freebasing. It's not just the Tenderloin either.

The mentally ill, who cannot take advantage of services that exist to help them. There are individuals who are so out of it, so schizophrenic etc., that the only way they will ever be helped is if someone physically forces them into an institution. And can you imagine the response of SF constituents if such a policy was enacted? Totally impossible. One cell phone video of a capture gone wrong and it's over.

And lastly, there are tons of people who are 100% content with living on the streets by choice. There have always been transients in society who adopt this lifestyle, in every era of history. It's basically urban camping! No job, no responsibilities. It's a beautiful place with amazing weather. If all of Earth could easily navigate to the Bay Area, you could fill this city to the brim with people who'd "hobo" it by choice.

There MUST be a fourth type. The person who is on the street due to financial misfortune, who had horrible luck and found themselves in a spot they couldn't get out of. Statistically this has to exist. And we need to make sure those people get a ladder somehow to climb themselves out. Absolutely.

But to pretend that this fourth type is all that exists? Or that it's the majority?

Not even close.

Personally I feel that the engineers at YouTube are doing a good job for me and I would like to reward them for that.

One very effective method to avoid ads is to pay for the premium service. $10/month for far more content than any other streaming video service. Can not imagine trying to watch YouTube with ads.

I think we know more about abiogenesis than you are giving us credit for.

Silicon based for one.

Sigh. Analogies are hard.

Let's take a different naturally-occurring type of object that has only ever been found on Earth: waterfalls. To get a waterfall, you need a set of ingredients and circumstances to occur in a particular way that a waterfall results. We've only ever seen this on Earth. They come in many forms: Niagara Falls, jungle waterfalls, small waterfalls, even frozen waterfalls and underground waterfalls. They even have different colors, chemical characteristics, and each one can be said to be very unique from all the others.

We know of no other planet that has waterfalls.

Yet, because we have seen enough waterfalls on Earth we have an evidence-based scientific belief that waterfalls cannot be Earth-specific because all that is required for one: water, erosion, gravity -- exists throughout the cosmos in very large amounts.

Life is the same. We have seen enough of it in enough variety to know that it can take on many forms, including exotic forms that are impossible on Earth but would be possible elsewhere. The abundance of the ingredients and time are all that's required.

I don't think this is a very good analogy because we know far more about the nature of life, what is required to make it, and the abundance of those ingredients throughout the cosmos. Life isn't a lengthy, specific sequence of precise things. It's a phenomenon that occurs when certain kinds of things come together in certain kinds of ways -- many variations of these ingredients and permutations exist on Earth alone.

Your perspective reminds me of the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

The popular conception is the "puddle analogy." You can imagine a rain puddle becoming conscious, seeing the intricacies of its perfect fit with the pavement that surrounds it and concluding "wow, this hole fits me SO perfectly, it must have been made for me."

Thank you, upvoted. I appreciate your politeness.

OP: "This virus was natural therefore any investigations into its artificiality are moot."

Me: "This virus has unique qualities that made it especially contagious, so its artificiality is not moot."

You: "Other viruses in the past were also bad."

Me, now: Yes, other viruses in the past were also bad. If you meant that to relate to the previous comments I think you left out the important bits.

It's like if we were discussing whether we should investigate if someone caused a deadly landslide. Why would you argue that we shouldn't look into it simply because landslides also happen naturally? If there are empty crates of TNT on the top of the hill, shouldn't we look into it?

>Even if it was a lab release, it's still a natural virus and could have happened without the lab release.

That is not the assertion being made by the scientists pushing for the investigation. The assertion is that this is a chimeric virus that very much does NOT show up in nature and its lab-made qualities are precisely why it became a global pandemic.

Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like just happened to be lab made?

It makes me think of "dan" too as in the Tribe of Dan in the Bible. Dan = judge. Daniel = god (el) judges me. The Tribe of Dan supposedly spread out and, some say, seeded other civilizations up the Dan-ube river up into Dan-mark. For real.

I remember the same exact thing being said about Wuhan. That urns were completely sold out, that the gov't was covering it up, just terrible. To date China insists less than 5,000 people died of Covid, though and all of that was conspiracy talk.

Really? Tom Cotton might beg to differ.

Wasn't that the one associated with a known CCP spy? https://www.axios.com/china-spy-california-politicians-9d2df...

If you were a CEO and your board & investors thought you were worth $50M a year, presumably you would decline that out of selflessness and insist upon a much more reasonable living wage?

The ultimate solution to wealth inequality is to destroy all wealth. Bring it to $0. Everyone's equal. Is that a win? Or is there perhaps more to the story worth considering than inequality? Overall wealth, number of jobs, ability to get hired and promoted...? If you have charts on those things I'd be interested.