One of the biggest life lessons I learned was from watching the show Breaking Bad. I think we all have a natural disgust / aversion to evil people. While it’s important as a social function for protecting communities from bad actors, it harms our ability to understand evil.

That’s the key. Understanding evil and how good people descend into it is the best way to protect ourselves from walking down that path. It starts with recognizing that bad circumstances and unaddressed feelings of resentment and perhaps a sense of entitlement all contribute to our ability to justify and rationalize our own actions internally.

Hitler couldn’t have carried out the Holocaust without the help of millions of German citizens who rationalized in exactly this way.

Or you’re Putin looking side-eyed at yet another traitorous regional governor!

TIL: the primary function of balconies is murder!

Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?

The more money they have, the less happy they are. They’re addicted to making money, to watching the line go up and to the right. They’re addicted to trying to destroy the competition and buy them out, to consolidate more and more and more.

They are right when they say that wealth isn’t the key to happiness. They’re riding the bull and they don’t know how to get off.

We’d all be sitting on the back porch, enjoying an ice cold ginger beer at the end of long summer day!

More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.

My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.

What’s stopping Russia from importing gray market gaming devices and repurposing them for drones? How are these embargoes even supposed to work?

North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.

It was mentioned above that British kettles are 2 kW, not 1.5.

2 kW @ 120 V is 16.7 A, which exceeds the 15 A limit on most household wiring in North America. To be able to achieve that you’d need to get a 20 A rated circuit installed by an electrician which means pulling out and replacing the wiring with a heavier gauge.

The advantage of 240 V rating in the UK is that you can draw more power with less current, so you don’t need the wiring to be so heavy for a high power appliance like a kettle.

They make smaller dishwashers for 1 bedroom apartments. They’re very narrow so you can fill them up quickly.

Right but having a group chat of size 0 isn’t very useful.

There was nothing he could have done. It’s a mistake thinking the US changed so dramatically almost overnight in the past few months. In reality, the cracks in the dam have been growing slowly over the decades. There just comes a point where you can’t paper them over anymore.

All the suggestions here about moves Biden could have made to the Supreme Court or with other laws are forgetting about January 6th. There’s a huge number of people who voted for and actually want what is happening right now. Blocking them or delaying them is only delaying the inevitable. Politics is war by other means.

People don’t even agree on what good is, so there’s no way everyone can agree on what to do in order to do good. Many conservatives oppose progress because they don’t even agree that it is progress. They see a very sick society where the family has all but disappeared, social institutions have fallen apart, and the government can no longer be trusted.

Check it out, even including the partisan dimension of people trusting the government more when their party controls the White House, the overall trend is strongly negative. Just compare! Republicans trusted the government of LBJ — a Democrat in the White House for the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination — far more than they trusted the government during Trump’s first term!

Democrats have also lost faith in government and not even Obama was able to rekindle it for them. This is a very disgruntled, low trust society!

You earn less than 20k? Save your money, volunteer your time! Much more productive and rewarding!