Exclude non-profits and open-source software. In fact, tax multinationals out of existence.

Bold of you to assume he can spell.

Safe to assume it’s like ten times that much.

One of those 3 judges is a traitor to democracy.

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True. But this is a rarefied use case that doesn’t apply to 99% of teenage iPad users, at least in my pedagogical experience. Keep in mind the average ACT score for college-bound seniors in Florida is 18. Meaning these kids literally can’t even read. They’re not using iPads for anything resembling creativity.

To be fair, the GMO thing is funny and dumb.

You think I’d still have perfect SAT scores if instead of reading 500 books in high school I spent my time playing World of Warcraft? Get a grip.

Just Iowa things.

iPads are content consumption devices. Full stop.

The whole concept of a government banning access to drugs has no moral justification in any coherent normative system ever concocted. What is the argument here? Some bureaucrat incomprehensibly stupider than I am gets to decide what I do with my own body? What I am “legally” allowed to ingest? Unless the drug in question can make me explode, posing a danger to others, there’s simply no reason to prevent me from having as much of it as I want.

Unless the goal is to excuse the expansion of the surveillance state.

Can’t see this without making a shitbook account. If you have a screenshot…

First against the wall.

My original point is that breeding more humans doesn’t improve the world at the moment, at all. We need to find balance with our environment. Not to mention, we aren’t even raising humans to be “good” or smart or kind, all while devouring this planet like locusts.

If you’re struggling to wrap your mind around the claim that most people are assholes, I present to you the last US election, when over 50% of voters chose Donald Trump, a convicted rapist, fascist, and known pedophile. This is an enormous sample size, surprising no one who has studied history, since we’ve had slavery for like 10,000 years and most humans are literally incapable of abstract reasoning. You can’t possibly expect me to lament the decreasing quantity of these creatures.

Terrance Tao is smarter than I am but he is not better in some absolute sense, so you don’t need to deny that he’s smarter on my behalf. Instead, here are some unquantifiable things that do make people meaningfully “better:” kindness, passion, empathy, courage, honesty, wisdom.

Honesty bids me to acknowledge that Tao is smart, and wisdom that it doesn’t matter (re, the meaning of life). Lastly, standardized tests don’t measure EQ because it’s hard to quantify and irrelevant for college placement.

Americans are so fucking weird about IQ. Yes, some brains function better than others. Whoop-de-doo. Case in point, Trump and cows and shit.

We are in the middle of an extinction event worse than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, using 20 Earths worth of resources, playing out a Wall-E / Interstellar style apocalypse, and you’re sitting here crying that we ONLY have 8 billion people on this tiny rock (most of whom, let me remind you, are either fucking horrible or very poor).

Inequality results in higher asset prices. They commodified housing and allowed massive inequality. Now housing is expensive.

This happens because if you have more money than you can spend you start looking for things to buy. Houses and land, for instance. The neoliberal hope is that hoarded wealth will trickle down through investments. But there really isn’t enough money-making enterprise for the billions available, so rich folks start buying up assets, which become super expensive.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s more money than can be wisely invested. I’m saying the money is concentrated (often into the hands of the least discerning) and not efficiently distributed for utilization. If normal folks had extra cash, they might start a small business, but billionaires aren’t looking to open a trattoria or book store. They don’t have time for such minutiae, so they buy up land or gold or get into crypto schemes or some harebrained bullshit.

This is absolutely amazing news!

Russia’s favorite propaganda is to claim that democracy is impossible because state violence is universal. They don’t deny their own wrongdoing (the way China does): they embrace it with whataboutism.

Saying “all states are authoritarian” is meaningless. Of course all statehood is based in violence. Yet clearly citizens of Taiwan and China have different relationships with their governments.

To whit, I have no rights in China. They could disappear me for this one comment.