mechE321

Is legally enforced train dependence better?

City centers are already viable places to live without a car.

Unless the US had a waaay higher population density, we would have a hard time arriving at another system.

There is a finite but variable amount of money in the pot.

It is not a zero sum game.

The stock market has been doing terribly lately, so I wonder what dynamic is going on right now- even with higher profits something is fishy (high interest rates mean a higher yield on bond investments as an alternative, so lower valuations?)

The Bayesian gambler in me wants to think this:

The studies on ivermectin seem to be split between "good effect" and "no effect," and there don't seem to be any (by my extremely informal review! going off of memory here) in the camp of "bad effect."

Seems reasonable to take ivermectin as a decent gamble to me while we wait on the dang science to get its head out of its butt.

I would characterize any revolution as a bet.

You and your fellow revolutionaries take your chances at finding out whether you are actually more competent at running a society than your predecessors. The table stakes are anywhere between a peaceful legislative change and a few million lives.

I think that there's more people out there that think they can execute a competent revolution than there actually are.

The lower down a bit of suffering is on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the easier it is to measure on a societal scale.

Everyone's starving to death? Easy to measure. Everyone's living in an economically precarious situation? A bit more difficult to measure. Everyone's living life with a vague sense of listlessness and ennui? Much more difficult to measure.

Tackling the easily measured physical suffering both takes priority and has the most obvious means of feedback.