Just define “star” to include Earth, then you’re already very close to one!

I’d say the rich elite leave a vacuum behind, and that sucks.

Basically the ultra-wealthy are presented like a superstar, like a celebrity in american media. That way, everybody wants to identify with them, and that causes the thought that if they have more wealth “that’s good for all of us” because they identify with them.

It’s basically because they have superstar status that people worship them. That’s what this is all about.

it’s probably OCR (optical character recognition) software messing up again.

But your story just continues to show that nobody with such strong opinions seem to care until it directly effects them.

Yeah. I’ve been considering that it’s a bit like the difference between empirical and theoretical physicist.

The theoretical physicist uses models of how the world works to make predictions about the outcome of experiments. The empirical physicist has to do experiments to believe it. It’s kinda the same for people in politics.

Some people can predict what outcome certain policies are going to have. Others have to figure it out experimentally.

There’s various reasons for antinatalism IMO, and the two biggest ones are because people think they cannot (and never will be able to) afford children, and also because they recognize the suffering the children would go through.

Like, realistically, your children inherit a lot of your traits, and if you’re suffering in this world, what reason is there to believe that it will be different for your (hypothetical) children?

And also having children is vastly expensive. It costs $100K dollars upwards just to raise them to puberty, and that’s optimistic estimates assuming no future inflation. And then there is the whole uncertainty of the future labor market. So, would you rather spend that money to bring another suffering being into this world, or would you rather say “fuck it” and enjoy your own time on this planet instead?

we have this very nice expression in german called “der Geist in der Materie” which roughly translates to “the spirit in the matter” which expresses the concept that even though some object is material, there is still a kind of spirit inside of it. It’s like the matter itself is alive and conscious. We can see this in animals. It’s a very interesting concept.

If souls aren’t real, it makes our existence even stranger. Like two people rawdog one time and now there’s this conscious sentient being with hopes and desires and depression. That needs food water and shelter for 80 years

You know what i’ve been (jokingly) wondering about for a while now? Maybe souls aren’t real, maybe consciousness isn’t real, maybe it’s all a big hoax sold to us by Big Church to sell more salvation.

Yeah, we need more users. The fediverse/lemmy is stagnating in content because we don’t have enough people with niche interests. It’s mostly US-centered politics; we need more stuff from around the world. Fediverse/lemmy needs more users.

Yeah, taxing the rich is basically the only way to make a society work at all. Nothing else works.

You can try to just print money to pay for social programs (in other words, what the state/government is doing when it goes into debt), but that’s only a patchwork solution and not a long-term solution, because eventually if you print too much money you cause hyperinflation. So, taxing the rich is the only meaningful way to run a society long-term.

overheated housing market

i don’t think a market can be “overheated” (except if you’re referring to a bubble). what does that even mean?

Rent freezes are only good for those who already have an affordable housing. It doesn’t solve the systematic issue the slightest.

yeah. the better way is city-built public housing. the city can either rent out or sell the apartments to people who personally need them, both work fine.

this way, you actually increase the amount of housing on the market, and also the city-built houses are typically rented out at-cost, instead of for-profit, which makes them a noticeable bit cheaper than housing provided by big private investors.

We are just people, wanting mostly the same things.

nah, i used to think similar but i’m not so sure anymore. americans, from my perspective, really are more crazy than europeans, and it’s not just because of propaganda. it’s also from a learned risk-taking behavior that took centuries to build, whereas in europe that didn’t happen.

the function never gets called, but the running code reads the source code of this function to extract important constants, and if you delete the function, everything breaks :)

sounds like picking-your-side to me

median class

I mean we do too. We rely on information on the internet, which could all be fake. And that’s worrying me, actually. Have we been there in person? No? Then how do we know, actually?

Even our language has been perverted. When we like something, we call it good - a word that is derived from god: we put it in god’s vicinity. Therefore, it is instilled in us that everything we like must be close to god.

Satan isn’t close to god but i still like them. How do i convey that in a single word?

yeah it’s not 100% based but it’s an improvement over 2024.

every dog breed more dangerous than a wild wolf (which are kinda shy, actually, if not hunting in a group) should be banned IMO.