Generally true politically. But these are questions that need to be asked.

Yes, it’s tempting to say, “a human life is priceless, no price to save a life is too high.” But there are an infinite number of ways dollars can be spent to save lives. And by making cars more expensive, that puts less money in people’s pockets to pay for healthcare, quality nutrition, etc.

What if someone invented a miraculous but expensive safety device? Imagine if someone invented a device that decreased traffic deaths by 95%, but at the cost of $250k per vehicle. We would make vehicles incredibly safe, but at the cost of completely shutting working people out from vehicle ownership. Would it still be worth it? There will always be some point where safety just isn’t worth the cost. Not because we don’t care about human life, but simply because there are many potential ways for us to spend money to enhance human safety and well-being.

Because I’ve personally met Jesus Christ. He’s a 10,000 year old former cave man.

In these situations, sometimes I go full Joker and perform a reverse pass maneuver.

What’s a reverse pass? There’s a tailgater behind you. You move to the passing lane or the opposite direction’s travel lane. Then you slam on your brakes. Then move back into the travel lane. Suddenly the tailgater is in front, and you’re the one riding their bumper! The look of confusion you get is absolutely wonderful.

the irony being if you tell the people who whine that their house they bought has to go down in value to improve society, they lose their shit at you.

The real irony is that we don’t even need to have houses go down in value. Condos? Sure. But single family homes? The land itself will be what has value. As an area densifies, the land a single family home occupies becomes more and more valuable. And there will always be some folks that will want to live in a SFH. As more and more infill happens, what SFHs do remain become very premium items. Imagine if somehow a single family home existed on a quarter acre lot in Manhattan. That home would sell for a fortune, even if the house itself were a mobile home on blocks.

Owners of SFHs have nothing to fear, in terms of loss of home value, from densification. Condo owners will not see as much appreciation if barriers to housing construction are removed, but SFH owners will continue to do quite well.

Crazier idea: let’s abuse the hell of one and only one antibiotic. Select the antibiotic that has so many resistances that it’s practically useless in a clinical setting. Then prescribe THAT antibiotic to anyone who wants an antibiotic for the flu. The doc can truthfully tell them they’re being prescribed an antibiotic. They get their big fat placebo, and nothing of value is lost.

The way that particles interact with each other, the way bonds are formed, the way entropy is held off just long enough that a bag of 10^26ish atoms can examine itself and make cat memes… the laws of physics themselves suggest to me that something with some sort of a will or intellect set things in motion.

You are not independent of your observation. The probability that you live in a universe cable of supporting life is 100%. It would be impossible for you to observe any other kind of universe. Any universe incapable of supporting life will contain no observers.

For all we know there are an endless number of universes, mostly with laws of physics vastly different from our own. The universe itself seems to already be spatially infinite, why not also have infinite universes? There may be a vast ocean of universes out there, and the vast, vast, vast majority are completely uninhabited and uninhabitable. Realms containing only black holes. Universes where only light exists. Spaces where the universe is born as a cloud of hydrogen gas, and simply never gets beyond that. Maybe for every one universe capable of supporting life, then there are 10^(stupidly large number) of empty universes.

It may seem strange or unscientific to postulate other universes, but it’s a lot more scientific than postulating an intelligent, conscious creator that set the universe in motion. In the latter case, you’re simply assuming more of something that we already know can exist - a universe. You’re just assuming universes with different physical contants or laws. In the latter, you’re assuming the existence of an entity that has no other parallel examples. We don’t seem to live in the world of Greek myth where there’s multiple deities running around we can all openly observe. If you assume a creator, you’re assuming something that has no evidence for any entity of its kind existing. If you assume multiple universes, you’re simply assuming more of what we already know exists.

It is telling that we don’t live in a particularly habitable universe. Sure, we can tinker with the physical constants to make life impossible. But for a universe so “fine tuned” for life, an astonishingly insignificant fraction of the universe’s space is habitable by life. An astonishingly small amount of matter is living or even involved in sustaining life.

And the best the universe can seemingly do? In our solar system? A thin slime of life on a single wet rock, maybe some bacteria in some ice shell moons or deep subsurface bacteria on Mars? And the jewel of the system, Earth? That thin shell of life requires an entire planet to give it a surface to live on. And then the mass of an entire Sun is needed to keep Earth’s surface habitable. That’s the best environment for life the universe can naturally create. I’m sorry, but from an engineering perspective? If you are writing the very laws of physics and reality? You can certainly do better than what we have.

The universe is not fine-tuned for life. Such a universe would be one where the vast majority of space, matter, or both were habitable. It would be one that can efficiently support life, not requiring entire astronomical bodies to support rounding errors worth of living matter. If the universe was designed for life, it was designed by a shit designer. Maybe God’s an apprentice deity and we’re his practice project.

What we live in is a barely habitable universe. Look around you. The stars seem mostly dead. Our own solar system is dead rock after dead rock (with some possible exceptions.) We live in the type of universe that most observers would live in if there were a huge number of universes with randomly assigned physical constants. In such a setup, there may be some hyper-local optima where universes could be superhabitable, but their total number of inhabitants would likely be swamped by observers in universes that were just habitable enough to get life going.

The seemingly-logical need for a creator disappears if you simply postulate multiple universes. And our observable reality really does match well with us living in a barely habitable universe, which is what we would statistically expect if there were a large number of universes in existence.

There’s also superdeterminism.

I think of something like a compound bone fracture. Today, with modern medicine, that’s a routine and easily treatable injury. But at any point up til just a few centuries ago, a compound fracture was a death sentence. A clean single break could be reset, but multiple pieces require surgical intervention and alignment. And that just couldn’t be done safely. The physicians then just didn’t know how to prevent infections enough to make that surgery survivable. Plus they didn’t have x-rays to guide them, etc.

One day and you take a fall. Nothing extraordinary. You don’t fall off a giant cliff hundreds of feet to your death. You fall off a small 4’ high ledge. You land wrong, and you break your leg in a compound fracture. And that’s it. You’re now a dead man crawling. There’s nothing anyone on Earth can do to help you.

Are you asking leading questions?

Yes you can take out parent plus loans without collateral. That’s their entire reason for existing.

You’re confusing cause and effect. Usually people use drugs and have mental health issues because they are homeless. They’re not homeless because they have those maladies. Homeowners weather those challenges just fine. And living on the street creates drug and mental health issues. If I had to sleep on the sidewalk, I sure as hell would want to be high all day. Wouldn’t you?

A homeless drug addict is just a middle class drug addict with a smaller bank account balance.

So your parents borrowed against the value of their home to put you through college. They could have also taken out parent plus loans to do the same thing. Why is this an argument for letting home prices soar?

Stalin thought Siberia needed a lot of people living there. Look how that turned out.

Building more housing is the solution, even if those homes largely go to the upper middle class and wealthy. Building new homes primarily for well off people isn’t a historic anomaly, it’s the norm. If you’re already building a house, it doesn’t take that much more to add some luxury features to make it appeal to the high end of the market. This is how it’s always been. Historically, the affordable housing of today is the luxury housing of yesterday.

Preventing new home construction doesn’t prevent neighborhoods from gentrifying. You just end up with yuppies living in newly renovated former tenements.

Look what thinking cautiously has got us. Look what thinking audaciously has got them. What rational rational Republican voter would have thought that Trump was a good potential candidate in 2016? Rational opinion was that Trump was a candidate doomed from the start. Yet the Republicans through caution to the wind and went for the inspiring candidate. And look what it got them.

Every election we choose the path of least resistance. Every election we talk ourselves out of the truly inspiring candidate, all in the name of electability. How many Democrats have voted against the progressive primary candidate, the one who could inspire, the one who could rally…all in the name of electability? Hillary was the candidate in 2016 because she was more electable than Bernie. Biden was the candidate in 2020 because he was more electable than Bernie. Biden was nearly the candidate in 2024 because sticking with the incumbent was simply the rational and cautious move.

Maybe it’s time we have faith for once. Maybe it’s time we believe in ourselves and our message for a change. Maybe it’s time to stop talking ourselves out of running our strongest potential candidates. As a great poet said, you have to believe in impossible things, or else they can never come to be.

Yes. Spitting distance. They were both close elections. What rock have you been living under?

Unlikable to you. Not to his voters. And Trump also beat ten times as many men as he did women. So logically we can’t ever run a male candidate ever again. The voters clearly don’t like male Democratic candidates. Biden only won due to covid.

Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, should we require someone whose dream it is to be a carpenter, to take calculus to graduate high school? In what universe will that requirement be doing any good in their life? What will it serve other than a potential completely arbitrary barrier to simply graduating from high school? And a carpenter is actually far more mathematically inclined than most career paths people pursue.

Yes, learning calculus can be a revelation in mathematical beauty. But the same is true for a thousand potential fields of study. In terms of practical use to most people, they would all be equally frivolous. A case could be made that a thousand fields of study are something that people simply must be exposed to. I’m more in favor of letting people choose their own path. We shouldn’t be piling on arbitrary barriers on to a diploma that is only meant to signify basic competence.

You know, it may sound barbaric, but I’m beginning to reconsider the merits of public crucifixions as a form of state punishment…

Maybe instead of getting rid of the penny, we should simply redenominate the currency. You simply issue new versions of every denomination of currency and declare that their legal value is 100x the value of the old counterpart. So the new penny is legally worth an old dollar. Think of it as “US dollar v. 2.0.”

People get antsy when you suggest this sort of thing, as often it’s seen in countries experiencing hyperinflation. But it need not be. Countries with perfectly healthy economies could benefit to redenominate their currency every century or so. Even modest rates of inflation add up over time. If you want your currency’s value to remain reasonable, (ex: to avoid having to pay a million dollars for a cheeseburger some day.), eventually you do have to redonominate your currency.

Rationally, there’s really no reason not to do it. I wonder if it’s pride more than anything else that prevents us from doing it more often. It would be quite a mental adjustment to go from having a salary of $100k per year in the old system to $1,000 a year in the new one. Maybe that can’t help but make people feel smaller in some way? Even if rationally you can know that you haven’t lost anything, would you still feel poorer if you used to make $100k, but now only make 1k?