Sometimes you can only do what you can with what you have. Will this solution help everyone? No. Will it help anyone as much as they deserve? Probably not. Will it help some? Yes.

Truthfully, to ensure I receive better treatment.

Assuming you’re a man, I think we should make you take a pregnancy test every time you go to the doctor. After all, for all the doc knows, you could be a trans guy. So if it’s all about just covering all your basis, pay up for your pregnancy test sir!

Then why don’t they ask this question for all men? Why don’t they ask every man that walks in if they’re pregnant? If the justification is, “we must ask because the risk is always there, no matter how small,” then why would you dismiss the risk that the man that walks in is actually a trans man that happens to be pregnant?

If this was only about trying to cover all of your bases, everyone would be asked if they are pregnant, regardless of gender.

The walking stick was an afternoon project. Just carve, sand, and stain. The staff was a lot harder, specifically the tines that wind around the crystal. I made the staff off and on for several months. I built the tines up by cutting out thin strips of wood. Then I glued them together, laminating the tines up one layer at a time. Once they’re built up, I carved them into a smooth shape and filled in cracks in the epoxy. The amethyst is affixed into the socket I carved with epoxy as well.

I could have made the staff faster if I was really pushing it out. But just the time to glue it up would still require about 2 week to make.

Nah, that’s bogus. It’s a private company, they can do what they want. They could have absolutely given OP the 5/5 rating, and just had them sign something saying that they were content with the bonus appropriate to a 4/5 rating. No one would have had to receive a penny less.

Thanks! Here’s an example. That’s me on the left, my husband on the right.

I made both that walking stick and wizard staff from old Christmas trees. And a close up view of the staff:

When I can, I get a real tree. After Christmas, I trim all the leaves and branches off the trunk and put those in the municipal compost bin. I then put the trunk in storage and let it dry out for a year or two. Once dry, I’ll carve them into things like walking sticks, wizard staffs, etc.

We used to give lobotomies to those who didn’t fit in right in capitalist workplaces.

One fun version of this. I once read a fanfiction that included a character with an interesting trait. They were cursed to be completely, hopelessly, comically lost. They get lost going to the bathroom in their own home. They end up hundreds or thousands of miles from where they intend to be.

But the tradeoff is, if there is ever somewhere they actually really need to be, they will be there every time. A loved one about to get hit by a bus? By random chance, the character would just happen to be wandering at the right place and time to intervene. Their kid has an important school play they need to attend? They’ll by dumb luck find their way to the auditorium. They live a life completely unable to get to where they want to go, but in turn they will always be where they need to be.

I know it’s a joke. But this could actually be an interesting plot setup, with one modification. I would make it so that Trolley man couldn’t actually save anyone himself. Rather, he has the power to temporarily give anyone powers equivalent to Superman or similar. The only problem is this is so stressful on the person’s body that the power up kills them after it wears off.

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?