You gotta step up your game and find a profession that can earn you above that wage

Above median salary? What about the fact that, by definition, 50% of people won’t be able to do that?

Okay, okay, so wages rise over time, and eventually 99% of people are making above 66k… but then the new median will be, like, 150k, and everything in society will be priced accordingly, and some other person will have the great advice that “You gotta step up your game and find a profession that can earn you above that wage” again ignoring the fact that, by definition, 50% of people cannot do that.

No. The solution is not to tell people to work harder, or just find a better job. You want a society where people clean the rooms in hotels, right? What would happen if all cleaning staff took your advice?

At the bare minimum for this conversation, we should ensure that people making median income have a good quality of life. At the bare minimum for an ethical society, wages would not be the metric that determines whether someone deserves a good quality of life.

What if the problem is the assumption that problems can be solved with rigid rules, universally applied without consideration of context? What if the problem is the assumption that rules make something objective?

There’s no universal definition of “asshole”. That’s okay; you can still have “Don’t be an asshole” as a rule, because the interpretation of rules is inherently a subjective act. You can either subjectively interpret this rule, or you can subjectively interpret a convoluted system of rules designed to exclude assholes in an “objective” way, and fail at both excluding assholes AND being objective.

I know I’m being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can’t imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.

Yeah, but that’s because that’s what you’re used to with the F scale.

If you were estimating a number of tablespoons of sugar, you wouldn’t be estimating in groups of 5, because that’s crazy. You’re probably more accustomed to estimating one tablespoon at a time. The same with estimating measuring cups of milk.

Or, if you don’t cook very much, for estimating walking distances, you’re not estimating in groups of 5 miles. You might group by quarter miles and say, “It’s a quarter mile away,” or a half or something.

There’s nothing special about this scale. All of the supposed benefits are the result of your familiarity with it. Had we been using °C the whole time instead, you would be estimating degrees two at a time instead of 5, and everything would be completely normal.

Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.

This is probably just a matter of taste and convention. If everyone knew what 12°C was, then it would be perfectly fine for everyday use. Everywhere else in the world, people are using it for everyday use, and they’re doing just fine.

Same for L/100km. Oops, you specifically wanted to know how far you were going to go with 1 Liter? You can convert that just fine. But it’s just as likely that you’re looking at mpg, and you actually wanted to know how many gallons it would take for you to go from A to B, in which case you also need to do a conversion.

Exercise:

• Set a timer for 1 minute.

• Sit down and do nothing.

Do that every day. After a while, you’ll adjust and it wont be painful. Then do 2 minutes. Then do 5. Then do 15. Every day.

Here’s what happened:

You’ve lived your entire life in a bowl of cocaine. You were born into it. When your parents wanted a break, they gave you some coke. When you were good, they gave you some coke. After you completed your homework, you were allowed a little coke. When you grew up, if you feel tired, or feel like you don’t want to do something, you can have a little nose candy to recharge.

If you want to stop using so much cocaine, you can’t just go cold turkey. You need to start by being able to survive one minute at a time without it.

It’s easy to just remove the bowl of cocaine and not use cocaine. But that’s not going to help you practice choosing not to do cocaine when it is available.

Factually, using AI in your education means you get less value out of that education. In every math class ever, you’ve probably heard some version of,

“I don’t care that you got the right answer. I already know that 2x^2 - 5x -3 factors into (2x + 1)(x - 3) and I already know that this information is freely available. What I care about is making sure that you can figure that out without anyone helping you.”

If you use AI to do a problem, you’re training your ability to do something that everyone else on the planet can do. If you force yourself to do it, you’re training your ability to actually think.

You actually WON’T have to do more work in the long run. Think of it as an investment. If you spend the time learning it now, properly, so that you actually understand it, then every test that your study for, for the rest of your life, will be easier, and you’ll get higher grades. Measurably.

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/

https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/ai-s-impact-on-cognitive-ability-mit-study-reveals-more-troubling-data/

Keep it up.

So this is why people don’t like your comment:

• It’s vague. You’re not actually taking a specific stance on anything; you’re just vaguely complaining about “things” that the left will not address, and “stubbornness”, so that someone can fill in the gaps with something it would be reasonable to complain about.

• It has the appearance of someone conflating “Leftism” with “The Democratic Party of the United States.” That’s generally bad form.

• The context of this post is a worldwide rise in right-wing views, so the above point is even worse than normal. Whatever issue you’re thinking of (which we don’t know, because you’re not actually taking a position, per the first point), it’s possible it isn’t associated with Leftism outside of the US at all.

No one can tell you that you’re wrong if you never actually make a specific claim, right?