Which is, of course, why the internet is a spectacular failure and SpaceX is our best chance to ever put a man on the moon, and polio is still ravaging the country. Great point.
Do all these things, cultivate meaningful relationships, avoid anxiety and drug abuse and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an optimal version of yourself.
Sadly not. That mostly just covers your body and emotional well-being. You have to nurture your mind as well, which is beyond the scope of my pithy aphorisms.
Maybe the first half of the book, the second half sells her company’s services really hard, very much aimed at customizing for each patient and staving off common American health problems. She has some tests not in the standard blood screens she thinks should be in there to give you personalized nutrition advice, she does reference Robert Lustig’s work and research a lot in first half.
Indeed. Was Beepboop arguing that inflation is the mechanism that funds our shared existence?
Why do you think cryptocurrency at its philosophical core enables wealth hoarding? If I don’t pay my property taxes, I lose my house, regardless of how much cryptocurrency I own.
Why can’t we have a separation of money and state where the state receives its due through taxes and is unable to inflate the money supply?
Cryptocurrency doesn't enables wealth hoarding at its philosophical core, as demonstrated by some that have a pure linear emission, like 1 coin per second forever, with no benefit whatsoever for their creators.
I think he's just advocating for the idea that money (and monetary policy) should be separated from taxation, like the gold standard. Or maybe an imaginary silver standard, where the citizens hold the precious metal directly (and pay taxes in it) instead of just having the currency backed by precious metal.
Just because the government and banking institutions can't easily censor and restrict the money supply, doesn't mean they can't collect taxes on it. In a word where crypto is the dominant form of money they can just throw you in jail if you don't pay taxes.
If you need to pay X amount of taxes, maybe the government should explicitly collect X amount of taxes transparently instead of collecting Y amount of taxes, selling a bunch of debt that needs to be financed at a later date, inflating the currency, etc. Because the more transparency in a democracy, the fewer ways for politicians to hijack taxation.
> There were real practical concerns that have only recently been worked around.
I would add the caveat that things have not been completely worked out yet. I agree that religious customs around sex served a practical purpose.
However, easier access to sexual pleasure seems to have unintended consequences. Traditionally, a woman and her family should be damn sure that a particular man is worthy of female costs of pregnancy. So there was more pressure exerted on men to be worthy of sex. Easy access to sexual pleasure lowers the bar for men.
eh. "Easy access to sexual pleasure lowers the bar for men." if you mean that undesirable men are able to have sex for pleasure (without procreation) and thus don't need to better themselves in the eyes of women (i.e. in a moral and/or social sense), i doubt that's accurate. there was always prostitution and sexual violence as an outlet for those unwilling to better themselves.
if you mean that in a biological, evolutionary sexual selection sense, then easier access to sexual pleasure _with birth control_ doesn't change the big picture at all either.
of course, if a man wants to start a family - for love, stable companionship, socially/culturally accepted and probably easily accessible sex and, finally, passing on his genes - the need for bettering himself still applies now as it did then.
> there was always prostitution and sexual violence as an outlet for those unwilling to better themselves.
Prostitution and rape are not perfect substitutes for consensual sex. The risks are much greater, so on the margin, there are men who are not willing to partake in these, and instead choose to better themselves when faced with a lack of partners.
> if a man wants to start a family - for love, stable companionship, socially/culturally accepted and probably easily accessible sex and, finally, passing on his genes - the need for bettering himself still applies now as it did then.
bar for that is higher than ever. My ex had a entire stream of guys in her DMs trying to chat her up on instagram. its nice being top of the hill but no one stays on top forever when there's never a break from that kind of competition. thats why Im happy my current gf is not on social media at all.
This is definitely something that surprises me when talking to younger people (being fine with their partner talking to people of the opposite sex on social media) despite the pains it seems to often cause. I've talked to multiple men and women who said a relationship ended over online infidelity that started out innocently enough (they're just friends, online conversations mean nothing, I'm just passing the time). Maybe they are afraid of seeming over controlling but it's something that seems to have been normalized as "okay" yet often leads to issues.
People see social media as a disconnect from real life but in my eyes looking at it within the context of what it's replacing it seems like incredibly inappropriate behavior. No one would ever be happy knowing their partner (of either sex) is having private meetings or conversations in person at all hours of the day/night with strangers of their own opposite gender. So why do private online interactions (keeping your social media door "open" to strangers who may have romantic intent and engaging with them at all?) not raise similar red flags among people?
The average US citizen used to understand the importance of money, how it’s defined, etc. There were entire elections over it (see Andrew Jackson).
Now we’re told it’s too complicated to understand, leave it to the experts in Washington. If we put restraints on their ability to create money bad things will happen.
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
Why do you choose 1970 as a baseline? Federal spending is absolutely out of control when compared to, say 1913, as a baseline.
“…a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”
Exactly this IMO. Federal government is way too big. I would be more sympathetic if we moved most of these concerns to a more local level of government. Trying to have a one-size-fits-all approach for the whole country is what causes so much polarization. Let the ideas be run as experiments more locally, so that people can more easily vote with their feet and wallets. I have never actually gotten a chance to vote how my tax dollars are used.
Yep, when the government makes a plan like "5 hotdogs per person per week" that's allocation, and when the government makes a plan like "each 100x100 meter plot to the highest bidder" that's allocation, and when the government makes a plan like "special rights to the creator or their nominee until 70 years after they are dead" that's allocation too.
