We live wasted lives
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one fact I found shocking is that currently only about 30% of humans use toilet paper. And yes I am aware of bidets, but that's not the remaining 70%, is it?
shitpost
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It's not just the convenience of running water, it's all of the infrastructure around making sure that water is clean and safe, which involves government regulation and audits, massive engineering projects, a lot of maintenance effort and a considerable amount of tax dollars.
Just as an example, leptospirosis is a common bacterial contaminant in untreated water:
Signs and symptoms can range from none to mild (headaches, muscle pains, and fevers) to severe (bleeding in the lungs or meningitis). Weil's disease (/ˈvaɪlz/ VILES), the acute, severe form of leptospirosis, causes the infected individual to become jaundiced (skin and eyes become yellow), develop kidney failure, and bleed. Bleeding from the lungs associated with leptospirosis is known as severe pulmonary haemorrhage syndrome.
If you go hiking in places like Hawaii (where the government gives a shit about public health) you'll see warning signs about lepto around pools and streams because people have this delusional fantasy about tropical paradises with clean flowing streams. If you go hiking in other places the lepto will still be there but the warning sign won't. Untreated, uncontrolled water is a hazard.
Everyone can't be an expert on water sanitation. Employing some experts to provide that service for thousands or millions of people is a fantastic solution. It's probably impossible to overstate how much benefit water infrastructure provides for society.
So I disagree with you. "Running water" (centrally managed water sanitation and delivery) is one of the best things human society has ever done. The benefit to public health is incalculable.
The only reason you might discount how much benefit you gain from this system is that you've grown up with it as normal. You've never had to worry about groundwater contamination, about boiling every cup of water before you drink it, about filtration or desalinization or testing for lead. Which is why I describe having access to this as a privilege - because we take it for granted.
Oooh. You went there. Well done.
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Throwing around the names of fallacies that don't apply instead of actual arguments doesn't further your cause just as much as you might think it does.
The no true Scotsman fallacy applies if:
- Person A makes a generalized statement ("No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge")
- That statement is falsified by providing a counter-example ("I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge")
- Person A does not back away from the original falsified statement but instead modifies the original statement and signals that they did modify that statement ("Well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge")
The main issue here is that using this fallacy, the claim becomes a non-falsifiable tautology. Every Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge is not a true Scotsman, thus the claim becomes always true by excluding every counter-example.
Let's apply that to the situation at hand.
- [email protected] made the statement that communism can work, providing an example where it apparently did work. This statement is not generalized, so the first condition for the true Scotsman fallacy already doesn't apply.
- [email protected] provided a counter-example, where communism didn't work. This doesn't actually contradict the first statement, because [email protected] never claimed that communism always works, so providing a single counter-example doesn't negate the statement that communism can work.
- [email protected] then pointed out that USSR states never actually claimed to have achieved communism, and that statement is true. According to USSR doctrine, the goal was to get to communism at some point, but that point was never reached. While this can sound like an appeal to purity, there's no basis for a "no true Scotsman" fallacy here.
Please read up on your fallacies before throwing around the names of them.
When you claim that something is a fallacy, even though the fallacy you claim doesn't actually apply, then you are doing so to discredit the whole argument without actually engaging with it. This is a perfect example of the Strawman argument, which itself is a fallacy.
Nerd up!
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I just wanna be one of those old timey blacksmiths hitting things on an anvil and getting paid for it. Nowadays though it's all like "Throw the glowy thing into the bang bang thing and it does all the work for you!". What if I wanna hit things with a hammer, huh?! What if I like the catharsis that comes with hitting something?!
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
What I love most about this is he works in health care insurance. His boss tells him he's not denying enough claims. Very American indeed.
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The fulfilling part is using that income to buy a telescope and admire the beauty of the cosmos
Or internet porn. Both of these are things our ancestorsnl couldn't have even dreamed of, and would kill to have access to
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The truth is people choose to live wasted lives. They could choose to do something fulfilling but don't. Even cavemen probably wasted their lives being scared something was going to eat them.
I started out choosing work that wasn't all that fulfilling as a toolmaker/engineer. I didn't find a lot of satisfaction in needing to hit impossible deadlines. So I ditched that career and became an EMT and finally a medic with a side helping of firefighter/rescue in several small and very rural communities that have shortages of trained responders. And just before I retired I taught some math in my tiny rural school because teachers are hard to get there. I never got rich with money or fame but that wasn't what mattered.
I feel like my life was not wasted for the most part. That I made a difference for the people and the world around me. In the small handful of years left to me, I can go satisfied I did what I could. You could too if only you would choose.
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One of the things we often forget is that a large part of our happiness is simply autonomy and self direction. I still remember working a “dreary office job” that I absolutely loved because we were given self direction and the managers were simply there to support us.
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The fulfilling part is using that income to buy a telescope and admire the beauty of the cosmos
Or internet porn. Both of these are things our ancestorsnl couldn't have even dreamed of, and would kill to have access to
I'm glad 1 hour of porn and telescope each day keeps you going. For most of us, it's not enough.
It would be nice to not be alienated at work. It would also be nice to have some kind of say in what we do 80% of the time we're awake. A more democratized workplace would do a lot.
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The truth is people choose to live wasted lives. They could choose to do something fulfilling but don't. Even cavemen probably wasted their lives being scared something was going to eat them.
I started out choosing work that wasn't all that fulfilling as a toolmaker/engineer. I didn't find a lot of satisfaction in needing to hit impossible deadlines. So I ditched that career and became an EMT and finally a medic with a side helping of firefighter/rescue in several small and very rural communities that have shortages of trained responders. And just before I retired I taught some math in my tiny rural school because teachers are hard to get there. I never got rich with money or fame but that wasn't what mattered.
I feel like my life was not wasted for the most part. That I made a difference for the people and the world around me. In the small handful of years left to me, I can go satisfied I did what I could. You could too if only you would choose.
Yeah, honestly knowing what I know now, this is the way to do it. Do whatever you want for most of your life and screw the consequences. Die at 35 without health insurance.
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Cool. Yet you are ignoring the very tiny fact that collective farms started famines. They didn't "just underperform".
iirc...Lysenko (soviet agri-scientist - a shitty one) had convinced the party leaders that his newly bred 'winter-hardy' wheat breed was worthy of being planted en masse. It had worked well under ideal lab conditions but failed after several crop yields when planted in the field, and this created famine.
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One of the things we often forget is that a large part of our happiness is simply autonomy and self direction. I still remember working a “dreary office job” that I absolutely loved because we were given self direction and the managers were simply there to support us.
This sounds great!
However, I also had a job like this and hated it. The things I hated about it were:
- Circumstances beyond my control made taking this job my best option, when I had really wanted to do something else.
- The ultimate product of my work wasn't emotionally resonant with me. I felt like I was doing nothing but working to maintain a system I didn't believe in.
- I felt like if I was going to have a job like this, I should be getting paid better and should be working on something more interesting. I thought the job was beneath me.
- Seriously, aesthetics matter. Commuting through heavy traffic to reach a suburban office park, where I walk through the door and smell filtered air, looking at grey cubicals under florescent lighting... is pretty miserable. Much better if the office was in a walkable, nice-to-look-at neighborhood where I would want to spend my time outside of work, and if the office had hired an interior designer who could make it.... just better in any way.
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iirc...Lysenko (soviet agri-scientist - a shitty one) had convinced the party leaders that his newly bred 'winter-hardy' wheat breed was worthy of being planted en masse. It had worked well under ideal lab conditions but failed after several crop yields when planted in the field, and this created famine.
You are not recalling it correctly.
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Anytime some says the economy or wall street are doing great i instantly know they are either rich or tarded or both
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You are not recalling it correctly.
no i am.
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Yeah, but now the monitors are thinner.
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I'm glad 1 hour of porn and telescope each day keeps you going. For most of us, it's not enough.
It would be nice to not be alienated at work. It would also be nice to have some kind of say in what we do 80% of the time we're awake. A more democratized workplace would do a lot.
I 100% agree, I'm just saying that life today is much more fulfilling for the average person than it was for, like, the average 13th century French peasant. The fact that we have access to this feeling of ennui in the first place is thanks to our safe and comfortable lifestyle.
Shit could be better, and we should fight to make it so. I just think we should also appreciate that our quality of life is nearly unrivaled throughout history, and even the modern world.
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hell yeah brother, 30 hours a week, 4 weeks paid vacation, guaranteed and paid for further education courses, protection from being fired while pregnant/ at home with newborn, minimum wage, privacy laws and employee protection laws, unionization, multiple paid federal holidays.
I fuckin love Europe.So funny enough, as an American, I have the majority of that while being in the military. We even currently have three months of maternity and paternity leave, which can be used as the member sees fit through the first year after birth.
All except the privacy laws and employee protection laws, though it can often be exceptionally difficult to fire people for reasons that don't involve the politics of the people in charge. And even then, lawsuits usually get those people backpay.
I'd be advocating for the US Coast Guard with this right now, but the current administration is shifting our focus from being a life-saving/preserving service to another border control agency, so... not a great time to be joining if it's for moral reasons. sigh
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
Id like to help the brown people trump is looking to purge from the country but look at this. I cant give all this up.
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I just wanna be one of those old timey blacksmiths hitting things on an anvil and getting paid for it. Nowadays though it's all like "Throw the glowy thing into the bang bang thing and it does all the work for you!". What if I wanna hit things with a hammer, huh?! What if I like the catharsis that comes with hitting something?!
damn that image bangs