Instigate

I know people who have intellectual disabilities who are some of the loveliest and most caring people I’ve ever met. Intelligence does not dictate a person’s capacity to be a productive and caring member of society. Empathy, however, is a skill that can be taught to all but a few who are clinically psychopathic. Intelligence is not a marker of a valuable member of society - empathy and compassion are.

Sex work is work. As long as a person enters into that work wilfully and can legally consent to it, it’s functionally no different than a labourer selling their body in labour constructing a building, painting a house, or digging a trench. Denigrating sex workers serves no purpose beyond needlessly moralising the choices of consenting adults.

It’s even better in Australia - not only do prisoners get to vote, legally they must vote or face a fine for not voting. We have compulsory voting for all eligible and enrolled citizens, bar none. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) sends representatives to every prison to ensure that the votes are all submitted correctly. This isn’t even in our constitution - we legislated it in 1924 and no political party wants to go near the idea of removing compulsory voting nor taking away the rights of the incarcerated to participate in our democracy.

The original Citizen CIA was great and this is an awesome re-tooling of that song! Very on brand for DKM. Punk has been the backbone of anarchism and has always embodied how to solve the Paradox of Tolerance - the Dead Kennedys’ 1981 song Nazi Punks Fuck Off definitely comes to mind.

He’s been doing all of the awful, harmful, spiteful things he said he’d do. He’s done none of the helpful things he said he’d do. The cultists are still holding out hope that eventually he’ll get around to helping them because he kept the angry and bigoted promises he made. Many will keep burying their heads in the sand because the cognitive dissonance of admitting they followed the wrong man for a decade is too much for their fragile egos to bear.

This is exactly how it works - I became single after 13 years and so had no previous experience with dating apps, so I decided to go all in and get one month’s subscription to Hinge, Bumble and Grindr. Before the end of the month I was concurrently dating five people (four women and one man) as a bi man in his thirties. Shit was pretty cash.

A lot of people asked me why I was so successful and I told them it’s because I paid for the subscriptions. For what ended up amounting to around $100AUD I got to date a bunch of people, had some great dates and great sex, and one of those five people is now my long term partner with whom I’m living. She was one of the ‘top recommended’ people on Hinge and the algorithm really got it right!

YMMV but paying for the apps actually provides quite a good service.

This is the exact same argument used against gun control and it’s disingenuous at best; obfuscating and lying at worst.

Of course we should limit the scope and availability of the tools that people use to cause harm to other people. Especially when other LLMs have been able to prevent this from occurring.

The heart of capitalism is definitely theft - theft of labour; theft of time; theft of energy; and theft of value. Intrinsically, it is a system that creates hierarchy and rewards exploitation of fellow human beings. The core tenets of unregulated capitalism are, subjectively in my opinion, a reflection of the evil of the sociopaths and psychopaths who benefit from how the system operates.

While I believe in communism as an ideal and socialism as the next-best-thing (preferably governed anarchically), I don’t see how western societies will be able to immediately get from where we are today to there without terribly bloody war in which countless lives are lost and suffering of the proletariat is rampant.

I think that moves to restrict capitalism (UBI; genuinely enforced workers’ rights; nationalisation of critical industry; stripping corporate personhood to hold individuals liable for the actions of companies; universal high-quality public education from birth to higher adult studies etc.) are the way to edge closer towards a more utopian society.

I don’t know how we make that happen while the billionaires and centimillionaires still have their thumbs on the political scales though. But, a man can dream.

What’s terminal?

Exactly right: a doctor who earns $500k/annum is working class where a landlord earning $50k/annum is capitalist class. The division between the two comes from whether or not the person sells their labour to generate income versus making money from capital assets without expending labour. It has nothing at all to do with the amount earned.

Now, the truth is that there are a fair few working capitalists - those who sell their labour, then use the proceeds of that sale to purchase capital to gain further income - but that’s where the waters get a bit more muddy. I am one of these people; I earn dual income from my job and from my investments. Many might consider me a class traitor, and there’s a fair amount of reason to that accusation, but I personally consider that I am just operating within the confines of the system I was unlucky enough to be born into. I’ll consistently vote for people who would take away my privilege to capital investments but, until they gain power, I’ll use the current system to my advantage.

Learning to read analogue clocks also helps provide some foundational learning for circular geometry - being able to quickly identify relevant segments of a circle and their respective fractions (5 minutes = 1/12 = 30° = π/6 rad etc.) helps build towards being able to compute circular geometric problems more easily in later years.

Yeah, the more heavily-clothed version is clearly the edited part. Her waist shrinks right down (along with the chair behind her) and the top has extremely uniform colour across it that doesn’t reflect the lighting environment accurately.

This is the exact problem I have with sitting to take a piss and, while I find it more comfortable, I’d prefer not to have to wash myself in the sink after every piss to feel clean again. Standing just cuts out the chance of getting that icy spicy porcelain all up on my wing wang.

The argument for higher wages for elected officials, when they were instituted a long time ago, was that low wages would create extra incentives for those officials to act corruptly and siphon away public money. That’s an argument that made sense at the time and genuinely held water.

What has happened over time though, is that the loosening of rules around lobbying (read:bribing); the continual massive gains of the ultra-rich to line the pockets of those officials in order to sway public policy; and the capacity for elected officials to use confidential information to engage in insider trading, has meant that those officials act corruptly, just often not in a direct “steal from the public purse” sense.

The original argument no longer holds water. If we instituted severe restrictions on lobbying and fundraising for elected officials as well as rules that prevent insider trading, I’d have no qualms with elected officials earning large sums of money. If their wage is literally the only way they can make money, they should make good money. The problem is that their wage is not the only way they make money.

I worked at a company that did this, and the retention rates were quite good against comparable businesses in the industry. They made huge savings on not having staff turnover. It’s actually just a wise business decision in addition to being the right thing to do.

I’m hedging that society won’t collapse. You might as well ask why I bother to show up at work - if society collapses the money I earn won’t be worth anything. If I’m betting on society to collapse, I’d be investing in stocking a bunker with weaponry and canned foods. I don’t see that as being a valuable investment yet.

There are larger, more established correlational studies that show a link between dental health and overall physical health as well. There needs to be much more study done but preliminary evidence would suggest that preventive dental care provides for a cheaper overall health cost for a person over their lifetime.

On one occasion when an idiot was blaring music from their phone so loud the whole train carriage I was in were forced to listen to it, I queued up some metalcore and held my phone up so close that it was near his ear. He jumped, startled, and then tried to start a fight with me which was a bitch to de-escalate and prevent myself from getting punched without other passengers verbally backing me up and him eventually getting off at the next station.

Suffice to say two things: it’s not something I’ll likely do again for fear of my own safety, and the people who do this have a significant overlap with people who consider personal violence to be a warranted response when inconvenienced; i.e. they’re selfish, violent arseholes.

Fair, and that’s why I personally have a portfolio of metals, but gold regularly outperforms inflation - especially in troublesome economic times such as we’re in right now.

Even if you were somehow able to, you’d only be able to withdraw it in dollars anyway, it’s not like you have a physical pile of gold in a vault with your name on it.

Not sure what the rules are where you’re from, but I have a literal pile of gold, platinum, palladium and silver bullion in a safe in my home. Yes, I absolutely have a physical pile with my name on it - when I decide to put a sticky note on it and write my name on it.

Nah, just buy gold. Gold has consistently outpaced inflation in just about every time period as high inflation leads to a skittish market who invest in gold and cause the price to buoy. Given the current AI bubble combined with the Trump Effect on global economics, my gold investments have made a killing over the last 12 months and continue to perform really well - even with the dip over the last couple of days.

We never should have got off the gold standard.