That's total bullshit. Middle class families in 1976 did NOT live in smaller houses than today, and certainly did NOT eat "poverty meals"... What on earth are you even talking about.
Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.
Again, I would encourage you to research historical statistics or talk to people who lived in 1976 about their practical living conditions, rather than going off of your intuition about what is "bullshit" or which things are "absolutely fucked". Our intuitions about these things are heavily warped by social media, where stories that feel true without being true are easy to tell and often more viral.
In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.
Summary: everything is 3 to 5 times more expensive. Existing plans grandfathered in. Existing servers will come back into circulation at their previous prices as they get canceled. Don't buy.
Oh if religion wasn't responsible for "massive cultural destruction" then mankind would have invented something else to do it (whatever is meant by "massive cultural destruction").
I disagree. When you are absolutely sure that God itself is on your side, then there is no atrocity to big to commit. I feel that religious zeal has led to some of the worst catastrophes in human history. I would put para-religious zeal in that category too, like dogmatic forms of communism.
The Crusades and colonialism can’t be distilled down to single causes, but even if you tried, religious reasons would not be the main ones. Political and financial motivations were far bigger factors in both.
> Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
More like malicious lobbying and incompetence made it impossible in many places to use any other form of transportation, despite there being safer, faster, cheaper, and healthier ways to move around. Which come to think if it makes this a rather nice analogy for the current situation... :)
Right, but is there a difference between searching, say "acetaminophen and ibuprofen combined in emergency department settings" on google/ddg and asking an AI to give me primary sources for the same - if i am going to use the primary source anyhow? I just mention "i used AI to find this" because usually there's no good way to do a google search, or there wasn't the last time i tried.
For example, is glyphosate the active ingredient in roundup? there are studies that suggest not. I can't remember the university, i can remember the rough decade (2010s). all i know for sure is that someone showed that glyphosate isn't the active ingredient, really.
Deepseek can't find it. ddg doesn't come up with it immediately. I might try "deep think" mode on some other AI later, or use an older LLM model i have locally to see. I have the pdf, i just didn't rename it to be searchable! doggone it.
LLM assisted search is now one of the best ways to look into dense and obscure topics though, particularly given as google search quality has degraded. All it needs is for you to read the sources.
Source hallucination has also come down tremendously.
I had to re-read that twice, some how my eyes slipped over this part: I thought you were saying "in the early 2000s in California schools you'd get marked down". Which yeah of course, lazy kids would copy-paste Wikipedia (with the formatting sometimes, lol) but you have to teach them that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a source, and yeah looking at the citations in brackets is what you should do.
But no you were talking about universities... The concept of citing Wikipedia in university is wild x)
I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.
> "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that.
They worked like that when I was in Paris ~3 years ago! At the time, people were rioting over the retirement age changes. I walked around the city the day after the protests. The city smelled like burned plastic. There were burned out rubbish bins and the husks of melted lime bikes & scooters all over the place.
Only if you believe that always caving in to a violent mob burning random (private citizen-owned, non-government) cars in Paris leads to better outcomes for the country.
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