I recommend testing Yerba Mate as an alternative to coffee. For me drinking even one or two cups of coffee can give a bad, anxious mood later in the day as caffeine withdraws. Meanwhile Mate seems to give similar energy, but the withdrawal feels more gradual, not giving me such bad mood.
Just get green, non smoke-dried version if you can.
+1 for wooden American homes, made from naturally sequestered carbon :)
I haven't done the math, but I'd bet the energy efficiency requirements would more than make up for it. Uninsulated/underinsulated homes are a huge waste of energy.
It absolutely is discrimination as not all whites are privileged. These days your skin color doesn't matter much, what really makes the difference is the wealth of your parents. A rich black guy is privileged compared to poor white guy.
Yes, MOST African Americans are poorer due to historical discrimination. But similarly some whites are also poorer due to historical reasons beyond their own control. The solution should be support to the poor to help them achieve better educational outcomes, regardless of their skin color.
Just raise taxes and build a system that helps all poor people achieve better educational outcomes instead of racist affirmative action. Scandinavian model provides a good example. Anything else is just nonsense and convenient to the rich elite.
Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work.
"Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work."
This is assumes you want to treat each individual as an individual. But, to progressives, an individual is just an anonymous 'representative' of an ethnic group.
If you had a system as you described, progressives would calculate the acceptance rate for each ethnic group. If the rate for each group were not equal, they'd consider that prima facie evidence that exam-based admissions are structurally racist.
First, I commend you on wanting to do something about poverty. I also feel that policies that help all improverished folks and bring more people into the middle class are important and necessary.
That said, the idea that Black people only have issues because of historical discrimination does not reflect the data, and thus I feel affirmative action would still be needed to address those inequities.
That is to say both Black and White differences, and rich and poor differences need to be addressed in my view. You can't simply ignore one or the other.
There's a rich body of observational and experimental research into racial discrimination, which shows racial discrimination continues to exist in health care, hiring and careers, apartment rentals, punishment in schools, etc.
> Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work.
Think about that a bit more, and look at countries that do that and what their higher education system looks like. Consider for example Mexico what percentage of students by ethnicity get into UNAM, what the exams look like, where the exams are offered and where the exam preparation schools are, how much the prep schools cost, if there are ways around it that favour certain groups. Many countries do this, do they have a better or fairer representative sample of students in their higher education, or just students who have been competently trained to pass an exam? An exam is one potential way in which students can shine, but it's unlikely that the person ranked at position 1 is Pareto dominating the person at position 2 on literally every axis.
"Life isn't short--it's LONG, and you have a brief moment in that life to maximize your preparation for the rest of it. Use it wisely."
Anyone can die any time if they're unlucky enough. Leaving much of the fun until you're old may thus be a very bad strategy.
I agree one should focus on productive activities already in their 20's, but meaningful leisure is important too. It's meaningless leisure that you do only out of boredom that people should restrict more - for me that would be social media, news and gaming.
My wife's grandparents actually made a metal frame specifically designed to hold the Finnish maternity box at a comfortable height. Now it's in use for our newborn, since the box size hasn't changed.
Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.
Funny enough, those niche strategy games are, IMO, a great example of middle ground that I think is missing in the industry.
We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people.
What about something in between?
Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look.
And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things.
This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.
Usually you still need a decent pay, since few jobs really are interesting/meaningful enough to make you work for free, or for a salary that doesn't allow you to save enough to buy what you really want.
I don't have expensive hobbies, only thing I want to buy is my own house. If my salary doesn't allow that goal with rising property prices, then living on welfare can be the rational choice if better job opportunities simply aren't available. A few extra hundred doesn't motivate if I can't buy anything meaningful with it. For many millenials it's easy to get enough money for short-term hedonism,but anything else is difficult.
I agree 100%, if your money can't be used for meaningful things (housing, savings with interest, etc.), there is little point in working for it beyond the minimum effort required.
You can always find new friends once you start meeting people off internet. Tbh I find purely online friendships not to last long, especially now as an adult.
Nuclear is problematic, but it should not be phased out as long as there's fossil fuel used in energy generation. All efforts should go into replacing fossil fuels for now.
Just get green, non smoke-dried version if you can.