I fear a motorcycle blasting down my street at 10pm. What's the difference.
Once my cats realized the robo vac won't hurt them they don't even move for it anymore... Seems intelligent to initially be terrified of something and update your perception of it.
Having spent my entire life around cows I can say there's a great deal of evidence that cows are quite intelligent. Most of the time when people say they're dumb it's because they're hindering a human from forcing them to do something. Why should a cow "know" to go one way or the other or to not stop in a chute, or to not back up...these are just human constraints. We know what we WANT the cow to do and if they don't do that they're dumb. Sure I've seen cows do dumb things. If I was an outside observer looking at the severity and frequency that humans do dumb things I would come to the same conclusion, they're dumb.
I'm with both of you. Growing up on a beef farm taught me that cows can be very dumb (no, you can't walk through the barbed wire, and no, you can't get to the water in the cistern without falling in and drowning) but also do show intelligence in some ways (the personal vendetta against the veterinarian's truck, or seeing their best friend in spring pastures and absolutely going apeshit).
"This behavior is quite common..." is very misleading. This specific behavior is not common. Scratching an itch does not equal using a tool to scratch an itch. Every animal I've seen in nature knows how to use external static objects to help them scratch somewhere they can't reach. Dogs cats, bears, pigs, cows... etc. I think my cats are very intelligent, I've seen them use the bristle brush attachment we have on the wall to scratch themselves. If I ever watched one of them pick up a fork with their mouth and orient it in a way to scratch their back I would absolutely lose my mind. These are not the same behaviors.
If your cats picked up a fork, it would be to eat you after they killed you in your sleep; but, I could see how that could be considered “scratching an itch.”
I've seen my cats pull on a cord in order to reel in the toy at the end. I don't find that to be all too different from the cow orienting a scratcher. Should I?
Idk I guess that's really up for you to decide. My opinion is that behavior seems very uhhh instinctual? Like if they were eating something that was running away from them I'm sure they would employ a similar tactic/behavior. Thing far away from me I need it closer. The logical steps to use a tool that would have 0 instinctual context seems leaps and bounds more "complex". I'm no animal/evolutionary scientist, just my opinion. It very well could be!
Braindead to think salary is somehow attached to morality. I would say some of the most immoral people are people with a lot of money, and there are countless examples of that.
My logic is that, if you are trying to evaluate whether you'd want to be a politician, consideration of cost/benefit is rational. If you aren't ethical, the benefit of being a politician is a lot higher (because you can get unethical sources of funds). If we want to attract more sane, talented, ethical people, we need to pay more — and prevent blatant corruption like privledged trading.
"trying to evaluate...". Normal people aren't trying to evaluate becoming a politician. It's a lifelong career for most people and you think the lunch lady or librarian who constantly gives back to their community was evaluating on "becoming" a politician? The financial incentives should be lowered. Pay them like you pay a school teacher and ban insider trading. Then you wouldn't have all these worthless nepo babies who just want a lax job and power over people in these positions.
We want highly talented people to be in government — it’s a lot better than the alternative. Why should we treat comp so differently than other fields?
I think a better choice would be to simply remove the ability or to profit from the job. Perhaps politicians give up all their property and become wards of the state after serving their terms, or agree to aggressive post-service surveillance and corruption enforcement.
Do people really think that all of the most capable people are motivated by money? I've made several career moves in my life which have prioritized things other than my salary or financial security. I don't feel this is that rare.
Yes, of course they are. Not solely by money, but the most capable workers are not going to work for less than market rate because they don't have to. They can get meaning and power and everything else they want, and still make way more than Congressmen get.
The problem is, a corrupt capable person is far more dangerous. I rather have a honest but maybe less capable politician in charge, than a evil mastermind.
I understand this, but at the same time the concept of this to me is absolutely wild.
We see this in the UK, the exact same argument. Yet I was paid more to manage a small tech team than an MP for fewer hours. You actively disincentivise people like me from taking public positions. I'm doing tech contracting and earn more than Prime Minister.
The UK gets about a trillion dollars a year in, and spends more. The US takes in something like five trillion dollars.
An exceptionally small improvement in improving the economy pays for itself indefinitely because these countries are absolutely enormous. Our MPs are paid about 90k/year, if you could improve the tax take of the government by 0.1% by improving the economy in some way *once* you could pay them £1M/year *tax free* and you could pay that *forever* even if future people aren't as good they're just not actively detrimental. This is also for paying people who aren't actually making big decisions, just the elected representatives.
Money should not be an issue, missing a good person because of the money is utter insanity given the payback.
"For the money" is a weird way of framing it. I wouldn't run for Congress "for the money", but I would need the job to pay me enough to keep living where I'm living (when I'm not in DC) and cover my needs, with the ability to contribute to my savings as well... which it wouldn't, at current levels.
Because the most capable among us are able to command high salaries regardless of whether they're 'in it for the money'. Congress needs to be competitive with industry for the best talent.
Also, giving politicians legitimate income makes them less susceptible to bribery and other forms of unethical income.
This is so naive. No amount of money could force me to work for a company I didn't agree with morally, if I am able to "command" a higher salary I can command it elsewhere. And less susceptible to bribery? I can guarantee you that someone bringing in ~ $200k a year doesn't need to be looking for other sources of income. What do they tell poor people? Stop buying starbucks? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps! Shame they'd have to live a less lavish lifestyle as a public servant :( So at this point we should have to beg people and incentivize them with astronomical salaries to not be a piece of shit? I think this is just the product of late stage capitalism. Nobody gives a fuck about anything besides money and how to get more of it.
Lmao. $200k a year doesn't even get you a nice 1 bedroom apartment in many of the cities these representatives represent. Let alone pay for the 2 separate residences that they effectively need to maintain.
And you are arguing against strawmen. Please point to an example of two of current Congress reps telling poor people "Stop buying starbucks? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!"
> So at this point we should have to beg people and incentivize them with astronomical salaries to not be a piece of shit? I think this is just the product of late stage capitalism. Nobody gives a fuck about anything besides money and how to get more of it.
This is the deeply naive view. It is not begging to pay market rate for top talent. The most capable people who we should want to run our government are worth far, far more on the open market than the current salary levels we pay Congress. If we want those people to consider Congress a viable option, we need to pay them accordingly. See Singapore for a strong example of this.
> $200k a year doesn't even get you a nice 1 bedroom apartment in many of the cities these representatives represent.
This is getting a little bit ridiculous. Manhattan is surely the most expensive housing market per square meter in the United States. You can get a nice 1 bedroom for about 5,000 USD per month. That is 60K USD per year. That is only 30% of their salary.
> Let alone pay for the 2 separate residences that they effectively need to maintain.
Their second place of residence while in Washington D.C.: That is paid for by the US gov't.
The nice thing that I've found with Kagi is the AI summarization has to be intentional. Sometimes I don't care and just want a simple answer to a search type question tossing a question mark at the end is a super simple way to interact with that feature when I want to
This is an extremely limiting view. They are both CSS at the end of the day. If extracting the complicated inline TailwindCSS class to its own vanilla CSS class makes sense for readability then what's the harm? You could also just define your own variables. Tailwind gives you full control to do this.
I don't understand the point of the rule sets and constant classes? TailwindCSS still obeys the same specificity rules of CSS so instead of `font-medium` on every <a> tag under nav why not just put `font-medium` on the parent <nav> tag?
I've been trying to tackle this exact problem. Current process is to use exa.ai to collect a wide breadth of research papers. Do a summarization pass and convert to markdown. Search for more specific terms then give the relevant papers/context to Gemini 2.5 pro and say give me a summary. Looking for very specific resources and to be honest it's been a terrible process :|
