Ideally the answers aren’t just political soapboxing.
Tax Brackets. “I got a pay raise and will now be taxed more and make less money than before the raise”
If <=30k was taxed at 25% and 30+k taxed at 30% and you go from 30k to 31k a year, only the 1k is taxed at the higher rate.
Benefit cliffs do exist however.
High price = high quality.
The luxury pricing model has totally enveloped markets at this point and the correlation rarely applies now.
Absolutely. I’ve learned over the years that it usually works out pretty well to find out how much the cheapest dogshit option is and aim for an option roughly 1.5x the cost. Obviously not a blanket rule but it covers a surprising amount of common items and I’ve gotten plenty of long-lasting affordable alternatives that I actually enjoy using rather than having the crappiest version of everything.
Yeah I look for the cheapest option and go a step or two higer
Depends on what it is but as a general rule to start from it isn’t a terrible idea.
Veg I will go cheapest because I don’t care if a carrot has a curve. Cooking equipment I usually go midrange and try to find out WHY the really expensive ones are better, then look for those specific features if they actually matter.
My bike is quite a bit higher, though there is a very wide range for bikes. I went for the cheapest of the high end bike range at £600. Probably spent close to than in accessories and maintenance by now too. Although some maintenance costs are me buying tools I didn’t have before too.
As much as I’m laughing at people spending more than $50 on a kettle or toaster or toothbrush or what have you and calling themselves clever shoppers, I think it’s worth spending on anything that goes between you and the ground, e.g. tires, shoes, bikes, etc.
Though I’m sure that adage has also been incorporated into modern pricing models and every damn thing is a fucking scam to manipulate you into thinking you’ve made a shrewd and balanced decision when you spend just a weeee bit more.
I despise every company with a fiery passion.
Expensive doesn’t mean the shoes are good, but cheap does mean they are shit. Of course you also get different types of shoe that may not directly compare with others.
Then you also get different shops selling the same product at different prices.
I selected my toaster by visiting a store and physically fiddling with the levers. From 20€ onwards, the feeling got noticeably better until 120€ price point after which it got worse. The range ended at 300€ SMEG(ma) toaster that felt like what it sounds like. I’m happy with my 120€ toaster.
You spent 120€ to toast bread! I don’t think you get it…
It’s the best toaster apparently. Tbh I don’t know why I would care about the feeling of the lever but at least they have the best toaster lever money can buy.
For that kind of money I would expect it to make, cut and toast the bread for me.
I toast a lot of bread and wanted a good toaster that will last a long time. I’m expecting to get minimum of 25 years of daily toasting out of it.
We are drowning in Temu trash. Maybe we should start to look at things from other than monetary perspective. I selected a good toaster and looked at the price tag afterwards. Apparently you can get shitty toasters for 20€ and 300€ but a good one costs exactly 120€
What store are you shopping at that has €300 toasters??? How could anyone ever get that much value from a toaster???
It’s crazy I know. They were bad quality.
With automobiles, there is an anti-correlation.
That’s a great one
That’s true but the other direction is generally true. Not always, but often high quality does come at a cost.
That their neurodiversity absolves them of any responsibility and the rest of the world should cater to it.
This is true, but at the same time it does not mean that people shouldn’t be given reasonable accommodation for their particular needs.
Many people struggle to grasp that these two ideas can coexist.
Embarrassingly, I think I’m someone who struggles with both ideas. How many meltdowns am I expected to accommodate before someone is not invited back to a social event? A work event? Because if a neurotypical yelled obscenities at me, it would be one and done, but I’m expected to forgive and forget when the person is autistic. How many times do you accommodate someone’s tardiness? I have ADHD, and I work really hard to be on time, but I’m late plenty. Sometimes for work. Often for social events. It’s not because i don’t care about other people’s time. I try really hard, I just fail a lot. Like who decides what’s reasonable?
Perhaps the question you should be asking is why are the meltdowns happening in the first place?
Accommodations aren’t about tolerating bad behaviour. They’re about changing the environment to be more friendly, and putting systems in place to help people manage things better.
Ooh that’s a good point! I hadn’t looked at it like that!
Of course the meltdown I’m thinking of is that his own toddler was trying to eat old food off the floor and I was preventing that and offering fresh food while babysitting for free for him.
He doesn’t have meltdowns so often now, but the only thing that changed is that he feels safe and comfortable around us. Ironically, his bad behavior is what made us uncomfortable around him which is what made him feel unsafe. So as it got better, it just got better and better.
Unfortunately for him, he was raised in an emotionally abusive home, so his regular bad behavior was learned and then when we reacted poorly to that it would lead to an actual meltdown. Consistent kind behavior and firm boundaries is what eventually led to a two way street respectful situation. A meltdown now would be much more accepted and understood but we had to go to group therapy to get here.
Absolutely fair, good answer!
That understanding someone or something means agreeing with them.
Or that refusing to understand is a valid counterargument.
Or that not vocally disagreeing is agreement.
I’m not sure if its get what you mean.
For example, I can put in the effort to try and understand why a triple Trumper MAGA Republican did what they did without agreeing with the actions they took.
Oh jesus I’m a moron lmao. I misread what you said given the context of my post.
On a related note, this is one of my favorite quotes: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle
That because a problem is real, any proposed solution to it is a good idea, and anyone arguing against a proposed solution doesn’t want to solve the problem.
Yes, grease fires are bad. No, you should not use water to put it out. No, that does not mean I am pro-grease-fire??
Decimation means “lose 10%”, not “lose all BUT 10℅”
If two people suddenly quit your twenty-man team you’ve been decimated. If eight or eighteen people quit you’ve been devastated.
(Plus a bunch of “politics” and civil rights things.)
Linguistics just doesn’t deal with definitions like that. It does mean that, and certainly even connotatively historically. Today, in modern parlance, it definitely means “to kill a large portion of” something, and is almost never used as a 10% reference. So your team could be correctly described as “decimated” in both scenarios.
Dictionaries are free to note whatever definition they want, but so is everyone else
Great answer
Worked in a company that decimated their workforce with redundancies. I word it correctly and other people wrongly assume it means something else.
That science is rational and objective.
In reality, the way that science works is much muddier than most realise. It’s full of subjectivity, and this isn’t a bug, but a feature. Intuition and tacit knowledge play a big role in basically any research (and this is why I am confident that AI can’t replace scientists). Politics are also present at every stage of the process. Science is at its least objective when scientists convince themselves that they’re being objective. We can’t escape our biases, so we need to actively acknowledge them and embrace the subjectivity of our situated perspectives.
The problem is that talking about this is a great way to piss off other scientists. I’ve been accused before of “betraying the side”, by a scientist who was aware that science has a disproportionately large epistemic platform (epistemic means pertaining to knowledge — basically just that as a result of the huge benefits of scientific advancements in the last century or so, science has been on a bit of a pedestal in terms of trusted expert knowledge in society. Criticising this is seen by a betrayal by some because of the concerning rise in psuedoscience and anti-scientific rhetoric.
However, I’m of the belief that some of what has driven the rise of psuedoscience is that the average person doesn’t like to be told “shut up and do what the smart people say”. They feel a lot of mistrust towards society (which, in many cases, is entirely reasonable, especially in the case of marginalised groups who have been heavily exploited by science and scientists),
The problem goes far beyond just science, but I think this is certainly an aspect of it. I sympathise with scientists who want to continue to have the privileged position they hold, but I don’t think that’s helpful in the long term.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly encourage constructive debate and skepticism. However, it doesn’t excuse repeating shitty arguments without doing anything thinking or research just because it makes you feel less bad and lets you not do anything.
One example that particularly bothers me was “humans affect on the climate is less than a single volcanic eruption”. There are a lot of things you could not trust about scientific reporting, but the base premise of 8 billion people flying around the world using decomposed dinosaur mass is at least an order-of magnitude larger in scale compared to a single volcanic eruption. At that point, you’d have to believe that there isn’t really 8 billion people or that oil is actually from somewhere else.
In summary I agree, I just want to add nuance that this doesn’t excuse people acting in bad faith. It’s important that everyone, not just scientists, recognize their emotions and bias and challenge their own arguments against these (I.e. am I just making this argument because I feel defensive?)
Great answer.
Photography is so much more than pointing a camera and pushing the button, even though cell phones have reduced it to that for a lot of people.
Good photography requires intention, planning, luck, skill in knowing how to compose a scene, knowledge of light and color temperature, sensor exposure, how to direct people about if people are involved, and then, in editing in post-production, skillful edits, adjusting tone, doing masking, color grading and calibration, and any other steps to perfect an image.
For me to produce one work here on this site, it can take me two or three hours, not including travel time!
And also worth mentioning that 1 great photo comes after 50 or so not-so-good ones. A lot comes down to luck, especially with more dynamic shots. Take a shit ton of photos and a few of them are bound to turn out nice.
I learnt the team “Point and shoot engineer” to refer to modern cinematographers/ photographers.
This took me a lot of work but I’m glad I made it.
They looks great!
Great answer!
That people are either purely evil or purely good. I once argued with a homophobe who wanted to protect her children from seeing lesbians on tv. She said she had to protect her kids because they came to her from turbulent backgrounds. So she adopted kids in need, that makes her a good person. Still, she was a bigot and teaching her kids to be bigots and that is a problem. Homophobia is bad and harmful but not all homophobes are automatically completely horrible people.
As an add-on to this, people having the thought pattern of:
They’re saying that my friend said something racist -> Therefore they’re saying my friend is a racist ™ -> However, my friend is a good person -> Therefore they’re not a racist -> Therefore what my friend said wasn’t racist -> Therefore the people calling my friend out are the bad guys
You can substitute in words like homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist etc. for racist — the flow goes the same. An excellent book that helped me to understand this was “racism without racists”. Reading that as a teenager helped me to more constructively respond when I have been called out for prejudiced attitudes, such as racism.
It makes me feel deeply uncomfortable to think of myself as a racist — and so I don’t. However, unlike people who default to this thought pattern that turns cognitive dissonance into indignant resistance to change, I work to accept the fact that I am absolutely capable of doing, saying or thinking racist shit — it’d be hard not to, when I’ve grown up in a systemically racist culture. But I can acknowledge that without blaming myself for it, which allows me to avoid the discomfort of considering myself a racist whilst maintaining my moral fortitude.
A phrase that’s helped me a lot is “you’re not responsible for your first thought; you are responsible for your second”. That helps me to actually interrogate where something is coming from if I catch myself having a reflexive thought that shocks or disgusts me. Unfortunately, this habit isn’t one that many people have.
Thinking about things in terms of innate essences people have (even if they’re less binary than good Vs evil) is harmful even when we’re just looking at harms to ourselves. For instance, I was a super bright kid, and “the smart one” was a core pillar of my identity. However, as I entered my teens, I was so scared of losing this that I became more concerned with appearing smart than actually being smart. It felt like something I didn’t have control over, which was terrifying. But I often say that I got a hell of a lot smarter when I let myself be dumb. That’s because when I think about what a smart person actually does that makes them smart, it’s stuff like being curious about the world, self reflecting on one’s beliefs and knowledge and being open to being corrected etc… It was a lot less pressure once I stopped thinking about things in terms of immutable, innate essences
I find myself with “racist” emotions often. After 9/11 we had months of terrifying imagery, the concept that nobody is safe, and the images of a turban-beard-combo alongside it.
Not being from a very multicultural area, when I see that classic look I dont think “guy going to work” I think “maybe got a bomb?”. I actively work against it and ignore it, but it was deliberately and forcefully brainwashed into us.
Im so cheered up to see you saying “youre not responsible for your first thought, but you are for your second thought”.
People who disagree with you are not necessarily evil, stupid or uninformed.
False
True
The whole notion that a living is something that needs to be earned.
Depends where you live. But overall survival requires effort, whether that’s hunting/gathering or office work.
That they need to buy cases and cases of water in plastic bottles which they throw in the landfill instead of just drinking their perfectly good tap water.
Depending on your municipality, sure.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. I drank tap water in India and threw up 3 times before leaving the office. I’ve seen the data center water and it looked worse.
Ummm, my tap water isn’t “perfectly good.”
Ummm, my comment was addressing the millions of people whose water IS perfectly good but they buy bottled water anyway.
Well mine is actually perfectly good safety-wise, but it tastes like shit. I eventually got a reverse osmosis system so I don’t waste any bottles anymore. Instead I waste water. BUT… But, when I’m at other people’s houses, if the water tastes fine, I drink that and refuse bottles. This is the best I can do.
Plenty of people saying their tap water is not good. Just buy/install an RO for your tap ya dummy. They aren’t that expensive or difficult to install. Or some kind of brita-type filter. I’m lucky enough to have an in-fridge filter. Cold, clean water on tap. It’s the best.
Bottled water companies don’t produce water. They produce plastic bottles.
They probably don’t even produce the bottles. They probably just put the water in the bottles.
Good point. And it’s often just municipal water too. So uh… Tap water.
I live in the US, I’m not drinking the tap water lol. That being said you don’t have to buy cases of individual plastic water bottles either.
And yet millions do. Maybe there’s something actually wrong with your water, but the vast majority of municipal water in the US is perfectly fine.
If the tap is chemically fine, but still tastes awful, I get buying bottled water instead
Why would you buy bottled water? Buy a filter
A lot of people have never (knowingly) met a trans person and it shows. The moment someone uses the phrase “man in a dress” unironically, they demonstrate that they are not someone worth talking to.
While that’s reasonable, there are genuinely people out there who do not know.
My ex hit me with that exact phrase, and once I’d explained what trans people really are she changed tack straight away. Trans people do not have a legal status here, and she’s now quite determined to be a good ally.
That’s a reasonable statement.
Either a strong religious belief or the belief that success is the result of hard work.
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Diet and exercise are such big controversial things.
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Here, you dropped this
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