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RoyalHenOil

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RoyalHenOil
·6 mesi fa·discuss
GOG might disappear, but your games won't.

If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.
RoyalHenOil
·7 mesi fa·discuss
90% taxes on people with only 200% of the median wealth seems awfully excessive. For someone with $16,000 in assets, this would leave them with $1,600 -- just 20% of median wealth. I strongly suspect no tax system in history has ever worked like this.

Not to mention that taxes are collected and spent at the national level, not at the global level. If you are proposing a global government that administers taxes worldwide, that is an interesting idea, but it's not exactly a place to "start" a new tax policy, given that there is no political infrastructure in place to support it and likely couldn't be for decades even if the world made a concerted effort to make it happen.
RoyalHenOil
·7 mesi fa·discuss
I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop.

You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.

You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.

In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.

Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.

For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
Even music without lyrics is distracting to me, but lyrics (if in a language I understand) definitely make it much worse.

Oddly enough, non-musical sounds (like birds or cars) don't affect me at all. I think it's the complex pattern-matching in music that is a problem for me. Of course, that's also what makes it so delightful to listen to.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
I find music distracting when I work because I listen to it too actively, but I can imagine that a subtle regular pulse or beat might help. It would beed to be quiet and plain enough that it would not dominate my attention.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
I wonder if the placebo effect is actually hope.

I wouldn't be surprised if you felt better even before you took your first dose; I can imagine you started feeling better just having a prescription in hand.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
When schools focus on only teaching the most rigorous and abstract definition of math, at the cost of teaching students how to apply math to real-world problems, the result is a lot of students who can do neither.

Likewise, when schools focus only on teaching literature by the most artistic definition, at the cost of teaching them basic day-to-day reading and writing skills, the result is a lot of students who can do neither.

Let's treat rigorous math and lofty literature like the specialized skills that they are, and offer them to students who show particular interest in those areas. For the bulk of students, let's teach them skills that will be useful and relevant.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
It is destructive to people who do not find abstract math problems inherently fun, which is (I would guess) the great majority of people. They come to the conclusion that they hate math or that they are bad at math, even though they would have grasped it better and enjoyed it had it been presented to them differently.

If your goal is teach math to the bulk of people, including those who will not go on to be mathematicians, it makes sense to tie math to something that the bulk of people can relate to. And most people DO enjoy thinking about physical objects and physical space (because we ourselves are physical beings who evolved to interact with our physical environment), so this is a really great starting point for introductory math for the average person.

If your goal is to only teach the subset of the population who prefer highly abstract puzzles, and to alienate all others, then our current methods are working fine I guess. But I don't think this is a good goal for general math education.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
We never found out who did it. It was an anonymous accusation. It could have been a stranger on the street, for all we know.

We don't even know if it was an intentional lie or if they genuinely thought I had been hurt. We never found out what they told the cops.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
What happens if the cops are called, rather than child services?

This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not).

But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months.

It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.)

What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
Priors should never, ever factor into it like this.

I was a foster child who was taken from my parents wrongly. A third party (not connected to child services) made a false accusation to the cops, who took me and turned me over to child services without any investigation. Even though I insisted nothing had happened and even though child services failed to produce any evidence (beyond aforesaid hearsay) over the course of their investigation, child services nonetheless fought extremely hard against letting me go home to my family.

In the end, a judge had to order them to return me to my family because they refused to accept that the accusation had been a lie.

In the meantime, I went through three different foster homes. I was a very difficult kid to foster (I cried and screamed a lot, demanding to go home) and so I unfortunately experienced abuse and neglect in two of the three homes. (My first foster home was particularly severe, which was strange because they were otherwise great parents to their biological kids. At least the other abusive home treated their real children equally poorly.)
RoyalHenOil
·3 anni fa·discuss
I actually strongly suspect that this is a major issue with cops. Even the most well-meaning new hire is likely to become jaded and paranoid after years of interacting primarily with criminals. They are probably more likely to assume the worst of a given stranger, even in contexts where there is no reason to suspect that stranger.