Both men and women fundamentally misunderstand both themselves and each other, I think.
There's big fat men who aren't rich who get with hot girls and even marry them (and have long happy marriages with them). There's big fat women who get with successful men and even marry them (and have long happy marriages with them).
According to the prevailing theories, these things simply shouldn't be possible, but they do happen. Because while undoubtedly there's a lot of tangible stuff in relationships such as looks and wealth, there's a lot intangible stuff as well.
As a counterpoint to the big fat men and women above, consider Hollywood movie stars and starlets, who have world class looks and overwhelming amounts of money, and even some intangibles like charisma, but often can't keep a relationship together.
There's big fat men who aren't rich who get with hot girls and even marry them (and have long happy marriages with them). There's big fat women who get with successful men and even marry them (and have long happy marriages with them).
According to the prevailing theories, these things simply shouldn't be possible, but they do happen. Because while undoubtedly there's a lot of tangible stuff in relationships such as looks and wealth, there's a lot intangible stuff as well.
As a counterpoint to the big fat men and women above, consider Hollywood movie stars and starlets, who have world class looks and overwhelming amounts of money, and even some intangibles like charisma, but often can't keep a relationship together.
Calling construction an upgrade doesn't mean it doesn't use material. Especially if the upgrade requires fundamental reconstruction, so for example tearing up all the old rail lines on gravel and timbers and replacing them with a much higher quality steel on a cement foundation (which admittedly may not be required, but for things like the northern manitoba route I spoke of you'd basically need to do that to even get the trains running at normal speed, let alone high speed).
Coal almost exclusively comes from an era hundreds of millions of years ago called the carboniferous period before any organisms learned to digest cellulose. After that period, wood that would just sit there and sink into coal beds instead gets converted back into CO2 by fungi.
I mentioned (though and it was an edit so you may have missed it) that you can't do high speed rail on normal rail infrastructure and so you'd need a lot more material. It'd need to be stable enough to handle the loads of high speed rail as well as I'm sure a number of other factors you don't need to consider with standard rail. If it was that easy they'd just pop a new train on the old tracks more or less.
Typically I'm a free market guy, but certain things sort of need to be set up as common goods, and if they aren't then you're just getting crony capitalism where the state steals people's money at the barrel of a gun, builds a thing using the power of government to steamroll people who own the land, then hands it to their friends. Even if someone else had billions of dollars to build something similar they can't because they can't steamroll through all the stuff you would have needed.
Even if you use renewable energy (and let's pick a version like hydroelectric energy that we know can run for centuries once built), you have to consider the total environmental cost of building and maintaining massive rail lines.
In 2009 I did a study showing that if you used 30% of all renewable and nuclear energy on earth at that time you could replace the cement industry's use of fossil fuels with electric. The thing I didn't notice at the time is that the creation of cement inherently releases CO2 even if no fossil fuels are burned. In the year since, I've come to realize that limestone is in fact the only real geological term carbon sink, and stuff like trees don't hold carbon for very long in geological timeframes.
In the same study, I showed you could replace hydrocarbons as an energy source in producing steel if you used another 30% of all renewable and nuclear energy on earth at the time. The thing I didn't realize at the time is you can't create steel without coal because steel is iron and carbon, and the carbon comes from a derivative of coal.
In both cases, fossil fuels are also required to gather the raw materials. Mining is a fossil fuel intensive operation. Some people might counter with "but look at this mine that's fully electric!", but I'm aware of such mines and usually they aren't telling you about the fossil fuels they use. One mine I'm aware of claims to be "fully electric" but burns a city worth of propane every day in the winter to heat their mine air. It also conveniently leaves out the ancillary fossil fuel use since you don't deliver 30T rock trucks (or other supplies) hundreds of kilometers into the middle of nowhere with Tesla transports.
When you're talking about tens of thousands of kilometers of rail, the amount of steel and cement required are almost beyond human comprehension.
I forgot to mention that a high-speed rail system needs to have a much different level of workmanship compared to a regular rail. For example there are rail systems up in Northern manitoba, but those trains barely move, and so if you wanted to turn those into High-Speed rail you'd have to create a powerful foundation which would likely be made out of steel and concrete along with the rails themselves.
Even if you use renewable energy (and let's pick a version like hydroelectric energy that we know can run for centuries once built), you have to consider the total environmental cost of building and maintaining massive rail lines.
In 2009 I did a study showing that if you used 30% of all renewable and nuclear energy on earth at that time you could replace the cement industry's use of fossil fuels with electric. The thing I didn't notice at the time is that the creation of cement inherently releases CO2 even if no fossil fuels are burned. In the year since, I've come to realize that limestone is in fact the only real geological term carbon sink, and stuff like trees don't hold carbon for very long in geological timeframes.
In the same study, I showed you could replace hydrocarbons as an energy source in producing steel if you used another 30% of all renewable and nuclear energy on earth at the time. The thing I didn't realize at the time is you can't create steel without coal because steel is iron and carbon, and the carbon comes from a derivative of coal.
In both cases, fossil fuels are also required to gather the raw materials. Mining is a fossil fuel intensive operation. Some people might counter with "but look at this mine that's fully electric!", but I'm aware of such mines and usually they aren't telling you about the fossil fuels they use. One mine I'm aware of claims to be "fully electric" but burns a city worth of propane every day in the winter to heat their mine air. It also conveniently leaves out the ancillary fossil fuel use since you don't deliver 30T rock trucks (or other supplies) hundreds of kilometers into the middle of nowhere with Tesla transports.
When you're talking about tens of thousands of kilometers of rail, the amount of steel and cement required are almost beyond human comprehension.
I forgot to mention that a high-speed rail system needs to have a much different level of workmanship compared to a regular rail. For example there are rail systems up in Northern manitoba, but those trains barely move, and so if you wanted to turn those into High-Speed rail you'd have to create a powerful foundation which would likely be made out of steel and concrete along with the rails themselves.
"Hello Mr. Grizzly bear, please let me elucidate my many logical reasons you should not try to eat me."
I've run a number of open source projects over the years.
Let me tell you how I organized stuff with the other contributors: I didn't. There were no other contributors. My projects weren't popular, and it's possible I'm the only one who used them.
There are a lot of people who have created projects like mine. And if we're being honest, part of the reason is I'm not very talented as a developer and my project didn't really scratch an itch people had, and I didn't put much work into advertising them.
So if someone else was more talented, produced a project people liked, and put the work into building their audience, why wouldn't that person whose talent, judgement, and hard work created the thing get to choose how the project is run? It's a sort of entitlement thinking that I should have a say in how something I couldn't create and didn't create should be run -- I had an equal chance to anyone else to create something cool and I blew it.
That isn't to say that every open source project shall or should be run like a dictatorship. Rather, it's to say that people who want to swoop in and implement "democratic control" of something after the fact are being unreasonable.
Let me tell you how I organized stuff with the other contributors: I didn't. There were no other contributors. My projects weren't popular, and it's possible I'm the only one who used them.
There are a lot of people who have created projects like mine. And if we're being honest, part of the reason is I'm not very talented as a developer and my project didn't really scratch an itch people had, and I didn't put much work into advertising them.
So if someone else was more talented, produced a project people liked, and put the work into building their audience, why wouldn't that person whose talent, judgement, and hard work created the thing get to choose how the project is run? It's a sort of entitlement thinking that I should have a say in how something I couldn't create and didn't create should be run -- I had an equal chance to anyone else to create something cool and I blew it.
That isn't to say that every open source project shall or should be run like a dictatorship. Rather, it's to say that people who want to swoop in and implement "democratic control" of something after the fact are being unreasonable.
One of the very long term effects of the Northern European style nuclear family structure where the eldest son isn't guaranteed to get the inheritance is that people are constantly moving and so you're going to have the least amount of inbreeding possible for a population. To make it and become worthy of starting a nuclear family, men will leave their households, their neighborhoods, their cities, their provinces, even their countries, and start up new families, and so there's the highest likelihood for two people who start a nuclear family to be unrelated.
The worst family structure for inbreeding would be endogenous clan structure (multi family household and cousin marriage is allowed), since you're going to be part of a family that has been there for a long time and you'll be interacting with other families who have been there a long time. This would include orthodox Jewish civilization as well as Muslim civilization. Inbreeding starts immediately, and by design. Royalty is similar to this as well.
The next worst would be exogenous clan structure (multi family household and cousin marriage is not allowed) since you would be trying not to marry your cousins, but you'd still be tied to the local geography and so a few generations down the line you'd be mixing bloodlines whether you like it or not.
One important thing is that the world today only tends to think about one goal at a time, and the world isn't so simple. Inbreeding is one thing to be aware of, as well as levels of innovation and general economic prosperity (people point out the higher inherent wealth in sharing a household, but by staying where family is instead of going where opportunity lives, overall family wealth will improve), societal stability and others.
The worst family structure for inbreeding would be endogenous clan structure (multi family household and cousin marriage is allowed), since you're going to be part of a family that has been there for a long time and you'll be interacting with other families who have been there a long time. This would include orthodox Jewish civilization as well as Muslim civilization. Inbreeding starts immediately, and by design. Royalty is similar to this as well.
The next worst would be exogenous clan structure (multi family household and cousin marriage is not allowed) since you would be trying not to marry your cousins, but you'd still be tied to the local geography and so a few generations down the line you'd be mixing bloodlines whether you like it or not.
One important thing is that the world today only tends to think about one goal at a time, and the world isn't so simple. Inbreeding is one thing to be aware of, as well as levels of innovation and general economic prosperity (people point out the higher inherent wealth in sharing a household, but by staying where family is instead of going where opportunity lives, overall family wealth will improve), societal stability and others.
It took me a while to realize what you meant and when it hit I laughed out loud and confused everyone.
It's definitely the anthropologic fallacy at work, and it's much easier to anthropomorphize an ai when it can form a sentence, which is typically a skill we associate with humanity and human intelligence.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/02/27/in-dozens-of-minnesota-schools-entire-classes-are-failing-to-meet-minimum-state-standards/
High school students in a lot of these cities seem to "graduate" like v-tubers.
High school students in a lot of these cities seem to "graduate" like v-tubers.
I might be wrong, but based on the first chapter, Tolkien writes way longer chapters than many authors so far. Pretty sure it was over an hour to read that chapter out loud.
The thing is, whether you have a multi-generational home is extremely cultural, and so you have lots of different cultures that do that but many don't.
One of the reasons that many cultures have the multi-generational home is that there are obviously benefits to it, including being able to aggregate wealth, but it also has some negative sides such as aggregating a lot of power in the hands of whichever family member happens to own the house, a lack of flexibility since individuals are tied to their extended family.
Here's my favorite video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFFwhbVqeU
One of the reasons that many cultures have the multi-generational home is that there are obviously benefits to it, including being able to aggregate wealth, but it also has some negative sides such as aggregating a lot of power in the hands of whichever family member happens to own the house, a lack of flexibility since individuals are tied to their extended family.
Here's my favorite video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFFwhbVqeU
Quite a while back I just started referring to the dollar store as the dollars store, because anything that you buy is going to be several dollars.
In the 1990s, almost every little girl that you talk to wanted to become a marine biologist.
Which makes it really funny that those girls are now grown up and they hate fish so much that men showing fish in profile pictures on dating sites is banned.
Which makes it really funny that those girls are now grown up and they hate fish so much that men showing fish in profile pictures on dating sites is banned.
https://youtu.be/WuJs22fRlQk
"Why do so many dumb stupid idiots think things are getting worse when everything is so clearly getting better?"
"Why do so many dumb stupid idiots think things are getting worse when everything is so clearly getting better?"
"but these guys say they're the resistance against the horrible, terrible normal people who just want to be left alone! I sided with them like I was supposed to!"
I figured I would illegally immigrate and vote in the federal election for Trump. I've heard Democrats love it when illegal immigrants vote.