Smaller salaries can lead to happier lives. Lower standards of living can lead to happier lives. Spending less on food can lead to happier lives. Less education can lead to happier lives.
There's just so much valorization of poverty going on.
Plucking a head of state and his wife out of a military compound and whisking them away to NY, without losing a single vehicle or soldier's life, is the opposite of incompetence.
I am no fan of the current administration, but we just have to stop thinking about them as incompetent. They are incredibly competent, they just don't have any particular interest in helping out 99% of the population.
I'd credit the agencies and military more than I would the administration directing them. The president couldn't run a casino, I doubt he run can much of anything effectively (though he can channel the nation's id).
Tanking the economy by managing tariffs like a toddler manages a light switch doesn't speak to competence. Nor does blindly cutting staff only to rehire them.
I suppose letting ICE loose to trample civil rights speaks more to cruelty, though their continual inability to win court cases goes to incompetence.
They just don't have any particular interest in helping out 99.997% of the population. If your net worth isn't at least $100 million, then this administration isn't working for you.
In fact, there are many indications that this figure is closer to 99.999%: unless your last name is Trump, this administration is not working in your best interests.
:-( I really don't want to be negative here, but really, the essay gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately. Propositional knowledge, i.e. knowledge which is described by true/false statements, just cannot be conscious experience.
Jackson's thought experiment sets this up. Mary has lived her life entirely in a black and white room, has never seen any other colors. But she's put the time to good use: she has learned every true proposition about how the brain works, how it processes dolors, even detailed descriptions of the neural processes which give rise to the conscious experienced of color.
After this, somebody at long last brings red rose into the room. Question: has Mary learned anything? Answer, no. By hypothesis, she already knows every true proposition about her present experience of the rose.
But what she does have is a non-propositional conscious experience which she's never had before. This has to be the correct answer, because of the work of another Philosopher, Wilfred Sellars. His (in)famous essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" gives a knock-down argument that conscious experiences of things like color cannot have propositional content. They are not like sentences, they are more like rocks and trees, i.e. real objects, but they cannot be true or false, and therefore they cannot be propositions.
Alas, reading the essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is a journey that many start, but few finish :-( It is very definitely the hardest thing to understand that I ever read. But indeed, it does inescapably prove that proposition just can't be used to make conscious experiences.
Knowledge which is described by true false statements can not be conscious experience, true and the essay just says our subjective conscious experience is only a representation of the true/false statements experienced by us as a private language
Can't speak for everybody, but maybe it has something do with hundreds of thousands of us being laid off, and we're just too busy trying not to go under.
For me it's interesting because global variable declarations haven't been needed before, so why now? Also, I'm not sure `global` was reserved before, but now it seems to be.
The point now is so that if you use a `global` statement in your code, Lua will now error on misspellings of local variables when compiling, rather than defaulting to treat them as globals.
Soooo....the article claims that somebody who makes $43k a year could cough up $10-20k over 3 years?
Even in 2008, if you were making $43k a year you'd be living paycheck to paycheck. Mr. White is already working a side-hustle at a car wash to make ends meet.
I think there's still a rather high chance that he would go too the dark side.
There is a sea-change in the quality of recent college graduates. These are COVID kids entering the workforce. They all but lost an entire year of education, and nobody has made any effort to catch them back up. They are just given a pass, year after year, because, you know, COVID.
At the same time, state legislatures have been entshitifying schools. They give them less and less money, and make unreasonable demands from them. For example, I taught at a school in Indiana which didn't even send a school bus around for kids in predominately minority neighborhoods. They couldn't afford it, because the law requires them to bus kids to private schools.
Vouchers are sold as enabling educational innovation---but what really happens is that funding is drained from public schools, and the kids get sent to private schools, whose primary directive is to PREVENT kids from learning about evolution, and to PREVENT them from acquiring the critical thinking skills necessary to know that vaccines don't cause autism. Entshittification both ways.
There's just so much valorization of poverty going on.