Our western culture of individualism is older than capitalism. Much older. It stems from our agricultural and pastoral modes of production. Grains like wheat as well as livestock like sheep, goats, and cattle are highly amenable to work by an individual farmer or shepherd or rancher. Wheat is sown in ploughed fields that have been worked by oxen or horses.

Compare with a different grain like rice which must be transplanted into flooded fields by large groups of people or crops like potatoes or yams which must be planted and dug up individually by mass labour.

The structure of individualism or collectivism is in the roots of our cultures going back thousands of years. So rather than capitalism giving rise to individualism I think the opposite is the case.

Yes and we want more steak and fewer Big Macs. Yet people are out there still buying Big Macs. Is it because Big Macs are better than steak? Or is something else going on?

Admittedly it’s very difficult if you want to maintain consistency but the benefits are enormous!

Persist everything to disk in real time. When the signal hits exit immediately.

Some kinds of black dyes are actually just really dark brown. When they start to fade they turn lighter which reveals the brown colour. There’s no way a poop stain transferred to your sock in the laundry. The enzymes in laundry detergent break that stuff down and keep it suspended in the water.

Just be glad your brother isn’t a pigeon or other similar sized bird. A pelican can and will swallow smaller birds whole!

Even something very simple like a coffee shop is difficult to run as a co-op.

Yes, if you have a few friends who are all passionate about coffee it’s possible for you all to get loans / mortgages to pool together enough money to buy/lease a small commercial property and open a coffee shop together. The only really significant pieces of equipment are the espresso machine and coffee grinder, both of which can be bought used for a few thousand dollars.

But here comes the issue: suppose it’s you and 4 friends who started the coffee co-op with $200k each (total $1 million) to buy the real estate and all of the furniture and machinery. Now the 5 of you work in the coffee shop and it starts growing more successful so that you need to hire more baristas (or pastry chefs or sandwich artists) to work there. How many baristas can you find who can afford to put up $200k to buy into a share of the co-op?

Or even more fundamentally: what if 2 out of the starting 5 decide that working in a coffee shop is too exhausting and they don’t want to do it anymore so they quit? Now the other 3 need to put together a total of $400k to buy them out? Or do you have a clause in the contract which says they forfeit their investment if they quit? Now I dunno about you, but as much as I love using my espresso machine I would never want to enter a contract like that! I’d much rather keep my $200k in the bank and work as a regular employee barista knowing I could quit any time I want.

They don’t have access to capital (means of production). Consider the following scenario:

All of the employees at a car manufacturing plant are sick of being paid a fraction of the total sale price of the cars they make. They decide, in solidarity, to quit en masse and start a worker co-op car plant instead so that they can all enjoy sharing 100% of the profits themselves.

So they quit. Now what? Well, knowledge isn’t an issue because they already knew how to operate all the machines in a car plant. The problem is that they don’t have the money (or the land) to build a new car plant. We’re talking billions of dollars and a huge piece of land which ideally should be located on a railroad line so that parts (which are very large and heavy) can be delivered affordably by rail.

So where are they gonna get the money? Not from private investors, of course, since that nixes the worker only profit sharing arrangement. Not from banks either because these workers, while highly knowledgeable and motivated, don’t have any collateral to put up for the bank loans. The banks do not want to be in the position of repossessing a bunch of specialized manufacturing equipment and trying to resell it at a loss.

The common response to this is: the government. But think about that. Do you want your government giving billions of dollars to a few hundred people so they can start a car plant and then keep all the profits?

Wow. I really love the colour rendition in this one. Portra 400 and the 50 Summicron make an excellent combo. Tack sharp too. Cute kitty!

Lovely composition. So peaceful!

Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!

There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.

Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.

Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.

That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?

No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.

Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.

Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.

That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.

What you’re describing is more like sympathy.

You can’t develop empathy until you break out of the filter bubble. To understand a person you first need to know what their life is like, what motivates them, what values they hold.

Everything I’ve seen tells me that the opacity runs in both directions. Empathizing with someone who holds radically different, diametrically opposed values to your own is very difficult.

This video is very long and entertaining and there’s a lot of evidence of the effort he put into it. The one real criticism I have is that it seems like he didn’t do a lot of research on what foods work well with freeze drying, preferring to do his own experiments and getting gnarly results on basically everything that isn’t already a well-known freeze dried product.

Personally I think one of the most useful things to freeze dry would be fresh, home grown herbs. Another big one is homemade soups and stocks.

As for the usefulness of freeze dried food? The big one he missed is camping and hiking. Frozen foods just aren’t going to cut it when you’re away from electricity for a week or more. You need lightweight non perishable food and for that nothing beats freeze dried. Just need to get some water from a lake or river!

Vaginal birth isn’t always excruciatingly painful. It depends on the mother’s body type and health but it can also be improved with a proper birth position. Humans weren’t evolved to give birth laying on our back like in the movies, we were meant to give birth in a squatting position.

Some women have even claimed that their vaginal birth was intensely pleasurable, causing them to achieve orgasm. Of course no one wants to hear this, as clashes with all sorts of taboos against women’s sexuality and giving birth in general!

I struggled a lot with watering early on! Overgrown plants in small pots have almost no water capacity in the soil. Plants you buy from the nursery are frequently overgrown for their containers and need to be transplanted relatively soon after you bring them home.

Also tricky is that if you put a plant in too large of a pot then the water capacity of the soil will be too high and then the plant can come down with root rot!

Now I’ve gotten used to checking the soil, especially at the bottom of the pot, for dryness and then watering as needed. It also depends on the plant species (plants can vary all the way from desert-loving dry species to fully aquatic plants)!

That was an example that doesn’t really depend on there being exactly 2 competitors. If there are 20 competitors and they’re all spending a lot of money on advertising then they’re all producing a net negative

I mean there’s probably some small amount of money they could spend on advertising that would be a net positive because it would inform the public of the existence of their product. But beyond that, they’ve moved from informing the public into trying to convince the public to buy their product. There’s simply no limit to the amount of money you can spend trying to convince somebody to buy something and no limit your competitors can spend to convince them not to!