There are actually five people in the picture.

If you know, you know.

I sit at home and when visiting someone as a guest. No mess, no cover positioning arguments, everyone’s happy for a meager cost of me potentially forgetting that this was supposed to be a quick in’n’out and writing this comment instead of rejoining the boring dystopia outside.

Don’t compare someone’s highlight reel to your behind the scenes.

I once convinced someone that they are actually doing a great job by sharing my struggles and showing that they are not an impostor. They now outshine me and will go to even greater heights.

And while that one episode of dealing with burnout and impostor syndrome is a drop in the ocean of their persistence, it’s a great illustration to how misleading comparison to others is.

PS: Also, if you have ADHD, you’re nearsighted in time. That doesn’t only mean “you can’t plan well”, it means “your life looks like a hazy blob, where others see a complex scenery”. And that can be devastating when doing a comparison. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others.

This statement made a lot of people unreasonably angry.

“European maritime empires”

You’re welcome.

That’s not what you’re saying at all, though. You said:

A dead nazi achieves a lot more than a living one.

What a perfectly fascist way of thinking.

Thorium reactors have a cleverly dumb failsafe. If reactor control fails, there’s a plug that melts and drains the contents into a container that’s not fit for runoff neutron generation.

That’s an example of a failsafe that fits its purpose. It’s still possible to fuck it up, but it would take a lot of effort to do so.

And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.

Safety features should work if everything else fails. Their failure mode can’t be “fuck it, it didn’t work”. Which is directly opposite to the failure mode of a subscription based service.

The don’t and they do.

Some myths are just clingier than a tick embedded in a hair follicle.

di(

If you think inflation is bad, see what deflation does to economies.

Wealth itself is a stronger predictor for future wealth than individual performance.

That quote of mine doesn’t talk about success, nor wealth itself for that matter. You’re ignoring everything in the message to argue against a statement that was never made in the first place.

Please reflect on the fact that until you joined the discussion, we didn’t talk about equating success to luck.

Afterwards, you will likely notice that your jackpot argument reinforces mine.

Millionaires often worked for their money. Billionaires often worked for their first millions too. Problem is, difference between a billion and a million is about a billion.

On the other side of the argument, the amount of people that work harder and smarter than any given billionaire and have nothing is simply staggering. If it wasn’t down to luck, they’d all be billionaires.

So yeah, it is dumb luck. Randomness is not uniform, and someone ends up being close to the time and place of a local spike.

I stand corrected. And somewhat dejected.

Portugal? IIRC they’ve been quite resistant to right-wing populism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

“Superpredator” is not a scientific term. It was used as an “overconsumer” in one publication, as far as I can find, but that meaning doesn’t fit the narrative of your copypasta.
And we definitely don’t maintain domestication of other predators through our predatory ability. On the contrary, domestication and cultivation of other species is what allows us to domesticate carnivores.

We are omnivorous vindictive social apes. Don’t take that description lightly.

We also have two real superpowers:

• We’re the only animal on the planet that can scale stable social groups into millions while being individually complex. Some glitch of ours broke cranial limitations of the group size that other primates adhere to.
• We are the only animal to have developed languages with complex grammars. While other animals can exhibit complex signaling systems, and possibly learn grammars we develop, we effortlessly develop and learn grammars that allow us to express novel thoughts without waiting for evolution. Hell, our children develop throwaway languages as a side-effect of playing with each other.

Everything else is a consequence.

PS: Blue-green algae would like a word about that “extinction event” claim. PPS: Leave hydrogen unattended for long enough, and it will start arguing on the internet.

They are left to the fascism, that they equate everyone who doesn’t agree with them, in a very special way - both are ultra right, but tankies are on the left of a spectrum orthogonal to the one the rest of us usually employ.