A wolverine. A kamoshika.

How much effort does it take to pay your staff more? Almost none. You don’t even actually have to do anything except tell your accountant to raise their pay.

Many of us realized that the simplistic labels don’t apply. We have views on issues, some of those views are quite clear and others less so, but you can’t capture our positions in a few words.

Honestly, you just become more protective of your stuff and things you consider yours as you get older.

Isn’t that plainly false? When I was in college, and just after that, I had almost no money, so I was incredibly protective of my stuff and things I considered mine. Later my income went up, so I didn’t need to worry about it as much. Surely many other people have had similar experiences.

You’re bringing up a good point. People who say we’ll become more “conservative” are usually equivocating on the meaning of the word. It’s not like we’re going to wake up tomorrow and decide that global warming is a hoax, or that we should stop eating cats and dogs. Of course we’ll keep doing those things.

Challenge presented. Who has courage to accept? We shall see.

Far.

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For the most part? That’s an empirical claim. Any evidence? My gut disagrees with you, but my gut also has no evidence.

I might help people because it makes me feel good, sure. But I might also do it because those are my values, long since established, and I try to live by said values. So it’s about what following a self-imposed expectation, not about getting something. For some people, some of the time.

Similarly, the argument that “being selfless is selfish” is not useful and provably false. Just go ask people, and they’ll tell you why they did things and how they felt. Then you have to argue that many of them are either lying or mistaken, which doesn’t seem like a winnable argument.

I’m not a professional code monkey although I’ve done a fair amount of coding, and every time I tried to do parsing myself, I later regretted it.

But telling people that they’re doing it wrong is rarely met with positivity. :-)

I think there’s an element of responsibility that some people feel when they respond. If you’re asking for a very niche solution that is likely to create other problems in the future, should anyone else look at your code or refactor it or rely on it, or should you forget how it works, perhaps people are going to be less inclined in helping you craft it.

If you still want to craft it, that’s okay, but you have to expect that some real percent of the answers are going to be those folk who know what the tried and true solution is, often because they’ve lived through the reality that you’re attempting to create and they’ve dealt with the aftermath of doing it special and different.

I feel like you’re ignoring a lot of background, but let’s run with your argument. Let’s assume that we have to have some elected politicians and some appointed or elected bureaucrats, and either we should try to have a capitalist system or a communist system of some kind.

Let’s try to keep things as equal as possible, knowing that we really can’t, but just for the sake of argument. Which system is more likely to be corrupted? Remember, the express goal of capitalism is to throw wealth at the capitalists. If the regular person gets screwed, that’s not corruption, that’s a feature of the system… Oh, wait a second, I guess we already have an answer to our hypothetical, don’t we.

But you did raise a good point. Any government, if it’s to function somewhat reasonably, needs to be one that has a lot of transparency, oversight, and accountability. If you don’t have those, it doesn’t matter how you start off because it’s going to end badly. So I agree with you, we shouldn’t be trusting politicians.

Disneyland is so creepy and depressing.

When the mice eat it, you gotta change the roll out for a new one. That’s my policy. Also, the cardboard hurts; don’t use it.

I don’t know what culture you live in, but I think your description of what’s embraced by modern culture is at odds with what we see on TV, on Netflix, on YouTube, in magazines, in books, talked about by people everyday.

What is it specifically that you wish you could find that’s not available, that you feel ought to be appropriate but isn’t, somehow? I’m struggling to figure this one out.

Finding out people’s salaries is a good thing. It’s how you prevent your bosses from screwing everyone over. Of course that information might be sensitive so don’t go around inquiring willy nilly, but it’s definitely a topic that you can and should sometimes visit.

(I know this is a s*** post so it’s all good but some people don’t realize the value in discussing salaries, and they think it’s something that has to be super secret when that only hurts you, the employee.)

Nobody is attacking your father here. At least I hope they aren’t. My questions were about your knowledge and beliefs.

If I told you that your assumptions about my background or wrong, and if I told you that I wasn’t confused, what would you say?

… It’s kind of sad, because you could have been part of an interesting discussion, but you got careless and decided that you would go into attack mode to protect someone who wasn’t being attacked from … I have no idea what you think you were protecting them from. Clearly they were trying to get a sense of why people have various intuitions, and presumably they are willing to be somewhat introspective about the things they grew up believing, too.

People often make bad judgments based on incomplete information. As you know, it’s a sad fact that some parents do horrible things to their children. If those children leave, never come back, and never send money, good.