IS he promising universal housing and food? Big if true.

Estonians pay a nearly 50% tax on salaries, we get universal healthcare and education, but not the other stuff you listed. Would definitely be way happier if we got that. Happier than a couple of euros more post-tax salary could make me.

What did Trump say about Elon’s computer knowledge winning the election again?

Oh yeah it was definitely fucked up. But at least we didn’t end up with Harris, so the world is saved.

Oh sorry, republican voter and/or republican helper.

It’s less that anyone said he’d be better for Americans and more that everyone said don’t vote for Harris, while Trump received no criticism. Getting dem voters to stay home is an old old republican strategy and the tankies definitely helped.

'cept the entire tankieverse saying that you shouldn’t vote for Biden (later Harris) because they’re the ones causing the genocide in Gaza. Like yes, they did jack all to fix it, but we all knew Trump would be even worse. Telling that to just about any tankie resulted in “How can it get any worse than genocide? Voting for Biden/Harris means you voted for genocide” or something along those lines.

Didn’t take very long for Trump to go “lol Gaza is prime beachfront property tho, let’s get em fuckers out” after he got his throne back.

Manchin might have a (D) next to his name, but he’s always been a republican in spirit. He cheered hard for Trump. Only reason the party accepts him is that no real democrat is gonna win west Virginia and they need every seat they can get in order to have a majority

Essentially the entire system is bullshit and while the democrats are ineffective, I’m not sure they’re always ineffective on purpose.

If it were to ever exit the S&P 500, it would for sure fall pretty hard. Unfortunately, for that to happen, it would need to fall even harder first.

My cheap ass TV from 2019 is 55 inches. How much is a 55 inch monitor? Or a 65 in monitor if I want to upgrade to a bigger size in the future?

My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.

Tell me you hate your own culture without telling me you hate your own culture.

The same reason mensa is a thing. People like to toot their own horn.

Fair enough, I’ve also at one point been 13 and done a bunch of useless online IQ tests. Never studied for them, they seemed like mostly simple pattern recognition and general logic questions, which I’ve never really thought you could even study for.

To a certain extent yes, but no one can be an expert at everything. There just isn’t enough time, and expertise is really what society rewards people for at the end of the day.

Absolutely. But general intellect, as far as I can tell (and maybe my understanding of it is wrong), is what influences your ability to shift to a new field and gain expertise in that. Years alone don’t cut it. In my own field, I’ve seen software engineers who can’t program for shit, let alone make any architectural decisions after a decade - and ones that are pretty competent after 2-3 years. Now imagine you’re 10 years into a career and it starts becoming less and less relevant due to changes in society. If you’re naturally intelligent, you’re both 1) more likely to have learned more from your 10 years than others have, so more valuable for longer, and 2) more likely to be able to switch to an unrelated or semi-related career path and become useful in a shorter amount of time.

Of course it gets more complex than that because general intellect doesn’t span ALL skills. In fact, it’s more like ranges of aptitudes. I have great aptitude for STEM, pretty decent aptitude for languages, and absolutely none for arts. No drawing, no singing, etc. No matter how much practice I get and how much practice I got in my childhood. There’s just skills I won’t learn in 10 years of practice, and skills I pick up rapidly, and it’s been that way since childhood.

Hell, maybe general intellect isn’t a thing after all.

I think IQ in particular unfairly prioritizes understanding of language and logic, over artful skills and, e.g emotional intelligence (which is measured by EQ I guess). It’s a pointless measure. My main point that I wanted to make was that some people are naturally more gifted, and just faster learners, than others. There’s people from good families who have never suffered from malnutrition or emotional abuse and went to good schools, who aren’t all that smart, and people from far worse backgrounds who are geniuses. Something must be contributing to that. If not genetics, then what? At the same time, yes, people from emotionally healthy families with no financial issues, are more likely to be successful in school as well as life in general.

Wait, do people actually study for IQ tests? Why? Language makes sense, if I tried doing one in German I would fail because I barely speak it at an A2 level, if that.

I reckon general intellect does matter. In a world where your job might not exist in 5 years because lol AI, it’s best to be able to adapt fast. Specialize, yes, but one day your specialization will be useless. Best case scenario, it’s after you’ve retired.

And going back to heritability, there’s definitely some heritability there, but the problem with twin studies is that twins tend to have the same socioeconomic backgrounds too. Still, just malnutrition, environmental pollution, etc, are big enough factors that taking care of those on a nationwide scale (since we’re talking about a particular nation here), would be much more significant than eugenics. Then we get to education - again, this same particular nation has a lot of gaps in the availability of good quality education.

It’s genetic and environmental (I’d argue that societal is a subset of environment - the society you live in is part of your environment).

IQ is far from a perfect measure for intelligence, but it has a high degree of inheritability - up to 80%.

However

As soon as malnutrition comes into play, IQ is automatically severely diminished. Add in all the other environmental factors too, and - it turns out we do have a lot more we can do to increase peoples intelligence, before resorting to eugenics.

“Golden Dome”

Given that gold is a relatively soft material, I assume that this one isn’t for defense like Israel’s Iron Dome, but rather for large scale golden shower parties for Trump and friends.

They still have a police mate. The city one was dissolved on the same day the county one started operations. There was not a day without police.

Likewise, if you are basing your decision making on “what most people want to hear”, you probably are both a) not an effective strategist, and even further b) not a very good person.

Maybe a better salesman than you though. Not that I’m a salesman at all.

You’re selling a nice system, but calling it total mayhem and anarchy. Nobody’s gonna want to buy it.

You seem to forget that people have to vote for things to happen. In a democratic system, anyway. If you want people to vote for police reform, call it police reform, not police abolishment. People read headlines, not articles. Most people read that a candidate is for police abolishment, it’s an immediate nope for them. People don’t want to live in a lawless society and nobody’s gonna read into what the candidate says they mean by abolishment.

Oh no!

Hmm… If I find the envelope, yes. If someone is handing it to me as a bribe, no.

No

No

Hawaii maybe? Weather seems nice, same for the nature. Nice place to get your thoughts off murder.

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

Wikipedia seems to think they still have a police department. So the police as an institution isn’t being replaced, it’s just being reformed. It’s controlled by a different level of local government and it has different rules now, but it’s still police. If this is what you’re supporting, you’re not for abolishment of police, you’re for police reform. Which the US does heavily need. Abolishment of police means something else entirely.

So they didn’t abolish the police, they reformed it. That doesn’t disprove my statement, which in itself was not a shot at you, merely commentary on what you said.

You said

They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.

And I don’t disagree, I merely stated that police of some sort, regardless of name, is not just an emergent property, but also a necessity. I never said that the way Americans do policing is THE way to do it. I’m not American myself.

Firstly, we already live in a lawless society; see any of the actions Trump has taken since January. Its just a matter of “for whom does the law apply?”

That’s more an America problem than a “police is inherently bad” problem if you ask me.

TL;DR: Yes, I agree, policing in the US needs heavy reforms. But the moment you go around saying “abolish the police”, you’re not talking about reforms, or at least that’s not what most people are going to hear. They’re going to think they’re going to have to live in The Purge. So maybe stop referring to it that way and people will give your ideas, which are actually good, more consideration.

But countries with no history of slavery have police forces and prison systems. They are an emergent property of large social systems. Society will re-invent the role. We might as well fill the niche in a manner we want, instead of a manner we dont want.

I mean yeah, if you don’t have means of enforcing law, the law becomes pointless, might as well abolish all laws.

And I mean that MIGHT be possible, but do we really want to test what it’d be like in a lawless society where it’s probably going to be money and violence that decides who’s right, kinda like now, but with no possibility of suing the people with money or violence, you could only respond with your own violence.