If Grok starts responding with “idk I wanna kill myself” to “what do you want for dinner”, I’m quite sorry, those are my conversations. To be clear, I’m not the one who constantly wants to die.

God damn WhistlinDiesel and his truck antics

There was an order to stop selling a particular company’s ruccola temporarily in my country a few years ago. There are merits to veganism but this isn’t one of them.

And Cuddy, but it turns out that it’s actually a weird Victorian hallucination of her

It’s on Windows too, no need to download an emulator or support Nintendo. Only need Proton or just Wine.

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.

Doesn’t seem to be in my country yet, but apparently it’s in a few other EU countries so there’s hope yet!

In the meantime I log into Facebook when I need to buy used car parts. There’s other sites but it’s nowhere near as usable as just writing “hey someone wanna sell me a 3.0 tdi (BMK/ASB) turbo pls” into the Audi group on Facebook. Such is the life of driving shitboxes anyway.

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.

I wish. Have wanted to go for a long time.

I dislike the cunt but never have I asked anyone about their opinion of her tbh

Those carried me through middle school when I had 9 or 10 hour days in 8th grade for some inexplicable reason. Luckily they’re no longer for sale. Same drink in a 0.5L can is but it sucks even more in that format somehow.

Yeah, why pretend physics are being broken when we could instead discuss the fact that we’re one step closer to having moisture farming as a profession!

I thought it was just an erection lol

GitS itself is cyberpunk, is it not?

All that’s happening now is that software engineers have less job security than McDonald’s staff. If you think that’s good for anyone but corporate shareholders, I’ve a bridge to sell you.

Ideally everyone’s jobs should be getting better, but all that’s happening is that for a bunch of people, things are rapidly getting worse. Worst part is, kids are still being told to go study computer science because “it’s the future”, knowing full well they’ll be working at a fast food chain with that degree because there’s going to be one job for every 50 students. Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will continue to make record profits though. Just with fewer pesky employees to pay.

I’d rather see the fence painter be paid more than the software engineer be laid off. I thought we were all part of the same working class. But maybe that’s just me.

DeVault has some decent opinions. This is one of them. I’m glad to see you actually read the thing in the the end, even if it was only after your initial judgement.

I just buy what’s comfy. And cheap. Most of all, I buy the first pair that fits. Who has time to worry about style, really?

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.