booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Teeth can need work from physical trauma, too. Getting hit in the head while hunting or fighting or just hiking might cause a cracked tooth, which can be deadly in the absence of dental care. Or just while eating, sometimes a stray rock or bone fragment or shell might cause an issue.

Lots of other species can regrow teeth in adulthood, even a handful of other mammals. All sorts of animals can have tooth problems in the wild, so I wouldn't assume that prehistoric humans were exempt from that general danger.

The sign of a successful ad campaign is when the campaign itself gets satirized to continue to build on brand awareness.

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

What, a ghost choked you in Switzerland?

Anakin Skywalker was able to build this in a desert with scraps!

They've got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola's fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder's indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They've had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors' cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn't actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They've gone after India's Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn't led to anything actually uncovered. India's security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani's founder is close to India's Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn't enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn't really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don't have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

Enshittification isn't always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn't because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

At this price point, he can hit.

one that eats sulfur and excretes iron, and one that eats iron and excretes sulfur

Thermodynamically, how could these two cycles sustain metabolism? Were there other processes/species in the mix to introduce chemical compounds that had more energy contained within?

I think a big part of the problem is that quality of life is correlated with longevity. Some people start having health issues in their 40s and die in their 60s. Others start having health issues in their 70s and die in their 80s.

And so the question becomes whether maximizing high quality years adds to the low quality years, or not. And so the question might not be about extending life itself, but about extending healthy years.

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.

But some who has earned a penny in interest has spent time as both worker and owner.

I'm not talking about people who only make a small amount of interest or investment return over the course of their lifetimes. I'm talking about people who are already unambiguously middle class (between 25th and 75th percentile incomes), who end up relying on investment income to provide most of their retirement expenses.

I'm talking about people with half million dollar 401(k)s that return hundreds of thousands over the course of a retirement. Some of it is principal but most of it is gains/return/interest.

Basically if you're able to retire in America, you're an "owner" for those decades. Yes, there are people in America who can't afford to retire, but most people in the middle class can.

Also, its not the conventional way. You 100% made that up and what you're describing is petite bougouise.

Defining the middle class as middle incomes is pretty conventional. I think you've misunderstood my description of the middle class (people who fit the definition generally have income from both work and from investment) as a definition.

So let me be perfectly clear:

1. The American middle class, defined as those with middle incomes, earns significant amounts of money from both wages/salaries for their work and on return on their investments, especially in their primary home (with a 60+% homeownership rate) and retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs, 403(b)s, even multi employer or government pension funds that are paid for through investment in publicly traded securities).
2. The worker versus owner definition you proposed near the top of this thread is insufficient to describe class, because of the large, large number of people who rely on both and could not support their existing lifestyles without both.

And hey, I was gonna let it go but it's clear your autocorrect has now adopted it as a new word it will happily let you spell wrong repeatedly: it's spelled petit bourgeois, or petit bourgeoisie for plural.

There's also really tight coordination between sight and proprioception, as our visual processing seamlessly stitches together visual information into a three dimensional model of reality, even if we're moving while taking in that visual information, through stereoscopic signals from two eyes.

The median net worth of a 65-year-old in the United States is about $390k, so the income it produces is generally a modest supplement to social security. At the 75th percentile, which is also generally considered middle class, net worth is about $1.1 million and easily enough to provide a comfortable retirement lifestyle.

The idea that someone is middle class because they’ve earned a penny in bank interest is absurd.

No, the idea is that the middle class (defined in the conventional way) spends time in both the "worker" category and the "owner" category.

The ordinary middle class pathway is to work for 30-50 years and then retire on their savings (or a defined contribution retirement plan) or to rely on a defined benefit pension fund that is itself invested in securities, aka capital. This is the baseline expectation of retirement planning for the middle class in the U.S.: the investments/savings provide the cash to live on, while ownership of the primary residence shields the retiree from certain housing costs, or can provide cash flow through a reverse mortgage.

Through the power of compounding, a 40+ year savings plan generally increases its value over time so that the vast majority of the value comes from return on investment rather than invested principal.

If you want specific calculations, we can do that to show that the typical middle class path takes in more than "a very small amount" in their retirement savings/investments.

Or are you planning on coming back with a load of caveats

These details are obvious from my first comment in this thread, that the middle class in the United States works its way into an "ownership class" in time for retirement, through savings/investment. That's exactly what I meant in that comment, and spelling it out makes it pretty clear what I meant at that time, and that I haven't shifted my position in this thread.

Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.

I'm specifically pointing out the problem with the "how they earn income" definition, that it seemingly assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive, to try to argue that there's no such thing as a middle class They're not. Most people who are in what most would recognize as "middle class" under the traditional definition get income through both methods, especially over the course of their lifetimes.

So even under that definition, which attempts to pretend there isn't a middle class, there is still a middle class: those who have income through both methods, or even hybrid methods (ownership of an actively managed business that allows them to earn money while working but wouldn't earn money without their own labor).

Middle class generally means people whose incomes are in the middle half (ranging from 40th to 60th percentile to the 20th to 80th).

If you want to pull out your own new definition based on whether their income comes from work or from return on investments, then I'd still point out there's a large number of people who do both, especially when compared across the entire life cycle including retirement. So if you insist on this alternative definition, you still have to account for the big chunk of the population who do both.

Are they working alone, or do you envision groups who can stop, collaborate, and listen?

Dammit for the last time you can't wear an NBA jersey and shorts here, this is a doctor's office.

If you work for your money, you're part of the struggle. If you own for your money, you're part of the problem.

But the middle class is those who are able to leverage working for their money to accumulate capital to where they can live off of the proceeds of that owned capital. If you're able to retire, you eventually become part of the ownership class.

There is a shrinking middle class but the actual people in it are those who split their adult lives into eventually retiring on their wealth, accumulated through working.

I agree. Stated another way, imagine the trolley is headed towards 5 people, and you have the power to pull the lever to divert it to a path where there are no people. Even if someone tied those 5 to the tracks with the intent to kill, your failure to save their lives (at no additional cost to others) is widely regarded by most systems of ethics/morality as a moral failing. Yes, the person who tied the tracks bears blame, but so does the person who could've easily saved them but chose to let them die.