91–100 of 105 posts
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Scratch the surface, and people are the same. There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately. But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren'…
I wish at least to be protected by the army in some disastrous circumstances, I think. Pathetic or not.
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A life of indolence does not lead to any of those things. We simply are not built that way. We were built to struggle.
But for what end? "Productivity" for the sake of what? Work for the sake of work is worthless.
Peoples' wants are unbounded.
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I just read a book on Washington and they were calling him Your Excellency a lot. Did he reject this later, or did you mean this more rhetorically?
he rejected it from the beginning. https://www.heritage.org/commentary/the-man-who-would-not-be... After the [revolutionary] war, there were calls for Washington to claim formal political power. Indeed, seven months after the victory at Yorktown, one of his officers suggested what many thought only reasonable in the context of the 18th century: that America should establish a monarchy and that Washington should becom…
We owe a lot to him.
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Could you give us a concrete example of what you are referring to?
There are probably many ways to slice or unpack the topic, and it can probably be approached at least partially from many different perspectives in different disciplines, but it may be captured reasonably well under the study of social dynamics. I will leave specific scenarios to the imagination, experience, or history, however, but I did cite at least one example in the original comment.
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Coke is the biggest spender - what about their product do we not know about?
You know about them because of their advertising.
I know about jarritos too and don’t recall having seen any ads for them.
If ads were useful and benefited my life, I’d watch them on purpose instead of them being forced on me.
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I just read a book on Washington and they were calling him Your Excellency a lot. Did he reject this later, or did you mean this more rhetorically?
he rejected it from the beginning. https://www.heritage.org/commentary/the-man-who-would-not-be... After the [revolutionary] war, there were calls for Washington to claim formal political power. Indeed, seven months after the victory at Yorktown, one of his officers suggested what many thought only reasonable in the context of the 18th century: that America should establish a monarchy and that Washington should becom…
Frustrating to have such an authoritative sounding correction be wrong!
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Somewhat related thought: World power consumption is around 20 TW (of which around 3 TW electricity), that's very roughly 2 kW per person (obviously not equally distributed). A human consumes around 8600 kJ of energy in their food per day, or roughly 100 W (search for "basal metabolic rate"). Most of that is needed just to keep the body running, but around a quarter or so can be converted to physical work: an average…
It took me a reread to realize what you were saying. If 745 is one horsepower, is 25 W one personpower?
And the point is that we use some 2000 W, so have the equivalent of 26.6 people working for us nonstop (requiring 80 people total on 7 day a week shift work).
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You know about them because of their advertising.
When I see an ostrich chasing a limo driver and a liberty mutual jingle plays, I’m not being given any useful information. I know about jarritos too and don’t recall having seen any ads for them. If ads were useful and benefited my life, I’d watch them on purpose instead of them being forced on me.
You remember Liberty Mutual.
> them being forced on me
That's the price you pay for "free" streaming.
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Socialist products never seem to be competitive in the world market. Nobody wanted to buy Soviet cars outside of the USSR, for example.
People seem to like Medicaid just fine though