This is one possible answer to the Fermi paradox.

I think a tendency for intelligent life to destroy itself would make it more rare than it already is, but doesn’t do enough to account for the unlikelihood of never encountering it. Once a species is spread across more than one planet, I would think it would be very unlikely for an extinction event to wipe all of it out before some survivors can bounce back. So all you would need is one or more civilizations beating the odds up to that point to become basically unstoppable.

Also, intelligent life might frequently kill itself off, but that doesn’t mean intelligence is a disadvantage to long term survival. The vast majority of unintelligent species also go extinct. It’s more that reaching stability is quite hard, with or without intelligence.

Budgets are useful tools, but they really should be temporary. If you have a major change in income or expenses, it can warrant monitoring for a while. But once you’ve reached a point of financial stability, you will know what you can afford already. Setting up auto pay on regular bills, putting balance alerts on your accounts, and just acting your wage makes it pretty easy.

But honestly, what you can afford is just a hard cap on what you should be spending. You should be living below your means already so you can build up investments to retire on. Then unexpected expenses are easily handled by scratching something off your emergency fund. And windfalls mean you can reach your financial independence goals that much faster. Until then, you don’t have to live as if you’re destitute, but just be frugal.

Seriously, the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck is horrifying. If you are one of them, you should be alarmed. Things aren’t going to get cheaper, and wages are going to struggle to keep up. And at a certain point, you won’t be able to work. So you have to remember that your future self is a dependent for your current self.

If you haven’t planned much, here’s a helpful priority pipeline for how to work towards financial security. I stole it from one of the finance subreddits. It assumes you’re in the US for the tax-privileged efficiency stuff, but the gist is just keep putting your money in the most important/efficient buckets until they’re full, then move on to the next.

My friends’ discord has pinned messages for things like mod lists and server connections that we would still use years later. More public groups for things like fan communities probably have plenty of rules and instructions that are displayed to new users. They could be linked as a shared file to download, but having it easily viewable in-client is a legitimate use case.

Isn’t that good though? I also have a fairly high income and live in a high income country. Compared to people in poorer countries, we would be the upper class living very charmed lives. In fact, the US poverty line is at $15,000 in annual income, or just over $40 a day. But someone making this much would be richer than 83% of the world. People in less privileged countries should have better access to well-paying jobs to help mitigate the disparity.

That doesn’t get him off the hook financially though. If the mother put his name on the birth certificate, he’d probably have to take a test to prove he’s not the biological father. And if he is, tough.

I looked into it more and realized I misunderstood how it worked. You’re right, a mother can add a man’s name to the birth certificate without his consent, and then the burden of proof is on him to prove that he is not the father, which typically means a paternity test. Obviously that is unfair. I think the better solution is to require the father’s consent before adding their name in the first place, or else making it tentative until it is “ratified” by his consent (or a court order in either case). And only in special situations like the father being dead or unreachable would it resolve without him.

This is why I support legal paternal surrender. As long as women have access to abortions (legal, easy, free), men should have the financial equivalent. That’s only fair.

Well, women don’t always have access to safe abortions, and regardless I don’t think this needs to be tied to that. I think this shouldn’t be treated differently between genders. Either parent should be able to surrender legal responsibility for the child, and if both do so then the child is surrendered to the state. If only one does so, that one should be forced to still financially support the single parent similar to alimony. I don’t think either should be able to voluntarily shed financial responsibility though. At least once they are born, a child has a right to a certain amount of support from both their parents, unless both agree the state would be a better custodian for them.

No, that’s a breach of the privacy for the father and child. An alleged father can already refuse to accept the legal responsibility for a child. A court could demand that they take a paternity test or accept responsibility, but that would still be that person’s choice.

That’s the general outline for the story relevant quests, but at least in some games you can read the flavor description for the optional ones and it would be something like a spoiled princess wanting a new dress made from the monster hide.

What should happen is that some people shift to continued support, and some move to a new project. If a company really needs workers only for a short time, they should hire contractors who can then move to something else afterwards. Treating employees as disposable like this is not just super disrespectful, it’s also a poor use of resources strategically.

False accusations should have strong punishments, but that doesn’t mean every accusation should result in either the accuser or the accused being punished. Not being able to prove someone is telling the truth does not mean you can prove they are lying, especially when the confidence threshold is proof beyond reasonable doubt.

I personally think that false accusations should theoretically be covered already as perjury and libel, but I don’t think that actually happens often.

Covid definitely had a strong immediate negative impact on kids’ education, but the trend of children struggling more in school over time is older than that. Until recent decades, there was an observed increase in children’s IQ over later generations, called the Flynn effect. Children were on average expected to be 3-5 points higher in measured IQ than those born a decade earlier. But we have reversed that trend after peaking somewhere around the 80s. There are likely a lot of contributing factors, but they should all be environmental rather than genetic. So hopefully later generations will be able to reverse the trend again and support their kids’ development in ways their own parents had neglected.

That’s rough. I hope you are able to find something more flexible.

I’m a software developer, so there’s a lot of WFH positions at least compared to other fields. But unless you have particularly good connections you would probably need to get a related degree if you wanted a job at most places. I’ve also heard it’s not a good time to be applying unfortunately. You might be able to try for some WFH consulting work related to your current job. Big software companies will hire contractors for temporary work too I guess, but they would probably still want experienced candidates. For me, this was just a position I applied to a few years ago and was lucky enough to get an offer. I don’t think there’s a secret to it, sorry.

I’m vegan but really missed ice cream so I started getting Ben and Jerry’s almond milk version when it’s on sale. It irks me that they charge for a pint what I could get a gallon of the dairy ice cream for, but there isn’t much selection for dairy-free. For whatever reason vegan versions of foods are pretty much always priced like premium brands. I’d be happy to buy generic brands of stuff in bulk, but instead I look at the price of something and often decide I don’t need it after all.

Yes. I have worked at both and I feel much more comfortable at home. It gives you a level of flexibility that is hard to describe. I can start my day early, take a break for an hour, and resume it when I feel I can give it the proper level of attention. When I was in office, there was a pressure to look like you’re working all the time. It felt hard to concentrate when the expectation was on dedicating the expected time to work rather than getting something done. With WFH, it’s more about getting your tasks done and generally no one cares when you do it. And I can slouch and prop my feet up and have videos/music/audiobooks playing and whatever else I want without anyone knowing, let alone caring. I don’t need to worry about a commute, and all my food and comforts are available when I want them. I can easily handle things like being at home for a package delivery or a technician repairing something or walking the dog or just doing laundry.

That being said, I will admit it is considerably harder to get help with a task in office. You can’t just have someone pop by to look at something for example. You can still do a call or message, but it’s a bigger barrier to overcome. With WFH, collusion for a group more often needs to be scheduled, and you don’t have an analogue for water cooler talk.

Many places that offer work from home also have an office somewhere, so I would recommend new employees go in while learning the ropes, then switch as they become more independent. And some people like having different locations to help switch between work and relaxation mentalities. And it can be nice to get out of the house too. But overall, WFH is much better for me.

Yeah, a bidet alone isn’t enough to get you clean. It does most of the work, but it’s going to leave remnants that need to be wiped. It’s not a matter of water pressure either. Mine has a stream that will reach the other side of the bathroom at full power, but there’s still going to be debris.

Tropes can easily become cliches if done poorly, but in essence they’re just common concepts in storytelling. The idea of having a protagonist struggling with finding what lines they won’t cross, and accepting what consequences result, can make for a really compelling internal conflict. And having a no-kill rule is often a practical one for longer series in particular.

Imagine if Batman’s rogue gallery couldn’t be re-used unless the writers had them always be able to get away when their plans are foiled. When Batman instead sends them to jail, they can be shelved for a while without making Batman look very selectively incompetent at actually catching criminals. Instead, it’s justified as a principle that he upholds, while giving the writer opportunities to also show character growth for villains. And if you argue he should focus on the greater good by permanently eliminating threats, then it can be viewed as a character flaw that gives him depth.

It sounds like that comment chain is discussing two different things. First is the piefed default block list, which admins can edit as they please for their instance. Hexbear and lemmygrad are on there.

Second is the lemmy slur filter, which used to be applied across all of lemmy and was not configurable. That may have changed, but it isn’t clear how. But regardless, that doesn’t seem like a complaint about piefed, unless I am misunderstanding.

Williams syndrome is a rare condition in humans that causes them to have particular facial features, a very friendly and extroverted personality, and some intellectual disability. It occurs when a certain chunk of genes are deleted in development.

Dogs have an equivalent region in their DNA, and friendliness in dogs and wolves seems to correspond to which variant they have for one of the relevant genes. So our domestication efforts are kind of like breeding the closest thing we can manage to a disability into them.

https://www.aip.org/inside-science/rare-human-syndrome-may-explain-why-dogs-are-so-friendly

If anything, recognizing and defending claims of ownership primarily benefits those who have hoarded under capitalism. It’s much harder to accumulate wealth when you have to personally dedicate resources to defending all that you have. And so capitalists would be particularly interested in discouraging theft.