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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I got very randomly bumped up to first class on a transatlantic flight for business. I do not travel much for business, especially internationally. So, I definitely should not have had priority over more regular accounts. I have to assume I just got lucky, and that flight happened to have no frequent flyers.

    It was an eye opening experience. I got to hang out in a secret lounge. When my flight was ready to board, multiple staff escorted us to the gate. When we landed, we took a private van to a secret side entrance, which had its own first class only passport check. We were brought to another secret first class lounge through hidden back hallways to wait for our connections. The lounge looked down over the terminal, and the exit was a nondescript door you’d assume was a maintenance entrance.

    Being around that level of service and the other people in first class, it’s clear the wealthy live in another world. I looked up how much that ticket normally goes for after, and full price is for many people a yearly salary. It was nice, but it seems like a crazy way to divide resources.






  • Reading that article is a serious indictment of economic literacy in the United States. People don’t understand what role the president plays in the economy, what causes inflation, or how and why interest rates change. They draw really superficial causal links and don’t think about it after that; it’s fact to them.

    It’s reasons like this education may be the single most critical issue, since we can’t make progress on the climate or anything else if the population is incapable of critical thinking. I hate to say it like this because it feels patronizing, but Jesus fucking Christ.




  • Then it’s not a binary system. It’s a system with two extremely dominant members. Those are different things. You can be more binary in specific contexts e.g., gametes and egg vs sperm.

    I’d be very cautious about the healthy description in reference to intersex people. I don’t believe you are trying to say anything nefarious, but there’s a reason it shows up in eugenics arguments.

    I didn’t say sex was a spectrum, though perhaps someone else you were speaking with did. I wouldn’t use spectrum for sex, since there are multiple differentiating factors with differing measures.


  • I’m not quite certain the point you are making here. Is the implication that because humans typically have two hands, those that do not are not a group that can be described? Or that they can be, but only should be as the product of developmental errors?

    We don’t generally, where we know exceptions exist, refuse to acknowledge their existence. Saying sex is a binary is saying there are only males and only females. That’s literally what binary means. Like binary notation either uses 0 or 1. If it was possible for sometimes to have a 2, it wouldn’t be binary anymore. That’s a different thing.

    This is especially true for something like sex that is based on a grouping of traits, genes, expressions, etc. which are not universally 0 or 1. Sure, we generally agree on a category when some are different, but there’s some points where it’s not so stark. Hence, the binary fails because there can be overlap and grey.

    Nobody is saying we have to stop using male and female to describe sex in most cases, especially in a medical setting. But if you had a child born intersex, and the doctor turned to you and said, “Nah, my gut says male. Nothing will be different,” you’d probably ask for a second opinion.