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3 yr. ago

  • What do you mean by "end up broke"?

    Do you mean you're going to lose your job in a few months?

    Do you mean that you currently have no source of income and you project that you'll hit zero in a few months and won't be able to find a job?

    Do you mean that you're going to be declaring bankruptcy because of debts and will have to start over?

    These are all different situations. If you don't have a job and don't think you'll be able to get one even though you have months to try, is it because you're disabled or somehow unable to work? If so, there are government support programs available in most places. In places without that, people tend to rely on family to support them. If you can't work, can't get government support, and don't have family or friends who can support you, there really isn't any advice we can give you.

    If you currently have a job but they're laying you off in a few months, there are often support programs available. It's best to assume you won't get a job, or at least won't get one right away, so you should reduce your spending now rather than wait.

    Declaring bankruptcy is completely different. Often when people do that, they still have a job, it's just that their debts are unmanageable. In the US this is often due to medical debts. You may have a job paying a decent wage, but you simply can't pay down a million dollars in medical debt. That's a different kind of situation, because you still have a job, you still have money coming in and going out. The problem is often that you suddenly have to do without credit cards, you can't get a car loan, etc. So, in that situation the trick is more about how to switch to using cash and debit cards and to build back a good credit rating over time.

    If you're truly going to hit zero money in a few months, you need to act as if you're basically at zero money now. If there are food banks nearby, start going there and learn how they work. Watch every single cent you spend and cut off your spending ruthlessly. No subscriptions, no luxuries, etc. If you rent and you expect you're going to be evicted, start selling off your stuff. Better to part with it now and get some money rather than getting locked out and having the owner throw it all away. If there are public libraries nearby with Internet access, figure out how that works so you can still get online.

    Also, maybe you can move somewhere else before you hit zero. I don't know what your situation is, but maybe there are places with a dramatically lower cost of living where you can get by for longer. Maybe there are places where you could find work. It's best to make that decision early rather than be unable to make it once you hit zero.

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  • IMO the biggest problem with the post is that it is ignoring that natural world completely.

    We can't colonize mars, not because it's far away and hard to get to (although those are problems). The real issue is that we don't really understand our own biosphere enough to build even an imitation one somewhere else. The ISS is orbits so close it's barely out of the atmosphere. It's still well protected by the Earth's magnetic field, and gets regular deliveries of food, water, spare parts, etc. Every time we've tried a closed biosphere (biodome?) on earth, it has failed.

    The bigger Earth's population, the shorter the timespan we have before we can realize we screwed up somehow (i.e. overusing artificial fertilizer, emitting too much carbon, etc.) and having to urgently fix it or the whole planet is wrecked. If we had a "planet B" it wouldn't be so urgent. If we knew perfectly how the ecosphere worked, we wouldn't screw up. If we had "save points" and could just load them if we screwed up, then we could run closer to the edge and go back if we messed up. Unfortunately, this is the only planet we have, and we still don't know how it all works. Because of that, we should really run with a much lower population so that when we inevitably screw up there's a buffer to protect us while we adjust.

  • First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well....without direct control of the services, you're kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can't get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You're allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control?

    It's worse than that.

    You're looking at it as if the app-based delivery service has low standards. The reality is even worse. They use all kinds of surveillance and data analysis techniques to figure out which of their drivers is the most desperate, and will keep working for the lowest possible fees. Then, they give the most work to those drivers because they are the most profitable. The drivers know they're getting screwed, but they are doing app-based deliveries because they can't find anything better.

    The apps are a middleman between the restaurant and the customer and they don't just squeeze those two, they also squeeze their drivers.

  • It's good that they're attacking them on the software side, but they should also go after them on the legal side.

  • No, no, trust me, it's a mind control ray!

    See, if advertising didn't work, that would mean that companies like Google and Meta have their stock price based mostly on hype. And, that can't be true, because, as we all know, the market is always fully rational. Now, excuse me while I go check out how much my NFTs have gone up in value since I last checked in 2021.

  • Or "Their product must be massively overpriced to pay for all this advertising"

  • According to astronomers there are 3 'elements' in the universe: Hydrogen, Helium and Metal.

  • No, you're thinking of when milk fat is evenly mixed in, when your eyes are different colours that's homeostasis.

  • School is one of those words that leads to semantic satiation (or maybe just spelling satiation) quickly for me. The more frequently I write it, the more it seems that I can't possibly be spelling it right.

  • You sure ewe don't mean homophone?

  • how many lives can be saved with 100k dollars

    Is keeping someone alive enough to balance the books? Does the quality of their life matter? What if they're alive but living in a refugee camp?

    From a purely utilitarian perspective, you could even calculate the expectation value of lives saved / lost

    I don't think you can, not without making massive assumptions. Lives lost directly might be easy if the button is labelled "0.1% chance of killing someone". But, what if you spend your $100k on driving a light truck which emits a lot of pollution, which in turn contributes a tiny amount to the deaths of a lot of people?

    And, for lives saved, say you do it in a pretty easy to calculate way, donating food to people who would die without that food. Is that where the calculation ends? What if that person goes on to help other people? Or what if that person goes on to become a soldier and kill people.

    I don't think it's at all realistic to try to calculate an expectation value of lives saved / lost with any accuracy except through the most direct effects.

    the absurdity of utilitarianism when taken to the extreme

    I guess that's what I'm getting at.

  • such a low probability overall you probably up on the whole deal if you use that money to help other people.

    Depends a lot on how you're helping them and what you're doing with the rest. If you're spending like a typical American (or Canadian) you're doing a lot of environmental damage with your day-to-day life so you're killing people incrementally with that lifestyle.

  • Yeah, that would be an interesting twist. 100% chance that pushing the button kills someone, but it might happen in 2 years or it might happen in 30 years. But, even if someone lives a perfectly normal life for 30 years, their cause of death will be this button.

  • 100% of people in a large population absolutely will die. I don't know why you think some people are immortal. I also don't know what that has to do with this meme.

  • Yeah. Non-zero chance your car's emissions kill someone too.

  • More interesting (and more realistic) if it isn't a guarantee that someone dies if you push the button, but a probability.

    Would you push the button if it was a 20% chance someone dies? A 5% chance? A 1% chance? 0.1%? Is there a number where it's ok to push the button? If it was a 0.0001% chance, how many times would you push the button?

    Also, does it change things if you know that your button push resulted in someone's death? Is it different if it's someone standing right there? Maybe on the other side of a one-way mirror? What if it's just that you get a green light or a red light after you push the button and you don't have to see someone die or know who died or how they died?

  • The scientific method itself would be massively useful. It's amazing how long it took humanity to get there, and how much it changed things. Even in the 1700s astronomy and astrology were basically both considered equally important fields of study. The queen of England had important advisors who took the alignment of celestial bodies into account when deciding policy.

    What I think would be the most useful thing to know how to build isn't electromechanics, it's just plain mechanics.

    In WWII US warships calculated firing solutions using purely mechanical, analog computers. If you knew how to build a shaft, a gear, a cam and a differential you could do pretty astounding calculations. Even just knowing how to build and use a slide rule would be pretty mind blowing for a lot of people in ancient times. Or you could just be the guy who invented zero.