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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 6th, 2024

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  • I’ve received in-patient care, overnight studies, emergency procedures, and much more in Spain without ever paying a dollar in copays or fees, and I’ve never waited more than 2 weeks for non-urgent care or an hour for urgent care.

    My taxes are $600/month total in Madrid. Given that I have epilepsy, my insurance alone in the US was $490/month, AND I paid more in taxes ($1100/month).

    So, yes, universal healthcare isn’t “free,” and it’s supported by taxes. And still, Americans are taxed more AND have to pay for insurance? And then you still have to pay copays? I don’t think “dur dur me taxes!” is actually the strong argument you think it is. And wait times are no longer (or in fact are shorter) in many countries with universal healthcare. But you know what’s longer? Life expectancies.



  • I mean Venom is injured all the time in ways that would clearly impact a body within it. So either the host body goes full caterpillar-coccoon and is basically jelly while Venom is fully formed, or the host’s body becomes immune to injury/near fully regenerable, in which case Venom could wreck the host’s face without worry.





  • My point is not that previous people haven’t done significant things, it’s that they did those things independently of who one of their many ancestors happened to be. Much like an actual ripple, the larger the pond, the less likely any disturbance is to reach the shore, and the more likely it is to be quickly lost to the natural turbulence of any body of water.

    If your evidence against that is the existence of significant inventions, there are very few, if any, that wouldn’t have been invented by someone else within years. No major invention or discovery, from the light bulb to relativity, has been made while others weren’t working on the same problem and making similar, if slightly slower, progress.

    That’s why they say necessity is the mother of invention, not a person or an institution or anything that could be credited to a single creator.

    And if you think humans are still evolving according to selection pressure the way that other species have/do, you just don’t understand how evolution actually works. The moment we gained self awareness and created social structures, we drifted so far from biological evolution that it’s an entirely moot point in terms of future generations. The least adaptive of us now, on average, still lives through the entirety of our birthing/fertile years, while significant portions of a population dying during or prior to fertility is the only way that natural selection works. That or the existence of bachelor herds that lead to a very slim minority being the only ones to breed. Neither of those are the case with humans.

    Ultimately, having kids to ensure your own legacy is possibly the most selfish reason you could create someone and thrust them into 80 years of what should be their own life.


  • I think that’s pure conjecture about how having kids affects the world. And the nature, worthiness, or value of those 12 people has nothing to do with whether or not you happen to personally be their ancestor. There’s nothing different or more special about one person’s progeny than another, so who cares if it’s your kids or 8 billion other people. The idea that that is important in the future is all about making yourself important in the present.




  • Ok but LA sucks for reasons that have nothing to do with what I want from a city and everything to do with what everyone wants from a city: walkability, affordability, good roads/traffic and infrastructure, good vibes, authenticity, public transit, and people who don’t suck.

    Even people who are from LA and say “we have all that and I love LA” only mean “I love my neighborhood in LA, which is a 90 minute drive from the 7 other malignancies of highway sprawl that also call themselves LA.”