The sound of a metal utensil squeaking against a plate. Nails on a chalkboard. Dry skin on dry paper. The smell of tobacco smoke. The sound of a modified or worn out muffler on a car or motorcycle. The tickle of a runny nose. The tickle of drops of sweat running down my face and back on a hot day.

Replaceable parts was the greatest industrial innovation in the history of the world. It’s the single most important reason that millions of people can afford refrigeration, stoves, lightbulbs, TVs, cell phones, cars, and everything else in the modern world. Without replaceable parts these things would only be luxuries for kings and queens.

The problem of engineering departments being “glorified parts replacers” is a social problem: elite overproduction. Society simply does not need millions of engineers (or lawyers or historians or urban planners for that matter)!

I’m confused. Here was your original comment:

When you could stop working and just coast off of what you’ve got till you die. At that point, making more is a luxury.

That, to me, includes grandmas who live off their pension cheque as “coasting off what you’ve got.” Did you not intend for that interpretation?

There’s an enormous gap between grandma living month to month on her pension cheque and Jeff Bezos money. Grandma doesn’t work though so you could say she’s “coasting” even if she relies on the senior discount at the grocery store to get by.

There’s also a lot of people who have a lot of wealth (in the form of land, buildings, equipment) yet can’t afford to stop working, such as farmers. The UK government is going after these folks aggressively and they’re very unhappy. We could be seeing a strike by farmers in the new year where they simply stop delivering food to market.

So you don’t think people should ever be able to retire?

You can also learn hobo code. Engrave/mark signs in secret places. All you need is a sharp edged rock, a piece of chalk, or even a stick of charcoal.

Banning writing instruments is not realistic unless you’re keeping the entire population indoors in an immaculately clean prison or mental hospital type environment.

Some kinds of black dyes are actually just really dark brown. When they start to fade they turn lighter which reveals the brown colour. There’s no way a poop stain transferred to your sock in the laundry. The enzymes in laundry detergent break that stuff down and keep it suspended in the water.

Just be glad your brother isn’t a pigeon or other similar sized bird. A pelican can and will swallow smaller birds whole!

Even something very simple like a coffee shop is difficult to run as a co-op.

Yes, if you have a few friends who are all passionate about coffee it’s possible for you all to get loans / mortgages to pool together enough money to buy/lease a small commercial property and open a coffee shop together. The only really significant pieces of equipment are the espresso machine and coffee grinder, both of which can be bought used for a few thousand dollars.

But here comes the issue: suppose it’s you and 4 friends who started the coffee co-op with $200k each (total $1 million) to buy the real estate and all of the furniture and machinery. Now the 5 of you work in the coffee shop and it starts growing more successful so that you need to hire more baristas (or pastry chefs or sandwich artists) to work there. How many baristas can you find who can afford to put up $200k to buy into a share of the co-op?

Or even more fundamentally: what if 2 out of the starting 5 decide that working in a coffee shop is too exhausting and they don’t want to do it anymore so they quit? Now the other 3 need to put together a total of $400k to buy them out? Or do you have a clause in the contract which says they forfeit their investment if they quit? Now I dunno about you, but as much as I love using my espresso machine I would never want to enter a contract like that! I’d much rather keep my $200k in the bank and work as a regular employee barista knowing I could quit any time I want.

They don’t have access to capital (means of production). Consider the following scenario:

All of the employees at a car manufacturing plant are sick of being paid a fraction of the total sale price of the cars they make. They decide, in solidarity, to quit en masse and start a worker co-op car plant instead so that they can all enjoy sharing 100% of the profits themselves.

So they quit. Now what? Well, knowledge isn’t an issue because they already knew how to operate all the machines in a car plant. The problem is that they don’t have the money (or the land) to build a new car plant. We’re talking billions of dollars and a huge piece of land which ideally should be located on a railroad line so that parts (which are very large and heavy) can be delivered affordably by rail.

So where are they gonna get the money? Not from private investors, of course, since that nixes the worker only profit sharing arrangement. Not from banks either because these workers, while highly knowledgeable and motivated, don’t have any collateral to put up for the bank loans. The banks do not want to be in the position of repossessing a bunch of specialized manufacturing equipment and trying to resell it at a loss.

The common response to this is: the government. But think about that. Do you want your government giving billions of dollars to a few hundred people so they can start a car plant and then keep all the profits?

Yes and they’re yet another collectible product that exploits the psychology of a subset of people who compulsively collect things. I put them in the same category as gambling and note that there’s a lot of crossover with these things (loot boxes and CCG booster packs being prime examples of a gambling and collectible combo).

That or the alien will simply scour all life from the planet and then strip mine it for resources. They don’t even have to be more intelligent than us. Suppose they were roughly equivalent to human intelligence but had an insect-like eusocial behaviour with a billion year old culture. They could be far more advanced than us simply due to the availability of time.

Thank you. I would even argue that Return of the Jedi wasn’t great either. I mean sure, it was beautiful and the Moon of Endor with its giant trees looked amazing, but the plot was mostly a rehash of the original (another Death Star? Really?) plus silly Ewok shenanigans that made the empire into a total joke.

They’re spy machines designed for children. They give them to all students in school and force them to do all their homework with them!

I’d be wary of calling him guilty by association. Maybe when he realized who he was really hanging out with he was so horrified and disgusted that he just had to get involved and do something to fight back?

You can sell out on anything, no matter how unpopular it is, if you don’t make enough of them. How many of these things did they actually make?

Here’s the thing: if you change the thickness of the layer then the colour will change along with it, but the material is otherwise the same. This occurs because the layers produce a phenomenon known as thin film interference. So it’s not the material of the coating layer that produces the colour, it’s the interaction between two layers.

Anyway, you can see all of the colours of a light’s spectrum through a prism but you wouldn’t say the prism itself is any of those colours. It’s transparent and refractive. That’s all we have here with the glasses: refraction and reflection, with interference of certain wavelengths due to the exact thickness of the layers.

Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!

There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.

Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.

Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.