Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

I think that’s debatable. Personally, I went to university and had a great time there. Apart from learning, that phase of my life had lots of events, parties and spending time with friends. I always saw it as a priviledge that I had the opportunity to gather so much knowledge. Especially as school and university are paid for by the state where I live.

When I said no one, I didn’t mean literally zero people. I’m sure if you announced a project to launch a manned spacecraft into the sun you’d get people volunteering for the suicide mission. What I meant is that you’ll never get enough people to do it based on personal interest alone.

For every person like you who loved studying engineering in school (with all the 7 course per semester schedules, insane 8 hour days in classes plus 40+ hours of homework, “hell week” of nonstop midterms, and brutal “weed-out” final exams) there’s going to be thousands of others who just won’t bother because the pay is no better than what a janitor makes. Heck, why not study philosophy or medieval history instead?

And then when you get past school you get to the real problem: many of the jobs in these fields are incredibly dull. People might go to aerospace engineering school with big dreams of designing the next Concorde jet, yet find themselves doing nothing but paperwork review for Boeing. You think the Boeing safety scandals are bad enough in today’s capitalist world where the company is motivated by profit and the engineers are highly paid? Try getting anyone to take safety seriously when you pay everyone the same so there’s no real disincentive to avoid getting fired.

And that’s the other elephant in the room with engineering. In civil engineering the lead engineer has to sign off (and stamp with their professional seal) the plans for a project. If the building later collapses that engineer can be held criminally responsible (and face jail time) should the design be deemed unsafe by the investigation. Without paying the lead engineer any more than a junior engineer, how are you going to get anyone to accept that personal risk on themselves for no compensation whatsoever?

This applies to many other critical jobs where health and safety are on the line. Similarly for jobs where the worker is risking their own life. If you can’t compensate them for this additional personal risk (financial, criminal, or life and limb) then you’re going to have a very hard time finding people to take the job.

The other side of the coin is that some jobs will become extremely popular just because they are more fun to do. Since you can’t pay these folks any less to do the fun jobs, you’ll have a hard time deciding who is allowed to do the fun stuff and who gets stuck with the boring/dirty/dangerous/disgusting/undesirable jobs.

For example, actuarial science was a very popular major to study at my university. The field is competitive to get into and highly paid. However the job itself has a very high turnover due to people voluntarily choosing to leave! The work is so damn boring that even with high pay they can’t convince people to stay! With low pay the problem is going to be even worse. You’re going to have to lower the bar to let less intelligent/skilled people into the job but that is not likely to turn out well because the job is very technical to begin with.

*Uninstall Windows, problem solved.

FTFY

But if you tell people that everyone should make the same no matter if it’s room keeping or an engineer, they mostly get upset. Because **they** derserve better than those dumb, lazy fuckers who didn’t even go to school blahblahblah

That’s a pretty uncharitable take. Whether people get upset or not is irrelevant. What matters is what people’s incentives are and how they respond to them.

If you pay janitors the same as engineers then no one will bother going to school to study engineering. The whole incentive structure of your economy evaporates, leading to collapse.

That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, since it’s by definition beyond the ability of science to answer. It suffers from the infinite regress problem which many people invoke God to solve (the uncaused cause) but that’s not very satisfying, is it?

I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

Definitely stronger than humans, pound for pound, but probably not as strong as gorillas!

You’d have to be really strong to hold a shield that large, with that much steel reinforcement, without strapping it to your arm.

How does one rotate a shield that’s strapped to your forearm?

I’ve seen some of these tiny bees pollinating my tomato plants!

Do you have a source for this?

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).

Very low average density but the vast majority of the population is close to the US border. The vast majority of the land in the country is completely empty

Yes in fact the US tried to thwart the creation of the ICC as much as they possibly could. The Israel question has been the biggest reason all along. But also they didn’t want Bush being prosecuted for invading Iraq.

It’s really quite an amazing adaptation. These fish live at extreme depths. There is essentially no light at all down there, apart from the dim glow of the bioluminescent bulbs they use for luring prey. I would imagine encounters between males and females of the species to be quite rare under the circumstances. That the male can permanently attach himself to the female is a very tidy solution to the problem.