definitemaybe

lol, high school.

You're confusing two concepts. Even volunteer firefighters get paid, in the OP. But they don't operate under a profit motive.

The profit motive is seen as integral to the success of capitalism, in economic theory. The idea is that owners of capital will invest in ways that maximize the profit of their capital, and, in so doing, maximize the total value creation from the capital. Hence, the profit motive incentivizes everyone in capitalism to maximize total productivity. Therefore, the profit motive maximizes the gross economic production, and hence utility, of the entire system, even though individual agents are only pursuing selfish maximization of profits.

All of that is true. But it also doesn't tell the whole story.

In particular, it breaks down in two main points:

1. Externalities are not captured by the profit motive. Negative externalities, like pollution, but also positive ones, like companionship and happiness.
2. The profit motive is true for total creation of utility, but it completely ignores the distribution of utility. Neoliberal trickle-down free-market economic policy is inimical to equity, despite, on the surface, seeming like an effective policy to maximize total utility generation through the profit motive.

There's a whole other problem with the profit motive, too: we all have an innate drive toward creative expression and helping others. I suppose you could, cynically, say that these motivations count as "externalities", but I think that's a bit reductive. People will want to create things even without profit motive. UBI studies all confirm that people will want to continue "being productive", even if they don't need to work.

Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.

Their donuts were great until around 25 years ago (?) when they switched away from baking them in house. Their sandwiches were pretty good when they were first introduced, too. Then they were bought out by Burger King and started degrading the quality of their ingredients—when they switched from cheddar to processed cheese was the last time I ordered one of their sandwiches.

I don't understand why they're still so popular. Who the hell is buying enough crappy coffee and food from then to keep them open? You can get far better coffee and food from almost any of their competitors, for the same price or less even.

Are national guard trained in protestor rights? They aren't police, aren't trained as police, and have no business policing unless it's a state of emergency.

Unless I'm totally off base. I don't know anything about the American national guard. I'm not even American.

I sure as hell didn't know what it was when I was 20. I think I only learned about all this shit when I was teaching a student who had a confederate flag phone wallpaper (not in the US, btw), and I did a "crash course" in other to look for that are subtle symbols, like 1488 and lesser-known Nazi/white supremacy logos.

Some of them are super generic, too, like the one that looks like two parallel square-ish lighting bolts, or the square-looking ankh thing. (Someone linked a list above, of symbols banned in Germany).

Seems more likely that the establishment is trying to smear a progressive candidate than that a progressive candidate is secretly a neo Nazi.

Now that November is around the corner is the best time to book shots, too. You'll hit peak immunity before the winter holidays, when everyone and their dear ~~plague rats~~ children travel all over the world at the same time.

Maybe, for "rec league" or whatever, but school teams are usually meant to be competitive, and non-gendered sports would mean girls wouldn't have equitable access to athletics.

But even for non-competitive teams, girls are unlikely to be able to access shared sports to the same level as boys. At a ~~party~~ high school I worked at, there was a major challenge with girls being willing to access open gym time, feeling uncomfortable advocating for access to basketball nets for practice—even girls who were on the competitive team felt they couldn't use open gym time.

TL;DR: Sexism runs deep. We need policies that recognize that and build equity, not just offer "equality" that perpetuates, or even magnifies, the problem.

Dwarf Fortress, so much. But I agree; I don't think that type of play is unintended. It's a fantasy world simulator first and game second (if at all). There are absolutely no objectives in the game at all; it's entirely self generated.

Like, what's more fun than chopping down all the trees, getting the elves raging mad at you, then holing up in your giant underground+inverted pyramid "hourglass" base while completely ignoring the siege going on above/below you while digging deep to get magma pumps set up all the way to the inverted pyramid so you can flood the surface with magma and kiil all the elves with fire, without having a single military dwarf the entire time because you can't be bothered to figure out the military menus/training when it's not as much !!!FUN!!! as mechanical defense options (lava traps.)

Is that a game, or just a sandbox? idk, but I love it. I haven't played in a while b/c of life commitments (kids, mostly), but I look forward to playing again.

Apparently military is a lot simpler, now, but I can't be bothered. Traps are so much more !!!FUN!!! and I totally haven't drowned my complete base with a failed water trap design killing all my dwarves. Not recently. (Mostly because I haven't played recently.)

Took me a second...

The challenge, as always, is to never underestimate a bubble's capacity to outlast your solvency. I personally know people who have been heading against the housing "bubble" in Canada bursting since 1999. They've spent a lot of money with nothing to show for it, yet, and missed out on housing prices, like, quadrupling? Quintupling?

So, good luck. Buying out-of-market puts might be a safer bet, since you're most likely to "just" lose all your money, with a small chance of a massive payout of it "properly" crashes.

Exactly right. Parent poster is conflating the investment in "AI" since 2022 (almost exclusively meant to mean LLMs, like ChatGPT) and specialized "AI" systems (almost exclusively "machine learning" systems).

A LLM is just about useless for any sort of surveillance or data analysis tasks. The bigger fear with LLM proliferation is as a propaganda machine, astrotufing the whole Internet with mass LLM-generated bullshit.

Nothing on the OP is talking about honey bees. There are many species of bees. I'm a big fan of mason bees; they pollinate like 20 times more than a honeybee, iirc.