How did you do that?

We need to make it illegal to force people to use a chatbot. It’s just a way to create the most frustrating experience possible without even having to pay an Indian call center. It’s the new version of being put on hold for an hour and then getting transferred and put on hold for another hour, someone you can barely understand picking up the phone, and then hanging up on you after you explain what you want and making you call again.

I hate that YouTube Music keeps trying to make me waste my bandwidth on videos that have worse audio quality than when it just plays the song. 0/10 smoothbrain design, probably just to sell more video ads.

What were the multiple awful visits for?

My point was that using the Sun, Earth, or really any object as a reference is arbitrary and the “same position” at two different points in time is completely undefined.

Actually 🤓, position and velocity are relative, so that’s a nonsensical statement without defining a reference object for the Earth’s position. If we’re not assuming you end up safely on dry land, you could just as easily end up light-years away as wherever you were relative to the sun.

This comment deserves its own meme.

Not banned. I think it’s great that when you copy posts from .ml, you mention the author now.

And after 200 years of matriarchy, people would be saying that women are evil and we should have a patriarchy. Whoever holds the power always ends up oppressing whoever doesn’t.

I’d love to live in a society where no particular gender held most positions of power or had more legislative influence.

Why do we have to pretend the constitution matters when our enemies don’t?

The people responsible for doing that should be in prison or dead.

Even nerf bullets can hurt you if they’re shot at you in sufficient quantities.

I don’t mind them adding ads.

I’m gonna stop you right there.

Serial killers have to serve time added up from each individual murder. Corporate scumbags stealing from millions of people should be sentenced to prison for millions of years.

What stood out to you as particularly bad on your rewatch?

You’re absolutely right that access to education can greatly improve intelligence. Critical thinking skills are just that - skills that must be learned. Genetics are just one of countless factors involved in how intelligent someone ends up being.

I saw Idiocracy a while ago, so I can’t remember every detail to bring up examples, but I think the characters surrounding the main character did show growth and a willingness to try to learn things. I don’t think we see much of an education system in that movie’s portrayal of the future either.

It’s also worth noting that while your genetics absolutely affects your brain structure and chemistry, parents can pass on stupidity or intelligence to their children in more ways than just genetically. After all, most people learn more from their parents than from anyone else.

If one believes the accuracy of film’s central premise—that the dumb are reproducing at a higher rate than the smart, which will lower the world’s intelligence until idiocy reigns supreme—it’s only natural to want to stop that from happening. From there, it’s not at all that great a leap to begin believing that maybe there should be some kind of policy only allowing intelligent people to reproduce—in other words, sterilize the dumb.

This is just the author asserting their own absurd leaps in logic as the intended message behind the movie, which it clearly isn’t.

A 2015 Pew study looked at how many kids that women with postgraduate degrees have given birth to over the past half-century. In 1994, 30 percent of women with a master’s degree or higher were childless, a number that’s since dropped to 22 percent. In 1976, 10 percent of said women had one child, while in 2014 that numbers up to 18 percent; those with two kids rose even more dramatically, from 22 to 35 percent.

The author draws the wrong conclusion from this data. Just because women with degrees are having more kids now than in the past doesn’t mean that women without degrees haven’t always had more kids than women with degrees. It’s very telling that they never bring those numbers up.

If you automatically assumed that intelligence having a hereditary component to it meant that I was trying to say that all dumb people’s children were also dumb 100% of the time, you might not be as smart as you think.

I don’t think it ever actually promoted eugenics. It just explored the natural consequences of two facts in a comedic way:

• Intelligence has a hereditary component to it.
• Stupid people have more kids.

It never tries to push any eugenics-based agenda. It would have if they tried to say that dumb people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, but they never went anywhere near that.