Not owning a personal vehicle is only okay if you live in the heart of a city …

Like most people in the western world (and indeed likely in most of the world) do.

… and don’t go outside of that little bubble.

Because rental of smaller vehicle services (like taxis, etc.) is totally not a thing.

The problem here is that you have the American disease (even if you’re not American). You’re so infused with the cultural insistence that there’s only one way to do things … the way things are done now … that you literally cannot conceive of a life without cars (or guns, or with public health care). Despite this being, you know, the norm for most of the world.

Switching to an electric car is a 100% reduction in carbon usage for my commute.

Is it really? Are you positive?

How is your electricity generated. Coal, natural gas, or oil? Congratulations, your carbon usage is HIGHER with an EV than with an ICE! Is it hydro? Go look at the methane produced by those huge reservoirs. I haven’t seen the calculations, but it’s not neutral.

Oh, I know. You use solar and/or wind. Now look up the environmental costs of producing those. And of mining the special metals needed for the batteries. Or if you’re nuked, the costs of mining uranium.

Switching to an EV is not the simple “zero carbon” solution you seem to imagine it to be.

No new car, of any kind, is cheaper than a car you already own.

Except that EVs don’t do shit to save the planet. Personal vehicles are the problem. Making a slightly different version of them is worthless.

Let’s not forget that EVs are heavier than their ICE equivalent classes of vehicle, meaning they use more energy. Which is a problem because a) they store ever so much less energy, and b) they’re ever so much less energy-efficient. So you need more energy to move them, and charging inefficiency mounts on top of that, but hey, at least you have shorter range!

EVs are not what is going to save the environment. Indeed depending on your source of electricity (most of the world still uses fossil fuels to generate electricity, recall!) you could well be making things worse by switching to an EV.

You know what will save the environment? Ending personal automobile ownership and instead beefing up public transportation.

Spoken like someone who’s never been creative once in her fucking life.

Personally I’ll embrace the technology by putting tire puncturing strips all over the place.

OK, I’m punching out of the conversation here. I think that:

1. It’s pretty clear from the votes and from the general confusion expressed that your expression was poor generally, not just to me.
2. You’re not interested in improving your ability to communicate.

Should you ever find the desire to improve your ability to express your thoughts so that you can actually partake of the conversations you seem to want, well, I’ve given you the advice to get there. I am, however, out.

(P.S. Yes, I’m aware that there is a tension between “Concise” and “Complete”. You seem to think you’re a smart guy. You’ll figure out how that’s a) possible, and b) resolvable. After you get over sulking, I mean.)

Your job here is to pitch an idea that others do not currently accept. Whether they do not accept this idea because they disagree with it and need persuasion, or simply have never heard of it, it is incumbent upon you to communicate this idea effectively. If you do not communicate this idea effectively, your idea is stillborn. Hence Frye’s position of ideas not existing until they’ve been incorporated into words.

It is your responsibility to express your ideas using the five Cs: Correct, Complete, Concise, Courteous, and Clear. Failure in any of these is going to lose you your chance to persuade others of your concepts. Notably it is not incumbent upon anybody else to try and tease the five Cs out from you. There’s a whole lot of ideas out there competing for the attention of people, and if your ideas aren’t structured in a way that makes people want to read them, they won’t spend the time. They’ll move on to the ideas that are properly communicated.

Given your screed above, I’ll do you a solid and critique it piece by piece. Every so often I’ll parenthetically add one of the five Cs I think you’ve broken like this: (Courteous).

I’ve definitely shared this concept or observation or whatever you want to call it before, but recent events have made me think of it again. I should clarify first that what I base this train of thought on isn’t entirely something that clicks for me, something I might not get into expressing, but it definitely makes you or at least me wonder why the implications in the train of thought aren’t considered, at least outside my occupation (since I’m in an occupation designed to work around the otherwise neglect of the concept), and I thought of running this by.

The first paragraph is rambling and incoherent (Clear). There’s at least three ideas expressed in there, without linkage internally (Clear), and no visible relationship to the rest of your essay. It strikes me as ranging from entirely irrelevant—nobody cares if you’ve expressed this before, nobody cares what your vague and unnamed occupation is, etc.—(Concise) to flat-out confusing and head-scratching—the entirety of the second sentence, even if it were relevant (which I rather doubt) should be taken out back and shot, replaced by at least a pair of sentences, possibly more, that actually communicate—(Clear).

Back in the old days, it was common for business people to pay their workers more honestly, as in based on what they thought the worker seemed to deserve.

How old are we talking here? At no point in my nearly 60 years of life, nor in my father’s life before me, does this describe how salaries were assigned. (Salaries have always seemed to be assigned as “whatever the bosses think they can get away with paying”…) If this is your thesis statement, it is absolutely unsupported by most people’s lived experience, I’d guess, and thus is a big breach of (Correct). If you have receipts, naturally, that would be fine, but you don’t supply them, which is a breach of (Complete). So which is it? Incorrect or incomplete?

Often the workers would seem underwhelmed.

This statement is so vague it could be held up as an example of how “vaguebooking” escaped the confines of Facebook and bled into Lemmy. (Concise) (Clear)

Organized criminals would then step in and say “you’ll get more out of us” and so that part of society grew.

And again, more receipts are needed. This is such a bizarre explanation for the nature of criminal enterprise and its history in humanity that if you don’t substantiate it this is just going to make people stare at you and then check your temperature quickly if you were to say it in person. (Correct) (Complete), one of the two.

For some reason, the first thing within the mind of the people in charge, trying to assess everything, was “let’s invent this thing, we might call it the minimum wage”. Alrighty. So this side thinking, what do we think of it? Something happened, right?

And here we fall into a straight-up example of purest word salad. (Clear) I have absolutely no idea what it is you’re even trying to communicate here. Which leads us to the next paragraph.

So here is where the train of thought works into the picture.

This is a complete non sequitur from the previous paragraph. There’s no linking of the concept(s) of the previous paragraph to guide the reader’s thought. You’re just back to mentioning this vaguely-articulated “train of thought” from the first paragraph that has not yet even come close to being introduced. The result is confusion. (Clear)

Matters of monetization are just one arena up the sleeve of bad actors. A lot of people feel abruptly socially isolated. When this happens, instinct is often to seek out companions. Social life might be dead or people might be avoidant. Someone I know is in such a situation. Along comes what might be called a bad actor. To them, they might see a potential extension of themselves with freedom of minimal effort. And voila, someone new joins the “bad crowd” or “dysfunctional crowd”.

And here we finally see your point…ish? You’re saying money isn’t enough; that there needs to be also a “minimum social wage” if I’m reading you correctly. This is actually an intriguing idea that’s worth developi…

Watching this unfold myself, I think to myself. Places have a “minimum reference point” for the topic of exchange/payment/whatever the word is, so then what does the non-thinking come from to apply this thought to the whole isolation thing mentioned?

…DAMMIT! And the development peters out. There’s no exploration of what such a “minimum social wage” might look like. How you’d measure socialization. How you’d prevent bad actors from gaming whatever rules you came up with (like they game minimum wage). No definitions. No expansion of ideas. No nothing. Definitely this is not a pregnancy, it is just gas on the stomach, to invoke Frye again.

Anyone here have people they know who were absorbed into a bad part of society when everything seemed dead and thought “well, it’s not like anyone else was going to give them what they need”?

And here’s a segue away from the actual idea’s ghost and back into vague and meandering non sequitur.

This is why you’re getting faced with confusion instead of robust discussion.

If you really want to have a robust discussion you need to learn to communicate your ideas better. You should probably pick up a book on informational writing (technical writing, essay writing, etc.) and maybe even take a class on it to have a teacher assess your writing (in far greater detail than I did!) to improve it. That way you’ll express more than gas on the stomach.

I’m not sure I can give a larger part that 100% of it. I would recommend that you follow the advice of Northrop Frye and sit down and think before writing. The number of people who are misunderstanding or plain old not understanding what you are suggesting (if anything) should be a strong clue that you have communicated with stunning ineptness. To cite the linked document, these people (myself included) don’t know “whether [you] are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach”.

Learn structure. Learn expression. Learn, in short, to think, remembering, as per Frye, that “there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it” but rather that “ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words”.

Then, once you’ve actually solidified the thoughts in your own head so you understand yourself what they mean, try to communicate them again. You’ll find a lot less frustration that way.

OK, so I did a bit of research (as is my obsessive self’s wont) and can answer for “gender”.

Our modern understanding of sexual matters is far more subtle and nuanced than the old-fashioned notions most of us grew up with¹. What follows is a simplified take on things. The reality is more complicated and has many more axes than I’m highlighting.

At the lay level you can think of there being three axes of sex-related issues:

1. Sex. This is whether you’re dangling wedding tackle or not. Your physical sexual characteristics.
2. Orientation. This is the sex (or, more broadly, gender for which q.v.) you are attracted to for sexual activity.
3. Gender. This is the mental model you have of which sex you are.

Gender is in most cases oriented to match your sex (cisgender) and in opposition to your orientation (heterosexual). Because, however, the body, and various parts of the brain grow at different times, it’s possible for these three axes to differ due to hormonal differences in the mother’s body (external factors) or to activated genetic influences (a mix of external and internal factors). If one of these factors activates at one point in development, the part of the brain that regulates sexual desire flips the switch and your orientation is different². If one of them activates at another point in development, the part of the brain that models your internal view of your sex flips and you now have that thing called “gender dysphoria”.

And after literally centuries of trying to “fix” people with gender dysphoria through abuse, through religious counselling (c.f. “abuse”), and through therapy, it’s pretty much well-established that gender dysphoria has no talking (nor abusive) “solution”. Thus the kindest thing to do is to let people whose gender doesn’t match their physical sex to present the gender they feel themselves to be by behaviour, manner of dress, and ultimately, as far as is practical, physically. Anything else is abusive and cruel.

Note, again, I stress this is the very simplified model, and it’s filtered through my inexpert, non-practitioner understanding of things. (I’m open to correction by those with actual expertise in the field, obviously!) As such it doesn’t address the huge forest of orientations (which I alluded to in the footnote below), it doesn’t address intersex issues, and it doesn’t address gender issues like the “non-binary”. And indeed I don’t, to cite Orwell again, “bellyfeel” gender dysphoria, enbies, aces, etc. … but in the end it doesn’t fucking matter. There is literally zero impact on me if someone wants to call themselves “non-binary” or “trans” or “ace” or whatever. So even if I don’t “get” it, what I do “get” is that these people are profoundly unhappy in the circumstances they find themselves in and if transitioning helps them, all the fucking power in the world to them!

¹ Why “most of us”? Because there are cultures out there that have more nuanced models than the strict binary. Look up terms like “hijra” for the Indian sub-continent, the role of eunuchs, M→F gender-swapping actors, and F→M cross-dressing characters in heroic lore in ancient China, the กะเทย/kathoey of Thailand, the whole allure of “fox spirits” all over the east Asian sphere, the “two-spirit” peoples of North American natives, etc.

² For instance that part of my brain flipped me to a “2” on the old-timey Kinsey scale (nominally heterosexual), though on more modern classifications that the kiddies would use I’d be a het-leaning pansexual.

I found it very confusing between …

I’ve definitely shared this […]

… and …

[…] “well, it’s not like anyone else was going to give them what they need”?

There are two types of men, in my experience:

• The 99% who watch porn.
• The 1% who lie about not watching porn.

If your father is a male, he watches porn, basically.

I recognize the term “Artificial Intelligence” from my own profession: marketing.

• “Madlibs backed by a huge database” doesn’t sound really all that attractive.
• “Bullshitting random text generator” doesn’t sound really sellable.
• “Artificial intelligence…” BINGO!

(Substitute any old attempts at making AI for the first two. This is an old, old, old scam. The first complete and utter failure of “AI” happened when I was a young girl.)

It never had any meaning.

Let’s unpack it. “AI” means “Artificial Intelligence”. What does “Artificial” mean? We can mostly agree it means human-made. (It gets a bit complicated, but this definition works.) What does “Intelligence” mean?

…

Oops.

There is no universally agreed definition of “intelligence” anywhere. There’s no agreed definition in philosophy, in biology, in neuroscience, in any realm of human study. There’s not even a hint as to where we’d go to get such a definition. Yet techbrodudes claim to have made an artificial version of it.

“I’ve made something great: Artificial Geflurtzenshi.” “What’s Geflurtzenshi?” “That doesn’t matter. I made it! Give me money!”

That’s what “AI” sounds like.

I’m all for AI.

Just please wake me up when we get it. Bullshitting parrots aren’t it.

👏

I need to work out a quad-lingual joke sometime: English, German, French, and Mandarin.

This is not even slightly true.

Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.

There is literally nothing “natural” about base 10. Indeed it’s not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.

(Western) base-10 needs two hands. Base-12 is one-handed. (There’s a base-10 system used in China that’s one-handed, mind. Or, rather, it’s one-handed until you reach 10.)

Also some maths operations can be done fairly easily (like division) with the base-12 finger-counting system.