I don’t know much about Iran, but do they have legalized slavery?

It’s debatable, and I’m by no means an expert. But forced marriage is still a thing, where you sell your daughter to a man to clear your debts. If you ignore all the sex slaves, there are still about 600k people living in “modern slavery” conditions. The government isn’t doing anything about it either from what I gather.

So no, it’s not legal the way it is in the US through prison systems, but it is very much a huge issue that isn’t being corrected.

But I mean between the US, Israel and Iran… There really are no good guys. Each of these governments does some real horrible shit.

What did Trump say about Elon’s computer knowledge winning the election again?

Oh yeah it was definitely fucked up. But at least we didn’t end up with Harris, so the world is saved.

Oh sorry, republican voter and/or republican helper.

It’s less that anyone said he’d be better for Americans and more that everyone said don’t vote for Harris, while Trump received no criticism. Getting dem voters to stay home is an old old republican strategy and the tankies definitely helped.

'cept the entire tankieverse saying that you shouldn’t vote for Biden (later Harris) because they’re the ones causing the genocide in Gaza. Like yes, they did jack all to fix it, but we all knew Trump would be even worse. Telling that to just about any tankie resulted in “How can it get any worse than genocide? Voting for Biden/Harris means you voted for genocide” or something along those lines.

Didn’t take very long for Trump to go “lol Gaza is prime beachfront property tho, let’s get em fuckers out” after he got his throne back.

Manchin might have a (D) next to his name, but he’s always been a republican in spirit. He cheered hard for Trump. Only reason the party accepts him is that no real democrat is gonna win west Virginia and they need every seat they can get in order to have a majority

Essentially the entire system is bullshit and while the democrats are ineffective, I’m not sure they’re always ineffective on purpose.

Did she? Because she seems to think it was a mistake on Germany’s part

My cheap ass TV from 2019 is 55 inches. How much is a 55 inch monitor? Or a 65 in monitor if I want to upgrade to a bigger size in the future?

My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.

Tell me you hate your own culture without telling me you hate your own culture.

The same reason mensa is a thing. People like to toot their own horn.

Fair enough, I’ve also at one point been 13 and done a bunch of useless online IQ tests. Never studied for them, they seemed like mostly simple pattern recognition and general logic questions, which I’ve never really thought you could even study for.

To a certain extent yes, but no one can be an expert at everything. There just isn’t enough time, and expertise is really what society rewards people for at the end of the day.

Absolutely. But general intellect, as far as I can tell (and maybe my understanding of it is wrong), is what influences your ability to shift to a new field and gain expertise in that. Years alone don’t cut it. In my own field, I’ve seen software engineers who can’t program for shit, let alone make any architectural decisions after a decade - and ones that are pretty competent after 2-3 years. Now imagine you’re 10 years into a career and it starts becoming less and less relevant due to changes in society. If you’re naturally intelligent, you’re both 1) more likely to have learned more from your 10 years than others have, so more valuable for longer, and 2) more likely to be able to switch to an unrelated or semi-related career path and become useful in a shorter amount of time.

Of course it gets more complex than that because general intellect doesn’t span ALL skills. In fact, it’s more like ranges of aptitudes. I have great aptitude for STEM, pretty decent aptitude for languages, and absolutely none for arts. No drawing, no singing, etc. No matter how much practice I get and how much practice I got in my childhood. There’s just skills I won’t learn in 10 years of practice, and skills I pick up rapidly, and it’s been that way since childhood.

Hell, maybe general intellect isn’t a thing after all.

I think IQ in particular unfairly prioritizes understanding of language and logic, over artful skills and, e.g emotional intelligence (which is measured by EQ I guess). It’s a pointless measure. My main point that I wanted to make was that some people are naturally more gifted, and just faster learners, than others. There’s people from good families who have never suffered from malnutrition or emotional abuse and went to good schools, who aren’t all that smart, and people from far worse backgrounds who are geniuses. Something must be contributing to that. If not genetics, then what? At the same time, yes, people from emotionally healthy families with no financial issues, are more likely to be successful in school as well as life in general.

Wait, do people actually study for IQ tests? Why? Language makes sense, if I tried doing one in German I would fail because I barely speak it at an A2 level, if that.

I reckon general intellect does matter. In a world where your job might not exist in 5 years because lol AI, it’s best to be able to adapt fast. Specialize, yes, but one day your specialization will be useless. Best case scenario, it’s after you’ve retired.

And going back to heritability, there’s definitely some heritability there, but the problem with twin studies is that twins tend to have the same socioeconomic backgrounds too. Still, just malnutrition, environmental pollution, etc, are big enough factors that taking care of those on a nationwide scale (since we’re talking about a particular nation here), would be much more significant than eugenics. Then we get to education - again, this same particular nation has a lot of gaps in the availability of good quality education.

It’s genetic and environmental (I’d argue that societal is a subset of environment - the society you live in is part of your environment).

IQ is far from a perfect measure for intelligence, but it has a high degree of inheritability - up to 80%.

However

As soon as malnutrition comes into play, IQ is automatically severely diminished. Add in all the other environmental factors too, and - it turns out we do have a lot more we can do to increase peoples intelligence, before resorting to eugenics.

“Golden Dome”

Given that gold is a relatively soft material, I assume that this one isn’t for defense like Israel’s Iron Dome, but rather for large scale golden shower parties for Trump and friends.

Gates is always whitewashing his own future or past actions when he does something philanthropic tbh

Is the opportunity “once in a lifetime” or can you find alternatives like Europe?

Generally speaking, opportunities are difficult to find and if you let go of one, depending on what kind of opportunity it is, you might get another one in a few years, or decades, or never. Depending on what line of work you’re in, European opportunities aren’t comparable to American ones either. Tech industry in Europe is in a laughable state, for an example.

Who the fuck thought it’d be a good idea to hold the world cup in the US, a country that doesn’t even give a fuck about football?

Ah, personally I just figured I’d use wireguard. I have few enough users that a bit of setup isn’t a huge issue. No way I’d want to expose it completely publicly, same with any other home servers I run.

The public availability without open ports is indeed a strength of Plex.

What’s missing from Jellyfin for you?

I’m going to migrate over soon personally. I canceled my plex pass instead of upgrading to lifetime a few months ago because I felt like Plex was going to go down enshittification alley soon. I haven’t used Jellyfin much though, so not sure what to expect at this point. I don’t have a lot of users luckily

Now I’m not an American and definitely not a Latino, but I’ve heard there’s a huge amount of Latinos who hate Latinos and want them all to stay out of the country (I.e fuck you, got mine), which is part of why they vote republican. Also all the Cuban refugees who really hate Cuba so they also vote republican just to make sure democrats don’t ease the sanctions on Cuba - which are of course making life hard for people who have not yet escaped Cuba. Hell I bet without the sanctions a lot of people wouldn’t be leaving it in the first place.

If all that is true, honestly, this is a peak leopards eating faces moment.