What's the craziest thing we just take as granted?
What's the craziest thing we just take as granted?
81 comments
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That like four people have as much wealth as 7 billion others.
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Water, arguably the most important thing for sustaining life, just falls from the sky.
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Hot water, directly from the tap. Showers are clearly underrated.
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And we still get charged a fortune for it. Yay capitalism!
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I mean you can collect rain water (or build your own bore hole), process it, treat it for storage, keep it, test it to verify that it’s still safe to drink, install and maintain a pumping system to provide pressure, provide adequate documentation and inspection opportunities, provide a traceable record of where it has come from, install a water water treatment system, provide the necessary permits to verify that you’re not draining polluted water into the ocean etc etc..
But I guess if you want someone else to do that for you, some salaries, know how and materials will need to get paid for, yes.
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We had a bad algae bloom affect our water supply making it undrinkable a few years ago and it really was a wakeup call that we take it for granted. We couldn't just turn on the tap and pour a cup of water anymore. People snatched up all the drinking water at the grocery stores and some places started price gouging by charging upwards of $50 for a 6-pack of Dasani water bottles. Thankfully it only lasted a week or two, but we keep drinking water stored in the garage now.
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Unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income. I mean, pretty much everything about capitalism tbf, but that particular thing is saying the quiet part out loud and it still gets almost no attention.
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A flat tax system would resolve a lot of this.
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The issue with a flat tax system, though, is that the value behind each dollar is different for different classes of people.
$20 is chump change for a billionaire. $20 for a middle class person might be some nice takeout for an evening. $20 could mean whether or not a working poor person can eat that day, or if they have to save what money they have for rent or electricity.
A flat tax system isn't actually "flat", not in practice. It'd be more accurate to describe it as "regressive".
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Having money means you automatically get to have more money - ie interest, rent, investments.
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Society. As much as laws and taxes and all the various things suck, it is still better than the alternative.
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Not trying to quibble or be pedantic, but I see it as a complex subject. Laws & taxes are extremely recent practices, while societies were probably around long before modern man came along, ~300kya.
I would also think some of those societies functioned nicely indeed, and were arguably an improvement over what we have now.
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Everything.
Like, I'm talking to you now from the back bedroom of a random house in a small isolated town in the north east of England, and you could be anywhere. Travelling on a train is crazy fast. There are SO MANY leaves on that tree. Dogs are the best and there's no way humanity deserves them. Isn't it cool that we invented bread? My travel mug can keep hot tea at an acceptable drinking temperature for hours. Hugs are amazing. Windows are insane.
Sometimes I have to take motion sickness pills and they make me a bit loopy to the point where I start to really notice things around me, haha.
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There's a Pratchett quote that goes something like,
"In a universe so full of wonders, it's a marvel that humans invented boredom."
Your post reminded me of that.
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That at any given moment you can just call someone in completely different part of the world and have a voice (or even video) conversation like there were just next to you. Imagine explainig this to people in middle ages.
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That some people can have a fleet or private planes and billion-dollar yachts while a major part of the population struggles to get enough food and has very limited access to medical care. Any sane society needs to have a minimal standard of life and needs to shift wealth (i.e. tax) as necessary to achieve it.
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That interacting with the smallest parts of our universe changes them from behaving like continuous waves to discrete objects.
It was weird enough a century ago when it was first figured out, along with all the associated weirdness like information erasure reverting behavior back to behaving like a wave.
But now we are regularly building procedurally generated worlds where continuous seed functions deterministically placing world geometry convert to discrete voxels when interacted with in order to track state changes.
TL;DR: The building blocks of our universe behave much like how we currently build randomly generated virtual worlds where free agents can interact with them. It's wild this isn't being discussed more than it is.
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Is there anyway you could clarify this for someone who is not knowledgeable about coding? My understanding is that procedurally generated worlds have a seed, which is a specific string of characters that will generate the same world each time when fed into the procedural algorithm.
continuous seed functions deterministically placing world geometry convert to discrete voxels when interacted with in order to track state changes.
This is the part I don't understand.
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So yes, you are correct about the seed aspect, but what I'm talking about is the function the seed is fed into.
Those functions are generally continuous. For example, a mountain in Minecraft as a non-blocky mathematical curve.
These continuous curves are then converted into voxels (volumetric pixels) like Minecraft's blocks. Then if you interact with them, it records the difference between what the function would generate normally and the changes. This saves on memory as it only records the interactions.
Given the seed function is deterministic, the same coordinates of space and time in the world will result in the same world geometry. Then you just layer on the discrete changes from free agents and you have the appearance of a fully interactive world.
Put another way, on the debate about free will, the details in how our universe behaves is exactly how you would design a world where you had free agents. If you were designing a world without free will, you wouldn't need to convert to discrete units at the point of interactions, as the interactions would also be deterministic and could be calculated by the seed function, even to the point of continuous fidelity (i.e. no blocks/particles, just waves).
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It's basically like all the technological progress since the The Jetsons and Star Trek aired has been focused in one place. We still drive normal cars made out of normal metal and plastic to normal (or actually inferior) jobs until we die at a normal age, but it's free to view and manipulate any piece of knowledge instantaneously and in a wide variety of public places that have open wifi.
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Certainly true. My point was that right now you and I, are using an electronic computing machine that is able to compute from billions to tens of billions instructions per second. In addition (if it was too weak for you), it also has another computing chip dedicated for parallel computing that is able to run TRILLIONS of parallel instructions per second (a.k.a. the GPU).
This is probably one reason why I like programming.
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These jerks at the top are smart enough to not use their nukes...
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Just smart enough...
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Produce that are readily available all year round and having some fruits that naturally won't thrive in your area be available in the grocery.
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For me it's time. That when we look in the night sky we don't see what's happening right now, but instead light from many years ago... Dunno, just can't wrap my head around it
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Flying, and to a somewhat lesser degree fast driving. The speeds involved are insane, and when flying so are the surroundings. People actually fall asleep doing this stuff now.
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Sewage system and wastewater treatment
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Food, House, healcare. Losing one of this and you become a ghost.
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In some countries this is much worst than in others.
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Life.
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Clean air. You don't even realize it's there until you go outside and hit this:
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Life.
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I would also add, the randomness of life occuring at all on a rock in the middle of fucking space.
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America-specific, but how well our culture-pot mixing has worked. Lots of incidents and issues make the headlines, but the crazy stuff makes the news because it's so unordinary.
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Reality. Anyone who has suddenly had their perception of reality completely unhinged due to a mental, psychiatric, or spiritual crisis is likely to attest their exuberant appreciation simply for "the ground beneath my feet"
81 comments