Consumer goods become cheaper through innovation and economies of scale. Freeze drying is a mature technology with limited appeal.

My wish is to take my dollar and by one share of Tesla at market price.

With something called sodium citrate and a splash of milk, you can make quality cheese behave like Velveeta. Search “sodium citrate” cheese if your interested. Oh, and you can make sodium citrate from baking soda and limes so it’s not like it’s unhealthy or anything.

I happen to loathe Velveeta because of Jimmy Carter so I was excited to get my nachos at home again.

The short answer is you don’t. Even in philosophy, a leading model of “truth” is something like “a statement is true if it’s true”. We humans are doomed to be confused and unsure.

What’s learning good for?

Idiocracy is a funny movie that I enjoy. However I’m disturbed by the number of people who say it’s a documentary, or a warning. That’s because the central premise of the movie (that humans breed wrong and if nothing is done, we’ll devolve and society will collapse) also happens to be the central premise of Eugenics.

In the US, everyone has the right to a trial, in theory. However, if every defendant, or even a significant minority of them demanded their trial, the system would collapse.

To solve this problem. Prosecutors (lawyers working for the government) are given extraordinary power. They use their ability to charge any defendant with inflated charges that carry long jail sentences, then offer to reduce the charges if the defendant gives up their right to fight. Despite being obviously coercive and prone to force innocent people to confess, it’s perfectly normal, legal, and necessary to the US criminal system.

The idea of “political neutrality” is naive or bad faith.

What you want is a right-wing sub. They pride themselves on being centrist, reasonable, and uncontroversial. You’re going to get lots of radical ideology, but don’t take it seriously bro, it’s just a joke.

Left subs may seem obnoxious with their politics, but that’s just because we’re trying to persuade you with argument instead of tricking you with flattery.

Art isn’t a progression. “Realism” isn’t necessarily a goal.

If capturing some subject in the most naturalistic way possible was the goal of art, there would be no need for paintings after the invention of the camera, and sculpture would be obsolete because of 3d scanning. Art must be something beyond capturing nature, otherwise there would be no reason for humans to do it.

Randomly choose 0.001% of the books.

If you think that’s a bad plan, it’s been the norm for the history of books.

We’ve two. The beautiful gods live in LA, the ugly ones in DC.

It’s important not to let cynicism become conspiratorial ideation. This is not a ploy to get troops killed as a rationale for American involvement. This is a defensive anti-missile anti-drone anti-aircraft battery. The soldiers operating it may be the safest people in Israel, at least from Iranian attack.

I’d go further and speculate that Iran would avoid deliberately attacking this high value target to avoid escalation. I’d go further still and speculate that Iran is counting on her missiles being shot down so that she can attack Israel without doing enough damage to spark a wider war.

I don’t count Iran as peaceniks, their behavior so far looks like a Nation keen to save face, while avoiding a war it’s not ready for.

The real rational for sending troops is that there is no time to train up IDF soldiers to operate it.

A “list of videos to watch later” can quickly become a dreaded multiple hour homework assignment. My “favorites” list on the steaming service is a graveyard of movies I thought I wanted to watch.

Milton’s Paradise Lost doesn’t paint Hell as pleasant, but Satan is absolutely the protagonist of the story. That’s 1667.

“somebody is fucking with me”

The Earth is way too close, and I don’t think a meteor strike on the earth, no matter how energetic, would look like a bullet going through an apple.

You’re gonna have to explain how a public defender has the power to jail anyone. Prosecutors coerce people to take deals thousands of times every day. Not only is that legal, and normal, the system would collapse without it.

You can use physical objects like dice or lava lamps that will naturally form random distribution when we check. But Newton and others would argue that even this was a determinant problem and if you had perfect knowledge of the dice and a good physics theory, you could predict the outcome.

We can only recognize randomness by the patterns it leaves behind.

The philosophical truth is that we don’t know if “randomness” is an actual phenomena or just a bucket where we put outcomes we haven’t learned to predict yet. A sort of randomness of the gap. Some have suggested that as a pattern-recognizing machine, the human mind simply can’t conceive randomness. Even the way “randomness” is verified is by looking at the distribution in the outcome and see if it matches the pattern we expect.

Were do viruses fit in the “tree of life”?

If you think people are stubborn for sticking with Youtube and Reddit, just think how many people cling to the belief that customers control corporations by voting with their money.

Too many innocents go to jail behind false arson accusations. You never know if the building was into it at the time, but then felt ashamed later and cried arson. And then it’s just your word against the fire investigators. Just the accusation can destroy your reputation, no trial or nothing.