In some places, real estate is at a serious premium, and you have to be fantastically wealthy to own a real home with storage space, and pretty well-off to even rent more than a room in a house. Rent on an average studio or 1br apartment is 87% of full-time minimum-wage take-home pay here, and would leave you with $5/day for all other expenses. I make almost 3X the local minimum wage, just bought a mobile home of my own, and don't have enough closet space after putting clothes in there to keep my vacuum cleaner out of sight, much less 30 days worth of supplies. (And I only have one week's worth of clean clothes, so it's not like they take up a lot of space).

So unless you're suggesting that everyone who lives in expensive places is irresponsible by not being filthy stinking rich, fuck off about irresponsibility. And don't suggest they should all move somewhere cheaper; who's going to wait tables for the rich landowners left living in the nice places?

"Quantum" means "discrete", as opposed to continuous. A quantum leap is a sudden leap as opposed to a gradual one. A discrete quantity does mean that there is such a thing as a smallest possible unit, and a quantum leap is a change by exactly one such unit, but the intended connotation is the suddenness of the change, not the magnitude of it.

The law only has power over criminals. If those who control the law want more power, they need to make more people into criminals.

Also (really a subset of the above): you can extract money from people by declaring them criminals and demanding fines or else you'll abduct them and lock them in a concrete room (or shoot them if they don't come along nicely).

Being willing to consider all ideas regardless of whose "side" those ideas are associated with, and being willing to move incrementally forward and make improvements to the country (i.e. progressive, not reactionary), but unwilling to rush big changes and break what already works without a secure alternative already in place (i.e. conservative, not radical).

There's a simple solution to that problem: make public schools operate on a fee-based basis competitive with other private schools (e.g. they charge the same as private schools do on average), and then offer every student a voucher sufficient to cover that tuition. If all the students still in public school stay in public school, absolutely nothing changes, but all those students now have the option of attending average private schools instead, and the public schools thus have the incentive to improve quality by competing with those private schools. "Worst case scenario": state-operated schools go out of business, but all kids still get a state-funded education at superior private schools. "Best case scenario": state-operated schools become competitive with private schools and everyone currently attending them stays there.

I like this idea for many kinds of public services. Let private providers actually provide the service, so you get competition and high quality, but publicly subsidize people's ability to afford those services, so everybody gets equal access to those high-quality competitive services.

Military and law enforcement reform need to come first because there are not only harmful but unbelievably wasteful programs there (the various Wars on Abstract Concepts at home and abroad, e.g. Terror and Drugs) which, when trimmed, would free up the money needed to properly reform the rest. Military and law enforcement are the first priorities of a government, the first things you need to have in place to have a government at all, but once those functions are handled satisfactorily, any excess going into them is the purest and most disgusting form of government excess, sapping money from the people the state is supposed to protect and serve and not even giving them anything back for it. So trim these back to the basics (refocus the military on domestic defense, and law enforcement on violent crimes with actual victims) and spend the money that would otherwise be wasted on them somewhere more useful.

Then, setting aside for the moment debates about whether or not the rest of these should be tax-funded areas in the first place, just taking for granted that they are and focusing on how to get the most bang for our bucks:

Healthcare and Education come next because we need a healthy and educated populace to get anything at all done. If people are sick and stupid, then they can't even properly take care of themselves, much less help to build a stronger society for all of us together, and they both suffer individually and drag the rest of the country down with them.

Infrastructure comes next because transportation and communication networks are what turn individual people toiling in isolation into a vast organized efficient economy. Educated and healthy people are the nodes of that network, but roads, pipes, and wires are the edges that connect them together into more than just the sum of themselves.

And last but certainly not least Space and Environmental sciences go hand in hand as the twin goals which, if anything, all of these public works projects should be aiming to promote (besides just the general welfare, which is what all of the above will get you). And I really mean hand in hand, as the technologies we would need to ever do anything in space are the exact technologies that we need to keep our own environment under control here on Earth: efficient energy production because there's no such thing as an oil well in space, recycling of absolutely everything because there's no such thing as a landfill in space, precise control of our air and water quality because there is no Mommy Nature with vast forests and oceans to clean up after us in space. It would be vastly easier to build a comfortable apartment complex operating entirely off the grid in the middle of the Sahara, or Antarctica, or on the bottom of the goddamn ocean, than it would be to settle anywhere outside the Earth. So let's take baby steps, and start with keeping our ordinary cities from drowning in their own filth first, and then see about settling the parts of the planet we currently consider "uninhabitable" (nowhere on Earth is "uninhabitable" compared to Mars), and by the time we've got our own house in order we should just about have the technology ready to think about building a new one. And at the rate our family is growing we're going to need a new one eventually, so lets get on that.

A further problem with the "if it's listed in the DSM it's a real disease" attitude is the conflation of conditions with disorders. Just because someone has a particular, identifiable pattern of thought and behavior, which may be useful to name and document, does not mean that that person has something wrong with them that they need fixed. I'm thinking in particular here of conditions frequently found in members of the neurodiversity movement, who may very well have some identifiable distinct difference from your typical person, but who would deny vehemently that it is a problem that needs correction.

There's definitely some use in a patient being able to say "I notice that I tend to do this that and the other thing and they're making my life problematic, can you help me change" and being able to put a name to that pattern and apply techniques known to alter it. It's another thing entirely for a doctor to say "I notice you seem to do this that and the other thing, you have a disease and I can treat it and make you better". Identifying and naming the patterns is great. Calling them disorder or diseases or something that implies a defect in need of correction, instead of a perfectly benign difference that doesn't necessarily need treatment, is a problem.

Much better than ordinary stition.

That's liberty, and it can come with or without democracy. There can be liberal non-democracies, and illiberal democracies as well.

I'd argue that on a very fundamental level we always have had democracy everywhere, because no form of government will remain in place unless enough people support it and few enough people oppose it: a state with more people actively (keyword: actively) fighting it than actively supporting it will inevitably fail.

The question is simply to whom do the masses delegate their power, whether by active support or passive acceptance. A king or dictator? An oligarchy or aristocracy? Some more directly accountable, short-term representatives in a parliament or congress? Or do they keep it all to themselves like in ancient Athens?

And then the more important question is, whoever that power is delegated to, what terms are attached to it? What will the people let those granted power get away with before they take it back?

The reason we have a tiny power elite doing whatever the hell they want is because most people either support or at least accept a system which allows them to get away with that. The ultimate power, and thus the ultimate responsibility, always lies directly with the people: if we want to get rid of the tiny power elite, enough of us have to publicly declare that we're not going to put up with their shit any more (by means of elections and legislation), and then stop putting up with their shit (appeal to the new legal structure that says we don't have to), and watch each other's backs (in the courts and at the polls again, or if we are blatantly ignored there, in the streets) to make sure that nobody's going to get steamrolled and forced to put up with it.

If we were not a democracy, that would just mean the election and legislation, courts and polls, would be out of the question, and our only recourse would be taking directly to the streets. And yes, I mean the torches-and-pitchforks (i.e. guns) kind of taking to the streets. Thankfully we are ostensibly a democracy, we have other recourse before it comes to that, and hopefully it will never come to that unless we all do get up off our collective asses, avail ourselves of those avenues of recourse, and still get ignored. But so far we're still at the "get people off their asses" stage. Until that happens, we're stuck with what the ignorant masses want: tyranny.

I am firmly of the belief that the user interface of software should, as directly as possible, directly reflect the kind of functions the software actually performs internally, and the job of the UI designer is to find a metaphor for the user to easily see and understand what it is that the software does and can do, and make it do that as they wish. This means there needs to be back-and-forth between the engineers and the users, mediated by the UI people:

• The users say they want something which does a laundry list of unsorted and unorganized things.
• The UI people should factor out the common functions involved in all of those things and determine what kinds of more general functions could be combined to achieve that functionality.
• They then hand the engineers a list of user-level functions which are actually needed, and the engineers go about implementing all the details behind the scene that the users don't need to know about.
• Then the UI people take that product and, if its functional structure has had to change at all for implementation reasons, update their UI concept to still accurately reflect that underlying functionality.
• They then take that back to the users and see how well the they discover the functionality, as well as whether there is any functionality actually missing.
• Then the UI people go back to their own drawing boards to make existing functionality more discoverable...
• ...or go back to the engineers to implement any missing functionality...
• ...and then back to tweak the UI to reflect that new functionality...
• ...and back to the users, etc...

In short, the job of a UI designer is both to distill for the engineers exactly what functionality the users really need, and to explicate for the users how to access the functionality the engineers have implemented, and do that until what the users need and what the engineers have implemented match.

$50k/yr is above the median personal income. According to this about 75% of Americans make under $50k. I'm not finding it now on a cursory search but the figure I'm recalling for the median income was $44k, although this same chart I just linked says 48% of Americans make under $25k so that would seem to be even lower. Perhaps the $44k figure I'm recalling is median household income, not personal income, which would include many two-income households and exclude anyone who isn't a householder (like me).

Either way, $200k will get you a nice mobile home in a park paying $800/mo rent on top of your mortgage around these parts (Ventura/Santa Barbara area). $1000/mo will get you a 1br apartment in the cheaper parts like Oxnard. From what I hear most of the Bay Area is the same. I'm sure Oklahoma City is a lot cheaper, but that's what I'm talking about having to move to Bumfuck Idaho if I want to live like a real adult. Staying where I was born and raised apparently isn't an option; only rich people get to live in decent places, eh? (I'd be happy in a 500sqft 1br shotgun shack if it were even legal to build such things in ways that didn't leave you still paying rent on them, defeating half the point of home ownership in the first place. Only options like that here are condos -- with HOA fees comparable to rent -- and mobile homes, with land rent comparable to apartments).

And don't fucking talk to me about having myself to blame or needing help with financial planning. I came from nothing, I lived in a literal goddamn toolshed next to my dad's trailer until I moved out on my own, my father was a bricklayer, my mom is disabled, neither of them had any college education or provided any financial support or even guidance to get me out on my feet, and despite all that I still got myself a four-year degree, am 100% debt-free, and working a middle-class job now. And I just told you in my last post that I hardly spend a fucking cent on anything but necessities; my only irregular expenses are the odd automotive or medical/dental repair and maintenance, the rest goes straight to cost of living or savings. All my non-rent expenses combined amount to the typical rent for this area, and I'm putting up with an intolerable living situation to get about half the average rent so I can put the savings toward a down payment on something eventually. I don't drink or party, I don't buy toys, I don't travel; all I want is to be left the fuck alone in a space of my own, and I'm pouring every goddamn ounce of effort I have into that endeavor and it's still looking more impossible every day.

And apparently that's true, from your own statistics, of almost half the people my age. A 30 year old man still living like a kid in someone else's spare bedroom would be a laughing stock in 1960, but he's just about average today apparently.

Hah. I'm a 30 year old man making almost exactly the national median income, and still living little different from how I did when I was in college. (Which I worked my way through, mind you, having parents who are both completely destitute). The only things I spend money on are rent, utilities, food, gas, and occasionally a movie or something. I don't buy toys or gadgets and I almost never travel (rarely even an afternoon's drive away for a weekend camping trip or something). Everything else I make beyond those expenses is going toward desperately trying to claw my way out of merely renting a room in someone else's house full of other people, which is looking more and more like a futile prospect unless I move to Bumfuck Idaho or the middle of the desert or something. And no way in hell could I ever support any dependents.

Meanwhile, a college-educated middle-class man my age in 1960 would be married with kids and living in a real family house, all on his own income. If I wanted anything close to that, I'd have to find a girl to makes more than I do to split the expenses with, and even then we'd be pushing it unless she was filthy stinking rich. Yeah, our technology has improved, but my computer is the modern equivalent of the television that my 1960 counterpart would likely have owned, my cell phone is the modern equivalent of the phone he would have had, and my car is little different from his would be. They're all fancier and higher-tech than things were then, but they're the standard lower-end options available today. Meanwhile, real substantial living conditions like the ability to live alone or support a family are drastically diminished.

No matter the size of a black hole, gravitational acceleration at the event horizon is c per Planck time. That's not "infinite", but it is maximal. Anything at the event horizon of a black hole will have its velocity increased by c toward the singularity as quickly as theoretically possible. You cannot build a rocket to put out that kind of acceleration in the other direction to keep you in place, because you cannot build a rocket to get you up to c at all, in any amount of time. Your talk about time axes sounds like it's an echo of a description of why you can't build a rocket to get up to c. It has nothing to do with black holes specifically, other than that you would need to get that fast to escape the event horizon of one.

If you were made of light, however, you would be moving at c, and you could orbit at the event horizon. If you're just above the event horizon, you could in theory get moving fast enough to orbit just outside of it. And in orbit, you don't feel any acceleration from gravity; you are free-falling around the black hole, and continually missing it. You could also have some flight path requiring 1g of constant acceleration to keep you from falling in. The size of the black hole doesn't matter for any of that; if you are anywhere outside the event horizon, you can find a flight path that will make you feel any amount of acceleration you want, for as long as you have fuel to maintain that kind of acceleration. (For an orbit, you feel zero acceleration, and so need no fuel and can maintain it indefinitely).

Where the size of a black hole does matter, and what I think you were thinking of in your earlier post about black holes of 100 solar masses or such, is tidal forces. These are the forces which pinch and stretch your body in uneven ways. Imagine you had a tetherball pole in the middle of a schoolyard. You stand far off to the east of it, facing it, with your arms outstretched. The lines from both of your hands, and your elbows, and your nose, toward the tetherball pole, are all roughly westward, so if you were to be pulled toward it, your whole body would be pulled more or less evenly. But if you stand right next to it, with your arms stretched out, your nose is pulled west, but your right hand is now north of it, and your left hand is south of it, so they get pulled south and north respectively, and the pole pulls your hands toward each other. If, like gravity, it also pulls harder the closer to it you are, it will pull your face toward it much harder than it will your hands, and make you smack your nose into it and then hit yourself as your hands fall in behind your head; while from a long ways away, all your body parts are pulled with about the same force.

Likewise with black holes. The closer you are to one, the more the different parts of your body (and spaceship, etc) are pulled in different directions and with different magnitudes. The farther you are from it, the more evenly everything is pulled. A very massive black hole has a very large event horizon, so at the event horizon, you are very far from the center of the black hole, and even though you are still experiencing the same acceleration you would feel at the event horizon of any black hole, it's all pulling you in more or less the same direction, so you could orbit there and suffer no ill effects. Around a small black hole though, even if you were orbiting just above its black hole and feeling no acceleration overall, the parts of you closer to it would need to orbit faster to maintain that effect and so would feel pulled and pinchedcompared to the parts of you further away from it, which would have more speed than they need to orbit and so tend to drift away from it. All in all you would feel pulled in every different direction and your body would be ripped apart. Around a larger black hole, even moving at the same speed to maintain orbit the same distance from the event horizon, all of you would feel roughly the same effects, so you wouldn't even notice them.

It doesn't even provide that benefit. It keeps the masses afraid and feeling dependent. That's only benefit to the people who want to leverage that for their own power, not to the people such measures are purported to benefit.