Or better yet, fund it by taxing it as a percentage of the average income. For the sake of simpler math, if the average household income was $80k, and we wanted a yearly UBI of $20k, could could tax all non-UBI income at a flat rate of 25%. That would break down thusly for the following households:
$0 income - $0 taxes + $20k ubi = $20k gross (i.e. $20k rebate)
$40k income - $10k taxes + $20k ubi = $50k gross (i.e. $10k rebate)
$80k income - $20k taxes + $20k ubi = $80k gross (i.e. 0% effective tax rate)
$200k income - $50k taxes + $20k ubi = $170k gross (i.e. 15% effective tax rate)
$100m income - $250k taxes + $20k ubi = $770k gross(i.e. 23% effective tax rate)

Adjusted on an annual basis, the result would be self-funding, non-inflationary, lacking in income traps (thereby incentivizing work), and genuinely universal (no means testing, no tapering off or excluding people who exceed a certain threshold, etc).

Complaining about something being 'political' is often shorthand for saying it doesn't affect you, but not everyone has that luxury. In my case, as a trans woman, I can't help but notice that he donated $50,000,000 to a PAC in 2022 that ran anti-transgender attack ads, nor that he spent $100,000,000 in 2024 supporting Donald Trump's presidential campaign (with total spending on anti-transgender attacks surpassing $200,000,000).

EVs and Space Rockets are cool and all, but when that financial success results in someone dumping tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into a movement that aims to strip me and people like me of our humanity, our dignity, and our rights, hopefully you can understand how that's not something I'm gonna shrug at.

You're kind of rambling, so I'm not quite sure what to respond to, but I'll try my best:
1) I never said Conway had a great personality, nor did I bring up her marriage. But you're using a lot of charged language, like "attention whore", and bouncing around in general. You seem to have a strong reaction to this stuff. Might be worth unpacking with a therapist.
2) Would you care to go into detail with the trans people you've met in real life and conversed with? Were they friends, co-workers, strangers on the street, or what? You said "9 out of 10", that implies quite a large sample size.
3) I never said that first-hand experience of anything is required to have knowledge; in fact, you seem to have totally missed the part where I explained how people can learn about things by being willing to question their initial assumptions (which is, like, a core part of science). Are you sure that you're not autistic yourself...?
4) Opinions can be ranked by validity, when the thing we're talking about is accessible in real life. Like, if I was trying to learn about primates, someone who's been to a zoo is more credible than someone who's only exposure is reading "Curious George", and Jane Goodall would be an even better source of information. The reason why Black Holes were a bad metaphor in your post is because they are inaccessible, whereas I (quite clearly, as evidenced by my typing this) am not.
5) lol, "have [I] performed some introspection"? JFC, I don't even know where to begin with that one... uh, the short answer is, yes. The reason why I chose to transition was was to pursue peace and happiness, despite tremendous social stigma. Between the heavy investment in time, money, and energy, it's about as far from a flippant decision as one can get.

I mean, to really answer your big question at: imagine you yourself going on hormone replacement therapy, and experiencing breast growth, reduced muscle mass, atrophied genitalia, and softer skin, among countless other things. Imagine spending dozens of hours getting laser hair removal across dozens of sessions, and losing all your course hair, with only the vellus left, unable to grow a beard or mustache. Imagine risking alienation from your friends and family, or of losing your career. Imagine getting your ears pierced and your nails painted, or spending time each morning applying make-up, and then time in the evening removing it. Imagine growing your hair out below your shoulders, and wearing tight-fitting dresses to parties, and getting called gorgeous.

Does picturing all of that for yourself make you feel good? Do you think you'd be happier, or safer?

If instead it sends a shudder down your spine, then understand /that/ is what I feel when I imagine having coarse hair, or a beard, or those big muscles, or a flat chest, or of wearing a suit and being called handsome. I had all of that stuff for decades, and didn't know how awful it was until I escaped it, because I'd never had another point of comparison. And holy shit am I by every metric happier, healthier, more financially stable, and stronger in my connections to friends and family than I've ever been in my life. An authentic life where I present on the outside how I feel on the outside, and the way people treat me in turn aligns with my sense of self, is just indescribably better than flatly and unconvincingly pantomiming a man.

Realizing you're transgender, and then undertaking a gender transition, is a profound experience that forces one to re-contextualize their entire life, past relationships, memories, etc. It's a real "Plato's Allegory of the Cave" mind-fuck.

Yeah, I mean... setting aside trans people, there are plenty of cis lesbians who don't realize they're gay until after being married to a man for 10 or 20 years. The reasons behind all of this are kind of fascinating, but I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that we don't often talk about the differences between physical arousal, aesthetic attraction, platonic attraction, sexual attraction, and romantic attraction.

With straight cis people, those are all typically more or less aligned with society's expectations (male arousal patterns, subconscious modeling on other men, prefer male friends, sexually and romantically attracted to women, etc). And if you're a trans woman who's attracted to men (male arousal patterns, subconscious modeling on women, prefer female friends, sexually and romantically attracted to men, etc), then you're clearly going against the grain, and might move through the world as a gay man or drag queen before transitioning. But if you're a trans woman who's attracted to women, then things can be a lot murkier and harder to figure out, because so much of how you move through the world aligns with societies expectations (thinking of the old "lesbian trapped in a man's body" joke), it can take longer for the parts that don't fit to become obvious.

Based off of your clumsy language, conflation of terms, sweeping generalizations, and High School level sophistry, it's very clear to me that you're operating off of tropes and caricatures. I dare say the average theoretical physicist has a much better understanding of black holes than you do of trans people. I mean, have you ever actually met a trans person in real life and had a conversation with them? Comparing people like me to a black hole is way beyond the "apples to oranges" metaphor.

But if you would like to model yourself off of a scientist, why not model their humility and accept that fact that your hypothesis might be wrong, and that you might have something to learn?

Ad hominems are attacks against the individual, which isn't something I did. Questioning experience and understanding of a topic, on the other hand, is totally in bounds.

I'd say I don't know where you got those ideas, but I'm sadly very familiar with the sheer volume of disinformation around the trans experience, what dysphoria is, etc. It's actually part of the conditioning that kept me from realizing this about myself (combined with an emotionally neglected childhood, a marriage that I lost my sense of self in, and a couple different neurodivergencies that relate to interiority).

To be clear, undergoing a gender transition is in fact a lifestyle choice, and as a result I'm happier and healthier than I've ever been, closer to friends and family, and stronger in my career. But being transgender is not a choice, it's an innate and often invisible truth.

The confidence with which you talk about things that you clearly have no experience with or nuanced understanding of is kind of astonishing.

Sorry to nitpick, but her sexuality wasn't explicitly brought up. Her gender, on the other hand, was.

As for why it's relevant:
1) The history of her struggles with dysphoria and transition are integral to her employment history, hence her career, hence her accomplishments
2) There are quite a lot of trans women in tech, and at least a couple on this site
3) Trans people are the target of a culture war being led by the right, and highlighting the ways in which trans people have contributed to society and the world, while also humanizing their story, is part of how we defend ourselves

Speaking from personal experience, they don't always know. Being trans wasn't even remotely on my RADAR until I was well into my 30s.

Of course, in retrospect, a lot of past experiences, memories, thoughts, feelings, and relationships were clearly pointing in a certain direction...

This movie isn't some CGI-fueled Superhero Distraction, it's a dark and serious reflection on a historical conspiracy to commit genocide, fueled by racism and a sense of cultural superiority, covered up and obscured by a web of lies, and it reveals dark, ugly truths at the heart of America. And one would hope that lessons are learned, so that we can avoid making similar mistakes now and in the future.

And we're now in an era where a former president espouses racism and cultural superiority, cheats to get ahead, lies reflexively, has the broad support of White Christian Nationalists, and has perpetrated actual conspiracies, ranging from tax evasions to attempted coups.

How was this speech not relevant...?

The Supreme Court weighed in, and it turns out you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Gender may be separate from sex, but that doesn't mean they don't relate to each other, just like sex and sexuality are separate and yet related. If someone was assigned male at birth, and they want to wear a dress because they are transgender and identify as a woman, but their township passes a law saying they can't wear a dress, then that is clearly sex-based discrimination (because you're not letting a 'male' do something that a 'female' can do).

Attempts to disentangle sex as a protected class from gender and gender identity as a protected class are fraught at best.

I've been working in video games for over a decade, and 0 vs 0.05 vs 0.1 vs 0.15 vs 0.2 seconds are miles apart in terms of feel, once you've acquired a sense for it. Trying plugging in an old Guitar Hero set, and then play with 0.2 seconds of audio/visual lag, and compare it to something properly calibrated, and the difference is night and day.

There's no such thing as a singular 'reaction time', the context always matters. Braking your car in an emergency famously takes over a second, because we're talking about a whole chain of events starting with your eyes and ending with your feet.

In a competitive game, sure, maybe your total reaction time between seeing and clicking is 150 ms, but you're cognitively processing things and intuiting the future much earlier than that (let's say at 50 ms, for the sake of easy math). That means that at 60 fps, you're planning and clicking 66 and 166 ms after the fact, whereas at 30 fps it's 83 and 183 ms later (25% and 10% higher times).

The difference is noticeable.

Up to ~2% of people fall outside of the rigid binary outcomes "XX/XY -> Female/Male Physiology": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Saying that Physical Sex is on a spectrum (even a relatively narrow one) isn't being politically correct, it's being more accurate.

And I'm a pope!