90% taxes on people with only 200% of the median wealth seems awfully excessive. For someone with $16,000 in assets, this would leave them with $1,600 -- just 20% of median wealth. I strongly suspect no tax system in history has ever worked like this.
Not to mention that taxes are collected and spent at the national level, not at the global level. If you are proposing a global government that administers taxes worldwide, that is an interesting idea, but it's not exactly a place to "start" a new tax policy, given that there is no political infrastructure in place to support it and likely couldn't be for decades even if the world made a concerted effort to make it happen.
I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop.
You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.
You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.
In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.
Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.
For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.
I went to school in south Atlanta, where both student body and teaching staff tended to be overwhelmingly Black. The school had a policy of hiring a certain percentage of non-Black teachers, including white teachers, and it had programs designed specifically to attract students from white and Hispanic communities.
The goal was not to give non-Black students and teachers a leg up; it was to promote diversity and ensure students graduated ready to meet all kinds of different people in the workplace. These policies were popular and uncontroversial, at least while I was there — though I dare say they would be deemed illegal now.
It didn't stop in the 70s. In many countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, it's still common for businesses to retain employees over the arc of their career.
This was my general experience as well. The very best quality education I ever received was in my 7th grade math class, followed closely by my 7th grade English class.
I did have some very excellent university classes (including ones that were so good that I audited them without receiving credit), but I also had a lot that were positively abysmal, taught by professors who were experiencing severe mental health issues (one who'd had a stroke and could no longer comprehend the material, another who was going through a mental break and stopped teaching us altogether, etc.) or extremely stressed grad students who were not fluent in English and spent class time trying to catch up with their PhD workload.
My best university-level education actually came after I graduated and got a job working in a lab at my university. During that time, I worked closely with the professor and grad students, and it was such an amazing learning opportunity that I will never forget for the rest of my life — sadly cut short by the 2008 financial crisis.
I would agree if it were applied equally across the board. I see no clear reason why "transgender rights, immigration or homosexuality" should specifically be spared from moderation, while other speech remains subject to censorship.
I am a dual citizen, and I have not found this to be the case in either of my two countries. Neither of them will accept photo IDs issued by the other, except for passports.
Introversion level is really just a measure of how much social stimulation you require on average. Everyone has some level above which they feel exhausted and below which they feel lonely/bored.
The difference between introversion and shyness is the difference between exhaustion and fear. They can influence each other (being afraid all the time is exhausting, for example), but they are ultimately separate emotions that need not coexist or have any relationship to each other.
Over my life, I have made plenty of friends both at work and outside of work — but NONE of them had no interests outside of work.
That's not to say that I've never had coworkers whose only interest was work. I just didn't become friends with them, because what is there to talk about? I greeted them and made basic small talk with them while we worked together, but that's not friendship.
And that's not to say that my friends' interests have nothing to do with the work they do. But their interests in those areas go above and beyond what they are paid to do.
AKC golden retrievers are very badly inbred (they are 27.3% inbred, according to the raw data from this study: https://cgejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40575...) — two random "unrelated" golden retrievers are more closely related to each other than human siblings are — and they are prone to serious health problems, especially cancer. It is not a breed I would ever recommend due to these issues, especially from AKC lines — which are bred for competition and therefore have a very limited stud pool.
But that doesn't mean all dog breeds are equally inbred and equally prone to health problems.
Poodles are in MUCH better shape than golden retrievers.
Golden retrievers are twice as inbred as poodles. And unlike golden retrievers, poodles have not been bred toward an unhealthy type; they have a slim, primitive body shape and a non-brachycephalic head shape that is associated with good health and long lifespan in dogs.
If I were seeking an example of a pointless, harmful breeding program in dogs, I would not have chosen poodles. There are endless other breeds (pugs, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, etc.) that have been wrecked by thoughtless breeding practices.
My mom is obese because she developed an autoimmune disorder while she was pregnant with me that attacks her thyroid. She has extremely abnormal thyroid cells that have to be biopsied twice a year and she has to take daily thyroid medication or she will die. She is about to start on Ozempic as well because the thyroid medication is not enough.
To manage her disease, she eats much less and much healthier (e.g., steamed kale for dinner every night) than everyone else in my family, and yet she is the obese one amongst us.
Please stop acting like life-saving drugs are evil and everything can be managed through willpower alone. My mom would be dead without modern medical science, and I would have died in the womb with her.
I am aware that this is the norm. It's not just language production; lots of things we do are done by seemingly unconscious parts of our brains, even though they feel like conscious choices we make.
I am open to the possibility that these "unconscious" things we do are not actually unconscious, but are actually done by parts of our brains that are separately conscious — i.e., other entities that live in our bodies with us.
No, I have never had any experience like this. I have intrusive emotions sometimes, but I don't really have intrusive thoughts or imaginings (outside of dreams).
My workplace offers both WFH and in-office work (our choice). Before COVID, most people worked in the office, but COVID forced everyone to get set up for and used to working at home.
One of the funniest changes that came with this is that, even when everyone is working in the office now, we still communicate primarily through our WFH chat program because it is less intrusive.
It's also very handy for referring back to later — to the extent that when we do have an in-person discussion, we usually summarize it in the chat afterwards so that we can search for it in the future.
Mind you, we don't have the issues you describe (questions going unanswered for hours or not at all). With very few exceptions, such as when someone was out sick and I didn't realize, all of my questions have been answered within minutes. I imagine that is is because we are a relatively small team (albeit stretched across several timezones these days) and the chat is mostly pretty quiet.
My only complaint is that it has made the separation between work time and leisure time a lot more fuzzy. We all basically act as if we are on call all the time to answer questions, and it is common for my coworkers to even attend video call meetings from doctor's offices and overseas vacations just to say hi.
I personally have not seen that workaholic employees get consistent preference in workplaces. Often they get shafted the hardest, particularly in highly competitive workplaces (where, for example, supervisors may undermine their best employees who might threaten their own ambitions).
And the hardest workers are also prone to burnout, which often leads to catastrophic career failures: quitting suddenly with no backup plan, changing careers, having a breakdown and ending up nonfunctional for months at a time.
I have worked in a variety of workplaces, some that were circling the toilet, some that were leading their industries and nonetheless still shooting higher, and some that thought/hoped they were the latter but just didn't have what it takes.
The most consistently successful companies I've worked for have their employees work like tortoises, not hares. They want us to work hard, but sustainably. They discourage all that hypercompetitive nonsense that rewards backstabbers over hard workers, and they encourage us to have a life outside of work to keep us sane. They do this not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they are insatiably greedy and focused: they want our next 20+ years of productivity and experience.
If you wish to maximize A, you will need to lower your standards for B, C, and D. This is the nature of any selection process: choosing a home to buy, breeding crops, writing legislation, etc. It us no less true for hiring employees.
There are a very limited quantity of perfect employees, and you are unlikely to ever have the opportunity to hire one. The vast majority of employees have a mixture of good qualities (e.g., being hardworking) and bad qualities (e.g., expecting a higher salary). Your best strategy is to prioritize those characteristics that are most important to the role you are hiring for and be flexible on characteristics that are less important.
If you get your priorities out of order, even if inadvertently (e.g., by asking unverifiable interview questions that select for better liars), you will make suboptimal decisions.
Unwashed eggs can also be refrigerated, and they last an absurdly long time that way — much, much longer than either refrigerated washed eggs or unrefrigerated unwashed eggs.
Once you refrigerate unwashed eggs, though, they need to stay refrigerated thereafter.
If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.