academia is fat and lazy. they are not lean and mean.

our entire education system needs to be leaner and meaner. but that’s hard work, so we won’t do it. we’d rather pay 50% of the grant money to the PI and then pay everyone else peanuts and wonder why none of our own citizens want to do research…

yeah, Trump.

Not that things weren’t kind of shitty before, he just accelerated the problems by defunding science and preventing foreigners from coming here to study, which sadly make up many 1/3 of the students of our PhD programs, especially hard sciences.

higher education in the USA needs systematically reform, but I don’t think anything Trump has done has improved anything, just accelerated the issues by turning off the money/labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.

a lot of this talented foreign labor is now going to study in other countries rather than the USA and that will impact things for decades, reducing USA’s lead in many scientific fields.

tell that to all the power users/mods here who act just like reddit power users/mods.

they don’t love telling you that.

the media loves telling you that, and loves making rich white peopel panic and go out and buy all new cups/cookware/appliances based on the new latest scary study.

and i have relatives who do this. every 5 years they re-buy everything in their kitchen based on whatever is the latest scare trend is. non-stick, plastics, pfas, bpa, etc. it’s like clockowrk, every 5 years there is a new boogeyman think that you have to go buy all new pots and pants and dishware to ‘avoid’. or water bottles.

i bet in 5 years we’re going to start hearing how eating of out steel cookware/cups is bad for you and we all have to go back to plastic because that’s safer.

maybe I’m gay but I never understood what directions have to do with feelings.

he’s easy to make fun of. he’s hyberbolic and hypocritical

and he’s ‘controversial’. the press can’t get enough of building him up into this big figure, when he’s anything but, but when they do they weirdly fixate on how ‘hunky’ he is, which is even more bizarre.

the people who are the most paranoid about crime live in the places where it is least likely to occur and have never been the victim of crime.

it’s sort of like the issue with immune systems, if you grow up ultra clean… you develop allergies because your immune system overreactions because it wasn’t trained how to react appropriately.

they do… just like they can’t breathe nitrogen.

Do you know anyone who breathes nitrogen?

I’m not sure what world you live in, but nobody gets held accountable who can avoid being held accountable. And that’s… true for everyone. Everyone is trying to avoid accountability all the time. People who seek accountability are rare.

Like, have you ever had a job or been in a school? Everyone blames somebody else for their issues. Very few folks say ‘it was my fault I failed the test/project’.

Hell most of our social structures are specifically design to avoid accountability.

you realize rich people are human beings right?

they aren’t aliens from another planet. they have all the same emotions and desires as you do. they just have more money than you do, so they have more ability to fulfill their desires.

It’s ironic, you expect them to have empathy for you, but you have none for them. You here, demonstrate yourself, that you have ‘othered’ them, and yet you think they shouldn’t ‘other’ people who aren’t rich.

Why do you do this? because you are cognitively removed from knowing wealthy people and they exist entirely in your imagination as these psychopathic monsters. further, I doubt you have any more empathy for the impoverished in Africa, than they do.

yep, and they all see the class above them as ‘rich’ and themselves as ‘working-class/normal/struggling’.

i remember my own parents going on about ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ in our town, and the income differential was like, maybe a factor of 4-6x. the poor people made 20k, we made 30k and the ‘rich’ people made like 50k. but this was in a rural area where we had no exposure to people making 100K+ let alone millions.

people don’t get how the psychology of wealth is all relativistic. where i live now people making 300K+ think they are ‘poor’ because they compare themselves to people making millions. and the people making millions think they are poor because they compare themselves to people making 10s of millions.

my sister makes 500K a year, lives in a 5million dollar house, and endless talks about the people living in 10 or 20 million dollar homes and how she is ‘just a normal working person’, and she thinks those are the ‘rich’ and she is the ‘poor’. the place she lives the ‘poor’ people make like 150-200K, and well people making under 100K just don’t exist.

a lot of rich people are rich because that way you don’t have to see any affects of a lack of wealth.

that’s the point. that’s why they social isolate themselves in gated communities and exclusive resorts.

being subject to having to look at poor people suffering is a thing only poor people have to suffer.

your idea that rich people have ‘feelings of immorality’ makes me laugh, because you clearly dont’ know any rich people, they don’t have these feelings at all. that 'feeling 'is a projection of the poor onto the wealthy who think they know how the wealthier live and feel… you don’t. they live in another plane of existence and the concept of ‘uneven distribution’ doesn’t exist to them.

you can’t care about stealing candy from babies if you don’t even know the babies exist. that’s the element you are missing.

both, or neither.

everyone has different circumstances.

there are rich people who live modest middle class lives, but lemmy thinks those people don’t exist. it’s that all moderately rich people are sociopathic monsters or something…

and plenty of poor folks are sociopaths. almost as if money isn’t exactly a determining factor in any of this…

not to mention an influencing factor isn’t necessarily determining factor… but hey that’s too subtle for the fediverse genius who think we’re all noble savages and it’s society that corrupts us…

yep. my sister threw up in a house with a income of about 20-30K a year, she now has about 50 million in net worth.

her main preoccupation in life how how evil the government is because it wants to tax her and give her month to poor people, who grew up like her and how awful and terrible that is. she has a psychological block now, because in her mind now it’s that she was always deserving of this and it’s everyone else who is undeserving.

she also has a victim-complex and talks the way many people here talk, it’s just she blames the poor people and minorities, the way lemmy posters blame billionaires. the rhetoric is exactly the same though, she thinks we need to eliminate the poor people/socialism, lemmy things you need to eliminate the billionaires/capitalism.

it isn’t though.

it’s that when you accumulate power and privileged… you tend to be more likely to exercise it indiscriminately, because temptation to do so is strong and the consequences lesser.

i know people who grew up poor and became rich… it was only after they were rich… for awhile, after their hedonistic treadmill had readjusted, that they became greedier and greedier and more sociopathic.

it’s a basic facet of human psychology you have backwards. when you don’t have power over others… you can’t abuse them. when you do have power over others, you can.

that doesn’t mean the powerless are good, it just means they have less opportunity to be evil. and there are plenty of powerful folks who aren’t evil.

entitlement is a hell of a drug.

it’s obviously an error/fake

what are you talking about? that’s cheap.

typical store price where I am for 12 cookies is like 6-8 bucks. 4-5 bucks might get you 2-3 cookies. a single cookie will run you at 2.50.

60 count cookie from is 24 bucks. 24 is 10.

you don’t have horses in europe?

pretty sure you do, as you’re always winning dressage.

it’s not cheap to get fucked up anymore. it’s not cheap to go out, all this tracks.

gyms however, are still cheap.

no idea what you are on about purity. i just know a lot of 22 year olds at my work who are broke and live at home. they are ‘boring’ and ‘pure’ because they don’t have much other choice. they can’t afford to party. they’d like to, but when you make 2-3K a month, spending $200 going out on a saturday night at a bar isn’t exactly affordable.

sex rates also correlate highly to economic conditions. nobody fucks and has babies when it’s economically tough, and when we have good economy there is a baby boom and the marriage rate spikes.