The actual answer: fuck the research and talk to them like a normal person. People can tell when you are trying to manipulate them.

Companies hype themselves to increase stock price. Trying to drive social change via the masses could easily backfire. If a company wants to change the tax code, they usually just hire lobbyists and donate to political campaigns, and you never hear about it.

Often companies post jobs “to be fair”, but have already decided on an internal hire. The word is 80% of hirings never appear on job boards.

They definitely can take what you don’t have. That’s what debt is.

Ok. So what’s your point? Like, what do you expect any individual person to do with that information? The person who notices that “life’s little luxuries” are impacting their financial security and cuts down on them will be in a better financial position than someone who lives in denial and digs themselves into a financial hole.

It will be $600 less to make in interest payments as you gradually pay the debt down.

More poignantly, however, it would be very useful for a $600 copay. And these are significantly more common.

You need your car to get to work. Your car gets a flat. $75 for a used tire.

Without emergency fund: $75 unexpected expense goes on credit card. Since you are still drinking fancy coffee, you have no slack in your finances, and interest starts compounding on that $75 which you cannot pay off. Eventually you figure out you can pay the debt down gradually by cutting back on having someone else make you coffee. You manage to gradually pay down your debt over several months. By the time you pay it off, the tire cost you $150.

With emergency fund: you are pissed off about the flat, but shell out $75 from your emergency fund. Your fund recovers in a couple months.

A mocha pot? But then I’d still have to buy coffee beans, which are a luxury, right? Not buying a mocha pot means you don’t have to buy coffee either, thus saving even more money.

There are degrees to all things. Doesn’t mean some things aren’t better or worse. If you are getting a latte at a coffee shop every day, making them yourself is a comparable amount of luxury for significantly less money. If you are actually strapped for cash, then indeed, simply give up coffee entirely.

But if you are struggling to save even $600 in a year, you are truly in a financial emergency, and doing something about that should be at the top of your list. If you are regularly buying fancy coffee, this is obvious low hanging fruit.

And that could go for all luxuries, to the point that life is just working to be able to work.

Sure. Again, degrees, choices. But again, if you struggle to save $600, then you need to save $600. Life can just be work for a while until you are in a more stable financial situation.

And none of this would be necessary if wages were higher overall, and there was a good social safety net.
Tell government to tax the rich, instead of telling people to forego their pleasures.

Okay, I’ve done those things. Now what does the financially struggling individual do once I have told the government that, and the government has ignored me? If their plan is to continue having no financial safety net while drinking cafe coffee every day, I’m just gonna say that that isn’t the best choice.

If the government turned around and did those things, that sure would be nice. But I’m not gonna count on it, and if you are struggling financially, you shouldn’t either. If you sit around waiting for the government to save you because they should, my bet is that you’re in for some disappointment. A better bet is to see that social safety nets are bad and likely to get worse, accept this fact, and the fact that you can effectively do nothing about this and other large mechanations of the world, and ask yourself what you can do to improve your own situation.

If you can barely save $600 in 2 years, then you 100% need a $600 emergency fund

Getting down voted for not being homeless. Lemmy moment.

Because then you have $600 in an emergency fund so you can use that to pay for an emergency rather than going into debt. It isn’t hard to understand that $600 is $600 more that you can use to make you life better, rather than frittering it away on coffee.

You’re literally trying to justify shooting yourself in the foot via self pity and learned helplessness. Just buy a mocha pot at the thrift store.

If you have supportive friends, a lovely partner or partners, can go on walks, and look at the moon, but think life isn’t worth living because you can’t drink a cup of coffee… Imma say that’s a you problem.

The snokle isn’t for water. It’s for dust.

Or halos, which are just a little annoying

As someone who grew up in the south - accurate.

But it’s missing a billboard for Jesus, followed by another billboard for strippers.

Eventually, yes! To find out how, read his book. It’s honestly one of the best books I’ve ever read.

That’s not how we use the word, though. Nobody calls that “involuntary” if it’s just a hole that happened to be there. If somebody put you in the hole, then it’s involuntary. The way “involuntary” is used in English, there is a connotation of an entity with a will that overrides your will.

The reason the term “involuntary” is used is to differentiate from voluntary celibates, like Catholic priests, who the cultural zeitgeist most readily associates with the word “celibate”. You’re reading too much into it.

Don’t complain that there are too many. That’s why we have ratings. When you say “the floodgates are open”, you’re just trying to blame somebody else for your lack of effort.

You phrased it that way because that’s how you think about it. You blamed the women, and you still do.

So you are saying I’m lazy, and also misogynistic… Seems weirdly antagonistic for what is essentially a semantics argument. Like, seriously, I’m giving you my personal lived experience, and you’re putting words in my mouth and calling me names. You’re clearly getting way too worked up over this, so I’m gonna end this conversation before your temper tantrum gets worse.

When people talk about AI taking off exponentially, usually they are talking about the AI using its intelligence to make intelligence-enhancing modifications to itself. We are very much not there yet, and need human coaching most of the way.

At the same time, no technology ever really follows a particular trend line. It advances in starts and stops with the ebbs and flows of interest, funding, novel ideas, and the discovered limits of nature. We can try to make projections - but these are very often very wrong, because the thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet.

I see I’ve found another Type 2 connoisseur.

Did you try to find a self-help book for how to improve your social skills? It’s not like this is a new problem. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936

I did try that actually, and I’ve read that book several times. Each time I come back to it because “it’s a classic”, and each time I roll my eyes at how trite, unhelpful, and sometimes manipulative the advice is. It’s a parade of funny tidbits that an already social person noticed about the way they already acted. It is, quite simply, not a good book on learning social skills or overcoming social anxiety. At all. Which is kind of my point - if this is the book on the topic that everyone recommends, and it is such hot trash, then someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is gonna have a hard time figuring out what to do. Of course, there are other books - but now the floodgates are open, and you now must wade through thousands of books on social skills, social anxiety, becoming confident and charismatic, the brain chemistry that causes your depression, how a new diet can fix your mood issues, how it’s all in your head, it’s not about how you act but how you dress, about 500 different inspirational figures who overcame their own neuroticism and became captains of industry, etc. Soon you are more messed up and turned around than you were before you started.

Calling it “involuntary” makes it somebody else’s fault

If I am walking through the forest and a sink hole opens up underneath me, and I fall in and can’t get out, I am involuntarily in that hole. Not everything has to be someone’s fault. Sometimes things are just shitty.

And it’s not women’s fault that you were unhappy with your sex life.

I never blamed women for my sex life. Mostly because blaming half the human population for something is silly - there is no way that many people could effectively coordinate to conspire against me. I also never blamed any particular woman for not being interested in me - after all, there were many women I was similarly uninterested in, and though I didn’t understand exactly what was unappealing about me, I accepted that they could have their own preferences and were entitled to that.

What I did do was develop a complex about how I was fundamentally broken as a human being which led me to consistent suicidal ideation throughout my adolescence. So, I mean, that was fun.

It was your own bad previous decisions that caused it.

Ah yes, my terrible previous bad descion of being bullied and socially ostracized as a child. Thank you for telling all the 8 year olds out there that the fact that they have no one they feel they can trust in their lives is their own fault.

If you failed a math test…

A more apt analogy would be if you failed a reading test because you have dyslexia which was never diagnosed and for which you never received appropriate support. And then the school just kept pushing you through the grades as you failed every single test and fell further and further behind.

Almost everybody has problems, and they all still have to figure out how to live their own lives.

Well sure. But I’m not going to tell a subsistence farmer in Sierra Leone that they are voluntarily poor because they could just risk life and limb to illegally immigrate to Europe and then work there until they can finagle legal citizenship, get a job as a janitor and work their way up the corporate ladder until they are CEO of BMW. And I’m not going to tell someone with only one leg that they voluntarily can’t walk on two legs, since clearly they could just make their own fully functional prosthetic just like Boston Dynamics made. Yeah, everyone is living a life, and they can’t expect sweet baby Jesus to just step in and solve all their problems. But at the same time, having problems isnt the same as choosing to have those problems which is what “voluntary” means.