it being a more human scale isn't intrinsic. it's purely due to what you're used to using.

I grew up in a Celsius country, and Fahrenheit is totally unintuitive.

You've made two assumptions here - one is that in the absence of the state, all people become individual actors, incapable of acting outside of their own immediate interest. Communities can form where people protect each others rights and property, without enabling a privileged few to monopolise violence.

Secondly, you seem to be ignoring the potential (or inevitability) for the state to become the most powerful violent entity. The state is not benevolent, they are simply the extreme form of "law of the jungle", where one entity becomes so much more powerful than the others that it can take whatever it wants, from whoever it wants. If the law of the jungle is bad, according to you, then so must be the state, because the two are fundamentally the same.

Absolute nonsense. You speak like this is a fundamental truth of being, rather than merely a consequence of the pervasiveness of the modern state.

The state is not a prerequisite for property.

If any person/group has a monopoly on violence, then you have a choice: abide by their rules (and have them use their monopoly in your favour) or operate outside of their rules (becoming the target of their violence). It doesn't follow that an entity with such a monopoly is in any way necessary.

there's a clear difference though, in that you can protect your own rights to physical, tangible property. you don't need to appeal to authority to stop somebody stealing your house (in principle).

A hospital near me has a smart elevator system. Everybody who wants to use it has to press the button for the floor they want to go to (this is in the hallway before getting on the elevator). So, if you are in a group of three people, all three of you press the same button.

The system then tells you which elevator to get in, and tracks how many people are on board based on how many times the button is pressed and which floors it stops at.

Think of socialism like a fancy baked good. Just because many have made a mess of their kitchen attempting it, shouldn't draw your attention away from the fact that the ingredients are rotten to begin with.

Anybody been listening to Volbeat's new stuff? They have an album coming out in a couple of months, and have released two of the tracks so far as singles.

By a Monster's Hand is probably the more approachable of the two:

I built a gaming PC this week. Took me two evenings, including the time needed to troubleshoot some issues with booting it for the first time, and installing the OS.

Having never done it before, I was pleasantly surprised with how straightforward it was.

It is a birthday gift for my fiancée.

I am like you, I often don't really want to do anything for my birthday. It actually makes me dislike my birthday somewhat, because it feels like a waste of the special occasion to not do anything.

Last year I went to a spa for a few days with my fiancée for my birthday. That ended up being a good birthday.

15 years is barely any time at all. We're talking about a totally new, unprecedented concept of money, in a world where most people have never considered why money even exists in the first place.

I don't really know yet. I'm at the age where I'm thinking about having children, and I suppose they will be my legacy. I want to raise them to be better, happier, more successful than me (I think that's the ultimate goal with children, to shape them into better people than you are yourself).

That's what I'll leave behind: people who are better than me, and who hopefully want to have children of their own who are in turn raised to be better still.

here's a picture of my bonsai as promised: it hasn't grown much over winter, but it will certainly need pruning within the next few weeks.

Definitely get a kick out of replaying Cyberpunk 2077. Have to give it a few months between replays, but there are a lot of builds and so many ways to approach the missions that it always feels new.

On my third playthrough I found, totally by accident, a whole new section of a mission that I'd never seen before, and completing it made a major change to one of the storylines.

I will take a picture of it when I get home

My other half takes the lead on our garden. She has a small herb garden in our kitchen, and has some seedlings for vegetables that will soon be planted outside. This year she has also started taking an interest in growing flowers to try and help our local insect populations.

I help out, and I like growing gourmet mushrooms. Last year I grew three varieties of oyster mushrooms in our second bedroom. This year I want to try growing shiitake and lions mane as well.

We have several indoor plants too. A big Amaryllis which has been going strong since Christmas, and I have a small bonsai that I tend to. Several cacti and succulents too.

while the potential social utility of religion might not depend on it's "truthfulness", the actual ability of religion to provide benefits to society does depend on it's "perceived truthfulness" to some degree.

taking myself as an example, I'm not religious, never have been. in fact, I'm fairly convinced that it's all just mythology. no matter how good of a case you could make for the social utility of a religion, it's unlikely to convince me that the religion is actually true. that limits the social utility of the religion because at least one member of the society has a high barrier to adopt it as a personal moral guide or philosophy.

in this regard, the social utility of religion does depend on it's truthfulness (or at least, on its ability to appear truthful). an untruthful religion is necessarily fragile in its capacity to permeate a society homogenously and persistently, because once the seeds of doubt are sown, the validity of the religion as truth will always be questioned, and it therefore is unlikely to be fully adopted by everybody in the society. a society with various different religions, and a mix of religious and non-religious groups will not gain the benefits of a society that has a single religion.

My other half and I are hoping to become expectant parents this year. Don't have any other goals, I suspect once there is a baby on the way we will find ourselves with totally new priorities.

what's the counterargument to this? I know that the "protect the children" argument is rubbish, but how do you refute it without making yourself sound like a pedo-apologist?

the security isn't to stop the bank losing money. it's to stop criminals from gaining money.

if the bank loses the cash they can just print more, so there's no issue for them. but, they can't allow us plebs to get huge amounts of cash without working for it. only they have that privilege.

shitcoins you can live in

don't suppose you know which episode? I'd be very interested to listen to it.