This is one possible answer to the Fermi paradox.

I think a tendency for intelligent life to destroy itself would make it more rare than it already is, but doesn’t do enough to account for the unlikelihood of never encountering it. Once a species is spread across more than one planet, I would think it would be very unlikely for an extinction event to wipe all of it out before some survivors can bounce back. So all you would need is one or more civilizations beating the odds up to that point to become basically unstoppable.

Also, intelligent life might frequently kill itself off, but that doesn’t mean intelligence is a disadvantage to long term survival. The vast majority of unintelligent species also go extinct. It’s more that reaching stability is quite hard, with or without intelligence.

Budgets are useful tools, but they really should be temporary. If you have a major change in income or expenses, it can warrant monitoring for a while. But once you’ve reached a point of financial stability, you will know what you can afford already. Setting up auto pay on regular bills, putting balance alerts on your accounts, and just acting your wage makes it pretty easy.

But honestly, what you can afford is just a hard cap on what you should be spending. You should be living below your means already so you can build up investments to retire on. Then unexpected expenses are easily handled by scratching something off your emergency fund. And windfalls mean you can reach your financial independence goals that much faster. Until then, you don’t have to live as if you’re destitute, but just be frugal.

Seriously, the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck is horrifying. If you are one of them, you should be alarmed. Things aren’t going to get cheaper, and wages are going to struggle to keep up. And at a certain point, you won’t be able to work. So you have to remember that your future self is a dependent for your current self.

If you haven’t planned much, here’s a helpful priority pipeline for how to work towards financial security. I stole it from one of the finance subreddits. It assumes you’re in the US for the tax-privileged efficiency stuff, but the gist is just keep putting your money in the most important/efficient buckets until they’re full, then move on to the next.

That doesn’t get him off the hook financially though. If the mother put his name on the birth certificate, he’d probably have to take a test to prove he’s not the biological father. And if he is, tough.

I looked into it more and realized I misunderstood how it worked. You’re right, a mother can add a man’s name to the birth certificate without his consent, and then the burden of proof is on him to prove that he is not the father, which typically means a paternity test. Obviously that is unfair. I think the better solution is to require the father’s consent before adding their name in the first place, or else making it tentative until it is “ratified” by his consent (or a court order in either case). And only in special situations like the father being dead or unreachable would it resolve without him.

This is why I support legal paternal surrender. As long as women have access to abortions (legal, easy, free), men should have the financial equivalent. That’s only fair.

Well, women don’t always have access to safe abortions, and regardless I don’t think this needs to be tied to that. I think this shouldn’t be treated differently between genders. Either parent should be able to surrender legal responsibility for the child, and if both do so then the child is surrendered to the state. If only one does so, that one should be forced to still financially support the single parent similar to alimony. I don’t think either should be able to voluntarily shed financial responsibility though. At least once they are born, a child has a right to a certain amount of support from both their parents, unless both agree the state would be a better custodian for them.

No, that’s a breach of the privacy for the father and child. An alleged father can already refuse to accept the legal responsibility for a child. A court could demand that they take a paternity test or accept responsibility, but that would still be that person’s choice.

What should happen is that some people shift to continued support, and some move to a new project. If a company really needs workers only for a short time, they should hire contractors who can then move to something else afterwards. Treating employees as disposable like this is not just super disrespectful, it’s also a poor use of resources strategically.

Covid definitely had a strong immediate negative impact on kids’ education, but the trend of children struggling more in school over time is older than that. Until recent decades, there was an observed increase in children’s IQ over later generations, called the Flynn effect. Children were on average expected to be 3-5 points higher in measured IQ than those born a decade earlier. But we have reversed that trend after peaking somewhere around the 80s. There are likely a lot of contributing factors, but they should all be environmental rather than genetic. So hopefully later generations will be able to reverse the trend again and support their kids’ development in ways their own parents had neglected.

That’s rough. I hope you are able to find something more flexible.

I’m a software developer, so there’s a lot of WFH positions at least compared to other fields. But unless you have particularly good connections you would probably need to get a related degree if you wanted a job at most places. I’ve also heard it’s not a good time to be applying unfortunately. You might be able to try for some WFH consulting work related to your current job. Big software companies will hire contractors for temporary work too I guess, but they would probably still want experienced candidates. For me, this was just a position I applied to a few years ago and was lucky enough to get an offer. I don’t think there’s a secret to it, sorry.

I’m vegan but really missed ice cream so I started getting Ben and Jerry’s almond milk version when it’s on sale. It irks me that they charge for a pint what I could get a gallon of the dairy ice cream for, but there isn’t much selection for dairy-free. For whatever reason vegan versions of foods are pretty much always priced like premium brands. I’d be happy to buy generic brands of stuff in bulk, but instead I look at the price of something and often decide I don’t need it after all.

Yes. I have worked at both and I feel much more comfortable at home. It gives you a level of flexibility that is hard to describe. I can start my day early, take a break for an hour, and resume it when I feel I can give it the proper level of attention. When I was in office, there was a pressure to look like you’re working all the time. It felt hard to concentrate when the expectation was on dedicating the expected time to work rather than getting something done. With WFH, it’s more about getting your tasks done and generally no one cares when you do it. And I can slouch and prop my feet up and have videos/music/audiobooks playing and whatever else I want without anyone knowing, let alone caring. I don’t need to worry about a commute, and all my food and comforts are available when I want them. I can easily handle things like being at home for a package delivery or a technician repairing something or walking the dog or just doing laundry.

That being said, I will admit it is considerably harder to get help with a task in office. You can’t just have someone pop by to look at something for example. You can still do a call or message, but it’s a bigger barrier to overcome. With WFH, collusion for a group more often needs to be scheduled, and you don’t have an analogue for water cooler talk.

Many places that offer work from home also have an office somewhere, so I would recommend new employees go in while learning the ropes, then switch as they become more independent. And some people like having different locations to help switch between work and relaxation mentalities. And it can be nice to get out of the house too. But overall, WFH is much better for me.

Yeah, a bidet alone isn’t enough to get you clean. It does most of the work, but it’s going to leave remnants that need to be wiped. It’s not a matter of water pressure either. Mine has a stream that will reach the other side of the bathroom at full power, but there’s still going to be debris.

I’m not gaslighting. There’s a way to do it that’s permanent, but if you do it wrong it will revert. I’m speaking from personal experience.

I have had them disabled for years. You have to go through the registry. It’s cumbersome but it doesn’t take long and is permanent.

Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.

But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn’t bother trying to fight simply because I didn’t have enough weapons to get through its health bar.

I support avoiding redundancy in general, but there are advantages to those that make them worth it if you get enough of a quality of life improvement for them.

I use my air fryer basically every day and really appreciate that it can finish cooking some things before my oven would even finish preheating. Cleaning is also much easier, I imagine it uses considerably less energy, and it tends to cook stuff more evenly in my experience. And it isn’t some fancy product, just the cheapest one I could find when I decided to try one out years ago. I’ve used my oven for a couple of things that wouldn’t fit in the air fryer over the years, but otherwise it’s basically been reduced to a stovetop with a clock.

I also use it for things I would otherwise microwave because it cooks it much better even if i have to deal with a short preheat. So nowadays my microwave is just left unplugged until I need a quick injection of heat, like for freezer-burnt ice cream or melting some butter or cheese.

I don’t think I’d get enough use out of a slow cooker to commit to the space, but I imagine it’s a similar story for people that would use it often. Same deal for like a rice cooker or ice cream machine. Also, my family was able to get an old toaster oven for cheap after our real oven broke, so these appliances can offer a cheaper alternative too.

I haven’t heard of hiring life coaches for poor people but I agree that would be an example of inefficient spending. I meant things like healthcare. The US spends more on healthcare than any other country, and so when a government program like Medicare or Medicaid covers a bill that means a very large subsidy. College is likewise exceptionally expensive, so need-based scholarships become a big expense.

If there was more of a focus on making these affordable in the first place, the cost for each covered individual would go down for taxpayers. This would free up the budget to expand coverage and offer more quality assistance in other places. Instead, it’s just a reactive policy of paying whatever the bill is when someone does qualify. This creates pressure to restrict who qualifies and what’s covered to keep prices down, while hospitals and colleges get away with charging absurd amounts since the beneficiary doesn’t feel the cost individually.

About 6 in 10 Americans say personal choices are a “major factor” in why people remain in poverty, while just under half say unfair systems are a major factor and about 4 in 10 blame lack of government support.

I think a lot of people in the comments are acting as if there is only one cause, and individual choices cannot be it because it doesn’t account for everything. Admittedly, the headline does frame it as if people believe it is the sole cause, rather than just the most popular. Personally, I would say both personal choices and unfair systems are major factors.

For lack of Government support, I am not sure how I would answer. The government actually does spend a lot on assistance for the poor relative to other countries, but I believe it is not done so efficiently to lift people out of poverty. It is very reactive and focuses on treating symptoms of core issues, so you end up with a lot of people in a constant state of being just barely able to keep their head above the water. It’s largely half measures that end up with worse outcomes and being more expensive in the long run than proper investment into making things better would be.

I am returning to Hollow Knight thanks to the Silksong hype. I had dropped it before because I was unsure where I needed to go to progress and was getting sick of running around the map trying to figure out which paths were actually available to me and which needed some equipment I didn’t have. Well, I did figure it out and basically have everything important unlocked so now I am enjoying it again.

If you do pick it up again, I have some advice. First, there’s a relic in an area called the Hive that will give you passive health regen if there’s a long enough gap between instances of damage. This means you can keep messing up a platforming section and as long as you don’t rush it you can heal back after messing up without needing new sources of soul. Second, there are some sections that are traversable with minimal equipment but become trivial with more. Deepnest was really annoying to me when I went through it and I frankly would have probably enjoyed it if I had one really helpful item unlocked (or even just a bit more health). Third, don’t worry too much about money. Normal enemies don’t give you much from farming and I think I’ve run out of stuff to spend it on mostly from other sources. So don’t be afraid to let it go. If you’ve unlocked the fast travel thing, just head back to vendors when you’ve noticed you accumulated a decent amount.

Like I said, I’m enjoying the game again after years away, but I really wish they had a better way of letting you know where you should go next and what isn’t available to you. Needing to go through zones again to check if something is now unlocked or not is tiresome. The pins help but they are not enough, and I didn’t think to reserve certain colors for certain types of obstacles the first time.

It depends on what you mean by current spending. I’m putting almost a third of my pre-tax income into savings already. If you mean I can live off of 65% of my default post-tax salary, sure. That probably wouldn’t change too much from my current expenses, and I would love the free time. If you mean 65% of what’s left over after my normal contributions, then that would be pretty tough. I consider my current lifestyle to be relatively frugal, so that would be very hard.

I’m actually trying to achieve the FIRE lifestyle, so the goal is getting to the point where average post-tax returns on investments is at least annual expenses. But I can’t do it by thirty.

I think this is the right explanation, assuming the story is true. Dry noodles expand when put in hot water, and I would think that includes gastric acids in the human body. The boy started having symptoms in half an hour and died soon after. That’s too fast for something like food poisoning, and they didn’t find anything wrong with the noodles being sold. So it sounds like pressure buildup from them expanding inside him caused damage.

OP, I would be careful not to eat too much at once, and eat slowly. The boy ate three packets at once. Maybe eat some other stuff with it so the noodles can’t build up a large mass of just noodles.