Err_Eek

> Educate the parents instead to spend more right time with their children.

This is kind of assuming that the parents have full control over the lives of their children. Which:

a. Isn't true b. Shouldn't be true (because some parents are bad)

As a parent you go to work for 8+ hours per day. During that time your child is in the care of "society" (school / daycare / whatever). And during that time the only thing that protects them is laws and regulations.

> This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those.

In most (or at least a lot of) countries states regulate casinos _so much_ than it becomes almost a technicality that casinos are privately owned.

Also with lotteries you have the scale factor -- in order to have an attractive lottery, you need a ton of ticket buyers, so if you have a national level lottery you can definitely make neighborhood lotteries way less appealing.

Blackjack and poker tables don't scale the same way.

... I haven't been thinking about inflation

...

But less jokingly, "you're wrong about X"/"you're doing X wrong" is quite clickbaity

imagine a writer writing more books than they read.

imagine a film director directing more movies than they watch.

imagine a software engineer writing more code than they read.

imagine a musician writing more songs than they listen to.

... etc etc

(As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true)

It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.

Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.

Personally -- I couldn't get past the first 2 chapters of the book. The notations it introduces are pretty unfamiliar for a newcomer and it quickly becomes really hard to follow. I genuinely would like to hear from somebody who managed to go through the entire book above, and what their main takeaways were (from the chapters that follow the two introductory ones).

The non-technical introduction chapter is pretty easy to follow, and I would recommend reading it.

I was asking myself the same question. The conclusion I came to is that the getting your mind blown phase doesn't keep you coming back again and again -- it's why games like Minecraft/League of Legends have much higher player counts than say The Last of Us, or other certified mind-blowing games.

I have a Quest 2 and a Steam Deck. Definitely my Steam Deck is getting more use, though it's initial "wow" factor was smaller.

> I think less people are interested in actually owning their housing.

How do you reconcile this impression of yours with the fact that housing prices are shooting up in all major cities, and have been so for decades? Why is this happening if fewer people are actually interested in owning their own housing?

As a sidenote: in my own personal experience housing is the single major issue of all my close friends and family, but it's only an option for a small minority of them. In fact, I have never met a single person who was in the financial position to buy a house/apartment and didn't do so.

What I meant is that making fun about how silly he was is elitist, meaning people like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert did nothing to help the liberal cause.

George Bush himself does indeed come from political royalty, which is why he did his best to present himself as the exact opposite, an average person.

> He's just lucky that President Trump came along to steal the title of "greatest criminal in the White House in the last 50 years" from him.

Pretty hard to make the argument than in terms of kill count Bush doesn't win this one

(a) & (b) definitely.

But I think that looking at it in context, it was a piece that maybe liberals should have read. During the Bush years everybody liked to point out the gaffes Bush was doing as if intelligent college educated people never messed up a word in a speech.

The fact is that Bush is indeed smarter than the bulk of people who really relished in laughing at his gaffes, and in hindsight all that sniggering did nothing to stop the surge of increasingly radical right wing ideas.

Even from my very left-wing perspective I found the constant mocking of Bush worrying and elitist -- the first thing that should come in people's minds when they think about Bush should not be silly & almost endearing gaffes, but Gitmo, Irak, Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand of corpses he left behind.

> I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.

It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.

I expect it to become significantly less fun the moment one of them gets fired / lags behind the others on work performance / gets into a long term relationship and wants to move out and suddenly finds out they're not one of the guys anymore

> One observation I'll make is that although adoption is considered a noble act in the US, many other countries consider it be throwing your baby away to be exploited.

Adoption is considered a noble act in Romania