When the earth held its breath, and the trees stopped speaking in green, I found your shadow pressed into the silenceโ not like absence, but like the memory of warmth left in a chair after someone has risen.
I did not call your name. It was already there, inscribed beneath the skin of rain, folded into the hush of wheat fields bowing under the weight of their gold. Even the wind carried youโ not as sound, but as the echo of longing before the voice has formed.
There were no angels. Only the dust rising from the soles of tired workers who knew love by its weight, not its wings. And still, the sun leaned low, willing to touch the dirt just to reach us.
You were the breath I took before understanding what it meant to be hollow and still full. You were the salt in my wound that sang.
Oh, what a terrible, beautiful thingโ to be stitched into anotherโs silence. To be the ache someone calls home. To carry within you the whole cathedral of their absence, lit by nothing but the soft, persistent flame of remembering.
And stillโ I would carry it. The ache, the salt, the tender ruins of your voice crumbling somewhere between my ribs.
I would carry it into the next life and the next, and the nextโ not because I must, but because even grief was more beautiful with you in it.
-- Jeffrey Freeman
A poem I just wrote as I sit here missing Noi Noi (my fiancee). She is so far away its hard, but I hope to see her soon.
I generally do invest in people directly, just as I do in aggregate. The problem is when you help people one on one your reach has a large impact burt over very few people.
I have many times in my life taken homeless people into my home and invested in them to get a start in life. In some cases they have stayed with me for a year or more, and in some cases I have even paid for their university fees.
About 50% of the time it works out and the money and time is well spent. But I can at most do this for about one person every few years. It doesnt scale well. Sadly if I just give people money 99% of them never achieve anything with it, it only ever works with strong guidance and oversight, and even then at only a 50% rate. So overall while I do find this important due to the small number of people I can reach it isnt typically the bulk of the time and effort I put into helping people anymore. Especially because now investing that time into making large amounts of money I can reach and help far more people
Having a system where wealth can be problematic is not the same as saying wealth is the problem, it means the system is the problem because it allows wealth to have an unfair advantage to begin with, and therefore is not capitalism (which by definition requires markets to be free, they arent free if wealth can dominate them).
This usually means things like anti-trust laws, and not allowing legal power to be bought. In other words, you cant buy your way out of legal trouble with a better lawyer, fines cant be flat rate fees per offense, and monopolies cant exist, to name a few. All of your points are easily addressed not by trying to eliminate wealth disparity but by addressing these root problems, because if you dont then even when wealth disparity is low you still have an unfair society where someone with even moderately more money can buy themselves out of legal troubles or otherwise take advantage of the system.
Material extraction - with anti-trust laws no one has anymore power to extract than anyone else, free market competition leads to fair prices and everyone pays the same regardless of how much money you ahve.
geo-political: Take money out of politics such that you cant buy yourway into presidency. ITs pretty simple, just outlaw politicians spending **any** money of any kind on campaigning, adjust the amount of money they are allowed to spend to be proportional to the size of their constituency.
tax related and economic wars are moot points as those represents **governments** not people with money. But if you want to address that then just apply the same principles ont he global stage between governments.
Just using banks - Dont require banks, let people store their money however they wish, including open-source techs like cryptocurrency.
@KimPerales Privatizing the govt is a great idea in principle, far less waste.. But when you do it trumps way, which equates to privatizing it with your own companies and your friends companies, not so much. As always Trump hints on things that may not be a bad idea in some aspect but with horrifically harmful execution.
Universodon is literally one of the servers that blocked us for being "free speech - no hate speech" server... Oh the irony of them complaining about the world they helped create.
@garyackerman Words in non-scientific context almost always have quite a few definitions that disagree with eachother. This is literally every word ever.
Well - it can mean a hole in the ground with water in it, or it can mean something done effectively (you did that well).
Not only are there **lots** of other plausible causes (of just one I gave you), you havent even explained the direction of causation.
A very simple explanation (again among many possible ones) is that being poor causes low intelligence rather than low intelligence causing one to be poor. If you are poor you wont get proper nutrition or education, both of which results in lower intelligence.
That said youre extremely low-intelligence answers are doing a remarkably good job at convincing me we should exterminate you at least, so you are least making a convincing argument, even if it isnt the argument you intended to make.
To be fair I may not be a righty, but as far as democrats are concerned (usually) even a centrist is a nazi. So I think your assessment still has some truth to it.
I dont think so. Who is the democrat here and who is the republican? I am staunchly anti-democrat and anti-republican party and while their current lunacy makes that divide particularly far even 20 years ago I would have opposed either party, albeit less so. Im generally centrist with a very slight left lean. No party would be a close fit to my ideals but you had to describe it I'm something like 40% libertarian 20% old-democrat, 10% old republican, 30% views contrary to all parties.
> We have scientific proof of the genetic basis of intelligence.
At no point did I suggest there is no genetic basis to intelligence. I stated there is no genetic basis for being poor, and that poor is not determined primarily by intelligence.
Considering your response suggests low intelligence, as you didnt understand what I said, sounds like you need to be gassed. I'm willing to use you as the test subject for your proposed solution.
> No, they're likely genetic in nature. Poor = dumber, generally.
No basis in reality for that what soever. People with low IQ generally can learn all sorts of high skilled labour jobs and make money just fine. The vast majority of the poor tend to be veterans who have severe mental health issues arrising from lack of mental health access combined with abuse expiernced during their service. Again something you wont see in countries that treat their people better and provide good vet services and mental health access.
Im not saying you should be concerned with europe. The point is societies change, and american can change in ways that would stop poor people from being an issue because it isnt a genetic problem to begin with but a societal one.
Its like sitting there punching people in the face and then when they start to flinch trying to blame genetic and then thinking if you kill off all the people that flinch then you wont have people flinching anymore.
Well no you can argue against it. When you gas the poor, since being poor is not unlinked from the environment you arent producing less poor people since society changes.
For example someone might be poor int he USA but that same person if they were in europe might not be poor, because the kind of person they are would thrive in one environment but not the other.
One could just as easily (and wrongly) argue that if you gas all the rich you will make society better because the poor people would now be able to thrive and become the rich themselves, and create an environment where poor people thrive and thus are eliminated.
The truth is, breeding doesnt work like that. You can breed specific traits that are easily measures (like height) but complex things like being poor you cant just breed out by directly killing the poor, you'd have to understand the underlying problems and fix those, which are unlikely to be genetic in nature.
Jeffrey Phillips FreemanInnovator & Entrepreneur in Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computing & Big Data. Avid SCUBA diver, Open-source developer, HAM radio operator, astrophotographer, and anything nerdy.Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, USA, currently living in Utrecht, Netherlands, USA, and Thailand. Was also living in Israel, but left.Pronouns: Sir / Mister(Above pronouns are not intended to mock, i will respect any persons pronouns and only wish pronouns to show respect be used with me as well. These are called neopronouns, see an example of the word "frog" used as a neopronoun here: http://tinyurl.com/44hhej89 )A proud member of the Penobscot Native American tribe, as well as a Mayflower passenger descendant. I sometimes post about my genealogical history.My stance on various issues:Education: Free to PhD, tax paidAbortion: Protected, tax paid, limited time-frameWelfare: Yes, no one should starveUBI: No, use welfareRacism: is realGuns: Shall not be infringedLG