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Cake day: May 4th, 2025

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  • https://imgur.com/a/3LDP7VW

    My grade in business, just a few weeks ago…

    My post is supposed to illustrate some baseline. I used just an off-the-cuff, arbitrary yet heuristic figure from my experience working in, of all things, elderly care. I was a nurses aide and certified as a one-on-one for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, helping the nurses feed and bathe, keeping the patients occupied…. Walking walking walking… and not falling out of bed etc.

    I did this for 5 years.

    So if you are running a business, and you have nurse employees, there are expenses, overhead, risks, and profit to take for your efforts. What should that number be? I picked 20% in the hopes someone would give perhaps a more realistic figure. Instead I get cut down.

    And no, Im not copy and pasting anything.

    What strikes me is, who can pay 3000 a month to watch granny? and that was just nurse salary, not meds, housing, etc. My numbers are made up, I chose 22 per hour for nurse pay, I have no idea what it really is, just wanted to get to get something going and im looking for others to post more data, though the conclusion will probably be the same… its a no win situation unless you’re extremely wealthy, granny dies.



  • Well, let’s look at the math briefly.

    First, what should a nurse make?

    Add 20% cut to this for your risk and management.

    Then, how many people should the nurse care for?

    (Nurse pay * 1.20)/patients=cost per patient

    (22*1.20)/5=5.28 per hour 24 hours per day So 126.72 a day Roughly 3,8000 a month per patient just for nurse care. Not including housing, utilities, food, or medication.

    Alternatives could be mandatory civic or military duty at 18 for a few years and nursing duty could be in there?

    Another alternative could be inmate care, paying minimum wage in municipal bonds, as a way to work off a sentence?

    Pay nurses less, requiring less certification?

    Outsource nursing to countries where wage arbitrage can be leveraged?

    Obviously this was fast and dirty but illustrates the expense.


  • I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.

    The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.

    I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.


  • And did you tap latex trees for the rubber? Did you smelt ore for the metal? Did you buy the glass from a company that was used to can those vegetables or did you refine it yourself?

    No. The seeds came from a catalog. The hatchet to chop the wood from a store.

    Modern conveyance made it so you wouldn’t have to spend all day tending to survival. Yet the author seems to imply that life is harder now, than in the past.


  • I beg to differ.

    An anthropologist should know about food scarcity. For thousands of years the family unit, tribe or village was under extreme competition from neighboring people and animals for resources.

    There is a video from cameras on monkeys. They literally spend their whole day looking for food. Or in other words, every waking hour is spent in the pursuit of sustenance. Pre-tractor man was the same. Without modern capitalist agriculture you would be toiling on the farm tending to sheep, chickens, plowing fields, milking cows and all the myriad of tasks needed to fulfill the food groups you so nonchalantly stuff your face with. It be non-stop work for all the variety you currently take for granted.

    The world, with low life-expectancies, was hazardous with no medicines, protections from the weather or modern law. Which i think brings a bit of stress when a festering carbuncle could mean your death. But thanks to innovation, it can now be easily cured by companies who seek monetary reward. I’ll take this normal over the other one.



  • At some point AI will infer beyond the wildest dreams. The mere description of an object will be enough to infer any combination.

    Through that inference, just knowing what a woman or a child looks like will be enough to put an image of child in any situation without any pre training images.

    What’s ironic is, you’ll actually have to upload and train on CSAM to catch these inferences.

    Do we ban hammers because a few people used them in the wrong way?


  • Local stores have very little locked up here. My area has industry, which provides wages. Wages produce taxes. Taxes are used for police. Through surveilance police arrest shoplifters.

    Complacency of theft only backslides society. I will agree that a waning industry, or that our hyper-fixation on growth effects society negatively, but that’s another discussion.

    If someone offers a free item, someone will take it whether they need that item or not, whether they can afford that item or not. Nature takes the path of least resistance. It’s easier to take than to work.

    As such, there is no incentive to work if the item is free. If there is no incentive to work nothing gets made. Yet people will need things so you’re forced to make items people need. Which makes items not really free after all to the dismay of many an anti-capitalist.

    Regardless, there will always be some percentage of the population that will feel above the rest, mainly due to mental deficiency or addiction, independent of the economic system. For punishment of theft I would prefer to see forced induction into the municipal workforce for 5 years, flat sentence with a minimum wage earned in municipal bonds, held in a community barracks with a tapered reintegration into society. A sort of forced communism for those who can’t cope.

    I’m ready for the downvotes.



  • I just read a report that said there are many jobs available and in my hometown, I see a steady request for help wanted, technical and other.

    I also know that many people find certain categories of jobs menial such as factory work or farming. Maybe it’s an ego, perception thing, maybe because it’s hard work.

    AI is taking and going to take jobs, but it would also open jobs, just look at the jobs we need right now that have appeared. Construction of data centers, water more important than ever, copper mining and refining, networks and sysadmin, energy sector, semiconductor manufacturing and many more like photonics (should reduce power and water usage.)

    Yes it’s moving very fast and that’s scary. Propping things up, bailing out, however does nothing to improve the situation. Spending the money that would be incurred by UBI on training workers and providing them with equipment would be far more effective.







  • Many many years ago, I had returned home from a friends. Think rural country road, cinder block garage a few yards off a dusty road that was separate from the house. A single industrial lamp fixture burning a 100 watt bulb swarmed by moths and insects. The night is heavy, hot and humid. Crickets and katydids turn nights silence away.

    Like I’ve done many nights, before going inside I would walk to the other side of the road to take a leak in the bushes, and as I was finishing up… What the hell was that?!? Something was moving toward me.

    Now I’ve been scared, gun pulled on me etc, but whatever I was seeing had me frozen, I literally couldn’t move, I was affixed as the little character bent down to climb through a hole in a rusty cattle fence overgrown with brush. A grey body, big eyes, hard to make out in the dull glow of the garage light and whatever faint moonlight existed, approached to within a few feet and stopped. All I could do was try and think of how much I love the Earth, the science of the universe and my reverence for nature and that of the natural world, and it stared, seeming to read my thoughts.

    And like that it turned around and went back through the hole in the fence from whence it came, diminishing into the darkness of the night. Finally I was released and my muscles began to work. Half-way to the house, I began to wonder if that was real, like my memory of it was already fading quickly. I never said I saw an alien or anything like that, however I have told the story about the grey thing with little hands that had me paralyzed with fear.

    Not so long ago I witnessed a raccoon walking and I sometimes wonder, was it a raccoon? Was it just the low light, brain filling in faint details of an out of world visitor??? I certainly would like to know.