What’s terminal?

Exactly right: a doctor who earns $500k/annum is working class where a landlord earning $50k/annum is capitalist class. The division between the two comes from whether or not the person sells their labour to generate income versus making money from capital assets without expending labour. It has nothing at all to do with the amount earned.

Now, the truth is that there are a fair few working capitalists - those who sell their labour, then use the proceeds of that sale to purchase capital to gain further income - but that’s where the waters get a bit more muddy. I am one of these people; I earn dual income from my job and from my investments. Many might consider me a class traitor, and there’s a fair amount of reason to that accusation, but I personally consider that I am just operating within the confines of the system I was unlucky enough to be born into. I’ll consistently vote for people who would take away my privilege to capital investments but, until they gain power, I’ll use the current system to my advantage.

It’s important to evaluate the original sources in those cases. Oftentimes the “cannabis linked to bad health”-esque studies are epidemiological or sociological studies that are linking health or mental health outcomes with cannabis use - regardless of the source of the cannabis (recreational/medical/illegal etc) or the method of consumption. The studies that link certain cannabinoids (usually not cannabis as a whole flower) to assistive health outcomes are medical studies where the usage is determined and administered by medical professionals.

I used to self-medicate with cannabis and it was really bad for me. I ended up getting onto medical cannabis though a doctor and both my physical and mental health outcomes have improved, while my overall consumption has drastically decreased. I used to smoke 1-1.5g of flower a day, usually through a bong, where now I use around 3-4g of flower a month in a dry herb vaporiser as well as using a daily CBD/CBG/CBN oil. My experience is not universal and is only a single data point, but helps explain the differences between the conclusions from both types of studies, based upon what they’re actually studying.

Decent goal. Smart of you to give yourself 200,000 years to achieve it too.

It’s your land-bordered neighbour (who threatened to annex you, be it facetiously or seriously only time will tell) invading a country in your hemisphere. It’s worth knowing about. I’m Australian and I think it’s worth knowing about.

D

Learning to read analogue clocks also helps provide some foundational learning for circular geometry - being able to quickly identify relevant segments of a circle and their respective fractions (5 minutes = 1/12 = 30° = π/6 rad etc.) helps build towards being able to compute circular geometric problems more easily in later years.

Yeah, the more heavily-clothed version is clearly the edited part. Her waist shrinks right down (along with the chair behind her) and the top has extremely uniform colour across it that doesn’t reflect the lighting environment accurately.

This is the exact problem I have with sitting to take a piss and, while I find it more comfortable, I’d prefer not to have to wash myself in the sink after every piss to feel clean again. Standing just cuts out the chance of getting that icy spicy porcelain all up on my wing wang.

The argument for higher wages for elected officials, when they were instituted a long time ago, was that low wages would create extra incentives for those officials to act corruptly and siphon away public money. That’s an argument that made sense at the time and genuinely held water.

What has happened over time though, is that the loosening of rules around lobbying (read:bribing); the continual massive gains of the ultra-rich to line the pockets of those officials in order to sway public policy; and the capacity for elected officials to use confidential information to engage in insider trading, has meant that those officials act corruptly, just often not in a direct “steal from the public purse” sense.

The original argument no longer holds water. If we instituted severe restrictions on lobbying and fundraising for elected officials as well as rules that prevent insider trading, I’d have no qualms with elected officials earning large sums of money. If their wage is literally the only way they can make money, they should make good money. The problem is that their wage is not the only way they make money.

I worked at a company that did this, and the retention rates were quite good against comparable businesses in the industry. They made huge savings on not having staff turnover. It’s actually just a wise business decision in addition to being the right thing to do.

Musk Zuckerberg

I’m hedging that society won’t collapse. You might as well ask why I bother to show up at work - if society collapses the money I earn won’t be worth anything. If I’m betting on society to collapse, I’d be investing in stocking a bunker with weaponry and canned foods. I don’t see that as being a valuable investment yet.

There are larger, more established correlational studies that show a link between dental health and overall physical health as well. There needs to be much more study done but preliminary evidence would suggest that preventive dental care provides for a cheaper overall health cost for a person over their lifetime.

Eh, I could take it or leave it.

I guess I’ll take it.

On one occasion when an idiot was blaring music from their phone so loud the whole train carriage I was in were forced to listen to it, I queued up some metalcore and held my phone up so close that it was near his ear. He jumped, startled, and then tried to start a fight with me which was a bitch to de-escalate and prevent myself from getting punched without other passengers verbally backing me up and him eventually getting off at the next station.

Suffice to say two things: it’s not something I’ll likely do again for fear of my own safety, and the people who do this have a significant overlap with people who consider personal violence to be a warranted response when inconvenienced; i.e. they’re selfish, violent arseholes.

Fair, and that’s why I personally have a portfolio of metals, but gold regularly outperforms inflation - especially in troublesome economic times such as we’re in right now.

Even if you were somehow able to, you’d only be able to withdraw it in dollars anyway, it’s not like you have a physical pile of gold in a vault with your name on it.

Not sure what the rules are where you’re from, but I have a literal pile of gold, platinum, palladium and silver bullion in a safe in my home. Yes, I absolutely have a physical pile with my name on it - when I decide to put a sticky note on it and write my name on it.

Nah, just buy gold. Gold has consistently outpaced inflation in just about every time period as high inflation leads to a skittish market who invest in gold and cause the price to buoy. Given the current AI bubble combined with the Trump Effect on global economics, my gold investments have made a killing over the last 12 months and continue to perform really well - even with the dip over the last couple of days.

We never should have got off the gold standard.

I’ve worked in two different inbound government call centre-type environments and can confirm that callbacks are always queued as per their place in the queue. This is using Genesys, which is a very commonly used virtual contact centre software, and using different iterations of the software at both jobs.

If you don’t get a call back at all that could be due to call screening/blocking (most call centres call out from a ‘no caller ID’ number) and if you have to wait longer than the expected time, that’s likely due to the existing calls taking far longer than the average or median call length or a number of people needing to be off-phones for a period (due to breaks, emergency, a planned/unplanned meeting, or to catch up on overdue admin tasks).

Many times my inbound work has been a callback and the person who requested the callback either doesn’t pick up or it goes straight to voicemail. Depending on the service, the worker may be trained not to leave a message, as is the case for many banking/financial institutions or crisis support services such as domestic violence or child protection hotlines, as voicemails can cause a security or personal safety threat.

It’s been a long while since I’ve seen an interrobang in the wild - you are a gentleperson and a scholar my good chum!