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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I fucking wish. At least then I wouldn’t have to be put on hold for 30 min just to have to eventually explain to a person who was hired 3 weeks ago how to do their job.

    Private insurance always has you speak to an actual adjuster for authorization, mainly because they know any sort of automated system would be more accurate and faster than having you talk to their undertrained and understaffed employees.

    Private insurance’s goal is to erect as many barriers between the provider and the patients as possible, and then blame the provider for all the barriers. It works every time.

    “I have the best insurance, they told me it would be covered”. Nope, Medicare is the best insurance and you traded that away for a privatized Medicare supplemental that lies to you about your coverage.




  • The professional reviews are hilariously mixed, I’m pretty sure Coppola unwittingly made a movie that also serves as a litmus test to see how pretentious and up your own ass you are.

    The honest reviews are basically, this made no sense, I don’t know what he was thinking. The positive reviews can be boiled down to “if you have to ask, you’re not sophisticated enough to understand”.


  • I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.

    I think excusing it as a “not serious” statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won’t second guess it.

    The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.


  • But Spartan women weren’t that bad off, compared to other places in antiquity

    We also white wash Spartan history pretty dramatically. Yes, Spartan women who were citizens were better off than their Athenian counterparts. However, that’s not saying much when you consider spartan citizens were a fraction of the population of Sparta.

    The vast majority of women in Sparta were helots, and were subject to chattel slavery. I don’t think you can claim that Spartans cared about gender equality when they had an entire social class made up of the bastards produced by raping their slaves.



  • Yeah… This is a bit sketchy. Pharmaceuticals aren’t just something that an amateur can make by following step by step instructions. Even something as simple as baking a cake requires some basic experience to know when things are going right or wrong.

    Even maintaining the calibration on a CLR requires some background experience, let alone building and programming one all on your own. With your actual reactor being as small as a mason jar, it means the margin for error is going to be small as well.

    This is neat for people with a background in chemistry, but I don’t really see it as anything but dangerous for the general public. They also are fudging their math a bit to make things seem a lot cheaper. Reagents can be really cheap at bulk prices, but you have to spend the time looking for them, and they aren’t equating the cost of a trained chemist making these medications.


  • seems today’s pattern in general. Such projects go for something hardly achievable, don’t achieve it, give us all that feeling of passive frustration, and divert attention.

    I think it’s kinda a byproduct of venture capital funding. With the Fed prioritizing low interest rates for the last decade, investors are a lot more willing to stick their money in yolo financial schemes.

    There are plenty of places on the planet which could use additional electricity, water, wired connectivity, normal roads.

    Pssh, why build physical things when you can just gamble on things like virtual currency, virtual intellect, or even virtual reality… /s

    Or, say, security from armed apes with UN membership, like Azerbaijan.

    Lesser Armenia has really flown off the handle lately. I don’t really know why they have UN membership, Azerbaijan is basically “what if the Saudi tried to build Singapore on the Caspian sea”.





  • We’re talking about the basic premise of the movie, which is: “If smart people reproduce too little and dumb people reproduce too much, we’ll have a problem of stupidity.”

    That’s your own flawed interpretation. The premise of the movie is about social “devolution”. Basically, an inverse of the normal social motivators occurs, where society no longer values concepts like intellect or education, and begins valuing things like fame, and risk taking behaviour.

    It doesn’t rely on nature or nurture, or anything else.

    The concept of intellect is inseparable from the concept of nature vs nurture.

    Mentally dishbled people have been sterilized, because they were “unfit for parenthood” due to eugenic arguments.

    The eugenics based argument is that mentally disabled people shouldn’t have kids because they believe their illness will be passed down to their children.

    Eugenics is a part of a long line of debunked “racial science”, and is meant to be applied in the aims of isolating a certain type of people from society. It’s not applicable to an entire society with different ethnicities being affected the same.

    No, but that’s literally the thesis of the movie, which I dislike. 🙄

    Lol, there are only two “smart” people in the movie, and one of them is a former sex worker… They also have three kids.

    So I don’t really think that tracks, more than likely the writers were trying to get across that dumb people like to inappropriatetly talk about their sex life in public.

    I think you’re getting a little caught up on concepts like “breeding”, which you seem to think is only something that happens in eugenics. All mammals are the product of breeding, it’s just a semantic term for sex with added negative connotations because we typically use it while talking about animals.

    The important part which you are ignoring is what could possibly explain the social devolution of every single person in a country within 500 years. Even if we were talking about selective breeding where we purposely paired stupid people together, this still would not explain every single person being an idiot. That would require a complete shift in social mores to the point where society as a whole sees no value in education or intellect.

    You are just being willingly obtuse, or are just really ignorant at this point. I’ve provided rebuttals for all your examples, and youve failed to do the same for mine, other than saying I’m “cherry picking”, which really isn’t an argument.


  • although being smart doesn’t make you a good parent and being dumb doesn’t make you a bad one, so I’m already generous)

    Lol, notice how you had to completely change the wording to make that somewhat palatable? Being smart doesn’t make you a good parent, but that’s not what we were talking about. Stability and access to a decent education is what nurtures intellect.

    how many mentions that dumb people do be fucking?

    So your argument is that only dumb people like to fuck?


  • What theory? Eugenics doesn’t work in real life. I’m critizising the movie on its’ own premise, not on scientific pedantry.

    But you aren’t… There isn’t any clear delineation in the movie that would suggest they’re implying intellect is due to nature over nurture.

    The reason this is still a debate in psychology is because it’s hard to achieve a statistically viable sample size for a conclusive study. To make a factual delineation you would have to know about the parents intellectual capabilities and then their children’s intellectual abilities. However, we would also need to study a child that they didn’t raise…

    So, unless Idiocracy has a scene in it where the child of “smart parents” was raised by idiots, and remained smart… Then it’s impossible to know if they were implying bits an inherited trait.

    Wait, I thought the clip was the setup of the premise. Like, the beginning. What other clip have I shared?

    I was talking about the end of the movie…that’s what we were talking about from what you quoted.

    At around 3 min in this clip. The narrator says they have 3 of the smartest kids in the world, and in the scene we can see the protagonist teaching his kids how to read. It also says his friends has 30 of the dumbest kids in the world, and he is teaching them how to chase each other with mallets.

    the prologue constantly bangs on how much stupid people are fucking and smart people don’t.

    People in lower income levels tend to have more kids with less access to decent public education… America being a land of inequality based on social status isn’t exactly a new idea.

    You never see a focus on kids not being raised well, which would be a nuture standpoint.

    In the clip you just posted their are kids being actively ignored by the parents who are arguing over infidelity… Not exactly great parenting.

    Basically all idiots in the movie are coded like white “trash” trailer park people (except the President, maybe).

    I did not get that impression… Maybe you just have some biased preconceptions about trailer parks?

    Where is an example of a behaviorist stance by the movie?

    How about the parts where you ignore the family structure and behavior of the “idiots” in the same scene? How about the protagonist teaching his kids to learn?



  • Dude, modern eugenics was invented almost 40 years before they knew genes were even a thing. Do you expect them pointing at a double helix and saying “this is the stupid gene”, before you accept a premise that’s based on breeding having an eugenic message?

    Yes, and this movie was written in the 2000s… If we want to get pedantic with the science aspect, then your theory is out the window to begin with. 500 years is not long enough for a species to radically alter their intellect on a societal scale.

    Nice cherry-picking. In the rest of the clip, they’re constantly ref renceing, how much “stupid” people breed. One punchline is specifically that a stupid person’s junk was saved.

    The rest of the clip? It’s literally the end of the movie… And again, there’s no way to delineate if the stupidity in question is a byproduct of parenting vs “breeding” as you put it.

    Do you know what “except” means?

    Lol, and how does it conflate poor people with stupidity? Just out of the blue…no context?

    the movie explicitly negates these behaviorist ideas.

    Lol, no it doesn’t.

    You would have a point if it would have focused more on the poor children being badly cared for, instead of slutshaming the poor.

    Lol, what are you talking about? I’ve brought up the care of children several times, and havent brought up sexual provocation at all?

    I think you need to take a nap or something.


  • The movie constantly focuses on genetics. It even ends with the naration that the (relatively smart) hero has a few smart kids and his dumb friend has a few dumb ones.

    It doesn’t mention genes… In the clip you are talking about where he has smart kids, you can see both of the parents actively teaching their kids how to read. It then pans over to his friends who had a bunch of dumb kids and he’s teaching them to play with fireworks or something.

    The movie never interacts with *any socioeconomic factors, except for conflating poor people with dumb people.

    If it never interacts with socioeconomics how does it conflate poor people with dumb people?

    The movie doesn’t get into that argument.

    It’s the whole point of the movie…

    What does “clean slate” have to do with this?

    Lol, so no. You don’t understand.

    Yes, that’s my point. The premise of the movie hinges on intelligence being mainly inherited.

    How are you making that determination? How does one delineate between the two within the context of the movie?


  • The joke is “this could have been prevented, if that guy became infertile, but unfortunately, modern medicine saved him”. That’s not jumping to codclusions, that’s the literal text of the movie.

    Yes…it is. Preventing a deadbeat dad from abandoning even more families to poverty is not saying that his genes are cursed or something.

    Seriously, what’s wrong with your media literacy? It’s so obvious

    Have you not ever heard of nature vs nurture? Never heard of tabula rassa? You do know that intellect isn’t determined by genes alone, correct?

    Nice try. I’m sim’ly interpreting the text of the movie.

    Yes, through the lens of eugenics…