I'm in the middle of reading Nonverts by Stephen Bullivant, about the variety of people who grew up in a religion and "converted" to no religion. He makes the argument that it's incredibly difficult (bordering on pointless) to make sweeping generalizations about all of them at once. His book is sectioned by which religion these non-believers came from, suggesting that their religious background accounts for a lot of who they are without religion.
We're falling into a trap of using subjective definitions the term "wealthy".
$2000-$3000/person/year [1] on top of regular insurance is a more than most people can afford, especially in a country where a large percentage of the population has little in terms of savings [2], and 60% live paycheck-to-paycheck [3].
But you certainly don't have to be a billionaire or even a deca-millionaire to afford it. You just need to be in the higher percentiles of your local income/wealth distribution.
I got hit by a car when i was a kid (as a pedestrian), and I have pondered the exact same things before. It was bad luck that I got hit, but was it good luck that the injury caused a coma, which helped my brain protect itself? Very quickly the good/bad binary becomes nonsense.
I read Unbearable Lightness in high school and it changed my life. I read it again a few years later in hope of changing it back, but it instead gave me a fresh perspective. I read literature all the time, but that one will always stick out as being exactly the right book to consult at several points in my life.
Gladwell is an excellent storyteller, but his tales always came off as glib to me. He never seemed to evaluate evidence that contradicted his narrative.
“Tall, wearing three earrings and a metal plate in his head, availing himself of profanity of a kind that would make an Algerian camel driver blush, Zack Zipperman, Ph.D. has for the past 26 years, in his windowless laboratory at MIT, been teaching white mice to dance the cha-cha-cha, with interesting results for those who can't comprehend why men born after 1942 never carry handkerchiefs.” - parody of Gladwell’s writing by Joseph Epstein: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/jack-out-...
I only left (err, closed my always-open browser tab) a few months ago, after reading through the discussion about the user survey. The number of comments saying, basically, “anyone who thinks the site changed for the worse is just a [insert right wing caricature here]” horrified me yet, by that point, was completely unsurprising. But after reading a few comments from people who had left the site, I finally realized that I could do the same, and I’d probably be happier for it.
thalidomide is still prescribed and is a highly effective drug. What's your point? The entire narrative about thalidomide completely oversells what happened and distorts people's understanding of drug safety.
Neat game, I find mixing paints really enjoyable so this right up my alley. I solved the hard game, no problem, but after my first selection in the regular game, it X'd out all of my picks, even though I got 93.5%. My subsequent attempts got me further away.
Part 2: How Chicken Genetics Barons Created the Egg Crisis (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/fowl-play-how-chicken-gen...)
Part 3 hasn't been released yet, but it's a good read so far.