And yet, people do.

Should we just ignore the dynamics of that system, and pretend it doesn’t exist? Or can we make observations about that system, and analyze its effects?

This comment section is all people missing the point.

The point of the post is that a particular job will generally stabilize at a particular pay. If it’s a tipped position, then the employer will pay less, so that the overall income is roughly at that stable income for that position, including the overall average tip.

So people who tip less than the average are free riding off of the people who tip more than average, where that worker will make an average tip overall, which comes more from the generous tippers than the stingy tippers. Thus, it effectively transfers money from generous tippers to stingy tippers, on net, in the long run.

The merits of this system, whether servers deserve to be paid more, whether we should push for reforms so that this isn’t the system, is besides the point. The post is making an observation of how things actually are, not advocating for how things should be.

I’m basically saying two things.

1. Permanence isn’t required or expected, although in some instances permanence is valued, in defining success.
2. Permanence itself does not require continuing effort. One can leave a permanent mark on something without active maintenance.

Taken together, success doesn’t require permanence, and permanence doesn’t require continued effort. The screenshot text is wrong to presume that our culture only values permanence, and is wrong in its implicit argument that permanence requires continued effort.

This comment is like telling Superman not to lift with his back.

All I’m saying is that continuing effort is not necessary. Permanence/longevity can be achieved through other means, in situations where permanence is important. The lack of need for continuing effort is even more obvious in situations in which permanence isn’t even a desired or intended outcome.

we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

I really don’t agree with the premise, and would encourage others to reject that worldview if it starts creeping into how they think about things.

In the sports world, everything is always changing, and careers are very short. But what people do will be recorded forever, so those snapshots in time are part of one’s legacy after they’re done with their careers. We can look back fondly at certain athletes or coaches or specific games or plays, even if (or especially if) that was just a particular moment in time that the sport has since moved on from. Longevity is regarded as valuable, and maybe relevant to greatness in the sport, but it is by no means necessary or even expected. Michael Jordan isn’t a failed basketball player just because he wasn’t able to stay in the league, or even that his last few years in the league weren’t as legendary as his prime years. Barry Sanders isn’t a failed American football player just because he retired young, either.

Same with entertainment. Nobody really treats past stars as “failed” artists.

If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer.

That is a foreign concept to me, and I question the extent to which this happens. I don’t know anyone who treats these authors (or actors or directors or musicians) as failures, just because they’ve moved onto something else. Take, for example, young actors who just don’t continue in the career. Jack Gleeson, famous for playing Joffrey in the Game of Thrones series, is an actor who took a hiatus, might not come back to full time acting. And that’s fine, and it doesn’t take away from his amazing performance in that role.

The circumstances of how things end matter. Sometimes the ending actually does indicate failure. But ending, in itself, doesn’t change the value of that thing’s run when it was going on.

| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good.

Exactly. I would think that most people agree, and question the extent to which people feel that the culture values permanence. If anything, I’d argue that modern culture values the opposite, that we tend to want new things always changing, with new fresh faces and trends taking over for the old guard.

I’m a human! I’m a human male!

That paper reads like it was written by an undergrad going through cargo cult motions of sounding like a scientist. And the evidence is still weak: many of those studies being summarized are studies where they poisoned rats and investigated whether onion juice has some kind of protection against the poison, as measured by testosterone levels.

The integrated circuits in a lot of lighting fixtures (and you know OP’s light is run by integrated circuit because it can be controlled by remote) are basically a black box of complexity where things can go wrong in a non-intuitive way. Some kind of failure to deliver sufficient power to a particular bulb or LED or other element isn’t necessarily an indication of anything in particular.

or a setting on the light housing causing less voltage (I think?) to make it to the bulb

Aren’t you just describing dimmers, the topic of the post?

People think we’re eating chicken abortions but really we’re eating chicken periods.

He is his own dad, because he did do the nasty in the pasty.

Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.

Well it’s not like Japanese or Chinese (or Italian or British or French or Danish or Mexican) chefs stopped inventing new dishes. Tonkotsu ramen was invented in the 1930’s. The original Kung Pao Chicken was invented sometime in the mid 19th century, in China. And General Tso’s was probably invented in Taiwan and brought to the United States shortly afterward.

Whether a dish is invented in its ostensibly “home” country or by emigrants from that country doesn’t actually change the legitimacy of the dish. There’s no rule against chefs inventing new dishes, whether they are immigrants or not.

Cookie is already a slang term for pussy, you can skip that step.

Yeah, cookie monster is blue, but this particular shot has so much dark shadow in that textured fur that it’s nearly black in most places.

Industrious eye

Ok there Ongo Baglogian

A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.

Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.

Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline’s own paradigms or models. In Kuhn’s view, scientists performed “normal science” by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn’s description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the “normal science” periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.

The prominent example was that Mercury’s orbit didn’t quite fit Newton’s theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn’t have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn’t until Einstein’s general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein’s theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.

Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.

Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own “Research Programs” that weren’t necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn’t much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own “hard core” that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the “protective belt” around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it’s perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn’s “normal science” and “revolutionary science” actually happened, and how Popper’s falsifiability criterion fit into each space.

Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn’t actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.

So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper’s views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.

It was a light hearted joke about the definition of “knowledge,” which is notoriously slippery.