Bjorn K Holmstrom

I wonder whether Universal Basic Income could help resolve some of this tension. Homemaking, raising children, and caring for others can be genuinely valuable contributions, but they often come with financial dependence on a partner, lost career opportunities, and reduced pension security. What if everyone had an individual, unconditional income floor, independently of whether they're employed, studying, caring for children, or doing something else? That could make homemaking a more viable choice for either partner without requiring complete financial dependence on the other. We could also explore additional support for intensive caregiving, though there's a danger of turning human relationships into bureaucratically measured work. Of course, UBI wouldn't solve everything. It could even reinforce traditional gender roles if women disproportionately withdraw from paid employment, and a modest payment wouldn't necessarily provide genuine financial independence. But perhaps the goal shouldn't be to get everyone into paid employment, or back into traditional homemaking roles. Maybe it should be to give people more freedom to choose how they live and contribute. Would that change how you think about homemaking?

I think we overlook the possibility for existence beyond mind. An infinite vastness of unknown and impossible to conceptualize for the mind. I'm meaning mind as the discernment tool dividing up experience, not Mind as reality itself. Edit: nvm you included the unknown to the bottom left.

Yes, it works well in my opinion, though I'm not saying Windows doesn't. I got a desktop a few years ago from my brother, he had installed Windows for me. I set a password but somehow got it wrong and couldn't login afterwards. Since he lives several hours drive from me, I couldn't just ask him to reinstall for me, instead I remembered I kind of liked Linux and downloaded Linux Mint on my Windows laptop to a USB stick and installed it. Been happy with it ever since, minus a hiccup when a kernel update made my GPU not work properly, luckily I could revert for a while, and they fixed it in a later update. Most annoying thing is to type the sudo password for updates, since mine is a bit long, but its just up to me to change it if I could be bothered. "The operating system is great, it is the apps that are the problem." @Joseph Maynor What kind of apps do you use that you don't find well or working on Linux? I mostly use AI for research (mostly python code) and update my websites. So I only need browsers, terminal, file explorer, text editor basically. Then I sometimes play some Steam games, GeoGuessr (browser-based) and Discord games.

I don't think the OP necessarily said that rich people are tier 2? My thoughts on the OP though: couldn't someone work a regular salaried job and still be Tier 2? Like a nurse, a doctor, a gardener. I don't see why being Tier 2 would necessarily mean distancing oneself from people at other stages. If anything, I'd imagine that understanding and being able to relate to different perspectives is part of what makes tier 2 distinctive. And just as AION said just above, development isn't linear. And I'd add, it is not single-dimensional either.

Scored 18/50

Take the question however you like. I'm curious where your imagination takes you.

I see this as a failure of our forum. I'll carry with me the things I've learnt from you. Especially this, which made me sad: """ In their eyes, I'm not Feminine enough to be a woman because I'm too competent. In their eyes, I'm not competent enough because I'm a woman. """ And what I've learnt from this thread; a willingness to always see the other person, without prejudice, is more valuable than winning an argument.

Sorry to hear that, we lost a perspective. Reading his posts they seem perhaps a bit immature and overreactive, but to me they are also funny. Maybe not so much if you are on the receiving end, nor considering the forum standards.

I've only tried japanese fermented beans, natto. Was peculiar for sure.

I'm now reading the paper a bit. It does seem physical focused, but has some sociological considerations; on page 9 about how males are earlier socialized for sports performance and on page 15 about the role of fathers and alloparents enabling female participation. The article however seems to have skipped these considerations, like you say

I know how it is to be swayed by my own agenda in the past, jumping to conclusions. But I think an agenda might be justified in certain situations too.

The paper's authors have PhD's in Anthropology. The Colonialism PhD belongs to the science writer who wrote the article about the paper, not to the authors of the paper. Not denying there might be agendas also among the researchers, just wanted us to have the facts right about what we are discussing. According to ChatGPT, the article's author has more of an agenda than the paper, which is more nuanced.

My brother's wife is a hunter.

I want to point out something important. Most people still think governments operate like households, but they don't. That way of thinking is held by orthodox economists and pushed also by the neoliberal agenda. In France it’s a bit more complicated. France doesn’t have its own currency, the French state can’t do everything a country with its own currency can do. But that still doesn’t make it like a household. The limits are mainly political and institutional, which are rules we chose. The real constraints are political will, public awareness, and actual resources like teachers and materials. Of course, this doesn't mean we don't also need to address wealth inequality, but it is made worse by falsely believing governments need to impose austerity when they should spend.

France has trouble channeling the energy of the street to actual systemic change. Protests force concessions, but the underlying institutional and economic blockages tend to re-form. Many if not most countries seem to have their own versions of systemic loops that keep them stuck.

Three things I think contribute to why Americans aren't as optimistic: There's a growing set of problems that require global coordination and can't be solved by America alone. The usual binary ideological model isn't very well suited to solving some of today's more complex problems. Some of the solutions those problems require don't sit very comfortably with the traditional American mindset.

I've been looping Dreamstate Logic's albums lately, very chill ambient electronic.

I don't disagree that many small parties are politically naive or that working through an established party can be much more effective. I'm making a different point: their proposed solutions can be poor while the concerns that produce their support still contain information. The 4% threshold decides representation, not whether that information exists. I'm arguing that a governance system should be capable of hearing what its existence is telling us.

That's too reductionist in my view, reducing the people voting for the parties with less >4% to null. I get that it is practical to have the barrier, but the signal loss is real.

That's awesome, I've been yearning to see more stage yellow arise in Swedish politics. Just went and voted today. I feel all parties are important (also the ones kept outside the parliament due to the >4% barrier), since they are all a sensor to concerns in the population, so voting for just one party is a bit limited. I've been starting to research ways to gradually improve the system, step by step from the current model to a polycentric commonwealth. Looking forward to hear about your political career.

I've been using Joplin since my OneNote got lost somehow, but you inspired me to try Obsidian, curious to see what the differences are. I'm an INTP, and have been mostly terrible at making any income in my life, despite good grades and being very close to finishing an engineering degree, so it seems my case adds to this framing.

You are not wrong that people with power often resist changes that would reduce their leverage. My hesitation is that framing the issue primarily as billionaires vs everyone else can sometimes make the problem look more personal than structural. The way I see it, many societies get stuck in stable but sub-optimal arrangements not because a particular group is evil, but because their feedback systems are weak. Problems accumulate, signals get filtered, institutions react late, and incentives end up reinforcing the status quo even when many people would prefer something better. That's part of why I focus on the baseline conditions rather than billionaires themselves. If people's basic needs were guaranteed, the bargaining relationship between workers, employers, governments and investors would indeed look very different. The question then becomes less if billionaires should exist and more about how to build systems that can sense problems early, adapt, and distribute opportunities widely without getting locked into unhealthy dynamics.

I see no problem with billionaires per se (why shouldn't anyone on the planet be a billionaire that so wishes?), the issue is the system where people are not guaranteed their basic needs met: that I think should be covered so that taking a job is something you do because your heart desires it. I’m not arguing for eliminating wealth accumulation or corporations. I’m questioning whether extreme wealth concentration is still a necessary feature if basic needs are structurally guaranteed. In that scenario, “billionaire or not” becomes less important than the underlying coordination system.

Most discussions of personal values treat them as preferences: things you care about, goals you pursue, metrics you track. I want to propose something more unsettling. Your values don't just shape what you pursue. They determine what you can see about yourself. Most people operate through an implicit objective function; a set of dimensions along which they evaluate their own life. Am I successful? Am I happy? Am I in control? These aren't neutral questions. They're observation filters. Whatever is true about you but absent from your value architecture registers as noise, not signal. It doesn't exist, as far as your ego is concerned, until it becomes loud enough to be undeniable. This is the self-variety gap: the distance between the full dimensionality of your actual state and the dimensionality of the lens through which you observe it. The larger the gap, the more of yourself is invisible to you. And invisibility, over time, produces crises that feel sudden but were always already present, just below the threshold of what your values allowed you to perceive. The contemplative traditions have been pointing at this for a long time, in their own language. The dissolution of a fixed self-concept isn't just liberation from suffering, it's an expansion of observational dimensionality. When you stop collapsing yourself into a narrow narrative, more of what's actually happening can be registered. I've developed this into a more formal framework; drawing on control theory, Ashby's Law, and research from psychology and contemplative neuroscience, but the essential movement is simple: what you optimize for is what you can see, and what you can't see will eventually govern you. I'm curious how this resonates here. Leo talks often about the limits of conceptual frameworks and the necessity of direct experience. This is, in some ways, a formal account of why those limits exist structurally, not just philosophically. What dimensions of yourself became visible only when you loosened your grip on a particular value or identity?

Rather than "truth = success," I'd reframe it through the lens my series of country reports has built: Observability (can the system perceive reality without the perception threatening its own stability?) is the precondition for adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity (can the system reconfigure itself as conditions change?) is the mechanism of success. Success itself remains undefined until a system specifies what it's optimizing for, and the highest-order success is the capacity to redefine the optimization target as collective understanding evolves.