exasperation

Not all kids are "climb into an animal enclosure at the zoo" dumb. That's a special kind of dumb.

Have you ever had to care for 3-year-olds? I'd argue that probably more than 80% of 3 year olds are "climb into an animal enclosure at the zoo" dumb. And honestly, for the 20% you don't have to worry about, it's not intelligence that keeps them out, it's other personality traits or physical abilities.

Human life absolutely factors into predicted lawsuit losses. Wrongful death lawsuits are expensive.

You're right about all that, but it's worth noting that U.S. population centers tend to be coastal. New York to Chicago is one of the closer city pairs between the 10 largest cities in the U.S. Here's the driving distance from New York to each of the other 9:

Los Angeles: 2800 miles (4500 km)
Chicago: 800 miles (1300 km)
Dallas: 1600 miles (2500 km)
Houston: 1600 miles (2600 km)
Miami: 1300 miles (2100 km)
Washington: 230 miles (370 km)
Atlanta: 900 miles (1400 km)
Philadelphia: 100 miles (160 km)
Phoenix: 2400 miles (3900 km)

Dallas and Houston are close to each other. New York, Philadelphia, and DC are close (and are already connected by the most popular passenger rail line in the US). But the others are all pretty spread out.

So the type of travel people might imagjne doing in the U.S. tends to be weighted towards pretty far distances.

There's definitely room for more happy people in the mix. I try my best to inject humor and whimsy here and there, while above all else trying to stay engaged with the types of topics I'm interested in (explaining things I know, asking about things I don't know, and generally keeping topics alive if they're good topics I want to continue).

I generally delete my draft comments that come off as rude, before posting them, because I'm not sure this place needs more negativity.

The result is insane in my opinion, it means any sensible math system with basic arithmetic has a proposition that you cannot prove.

Stated more precisely, it has true propositions that you cannot prove to be true. Obviously it has false propositions that can't be proven, too, but that's not interesting.

with a rigorous, needlessly convoluted proof.

Again, Goedel's theorem was in direct response to Russell and Whitehead spending literally decades trying to axiomize mathematics. Russell's proof that 1+1=2 was 300 pages long. It was non-trivial to disprove the idea that with enough formality and rigor all of mathematics could be defined and proven. Instead of the back and forth that had already taken place (Russell proposes an axiomatic system, critics show an error or incompleteness in it, Russell comes back and adds some more painstaking formality, critics come back and do it again), Goedel came along and smashed the whole thing by definitively proving that there's nothing Russell can do to revive the major project he had been working on (which had previously hit a major setback when Russell himself proved Russell's paradox).

how about:
x = 2
2x = 3,000
omg! they’re inconsistent!

You didn't define x, the equals sign, the digit 2, 3, or 0, or the convention that a real constant in front of a variable implies multiplication, or define a number base we're working in. So that statement proves nothing in itself.

And no matter how many examples of incomplete or contradictory systems you come up with, you haven't proven that all systems are either incomplete or contradictory. No matter how many times you bring out a new white swan, you haven't actually proven that all swans are white.

And formal logic and set theory may have seemed like masturbatory discipline with limited practical use, but it also laid the foundation for Alan Turing and what would become computer science, which indisputably turned into useful academic disciplines that changed the world.

but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone

Even if that is an effect where increased unionized non-supervisor wages push up supervisor salaries, my point is that there are simply fewer middle managers to benefit from that effect.

Plus the second order effects of a hollowed out middle choking out the pipeline for promoting and training future business leaders, so that it's a small number of big corporate executives overseeing jobs they've never had instead of the older system of a lot more small and medium sized business leaders supervising jobs they used to personally work.

It was a response to philosophers who were trying to come up with a robust axiomatic system for explaining math. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica attempted to formalize everything in math, and Goedel proved it was impossible.

So yes, it's a bit of a circlejerk, but it was a necessary one to break up another circlejerk.

I don't think the McAllisters were in union jobs. I think they were pretty high up the tier of management.

People talk about union jobs going away, but don't forget, non-unionized middle management has totally been gutted by outside consultants over the same time period. So the changes in the workforce have hurt the earning power of both the line workers and the middle managers who used to make up the middle class.

This whole thread is kinda wild to me, but I think this Princess Bride answer helps me distill it down to: I'm ok with you not liking movies that I love, but how can you say that you don't understand other people liking it?

I don't care for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings but never has it crossed my mind that this is more than just a matter of taste, that there are people whose preferences are outright wrong.

Up in horsey heaven, here's the thing
You trade your legs for angels wings
And once we’ve all said good-bye
You take a running leap and you learn to fly

Sauropods had hollow bones and air sacs all throughout for lightweight structural support. You can't just compare sizes and assume similar density as elephants or other large mammals.