That's your one-two punch right there. On Instagram, and viewing ads. Best thing to do is avoid both.

"The people I don't like are always unskilled." You shouldn't hate your enemies; it affects your judgement.

- Compulsory military service means the government captures the best and brightest of the country.

- An extraordinarily outsized number of nobel prizes belong to Ashkenazi Jews, and other indicators of intelligence (lack of propensity for violent crime, lifetime earnings, etc) are also quite high for the whole group.

This is what you don't get. _I_ already know it's not worth it. I've always known. It's everyone else! It's a wife who cares whether or not her husband has a good career. It's the police who care if you look like you're poor. It's the way every single person in society obsessively cares about the status of others.

What in the world makes you think I've had to build up status for my own sake? It's absolutely baffling that anyone could be confused about this.

I'll keep that in mind. If I'm suffering more than you are, the solution is to bring you down to my level.

A voice assistant is similar in an analogous way. A button works every time you press it, but a voice assistant works very sporadically. It's hardly convenient to repeat yourself frequently and randomly. A voice assistant requires internet access, which wastes your data (again, when you could have just pressed a button) and the quality of the voice assistant will change over time. It's less consistent, more expensive, and more complex. And for what? So you can use your phone more often? You already use your phone too much.

Just wait until you're not driving.

What most of these sorts of features do is not to add convenience; instead they remove the need to exercise impulse control. They reduce "friction," which means you do the action more often. But they don't improve convenience. Convenience is not needing to walk outside to the well to fetch a bucket of water. It's not someone making an app so automatic that you no longer need to use your executive function.

I have a similar experience but I don't think this disagrees with the parent. My mental exhaustion makes me seek out low-friction "junk food" behaviors. But much like drinking after work because you had a long day, the phone exhausts you in another way. The cure and disease are one in the same here.

Agreed, but I'm not so sure this was previously true. Or at least not _as_ true. There used to be a lot of more socializing by default. People who were poor in this skill set still had relatively regular social opportunities.

This seems to be gone today, and now it's purely manual.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/who-hurts-most-iran-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/business/energy-environme...

https://www.eenews.net/articles/iran-conflict-cuts-deep-in-p...