Except that kids tend to destroy things (the binoculars obviously, not a trowel), tend to be violent with and throw things (a real gardening trowel is heavy and could injure their sibling for life), and quickly lose interest in things (they forget about the $20 binoculars long before their lack of quality is apparent).
I mean it depends on the ages of your kids... but there are very good reasons most toys are cheap plastic. It didn't just happen accidentally. It's a feature, not a bug. (Except for landfills, of course.)
i don't know if it's a realistic expectation for everyone but i absolutely loathe getting new toys because with the exception of lego and compatibles and a few other constructable toys and plastic animal figures none of toys we ever got survived beyond a few weeks.
i once bet my son that the toy he wanted so badly would not survive two weeks. and if i won, he'd have to promise me to never ask for junk toys again, but focus on lego and compatibles.
and it seems to have worked. we were looking at toys in passing. and when i pointed out the quality of the material of one particular toy that he was looking at, he agreed, and said he didn't want it anyways.
Ironically WRT tiny shovels, kids plastic toys are made to fall apart for about $10, real plastic adult spades that last forever run about $5, and adult metal spades designed to rapidly fall apart cost $15. If you're willing to pay $30 you can get a dewitt that your kids will inherit, but it'll be ugly and heavy...
There's a different problem for binoculars, Thomas the Tank Engine binoculars will cost $20 for licensing, no name but optically superior adult binocs will be $30. Of course the $400 Steiners are worth it if you're actually going to look thru them, or if you spend thousands of dollars to get somewhere to look thru them it would be nice if they actually work.
My preferred alternative is cash. Always cash for gifts. It’s better for the environment, and it’s better for the recipient. Either you’re close to the person you’re giving a gift to and know what kind of utility they will get from a gift so it’s not wasted, or just simple cash.
A reason I basically just don't give gifts is that if I prefer to receive cash, and you prefer to receive cash, then what the hell is the point of it anyway?
I remember when I was little, probably early elementary, my brother gave me $5 for Christmas. I thought that was really swell of him, so I went to my room and got him $5. In the end, what was the point of it? It didn't mean anything.
I give gifts when there is something I'm excited about giving. Otherwise, I just don't bother.
Well, generally, it's adults (who have cash) who give children (who don't have cash) the cash.
I've never heard of siblings giving each other cash, that's really funny. :) I mean in my family, us siblings never exchanged gifts at all until we were adults with our own income. Gifts were always from adults to kids, not kids to kids.
But when I was a kid my aunts and uncles obviously didn't have a clue what I was into or wanted. Cash would be wonderful -- the whole experience of figuring out how much, what my options were, going to the store, picking something out, having it be linked to not just one but multiple family members...
Cash as a gift, for kids, is honestly pretty great. A million times better than the usual itchy sweater and socks from grandma that I could never wear, unfortunately.
> A reason I basically just don't give gifts is that if I prefer to receive cash, and you prefer to receive cash, then what the hell is the point of it anyway?
> I remember when I was little, probably early elementary, my brother gave me $5 for Christmas. I thought that was really swell of him, so I went to my room and got him $5. In the end, what was the point of it? It didn't mean anything.
This is solved by asymmetrical giving. The structure of Christmas, where everyone gives a gift to everyone else, is wrong. Compare Chinese New Year, where adults give money to children, or a Chinese wedding, where everyone else gives money to the bride and groom.
Important to recognise that Stefan Molyneux is not far-right, whether or not the far-right are encouraged by his YT channel deletion. I would classify him as an atheist/libertarian.
I vaguely remember seeing that he’d endorsed Trump in 2016, which surprised me because it hadn’t been long at the time since I recalled him advocating completely abstaining from the political system.
I’ve not kept up with him, but it seemed like he was moving in a direction that was incompatible with the extreme libertarianism that brought him into the circles I frequented at the time.
If you break down political ideas into just left and right, the libertarian belief small government with strong property rights puts them fairly far right. Things are of course more complicated, and there may be other members of the far right who disagree with him on many issues, but he'd still be part of the broader "far right."
Is Stef still claiming to be an atheist? It seemed like he was making up with Christianity in recent years. Just the same, while he used to be an outright anarchist, he went all-in for Trump.
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!”
—Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
—YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.”
—Stefan Molyneux describes the Holocaust in YouTube video, Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants, March 20, 2016
If one man produces 1000+ hours of content then there's always going to be dodgy stuff when stuff is taken out of context.
('If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him' -- Cardinal Richelieu)
Black vs white IQ is an empirical rather than an ideological question, and a question best ignored, character and culture being more important than raw intelligence. However I'm not going to hang a man just because he failed to ignore it.
The fact that Molyneux is anti-Nazi ('overreaction') as well as anti-communist is very simply consistent with his libertarian philosophy.
are you actually so far gone you think calling the holocaust an 'overreaction to a Jewish threat' actually makes you an anti-Nazi? Jesus that may be the single dumbest thing I've ever read on this site, congratulations.
And, no it's not normal to casually advocate white supremacy in 1000 hours of recorded conversation. Dude's a full on neo-nazi who calls himself a libertarian, which probably puts him in good company with half of that demographic anyway.
That’s how you personally might classify him, but many would disagree with you. To my eye, for one, it seems quite obvious that Molyneux is a far-right figure.
Well now the videos are gone and I can't verify that any of those quotes were truly said. Many of them such as the one liners are obviously missing context as well.
I sense an implied “/s” in your post. But just in case, there are in-depth critiques that include significant portions of Molyneux’s videos still up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA
Certainly enough to get a sense for Molyneux’s ideology.
>They exist, but the woke crowd is purging them hard now.
Yes, thereby creating tomorrow's woke crowd. Tomorrow's woke crowd will ultimately purge today's woke crowd. So we may as well just politely state our opinions because self-censoring and trying to be nice won't save us.
But, and this is the important point, stating your opinion today may actually hurt you ( job loss, public media shaming, loss of business ) regardless on how politely it is stated.
In a sense, it is starting remind of me stories my parents told me of the old country during communist regime. Political jokes could and were reported by your friends. This could result in various social sanctions including 'wolf ticket' ( effectively blacklist of dissidents ) preventing you from getting a job, car, you name it.
Amusingly, today you find out, who your friends are by being unflinchigly open.
Speech isn't free. It's a form of action and actions are constrained. As the West changes from a Christian to a post-Christian culture, one set of blasphemy laws are being replaced by another set. One set of words you can't say in public by another.
Thoughts, on the other hand, are sometimes free. That's one reason the promulgation of despair is continually attempted: to shut down free thought.
Don't disagree with the facts but the suffering of humans depends as much on the content of their thoughts as it does on material conditions. A civilisation at the apparent height of its power and security can eat itself from the inside and decline rapidly. A wealthy individual living a privileged life can be beset by anxiety, and so on. Both of these things are strongly affected by the ideas that predominate in a given era. These include subtle ideas which can't readily be identified and which nevertheless spread and cause harm. So those ideas are a relevant part of the environment when considering which was the worst year so far.
The closing scene is priceless. Clive Sinclair defiantly drives into the future on his C5, without helmet or neck support, overtaken by lorries/juggernauts:
>How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes?
I think we need to be optimists. Not 'glass is half full' optimists, or 'humans are perfect' optimists but 'progress is possible if we keep trying' optimists.
If we decide to be optimists then our wealth, technological capability and sense of responsibility will all continue to increase. Handling historical waste will become safer and cheaper. An exciting future university project, perhaps, with documentaries, museums and spin-offs abounding.
What it isn't possible to do is to prophesy the precise means by which it will happen.
We may build reactors that produce less and less waste or no waste at all. Nuclear engineers and physicists may figure out how to transmute harmful elements into safe ones. We may end up launching material directly into the Sun. Or we might just dig a better hole. Or something else. Or something else again.
The fact that we don't know in advance is not grounds for pessimism.
“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.” (Howard Zinn)
Yes. Amazing how many people are content to makes presents of such dross to their young friends and relations.
Alternative approach: get the adult versions.
e.g. don't buy the $20 binoculars endorsed as 'educational'; get $40 dollar binoculars which last much longer and are actually useful
e.g. don't buy a plastic spade, give a gardening trowel instead
etc.