• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • This feels like a relevant situation to bring up one of my favorite Terry Pratchett quotes:

    The Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

    The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

    Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

    But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.












  • I think we agree on most of the points here, and now we’re just getting defensive about tone, and details.

    I was just trying to point out that nothing has a way it is supposed to be. There is what things are, and there is what we want. Yes you can use many of the features of our language to convince people of your opinion.

    I myself don’t like the idea of personifying the planet then imbuing it with opinions so I made the comment I did.