Slippery slope fallacy
I think there's another aspect that you haven't mentioned.
I've found that when I've overburdened myself with work, I tend to cope through copious amounts of caffeine. Over time, this habit limits my overall productivity, and forces me to undergo painful withdrawal symptoms to return to normal. When someone turns to alcoholism to escape the stress in their life, they limit the amount of productive time they can spend solving the problems that lead to their stress. The same goes for many ultimately destructive habits: binge eating, gambling, smoking, memes (yeah, they do decrease productivity), television, video games, violence, promiscuity, procrastination, and so many others.
I'm an undergraduate student, and the thing I've noticed about my unsuccessful friends is that pretty much all of them fell pray to one or several of the above and could not put them down. Habits that develop in the sake of escaping immediate pain ultimately produce more pain.
However, if you don't have any of these habits, I've found that the process of learning can be quite fun.
So, I suppose I agree with you, in a roundabout way. The relatively pain-free lifestyle is better, but I think it's a result of knowing how to spend your time on things that don't immediately feel good and less about being inclined to appear as though you suffer.
A lot of people's beliefs are influenced by their political affiliation. I'd be wary of a rating system. If one political party got ahold of it, they might use it to completely discredit their opponents, when the issue is just not very well understood in the first place and having multiple perspectives is very useful.
Climate change is the issue that comes to mind first.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I'll do my best to do the same.
That got way longer than I meant it to. I hope you get a picture of what life is like in the country. If you'd like to provide city perspective, I have no idea what people actually do for work there (big buildings full of offices? All I know is what's in movies.)
You don't seem to understand how rural life works and why it's important. You also seem to think that small town lives and rural lives are more expensive than city lives. Please, allow me to clear up some misunderstandings.
Small towns aren't places that manufacture food for cities. They're places where people live and thrive, where occasionally you'll see families that farm or raise animals for a job. You seem to think that all the rural area in the world can just be replaced by corporations that send out farmers to live more "efficiently". This doesn't make sense because you can't just make a farmer. You have to be raised on a farm, to understand the difficulties and enjoy them because they're your way of life. You don't see city folk moving out to the country to farm. Ever. You couldn't pay them enough.
They've tried to do corporate farming, by the way. It doesn't work. This is because in corporations, people get lazy. They figure out how to take advantage of the system and work as little as possible to get the money they need to live. You need to keep people paid, even when their job isn't currently relevant. It isn't the same with family farms.
Farmers work lots of jobs. That means planting, spraying, repairing machinery, harvesting, building things, and so much more. Everything is pretty much DIY because it costs too much to get others to do things. That's why everything is always jerry-rigged and sketchy as heck. It's cheap.
From the rural perspective, the city is the wasteful place. It just seems like a black hole of resource use and pollution creation, and for what? I read somewhere that it costs two million dollars to build a public bathroom in New York City. That is absolutely ridiculous. It should cost a hundredth of that, max.
Interesting. I like this post. You've certainly got the right audience for a good reception. Everyone likes to think about how much more they know than anyone else, myself included. It's tough to think about what will actually make the world a better place.
If you took a person and taught them all about modern medicine, agriculture, technology, and everything else except how it's put together, how would they think the world works? What would be different in that person's mind from the way the world is now?
In other words, what do you notice that you're confused by in the world today?
I think that's where we'll find the lies.
My dad and uncle can farm 2,000 acres between them because of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. I would like to see you do the same with integrated livestock and multi-cropping.
Why doesn't the block between B and D absorb the photon a third of the time, since it should have the same modulus as the detectors? What's so special about things that tell us that they've been hit by a photon?
I eat venison nearly every day... and I don't think I'm stopping. Thanks for the article, though, I'll be sure to avoid the brain.