Captainlavellan - Captain-Lavellan

I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he's shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

Credit to @the_depression_chronicles11 on instagram (reposted with permission)!

Harbinger

If you’re leaning toward supporting socialized health care, please listen to this.

The scary thing about socialized health care is not the idea of “free health care for all”, which is of course quite a nice idea on the surface. The scary thing, the thing that should absolutely terrify you, is not being able to buy health care.

This is a nightmare that millions of people in countries with socialized health care have to deal with today.

Of course, if you are healthy and you do not need to buy health care, it is not so bad. But the socialized health care system such as in the UK intrinsically is such that you cannot buy health care.

You may be thinking “well, why should health care be treated as a commodity? It’s not fair to distribute it based merely on who has money.”

That would be true in a situation where resources are truly capped and limited and owned by a central distributor. However, health care in real life is not zero sum. If a rich person buys health care they are not directly taking away from a poor person’s health care.

Example under socialism:

Hospital: we only ordered 500 bandaids but we have 600 people injured. Time to do a triage and see who needs the bandaids most. The other 100 people will have to go without.

Example under capitalism:

Manufacturer: oh gee we have 600 bandaid orders but have only produced 500. Better make another 100 band-aids.

If a rich person pays millions for a medical procedure, it does not directly take away doctors from the poor- it’s an incentive for more people to become doctors.

Here’s an example of some things that you can’t buy under the socialist triage system:

bone broke and healed wrong? It can’t be reset sorry. Need unusual potentially life-saving expensive care? That money could be split to serve two other people. What, you have your own money? We don’t accept that. How dare you treat health care as a commodity. Need slightly nonstandard care that the system doesn’t offer? Forget about it. Want a hip replacement? Why spend money on your quality of life when we have people who might die? (Although you can also be killed for poor quality of life, because the money to keep you alive might be better spent on someone who could have a good quality of life.) And you can forget about risky investment in new medical procedures.

Most importantly though, in a socialized health care system, people are a net drag on the system. The more people in it, the more that is taken away from it. It’s financially advantageous for a socialized health care system to ignore people’s illness in order to conserve its limited resources. The fundamental difference is that in socialism resources are seen as limited whereas in capitalism resources are seen as potentially unlimited.