Shut the fuck up Kinder. Don't give me your victim bullshit. No one asked you to respond to him.

I literally laughed out loud at that.

Nope, learned it in my world history course

Bull.

Shit.

Bullshit.

You wouldn't happen to have any dogs?

I have a dog and a cat.

All right then.

I have to disagree with the people claiming that morality can somehow be inherent or objective. I've no doubt that we have innate preferences, caused by emotions such as empathy, compassion and the like, but it doesn't constitute an absolute and codified morality.

The only moral system that can survive are ones who adhere to the proposition that "might makes right" and no system or prevalent morality in existence has ever or ever will break this mold.

Ultimately, expressions of "right" or "wrong" are emotional and we engage in post hoc reasoning to explain it. I read a book not too long ago which explained it like this: our immediate moral intuition is like an elephant taking a step to the right, and our reasoning is like the rider sat atop making sure that step to the right goes smoothly.

Does that mean we should drop our moral code? No, in essence, its essential to the stability of society. If you are, however, going to claim that morality is independent of our intuitions, expectations, reasoning and opinions, I can't see that as being correct.

I don't believe it.

Also

The article you linked doesn't even say that countries measure poverty rates differently in the fashion you described.

That wasn't the point of the paper. The paper was to show that measurements of consumption uniformly raise the worst off to a position that is considered, by global standards, to be middle class and to show that measurements of poverty in the U.S. are skewed.

It doesn't make any sense anyway due to the fact that there are many organizations that could extract that information and analyze income and consumption among the poor, so trying to say the well accepted poverty rates are skewed is a claim with no merit.

I don't know what you mean by that.

Further, the point is moot anyway if your prior point is that there is a difference between international affluence and intranational affluence, and looking at only one country, the means in which poverty is measured is irrelevant, so long as it is uniform and can extrapolate the relative wealth inequality of that one country.

I know you better than to think you're trying to equate poverty with inequality. . .

So back to my original point, poverty isn't unique in a first world country, and at the same time, it's still a high standard of living for the rest of the world.

I never said anything even remotely close to contradicting that. All I said was that, in terms of global poverty, pretty much everybody in the U.S. is middle class, and in terms of national poverty the definition is so relative that you can't even begin to compare it to foreign countries.

That is my point. I don't know how you've managed to come from claiming I'm incredibly well-off to claiming that, in the national scheme of impoverishment, I'm not particularly unique (which again, I'm not) - neither of those things I denied in the first place. My original point was that, relative the environment I have grown up in, my academic effort has exceeded those similar to or marginally above me.

Do you just pull this stuff out of your ass or?..

Other countries typically look at consumption instead of income, and because transfer payments aren't counted as a form income, they aren't counted.

Notably, the range of consumption levels for those reporting zero or close to zero income is not only wide but indistinguishable from the equivalent range for those reporting income levels up to 20 dollars of income per person per day—above the level of the official U.S. poverty line. This is illustrated by the horizontal section of the best-fit curve where the relationship between reported income and consumption is absent. Put differently, it is not clear whether a comparison of individuals reporting 20 dollars and zero dollars a day in income coincides with any difference in consumption or welfare. Thus, a focus on zero or close to zero income respondents may not offer the best filter for examining minimum living standards in the U.S.

I didn't ask you Google it, dumbass.

I think you a word.

Just under 1 billion.

I don't think people thought they were even that funny other than you.

Door enjoyed it.

Absolutely not.

Indiscriminate hedonism is best hedonism.

I'm going to stick my neck out and support Challenger, here.

Intolerance of intolerance is not intolerant. It's like self-defence against coercion. That being said, so long as the ignorants and the bigots don't actually violate somebody's rights, they should just be ignored for the most part.

I get that computers can do things quicker than us,
but I think that they will always be limited by the humans who made them.

Hence the term self-improvement. An aggregate of human minds will be able to create a machine superior to one human mind and far enough improvement will allow machines to rewrite themselves.