Charity food and health care is generally accepted as a good thing. By contrast, the idea of some kind of UBI (universal basic income) as a floor - where a person could have food and housing while pursuing a dream like creating art - is widely opposed (“paid work gives dignity!”).

Disbelief that our distant ancestors paid labor “taxes” to support artists in their community (which they definitely did) might be some psychological projection.

Interesting this guy and the barn owl got flat perches, where the other birds got something to wrap their toes around.

They look very squishy. Not awe inspiring like the rest of the show, but nice to have a place to pause from the sharp bits.

Public support fractures if the questions are broken down into more detail. People have unfounded fears of new “death panels”, and founded fears of the government screwing up implementation (Canada has crazy wait times for many medical services - it’s an outlier among developed countries, but demonstrates the screw-up opportunity). People support new services if they are funded magically, but aren’t willing to support tax raises, even though the tax increases would be less than the savings from not paying for private health insurance.

The complexity - and partisan politicians being more than willing to weaponize confusion over details to divide us against each other - is the barrier.

Global population growth is happening. Slowing down, but looks inevitable for at least several more decades. Given that baseline, it is optimal for all countries involved to allow immigration from countries with population growth (reduces strain on government services, adds to the economy with remittances) to countries with lower birth rates (tax revenues support social service budgets, increased entrepreneur rate of immigrants increases job growth, etc.)

Economies can transition to population decline while maintaining standards of living for sure, if handled in a planned way. Some short-term pain during the transition, then fine later. But why go through a combination of short-term pain right now, at the same time as incredible cruelty is required to keep out migrants?

A path to degrowth will be needed globally in the medium-term future (finite planet), but trying to implement that now at just the US locally isn’t going to help the planet at all.

Knitted socks were a huge deal when they became a thing in the 1500s - enabled by smooth uniformly sized thin metal knitting needles, which were just then possible with metal technology. We take for granted now that socks are stretchy, but for most of human history socks were stiff like any other fabric without any elastic threads as part of the fabric blend. Or sometimes cloth wraps were used instead of a shaped garment - the Russian military didn’t replace portyanki with socks until 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jan/16/russian-soldiers-replacing-foot-wraps-socks

The somewhat similar process of nalbinding was a thing as far back as ancient Egypt, and became common for socks and mittens in Medieval Scandinavia, but isn’t as flexible a technique as knitting, and doesn’t seem to have ever been used for gloves.

That knitting (and thus knitted socks) was invented in the 200s (when the dodecahedra were made) - and was used for gloves, somehow, and not socks - and yet didn’t make societal waves until the 1500s is a wild idea.

No, but it takes years of full time labor in a time where most human labor had to be spent on subsistence. That a community at that low tech level would feed and house someone doing something decorative for that many years is really cool. And I guess to some not believable.