Haven’t played this puzzle format before, really interesting. Just happy I managed to get all four.

I finished the puzzle #538 (7x7) in 5 minutes, 12 seconds in One Up Puzzle. Try to beat me! https://oneuppuzzle.com/

Pretty cool puzzle format.

I definitely get that from a reasonable perspective. But then I think about the words being used, and part of me wants terms like “upper” and “middle” to represent portions of a whole that have broadly similar sizes. But that doesn’t really reflect the realities of the meaningful differences between two different lives usually meant by the terms, so that part of me needs to take a back seat.

I’m not even sure I would say we are arguing. You provided your version I offered mine. We disagree, maybe, but I don’t think either of us is concerned enough to make a concerted effort to change the other’s opinion.

Yes, I did just argue over the semantics of argument itself. What of it? This is America the Internet, after all.

Like what the Kool-Aid man does to walls? We need a stronger fruit punch is all.

Not to mention “an object” is just a construct describing a collection of molecules that themselves don’t necessarily sit still or all stick around.

Dark energy would like a word

Capitalism

It was named after the sarcastic comment its early users would say to the people offended, “Try cords”.

jeffrey epstein list(1)(1) final(1).txt

I’d go with 20% as upper class. I think of “wealthy” as having money that lets you come and go as you please, just buy a fancy car if you want without really having to think about the finances of it.

There is a D&D-type game that measures wealth as a rating of 0 to 5, and you can make essentially unlimited purchases of items costing up to 1 below your wealth rating essentially at-will. So someone can buy a sandwich whenever, someone else could take a decent vacation/cruise whenever, another could buy a decent car without worry, one could buy a nice house like it’s nothing, and finally someone who could buy a mansion or private jet without real concern. Those in the couple-hundred-million to billions range.

I’d draw the Wealthy line somewhere in the mid-4 range on that scale. You could also consider it as “the point where safe/moderate investments could continue supplying a family plenty of comfort without working for two+ generations”.

Hrm, 77 million people voted for him…

Next: replacing the customers with kiosks

I was curious how many U.S. households earn at least $170k, and this website responded to asking about 170k by saying that the 80th percentile is $165,068.

So what you’re saying is, we need four giants and the Song of Healing.

I have the same problem losing both the temporary hypnagogic visualization and lucid dreams, rare as the latter even are for me: it’s so easy to do something silly, like pay too much attention to it or get excited about it, and BAM, it’s been destroyed.

I did have one occasion where the hypnagogic thing had mild success when I tried to imagine something non-stationary, in this case sort of watching landscape go by as if I were in a car watching it through gaps between concrete pillars in a bridge railing.

Good to know, re: hypnagogia. I’ve occasionally tried experimenting with it when I think to, while floating near sleep. I’ve weirdly found that moving my eyes certain ways, or focusing my eyes to certain distances, while I’m near sleep (eyes closed) can make it feel very suddenly like I can see something. My intent was to find what seemed to work in that state and see if I could use such techniques while more awake, but if you’re right, then that presumably won’t be as successful as I’d hoped.

I wrote this up for another comment, so I’ll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:

In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.

As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:

Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.

Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).

One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.

Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.

If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.