Think about literally every object in the universe, every person, every shoe, every table, every rock, grain of sand, grain of dust, elephant, tree, blade of grass, grape, etc…

Apples and Oranges are some of the most similar of all of them.

You weren’t, relevantly implies that there is additional context that determines their relevance. Often when people say “two things aren’t comparable”, they’re trying to use that shorthand to avoid debating the context that would make them comparable or incomparable.

No, things always have inherent context by nature of being things. Context can be used to make things incomparable, but they’re always inherently comparable without explicit context needing to be provided. This is literally the entire basis of the game 20 Questions.

these thinga are too dissimilar to be compared meaningfully. Like if some article says which is the best tool? And they give you a rake, a network router, and a nailgun. Then you meed context.

I think to OPs point though, is that all of those two things can be compared. The context of the article is what makes them incomparable. But if you asked me to compare a router to a nailgun I could talk durability, power draw, intended function, materials, relative ability to make it through TSA, etc etc.

Literally no two things are fundamentally incomparable. Things are only incomparable in specific contexts.

Judging the relative merits of two things, and noting the differences between disparate things, is fundamentally the same thing.

You can define a car as a steering wheel and an engine and a gear box etc.

Or you can define a car as a generic object and one of the first fundamental properties of all generic objects is the list of all other features and properties that that object has.

So noting the differences between two things, is really just judging the relative merits of their collection of properties.

I would argue that @[email protected] is correct, and people often use “can’t be compared” incorrectly, or they intentionally use it that way to be over the top and dramatic, like saying I love you to infinity.

Man, I kind of hate this guy’s videos. He really just seems like he likes to hear himself talk more than he wants to convey meaningful information.

I think the better question is what purpose is served by trying to categorize movies into “cartoon” movies and “not cartoon movies”?

Toy Story is a CG movie and has more nuance, character development, and purpose than say, the live action film Hackers, and so does Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is a mix of live action, special effects, and traditional hand animation, so what purpose is served by chunking them up based on which one used film editing / splicing, which one used stop motion, which one was traditionally animated, which one used CG, and which one had some blend of the above?

Money was literally invented to be an abstraction of resources. When people talk about money they usually mean resources.

Assuming you’re talking about American healthcare companies, thats because you have a broken nonsensical healthcare system filled with middlemen who will suck up profits.

That has nothing to do with the concept of opportunity cost. Pick a different industry, like agriculture / food then. If you spend $20 on food every month instead of fireworks, then feeding yourself the rest of the food you need is $20 cheaper.

That is absolutely just how money works, if that same money had gone to say, healthcare companies instead of fireworks companies, we would have the same amount of paper money, and we wouldn’t have fireworks, but we’d have lower healthcare costs since we already paid some of them.

The money itself? Sure. But that’s not what people talk about when they talk about money, they are usually referring to what the money represents, i.e. resources, which were all burnt up and used to create that fire work when they could have gone to something else.

i.e. if we spent some huge proportion of our money on fireworks every year, we would still have the same amount of money on paper in the economy, but absolutely everything else would cost far more. From our actual lived perspective we would be poorer.

Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show.

Completely agree!

Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.

Not with this though. A portion of the money has changed hands, the portion that goes to paying workers and investors. Another portion of the money was used to extract, refine, and process something that just burned up and no longer exists.

While money as an abstraction is made up, what it represents, the underlying value of society’s resources, is not, and that is unfortunately finite. So it’s also important to consider opportunity cost. That money could have been spent on other things, when you spend it on something wasteful and unnecessary that means it can’t be spent on more useful or productive things.

All that being said, I still think fireworks are rad and worth it, but they are a waste.

It’s not tho.

Or is this a battle I can pick to shield my self from ms

Read the post before coming to the comments to reply.

OP is asking on here about whether or not to pick this battle and fight his company over it. Yes, you are probably technically correct that a company can’t force you to install an authenticator app on your phone. However, that is a battle that you will have to fight with them that will accomplish essentially nothing if you win.

In Canada right now there is a major auto manufacturer that is being sued by the union over this very issue. It is a years long legal case that had to be escalated through the union, it’s lawyers ,and now arbitration. Does that not sound like a battle to you?

You’re wasting your life trying to fight battles you don’t even understand.

The point I’m making is that philosophers are trying to answer questions and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be getting PhDs, since a PhD is not given for just knowing a lot about Philosophy, but for discovering something new in the field.

Much like how martial arts is no longer as useful for self defence in a world with handguns, but instead makes for very good exercise and social connections, and is just fun.

Except that a key difference is that no one gives out PhDs for martial arts. Yes you can get a black belt, signalling that you are as skilled as the top tier martial artists (I assume, I don’t do martial arts), but you cannot write a peer reviewed paper and get a PhD on karate because that would require learning something new about it and publishing it.

Philosophy in how the common person relates to it may just be as a mental kata that helps to improve their cognition and emotional regulation, but philosophy as a profession and academic discipline is still very much concerned with trying to answer questions and find ways of constraining the infinite to relevant possible answers.

Sure, but at a fundamental level philosophers are not just sitting there asking questions with no purpose. They’re still seeking new understanding and information which is a form of answering questions.

I would argue that it absolutely applies to both existentialism and epistemology. Epistemologists frequently concern themselves with questions about the limits of human knowledge and understanding without actually going there themselves.

Philosophers literally invented formal logic to help them answer questions. Yes they are trying to answer questions and constrain the possible answer space where they can’t.