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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

The harsh truth is that your largest effects will always be local. What you do for your immediate family and friends will always dwarf anything you can do for society.

To expect your day to day to serve a larger social purpose is to subordinate either your lifestyle or your cognitive integrity to something you’ll never be able to completely convince yourself isn’t a lie you’re telling yourself.

If you can put your kids through college well-adjusted, you’re already doing better than most on that front. Beyond that, maybe maintain a few open source libraries for awhile?

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The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential. Mostly because it doesn't really matter, for most of the people the feedback is very much lost in the noise. (There's institutional inertia, states are big, changes are slow, Congress doesn't change that fast anyway, the Senate is entrenched; and similar situations exist in other countries too.)

And thus it's hard to reconcile how trivial it is that people don't see what's going on, yet they are the problem themselves.

This drives people mad on both/all levels.

"The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential."

I think this is only true in very specific circumstances. Ideological divide can also mean disowning your child for being gay, which is why among homeless youth there's a disproportionate amount of LGBTQ children and why the concept of "found families" is very relevant to the LGBTQ community. Certain families also will disown or withdraw from any member who doesn't follow religious teachings.

Often times ideological differences is quite meaningful when it results in the abuse/neglect of vulnerable family members.

Excuse my wording, I probably should have said that exactly this "putting ideology before family and friends" leads to this divide and vicious cycle.

In that I 100% agree.

It’s illegal to disown children in the U.S.

Could you expand on this a bit? I’m not sure exactly what you are saying here, and on its face it doesn’t seem correct.

The emotional withdraw is the real problem, not the legal hurdle of being guilty of not giving food and shelter.

But it is different. You ( like the russians and the english ) live in a gerontocracy which I would guess is a effect of your personal power base focus with individuals driving political campaings for them self, instead of being pawns that are whipped if they step out of the party line on issues ( an effect based off having multiple small parties ).

Swedens demographic among the MPs. 18-29 år 10,6 % 30-49 år 49,0 % 50-64 år 37,8 % 65+ år 2,6 %

USA Congress Representatives Newly Elected Representatives Senators Newly Elected Senators 115th 57.8 years 50.8 years 61.8 years 54.8 years

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