DoreenMichele

Americans strikes me as being in crisis due to various social factors making full-time wives and moms relatively rare. Our food culture, recipes, kitchens, home design etc etc are rooted in an implicit assumption that your wife or mom is doing the grocery shopping, cooking, keeping track of your health issues and dietary needs etc when this is no longer true for most people.

There seems to be an endless stream of people complaining they either don't have time to cook or they are fat and broke from consuming takeout and an endless stream of companies trying to address the issue, such as meal delivery companies.

I like Julia Child's skepticism about the effectiveness of productizing the space as the only or prime solution. It seems likely to me we need to rethink and rework our food culture so everyone can eat adequately, even if they don't have some privileged life with a high quality kitchen and full-time wife and mom taking care of all the nutritional concerns and logistics behind that, which are substantial.

It looks to me like Gaza wants water self sufficiency and self determination. I support such goals.

Why do you care what I think? I'm a dirt poor blogger and merely a woman in a man's world. All the evidence suggests that absolutely no one listens to me or respects me, so I'm baffled that some people feel so compelled to tell me what opinions I'm allowed to hold and express in public.

I'm aware of the hep A thing because it probably started in the homeless population in San Diego County, California. I happened to be homeless and running a blog called The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide, though I had been out of San Diego County for over two years.

I was contacted by some online rag and interviewed via email while on route to bring off the street. They misgendered me and made up a quote while cloth.

But it made me aware of the issue. So I then watched over coming months as reports of it spread further north to Los Angeles etc and eventually across the nation.

I blogged about it a few times but one dirt poor female blogger with no traction is not well positioned to essentially shout down a health crisis cover up by the US government.

Then Covid hit and people had bigger fish to fry.

I probably still have one blog post up somewhere about the quiet little Hepatitis A epidemic but I know I posted about it more than once and then redacted it more than once. I have a long history of doing that while trying to figure out this blogging thing. I do that less these days.

"Overton Window" plus who has credibility in the eyes of the public plus government goals of trying to avoid panicking people etc -- insert some Russian joke about The News isn't always true and The Truth isn't always news or something along those lines (a play on words, as I understand it, though I can count to ten in Russian and might know TEN more Russian words).

There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena. It's just not easy.

It's not easy with science either. Plane crashes killed people like some Cthulhu horror tearing planes out of the sky before they realized square windows create stress points when flying at jet speeds which eventually destroy the plane.

People died because of that design flaw and it wasn't immediately obvious why.

"Ninety percent of everything is crap." Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.

Try to not throw the baby out with the bath water while sorting this out for your personal edification.

And that's not even talking about all the water we've horrifically polluted.

That's like saying "The US supplies Mexico with water" because the Colorado River originates in the US and the mouth of it is on Mexican soil. Reality: America does all in its power to give as little water as possible to Mexico and the water that reaches the Gulf is a mere trickle, having been largely syphoned off by multiple US states before that point.

What I've read indicates Israel controls the water supply to Gaza and uses and abuses that fact in a hostile fashion.

At the moment, they are in horrendous crisis, the most obvious and immediate cause of that is Israel and Israel is effectively cooperating with the (according to you) Islamic agenda of painting them as the bad guy so they have a good excuse to exterminate them.

I'm an environmental studies major. I've read for years that our next wars will be fought over water. It looks to me like that's what we are seeing in Gaza.

Water is life. You can't survive without it. Politics aside, if Gaza can't get adequate water to survive, well, most organisms have a survival instinct and will fight like a cornered rat when given no viable means to survive while playing nice with their neighbors.

The pandemic impacted the entire globe and a lot of internet comments were driven by fear, not genuine curiosity or interest in problem solving.

While I understand why that is, it doesn't go good places.

I am perfectly happy to accept your assertion that context suggests this is basically a politically motivated piece trying to dismiss claims that it originated in a lab.

I wrote a piece elsewhere that boils down to "Christmas travel brought us the global pandemic." Regardless of where the issue originated, it spread globally and didn't remain a local crisis thanks to global travel and how that gets handled.

I don't have answers but I don't like the way the whole thing was handled and it's nigh impossible to have meaningful discussion of that with anyone anywhere on the Internet.

And given the lack of quality discussion, it's impossible to develop a good framework for how to even see the problem space.

My marriage was a case of opposites attract and we were once shopping for a bookcase and I hated the bookcase he wanted and he hated the bookcase I wanted. So I finally had the sense to ask why he liked it.

I wanted something pretty. He wanted something sturdy that wouldn't collapse under the weight of the books.

Armed with this information, it was possible to find a bookcase we both liked.

Decades later, most internet discussion seems to still be stuck in that space before I asked that question where we both thought the other person was clearly an idiot. Only I don't know how to get past it online.

I actually think the larger problem is how it spread via travelers and that some of the actions taken nominally for purposes of controlling the spread actually made things worse. People were herded together in airports to be checked or some nonsense.

We may never know the origin story and I still don't know what to suggest in practical terms for preventing something similar from happening again, but I do think it needs to be addressed someplace other than "wear face masks and use hand sanitizer" while otherwise doing the same stuff that helped spread the virus around the globe.

Most people on the Internet are looking to win an argument, not engage in discussion. I appreciate your comment as it adds information rather than picking a fight, but I'm somewhat inclined to step away from this nonsense at this point.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's an inconclusive piece that seems to be trying to reassure the public that "Everything's fine!" even though no one knows if it's fine or not.

Saying conflict between Israel and Lebanon is wholly unrelated to conflict between Israel and Gaza is like saying stuff happening in the US state of Georgia has nothing to do with its neighbor Alabama.

I'm failing to readily find an online blurb that supports my understanding. But that detail fails to convince me my understanding is wholly in error.

And I wish Israel would get its boot off of Gaza's water supply.

It rains something like 2 inches a year there. People collecting rain water someplace with so little rain are likely quite desperate.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...

I wish there wasn't so much conflict but sometimes the people resorting to violence have been essentially left with no other meaningful solution. People with power can politely ruin your life and murder you and yours and then claim you are the bad guy when you fight back less politely.

1. College educated people smoke less on average. This is true regardless of income even though typically less income correlates to more smoking.

2. In poor neighborhoods, when the number of residents without college drops below a certain threshold (like 4 percent maybe), crime skyrockets. The neighborhood stops being merely poor and becomes a dangerous slum.

A liberal arts education is widely scoffed at. There's some joke about what kind of careers different majors lead to and the punchline is that liberal arts major say "Would you like fries with that?" which is shorthand in this day and age for "You will probably be drowning in college debt and a wage slave working to pay off your student loans while living in Mom's basement if you are lucky enough to have supportive parents."

But they are called liberal arts because they are supposed to be liberating. They are supposed to free and empower you to live well and know how to cope effectively with crap life throws at you.

The Clemente Course is intended to be a free liberal arts college education for people living with terrible circumstances like generational poverty or in prison and has been taught in prison. It was founded on the theory that the right kind of education is the antidote to these kinds of intractable problems that routinely fail to be resolved by throwing money at them.

https://www.clementecourse.org/

I homeschooled my twice exceptional sons and a primary goal of mine was making sure my extremely bright but socially challenged children didn't wind up in jail. I provided them a humanities education defined as "learning how to live effectively with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of their own humanity and that of other people."

I'm a huge fan of liberal arts education and my AA is in Humanities. Yes, I'm very well aware it doesn't give you a lot of marketable skills to make bank promptly upon graduation.

I also have a Certificate in GIS from probably the most prestigious GIS program in the world and it promised everyone good salaries in short order which never materialized for me.

I don't regret it and it wasn't a waste of time or money but the historic tendency for college to correlate to good salaries is probably rooted in the fact that until they decided to milk poor people for student loans interest and turn a generation of college graduates into over educated wage slaves, a college degree was a proxy for "Someone with adequate resources and mojo and drive who knows what they want to do."

It wasn't the degree per se that made them successful. They had what it took to get the degree and that correlated strongly to having what it took to establish a serious career that paid well.

A sheepskin is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for some careers. It's not a guarantee you will succeed though and someone somewhere along the way imagined it was and many people are suffering horribly because of it.

Zoonotic spillovers in wildlife markets have long been known to present risks for viral emergence.

This has significant implications for urban planning and community development as a means to protect human health, a function the field once served which was a primary purpose at one time but which gets relatively short shrift these days.

Haussman's redesign of Paris was prompted by high death rates due to disease for poor Parisians living in overcrowded slums. His redesign is still world influencing and Paris remains famous as a very livable city.

Urban planners used to routinely consider things like walkability of the city not as a matter of convenience for residents but as a means to ensure people got adequate exercise in day-to-day life without really trying or having to join a gym and make time in their day for it. This kind of thinking has largely been abandoned in urban planning circles.

Time to bring it back with an eye towards "How do we stop disease transmission across large expanses of space?"

Disease wiped out a lot of Natives when Europeans began coming to The New World (aka The Americas). In some cases, entire tribes went extinct. Disease likely killed far more Natives than conflict with European settlers.

Hundreds of years later and planet Earth still can't get the memo about travel and disease transmission as evidenced by the pandemic.

Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."

The Internet fundamentally changed a lot of things and we still haven't sorted out all the bugs it caused in a system that was never perfect but worked better when your audience was more limited, among other things.

Just stating clearly you see this as terrorism while indicating your sources say Israel is behind it but you can't prove it is a potential legal minefield for the publication, so the writer likely was explicitly told they absolutely could not make both assertions in the same piece.

I took too long to write this and I can no longer post it as a reply to the now flagged dead comment which inspired it.

Edit: it's also a dupe and this headline looks more hn neutral:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41580205

I used to say that some people don't know what they think until it comes out their mouths. Writing -- good writing -- is often an exercise in the writer thinking deeply about something in a meatier way than merely thinking about it without trying to articulate it.

Sometimes in some sense for the first time.

Not entirely accurate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427090

Brutalist buildings are hard to maintain and update. They tend to not be accessible.

If you believe they "should" be preserved, perhaps write up guidelines on how to update them and publish it.

They are raw concrete. Surely someone could potentially paint them to improve their appearance.

My impression is that it sounds like a super polite version of the Keanu Reeves movie Chain Reaction or the Val Kilmer flick The Saint in which people in possession of world changing knowledge must flee for their lives.

Being "disruptive" has a reputation for making scads of money these days. Perhaps people should stop and think about how it can also make you enemies, make you a target, etc.

Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224853

It is hoped the drug — which is not a cure but will make the condition much less painful for sufferers — could also be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and chemotherapy-induced pain in the future.

As a writer myself who has watched journalism dying, crap articles being written by underpaid freelancers, the enshitification of the internet while everyone objects to any means used to monetize content creation, etc ad nauseum, I don't really feel like trying to figure out just how much this "really does" for patients.

The medical industry in the US tends to be about profit and I think people should, in fact, profit for their work but in medicine sometimes profit motive tosses the baby out with the bathwater. And I'm super burned out on trying to have any kind of meaningful discussion of that issue online.

I don't know how to solve that because there's no such thing as a free lunch and the people developing solutions deserve to be paid.

But Africa is extremely poor and the rest of the world suffers the consequences when we can't be arsed to make their problems solvable at a price point they can afford.