46,494 karma · joined November 27, 2017
Pro tip: Buy your grapes, take them home, rinse them and promptly remove them from the vine. They will last up to a week in the fridge if the plant they grew on isn't desperately trying to stay alive longer with zero hope of survival by feeding on the grapes.
That's sort of how I felt about my student loan. Doctors who didn't take me seriously as a mostly bedridden homemaker went full nuclear and put me on like 8 or 9 prescription drugs when I told one "I took out a student loan for this summer program. I cannot afford to drop out."
Dragonflies used to have like two foot or four foot wings spans. Now their relatively small and presumably play a very different role in the ecosystem.
Mother Nature isn't some Christian God that loves you and looks out for you. The fact that nature isn't looking out for our welfare is likely why things like Christianity are popular: Because actual reality scares the hell out of people and they need some kind of emotional opiate so they can go "La la la not listening!" and get through the damn day.
"Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins."
First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners."
This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.
R/programming is currently 6.5m, which doesn't matter because it doesn't invalidate my statement about the last time I checked.
If you want to claim r/programming is actually larger now, you need a current citation for HN traffic which you may not be able to find.
And keep in mind it's going to be tough to compare because Reddit members isn't actually a comparable figure to MAU, as noted elsewhere.
I do my best to account for that.
I remain mystified by people who compare HN size as a community to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter (aka X) which are platforms, not communities.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
I don't think most people mean someone is only temporarily homeless when they call them transients.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
Globally, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s.
Maybe we should restore them.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
Any criticism or critique of this paradigm gets hated on without anyone really listening or wondering what might motivate someone to be not crazy about our "we are borg" trends in medical care.
Mae West was once profiled by some show that went and showed the interiors of homes of celebrities. There was a large mirror or mirrored ceiling or something in her bedroom and the interviewer asked about it, why it was there. And she said "So I can see how I'm doing."
The episode never aired. That was very TMI for the era.
Me: "I think you cannot get corporations to cough up without some ridiculous extreme event like a behemoth dying. And I'm not holding my breath that would really do it."
You: "Your extreme ridiculous scenario is extremely ridiculous and here's why..."
Rinse and repeat.
Though I will note I'm agreeing that it's highly unlikely you can put a gun to the heads of corporations and get them to cough up, so I'm not sure what the point is here.
I'm a writer and a blogger. Newspapers are dying. If you put ads on your site, people use ad blockers. People find ways around pay walls. Etc.
Sometimes you can't somehow magically control the fact that people won't pay you.
Some people know how to add value and don't know how to turn that into an income and if they desperately need income and everybody wants their work but nobody pays them, it's extremely infuriating and crazy making.
And I'm not holding my breath that even that would sink in. People are amazingly talented at hearing only what they want to hear to justify doing it like they've always done it.
As someone who did a lot of volunteer work, these issues resonate with me -- painfully so.
That's probably my primary motive for reading such articles when I'm not really a programmer.
Star Trek proposed a magical technical Tricorder as an ultra compact futuristic little black bag. You could whip it out and aim it at someone and have scads of useful data instantly.
Reality delivered us new tech like MRIs that require their own room at a hospital. Instead of the doctor going to your home and seeing you in the context in which you live, thereby providing substantial information without having to ask, the patient now goes to the clinic.
The result: The patient has ceased to be a whole person and product of their environment in the eyes of the physician. They are merely a specimen in a petri dish.
At one time, most humans lived in small communities where everyone knew each other and the doctor was one of the smartest and most educated people there. He was in the wisdom business.
Now doctors are expected to still deliver the results of being in the wisdom business while largely being reduced to technicians who lack the wealth of contextual information that once informed their practice of medicine.
This is compounded by larger communities and mobile cultures where we no longer know everyone for years and years.
How we fix this, I don't know.
But I am reminded that House was tentatively called "Everyone Lies" in preproduction. Figuring out the lies being told in every episode was a critical part of solving the medical mystery featured.
Modern physicians no longer know x patient is an alcoholic and hiding it and y patient is a philanderer whose sickly wife stopped sleeping with him years ago and it's both rude and ineffectual to ask about such things. You will likely be lied to.
But details like that are critical to sorting out what's really wrong medically and thus how to treat it effectively. And such issues absolutely fall in the purview of medical humanities, an aspect of the profession that desperately needs rethinking to resolve what ails modern medicine and thus improve health for modern people everywhere.
And also false.
In households with a nuclear family or heterosexual couple, women still tend to do the lion's share of "the women's work."
But people are generally marrying later, having fewer kids, more couples are having no kids, the number of households with four or more related members has plummeted, the number of households with one to three members has skyrocketed and far fewer people have someone in their life whose primary role is doing the women's work and looking out for their welfare.
People are time stressed, fatter and less healthy, etc. We point to a lot of different causes for those very well established facts and I'm saying that one common denominator that gets largely overlooked is the decline of the number of full-time homemakers.
I've thought a lot about this problem space and the connections I have listed are clear in my mind. If it's not clear to you and you are interested in the idea, you are welcome to do your own reading and thinking and draw your own conclusions.
Given that I met exactly one woman with children who didn't feel affronted by how I was living, I imagine my opinions and such fall far outside the Overton window -- which seems to be the story of my life.
Improved health for people not living that way.
More freedom to live as you choose. Heteronormative culture has long pressured young people to get married and have kids and told them from birth they are straight without giving them time to figure out for themselves what their sexual orientation is.
Freedom to leave a marriage that isn't working because you no longer are a prisoner of the fact that your wife knows all your health issues and the dietary restrictions they dictate and cooks better than you, so she is essentially irreplaceable because that catalog of data about you isn't readily replaced by merely marrying a good cook -- assuming you can even arrange to remarry immediately and aren't forced to feed yourself (inadequately) for months or years while looking for a wife
Fewer mental health issues from society no longer dictating to everyone "You will be straight, don't confuse us with the facts. You will fall in love with The One meant for you, never mind the overwhelming evidence this is the exception not the rule. You will fit your entire life around tasks society decided are yours at birth due to the bits between your legs."
Less homophobia, less transphobia, less misogyny, more economic stability due to more personal flexibility.