bonchicbongenre

The origin seems pretty obvious to me — Abe is part of the old guard, a plutocrat and moral conservative, like his propagandist supporters in the US media. Doesn't take any squinting to see their interests align

For example: am Canadian, had to get stitches for a nerve-damaged lacerated finger. Doctor tried to prescribe me Oxy — which was absolutely ridiculous for such a small injury, so I refused it. I'm pretty certain that I'd be an opioid addict had I accepted that prescription, knowing myself.

Canadian healthcare is great, and dissimilar to American, in that it's treated as a public good.

Canadian healthcare is not great, and similar to American, in that a lot of prescription decisions are made from a similar cultural perspective as in the US, ie drugs are handed out like candy.

It's definitely not all about compensation, and it's not just an industrial move away from the US. I personally chose to do my CS PhD studies in Canada rather than at (better funded, higher-status) American options, after leaving a US undergrad. Those other options would've been strongly preferable had it not been for my experience with US culture during undergrad; as it was, US culture made clear to me that staying there was out of the question.

More than a dozen of my friends who graduated at the same time did similarly, both those who went on to grad school and those who went into industry. This wasn't because there weren't options for us in the US — we all had choices. The honest truth is that, among those bright people I knew in undergrad, the large majority (Americans and international alike) were wholly disgusted by the US in recent years, and being unable to effect any change, they left the country.

I completely agree with you; thank you for saying what should be the obvious (but isn't, sadly).

Thank you for this phrasing; it puts to words exactly how I feel about the tact used in this article.

Just wanted to chime in saying I'd be very interested in purchasing one/supporting a kickstarter for a lichess-connected board — even if a bit hacky, it would still be wonderful

Am I the only one who strongly prefers the original image over any of the edits? Except the B+W, they all look way too saturated to me, and the cloud/snow colours look especially unnatural to my eye

They really don't choose to "live a different lifestyle". It is simply the case that water, one of the basic necessities for life, is not readily available to many low-income Americans. Water access is routinely turned off or simply not available [0, 1, 2, 3] for those who can't pay or who are unlucky enough to live in certain areas. It is another example of the rampant wealth inequality [4] and degradation of social support [5] that been worsening in the US for decades [6, 7, 8]

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52384622

[2] https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/

[3] https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/17/21223565/coronaviru...

[4] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-soc-0...

[5] https://people.umass.edu/crotty/Austerity_War.pdf

[6] https://www.nber.org/chapters/c7443.pdf

[7] http://www.macrohistory.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HSCF_...

[8] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/708815

Somewhat related — does anyone know an easier way to cancel one's NYT subscription than going through the rigmarole of waiting for/talking with multiple "customer service" reps?

After NYT's all-too-credulous parroting of Barr's mischaracherization of the Mueller report I tried to cancel mine, but spent over an hour on the phone with no progress, and gave it up. I should have persisted — I don't want to give them my money any more, and this is all the more reason to cancel. At the same time, I don't have the time or patience to subject myself to phoning them again in the near future. Surely there must be an easier way? Certainly there should be.

Thanks for the info. That link is broken for me though — is it up for anyone else?

As other commenters have pointed out, a quality life is dependent on a liveable environment. Moreover, the article isn't making value judgments -- it is just discussing outcomes. This really seems like you're projecting your own political stance, and aren't engaging at all with what is written in the article.

Also, if someone were to distrust science because of a factual article -- well, I don't think science could really do much for them, and at this point in history they're probably best ignored.

As with the other commenter, I also don't feel that only tech companies should be held to this standard. Everyone should; this includes tech companies.

This is a really insightful and heartfelt comment; thank you very much for sharing it. It really resonated with me, and has highlighted problems I really should think about for myself. Thank you

This, sadly, conforms very well with my experience of lower-income/higher-minority schools. I was a volunteer teacher (for a program teaching young ones to code with Scratch, once weekly) at a number of West Philly grade 1-12 schools for a few years, and the environment in those schools was obviously to the detriment of the students. Wonderful kids, but it's no wonder that so many won't make it to a better life when they're taught nothing of value, but are taught that they're to be feared, derided, and not cared for from a young age. I kid you not, the average SAT math score from one school I taught at was in the 300s (and of course, less than 10% of those graduating took the SAT/ACT) — you can score a 300 on the SAT math without answering a single question correctly. The students were taught nothing at all. There was constant cacophony of teachers yelling all the time, I saw multiple police in the halls every day, had to be scanned myself going in. The whole thing was ridiculous, and it's only clear purpose was to imprison those wonderful children in the poverty and destitution they were born into

Oh yeah, absolutely. The whole world order is broken, and I'm not at all happy with Canada's milquetoast responses to myriad issues (Omar Khadr, yes, but also not more strongly responding to the Uighur's treatment, or dealing with our own racism, or our own policing issues, etc etc etc). Re public discourse specifically it's a matter of degree though, and my real experience is that I've been able to have more reasonable conversations with those I disagree with here (and in Europe) than would've been conceivable there, even though all mentioned societies harbour evils. I certainly don't mean to discount the numerous problems that Canada and other countries have, and I have no pleasure in bashing America (rather, I'm deeply, deeply sad to feel this way about a country that I was taught as a child represented ideals of justice and opportunity). I more meant that I'm not at all hopeful for nonviolent progress in America, given the impossibility of discourse and cultural disdain for self-reflection or external perspective, whereas I still hold hope for other societies that (maybe too optimistically) are broken but not irreparably

Sorry if that's too depressed, but it's my genuine impression :( for context, I left the States to do my grad studies elsewhere, having been seriously depressed by my inability to effect any meaningful change (volunteering to teach low-income children only does so much good in a system that keeps them low income; peaceful protest is ignored; organizing philanthropy has benefits but ignores root issues; I ran into institutional barriers at every step). I'm in Canada now, and while I'm still fighting against the same injustices and remain supremely disappointed in the national and world state of affairs, I feel much less hopeless here, and that I have been able to do more (although not nearly enough) good without being stymied in a system that quashes discourse by default

That was not the original commenter's point at all. Doing things in sequence is fine. Doing things so slowly as to be useless is not.

The answer is that, by and large, it doesn't occur to them. I'm a Canadian who spent my college years in America, and was honestly completely aghast at the whole society and most especially how it is reflected in their media and public "discourse" (culture≠media, yes, but it's disingenuous to say that the constant diet of vitriol, propaganda, and pure unreason would have no effect on the national character). It genuinely doesn't occur to them (generally): the country is myopic, and hypocrisy means nothing when you're ignorant of any inconsistency.

(Queue the whataboutism, or deflection, or whichever fallacy of the day)

Seconding Smaug123's question. I read the article through and can't understand what is meant to be insightful about it. Enlighten us?

Ignoring the article's other issues, reading "Math is, of course, a product of geometry and physics" was completely unbearable. Reading that actually physically hurt me, and must have every philosopher of mathematics from Russell on down rolling in their graves. Yikes yikes yikes

This really resonated with me. I am very sad to say that I agree with you. I'm a PhD student elsewhere now, but did my undergrad at UPenn in the States and was absolutely disgusted by the framing of science/learning/academia in the country in general (as well as the country's general level of media discourse). Of course, school itself was wonderful, and I'm blessed to have had such humbling peers there; that stood as such stark dichotomy with the country as a whole. The social moment very much felt like I imagine being a Soviet biologist watching Lysenko come to power would. I worked so hard for social good in the US, but it all felt futile. I chose a respectable opportunity at a program in my home country (Canada) over higher-ranked options in the US because of it. I know a number of friends who similarly chose foreign programs over previously more desirable American ones.

The author's perspective is warranted, as it pertains to the issue of spreading misinformation. For example, older demographics have been shown to be more likely to share disinformation on Facebook. See, eg, [0]

[0] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

A non-functioning scraper at that. It wasn't able to define the word "apple" for me.

What's up with the BBC even writing that there is "no credible link" between the two? Why qualify with "credible", when it's more correct to say "the two are unrelated", ie indicating that there is no link whatsoever.

Then again, maybe it's a lost cause, and no amount of clear editing would get the point across to the unthinking idiots who harm us all.