hotpotamus

My entire experience as an American has taught me that rules are for someone else to follow. For instance, I get made fun of for following the speed limits. Jobs have taken labor laws as minor hindrances to be worked around at best or ignored outright - these people seem to be finding work after all, aren’t they?

I’m not super comfortable with it either, but it seems to be a country where opportunity is placed above the law.

I've heard the talking point regarding innovation for awhile now. To me it sounds a bit like an alcoholic with a failing liver hoping that medicine will come up with some miracle cure so they can keep drinking as much as they want.

I had the same thought - really cool that they calibrated it against modern measurements and were then able to find known historic anomalies in the data. On the other hand, it would be nice to get one or two stories where things are going better than expected, wouldn't it? Of course, then the deniers will just use them as evidence that everything is going to be OK, so we don't need to do anything.

I've never seen the social contract, let alone signed it. I suppose I used to sort of believe that it existed, but that belief, like so many others I once held, has not survived the past decade or so. Certainly I believe in consequences, but they seem little better than random, though they quite rarely touch the wealthy/connected.

If US pharma executive pay and marketing budgets were similar to their European counterparts and only R&D budgets were out-sized, then this might ring true, but to my ears it just sounds like yet more apologia for plutocracy; a tune that I've become more and more accustomed to the longer I've lived in the US.

Indeed, the governor of Texas blamed the green new deal/windmills for the power failures. I was quite surprised to learn that my state, governed by Republicans for most of my life, had implemented any sort of green new deal.

Nevertheless I learned, much to my surprise, that most of the state's natural gas system (which supplies the majority of energy for electrical generation and lots of home heating) had frozen. I (naively) thought that would be impossible since methane doesn't even turn into a liquid at any temperature ever to occur on Earth, but it turns out there's plenty of water mixed in hydrocarbon deposits.

I suspect the governor knew (or could easily have been told) all this, he just thinks he leads a state full of fools, and after a lifetime of observation, I'm inclined to concur.

Perhaps as a society, we could all contribute to a pool of money and when people get sick they could draw from that money as needed in order to pay for their healthcare. It could probably achieve much efficiency through economies of scale and consolidated administration.

Which jobs have you worked?

Thank you - as someone with a bit of disability and facing future hip surgery, that's a helpful perspective. You're not far off on my age; I actually aged off my parents insurance right around the time the ACA passed and so I was able to get back on because of that law which extended parental coverage until 26. I'm currently quite happy with most aspects of my employment which includes my health insurance, but that situation never seems to last.

How many delivery drivers are you friends with? Ever bought them a tank of gas or a tire because they can't afford it? I have; they might prefer it to the soul-suck of retail, but that doesn't make it anything like a good job.

And those are economically good jobs?

> There are no “bad” jobs

What about fentanyl dealer? Hitman? Psychologist for a social media or tobacco company? Telemarketer?

From memory, photons are massless, otherwise they could not move at light speed. They do have momentum though.

It's probably worth remembering this sort of thing when people say there is no difference between the parties. Every Republican voted against it, they almost repealed it, and apparently are gearing up for another crack at repeal https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-o...

At your age, you'll likely be on Medicare soon either way, but some of us are still decades away.

Perhaps more people are living in piles of misery - it seems that anxiety and depression levels only increase. I see many people try to write this off as some artifact of data/survey or other, and yet, fertility also seems to trend inexorably down. Maybe your beautiful experience of life is more the exception than the rule; certainly that is not how I would describe my life experience.

While I suspect that your budget could probably be tightened up a bit, I have to say that I'm ever glad I never wanted to have children - just keeping my own ass housed, fed, and health-insured (important for someone with a bit of disability) takes about everything I got.

There was another story here this morning that got some discussion about how people are omitting children as a way of finding work-life balance; who can blame them?

edit: other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39259093

Wouldn't it be good that they're not planning on having children to whom they'd model that behavior to?

This is why it's strange to me that having children is portrayed as some selfless act; many say they are creating them for their personal fulfillment.

Nevertheless, I'm sure if I had PG's wealth, I could have kids and have a lot better work life balance with them. But I do not.

The Nexus comparison is interesting since Picard chose to leave it because he knew it wasn't real and convinced Kirk of the same.

I think I never wanted children because I realized quite young that there’s no god and when I died I would be done and gone and nothing I had done would ever have mattered. It did not make for a happy childhood and is not something I’d wish upon a child. And I don’t even have any happy stories about religion to pass onto a child like my parents tried to impart on me.

If I were to create people in order to try and find some meaning but leaving them as adrift in this meaninglessness as I, would that really be a selfless act? It seems quite the opposite to me.

Perhaps this is indeed “cope” in one way or another, but it’s what I’ve felt from a very young age, though I think it took me a lot of reflection to realize it and be able to put it into words.

As a resident of Texas, I’ve noticed that those also cost more in spite of the minimum wage remaining unchanged since the mid 00’s.

You're not exactly over the target, but it is a bit novel to see an acknowledgement of white privilege mixed in with what is more traditionally a conservative concern about property.

As a mentally ill homeless person myself, I don’t doubt that there is some connection. What I would question is if the current increase in homelessness corresponds to an increase in mental illness.

Given that homelessness is at record highs, I wouldn't worry too much about those with more homes than they can use; I think they'll be OK.

Is there anyone currently residing in it? If the reason that it is disused is merely some bureaucratic snafu, then that actually feels even more dystopian than some run-of-the-mill abandonment.

I've never found the job to be all that important; especially once I saw how quickly my work was discarded for some new, fashionably different way of doing things. Honestly it's scary to imagine that some child's health insurance would depend on me staying on the treadmill of ever-changing tech nonsense. I doubt my ability to keep pace for a couple decades.

I'm guessing the people who own those things acquired them with money. I'm sure it's possible to figure out a value.

You've hit the nail on the head. I also have a childhood hip condition (Perthes disease) that has had me looking at hip replacements since my 20's and having the same fears as your friend.

Looking at pro athletes is sort of instructive; essentially none of them have returned to play after a hip replacement (Bo Jackson kind of, but in limited capacity). A few, most famously Andy Murray, have returned after hip resurfacing, so it's probably about as close to a natural hip as possible, but likely still a bit inferior.

I'll just say that my on-the-ground experience (limited such as it is to the markets/trades that my friends and family work in) doesn't express that construction is all of a sudden a good job. I could perhaps be convinced that it has upgraded from a shit job to merely a crap one, perhaps because so many people have escaped it that they have to at least pay slightly better these days. If I had any kids, I'd still be inclined give them the same advice that my blue-collar parents gave me - go to school to do just about anything else.

That paper that you're citing is from 2022; hardly what I'd call historic. And is 2 in real dollars? Because it doesn't look like it and I wonder if it would be just a flat line if it was.

I'll say that I've worked along side my cousin's baby-daddy (I think in future I'll just call him "T" as that's less unwieldy), and he's a fine painter, but ultimately there just isn't that much to the job. I remember the first time I used a paint sprayer on a new construction job myself; basically you just need to learn where the trigger is and in a minute you can paint a wall that would take an hour with a roller.