kieselguhr_kid

Before I had kids, whenever I was tired at work, someone would say "you think that's bad? Wait til you have kids." I would roll my eyes and assume it was either hyperbole or that it was a mildly more intense version of what I felt. Of course, you know that I was wrong, and after 96 hours with a newborn I knew I was wrong too.

I compare the exhaustion you feel from parenting tothe effects of psychedelic drugs. It's pervasive, life altering, and impossible to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it.

I know this is some kind of sarcasm but I'm not sure what kind of sarcasm it is.

Look, the obvious point here is that you can't take someone's pretext for war at face value like the fuckhead who thinks it's okay to starve Yemeni children because of Iran did. There's always some kernel of truth to hang them on, but it doesn't justify criminal military aggression, either in Ukraine or Yemen.

They haven't taken a single major city in Ukraine except Kherson and Mariupol, two major Ukrainian cities.

JFC.

The displacement of Ukrainian children is awful, but also occurred in all these other conflicts. The flow of refugees is also awful, as is the imposition of the conqueror's ideology, but that happened in Iraq too.

All the other effects are speculative and caused as much by US/EU sanctions (which have historically never accomplished their goals and have not had their intended effect even in this conflict) as they are by the invasion.

I'm not saying the war in Ukraine isn't a horrendous war crime. It absolutely is. But it just hasn't reached the scale of the other conflicts I mentioned, and I suspect that the fact that white Europeans are suffering instead of Arabs or central Asians is the root of this overemphasis.

People are downvoting this but it's like...objectively true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_el...

The taking of Mariupol, all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk have been successes. They've been hard fought, grinding successes, but successes nonetheless.

The study of Iraqi deaths is ongoing and I suspect that the confirmed civilian casualties from direct violence is an undercount, but regardless we should also be counting excess deaths caused by the deterioration of the country's infrastructure. That's a direct result of the war. It does mean we have no good way of counting the dead in Ukraine yet and won't for years.

That said, the Ukrainian state has survived and is continuing to provide civilian services. Ukraine still produces plenty of electricity (it is even exporting it), and still is able to provide food, healthcare, water, and other essentials. There are tight supplies for some things, like gasoline and some medicines, which is awful.

Contrast that to the devastation after the American invasion of Iraq, the starvation in Yemen, or the chaos in Afghanistan. Iraq still has spotty electricity and deals with violent incursions, and the war has spilled into Syria. Yemeni deaths have been horrific, but equally bad has been the widespread hunger and extreme poverty the war has thrust millions into. I just don't see that kind of suffering in Ukraine. At least not yet. If the war continues at this level of intensity and Ukraine collapses entirely, which I find unlikely (indeed, the level of intensity and casualties is already down significantly from its peak in March) I'll reassess.

I have two major critiques here:

1. There's no reason to think the criminal invasion of Ukraine will result in victory for Ukraine. The Russians will fall short of their maximal goals, but they're having significant battlefield successes now. Sometimes, criminal invasions are completely successful. In this case, I suspect that a long, low-intensity conflict with two entrenched sides is the most likely outcome.

2. This is not the greatest atrocity of our generation. There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. All three have led to the total destruction and failure of the invaded state. Ukraine has lost territory and there has been substantial suffering, but it has not been nearly on the same scale and the social disruption has not, at least yet, been anywhere near as significant.

I bring this up because moral consistency is important. Just as we should endorse the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves from criminal aggression, we must also endorse the same rights for other peoples. And we should be making the same calls, or not, for the aggressor states in these crimes to have their cultural influences purged from law-abiding societies.

I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that density itself is the cause of higher rates of mental illness. Density is more likely to correlate with exposure to car exhaust, for instance, and programs to care for mentally ill people tend to be located in denser areas. The crushing economic pressures of modern life regardless of location, combined with continued urbanization, seem to me more likely to be the cause than dense urban spaces.

I'm waiting eagerly for the day when people in the west can grow up enough to learn from Soviet city and housing policies. Too many people just turn their minds off when they hear that godless commies did it.

I live in one of the "complete neighborhoods" in Portland and it's really nice. I can walk to the grocery store to buy fresh food for each day, and I'm less than fifteen minutes by foot from three public parks (and a tiny one that I don't really count). This is far from representative of the city itself, but I would never want to give this lifestyle up.

It's misallocated through an enormous network of private contractors, ineffectual nonprofits and government bureaucracies. The unaffordable expenditure (public housing or at least publicly funded housing) is completely out of that budget, while the rest of the programs are so watered down and so much have been leeched out of them that they're completely ineffectual. Rebuilding capacity for direct state action, without farming out to all of these parasitic middlemen is a key component, as is reducing or eliminating wasteful and top-heavy bureaucracies.

No city can adequately fund these programs, and San Francisco certainly doesn't build housing for the homeless, have an enlightened drugs policy or have adequate mental health care. San Francisco and other coastal cities mainly differentiate their policies by treating the homeless populations there with malignant neglect instead of outright hostility, which leads to the phenomenon you see where 10-12 cities bear the brunt of a national homelessness crisis. Because San Francisco is one of them, you also see a bunch of entitled tech bros whining about how they have to see a homeless person sometimes on HN.

I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty good public transit though.

It actually isn't. You know trans people know this better than anyone else, right?

What we really need is a holistic approach to a lot of these issues. Ending the violent prohibition of drugs, building and providing housing for the homeless, better and more accessible mental health programs, denser cities, better transit, etc. We don't have a politics in the US that fully articulates the dynamic interconnectivity of all the issues and aggressively pushes for a set of solutions.

I want to make clear that I agree completely, but I've been injured in two car crashes in my life. Once, I was a pedestrian and crossing the street in a crosswalk with a signal when an old lady drove into me and then drove off. We had made eye contact while I crossed, but for whatever reason she decided to start driving nonetheless. The other time, I was stopped at a red light and someone arguing with their partner rear ended me. Incidentally, I caused minor injuries to others in a similar crash when I was a teenager. Clearly, there was no element of control to the injured parties in any of those three stories.

It'd be really nice if we could figure out how to convey to people that they don't have any significant control over their safety when driving, so that we can finally start making rational attempts to drive down the number of motorist and pedestrian deaths.

I think this is a weird take. You could analyze every human interest piece this way. Is that what the NYT does with Page Six? I read that and then don't think about the fossil fuel or tech companies' influence on their stories?

Just read a story about chili peppers and don't get all Joseph McCarthy about it.

Seriously. It'd be one thing if this was about tensions in the South China Sea but this is a story about peppers for fucks sake.

I'd also be interested as to what parameters could possibly be tweaked such that capitalism would find it unprofitable to commodify food or at the very least more profitable to distribute it to those who can't afford it. Massive state and international intervention might be able to do it but this isn't the kind of thing we could fix with minor tax incentives and penalties.

Doesn't the fact that it's reported in state-owned media suggest, although not prove, that it's not state driven? Why would they invite extra scrutiny to their disinformation campaign by publishing an article about it?

OK but what's the upshot wrt this story? Now that someone knows about its connection to the CCP, does it change how we ought to think about it in any way?

This false history is a literary achievement. Writing such a plausible pseudo-account and convincing so many for so long is impressive. I guess they should take it all down but I'm kind of sad that there aren't any comparable projects (note: I'm aware that there are wikis devoted to creating fictional worlds, but these worlds are rarely historically grounded or plausible)

Welcome to every city in America. If one armed dude scares you, I got bad news about your whole country.

There's a few nice ones and a few shitty ones. It's like any other city in the US, in that the working class neighborhoods have been gentrified or neglected to various extents, but nice working class neighborhoods have not yet entirely vanished.

If Portland makes you afraid for your life maybe don't go outside ever again. It's only scary if you're afraid of other people.

It's really nice here, actually. But don't come if you don't want to.

This particular act of vandalism is getting attention because Laurelhurst is a very wealthy neighborhood. All of these affected houses are worth at least $1M. The worst impacts of this crisis have been in homeless people themselves and in poor neighborhoods that the city chronically underserves, but outside of internet comments the press has shown little interest in examining that.

The scare quotes around "houseless residents" are stupid. They live in Portland and aren't housed. It's the best descriptor.

That's not how anything works. Your sensibilities being offended is not the same as materially disrupting the operations of the business.

> If you grab a megaphone and start disrupting a whole factory floor by using it to try to get people to organize for better rights while you're supposed to be working, that seems like it ought to be a fireable offense, where organizing at someone's house outside of working hours clearly should not.

Can you organize on company time? It depends - can you discuss literally anything other than work while at work? Then yes. If not, then you'd have to organize off the clock but not necessarily off-site. There are exceptions for reasonability sake (a nurse can't interrupt an organ transplant to organize, for instance) but sending company-wide emails strikes me as sufficiently non-disruptive as to be protected.