zeropnc

I mean... the whole point of a democracy is to protect against powerful people having "authoritarian tendencies", whatever that even really means

It is in a world where monopolies are a thing.

Yeah this stuff is getting pretty absurd. Someday in the future we’ll have grants for ugly people or short people because every little inequality must be erased in the human collective.

Countering “misinformation” by correct information is a far better approach than censorship.

The logical fallacy of “censorship is okay when I know it’s wrong” sets such a dangerous precedent, yet it’s downright celebrated by America’s left.

It’s quite frightening.

In a very roundabout way, RAM being a valuable item isn’t too far off from bitcoin

Typical Silicon Valley Catholic Church-style moral scorched Earth approach.

"Schizophrenia or AI" would make a good game

Uh, maybe you’re just complacent.... not to get into a war of anecdotes, but I live out of Air Bnbs and have lived in 100+ around the world. Very rarely is the place not as it seems, if ever.

I sometimes wonder if the future of humanity sees the decline of the state, and people just live on corporate land (Sidewalk Labs as an early prototype of this idea) protected by corporate militaries (Blackwater)

Currently sitting at a border stop in Botswana with about 25 trucks standing around idling for hours. I am very inclined to agree with everything you've said.

Ecosia isn't "promoting consumerism". It's simply accepting the reality of it and helping mitigate/counterbalance the damage. There's a key difference there.

You can ra-ra all you want about it, but consumerism isn't going anywhere - so either you work around it, or you accomplish nothing.

This is a very shortsighted and unrealistic way of thinking. Consumerism is core to how our society functions and isn't going away - why should social good and environmentalism fly in contrast to it?

This is the same backwards line of thinking that insists non-profit compensation be lower, leading to our best and brightest wasting away spying on people at Facebook instead of optimizing drug delivery out of Dakar.

Until we get over the fact that there isn't anything inherently wrong with capitalism/consumerism, we won't be able to start making it work for our people and planet. Luckily initiatives like the B-corp are beginning to change this mentality.

I never said you can't have problems. I'm saying the fact that you think your problems are even comparable to most of the rest of the world comes from a lack of perspective & education.

You're more likely to get hit by an asteroid than killed by a cop in the US - the fact that you think it's a real issue worth talking about, in a thread about 3rd world countries, shows your lack of perspective. Go tell someone in Sierra Leone about police brutality stats and poverty levels and see how you get on.

I highly recommend you get out of your internet-San Francisco bubble and go and travel off the beaten path to get a better understanding of what the rest of the world still lives like.

Kids in Tokyo are also sexually repressed and have societal mental health issues that continue to baffle academics. Kids in Tokyo also have absurd work hours, brutal education standards and are exposed to large amounts of pollutants.

But hey, at least they can ride the subway alone.

Every country has its' problems, and any country can seem great until you actually live there.

There is an actual commenter here suggesting Flint is an example of "3rd world country".

You'd think in the age of YouTube people would have more perspective on the rest of the world. Seriously, one stroll down the giant open air landfills (which double as housing for hundreds of people) of Dhaka should be enough to be eternally thankful for what one has.

People in the rest of the world die because there literally isn't good care available, regardless of whether they can afford it. As a kid, I once got a big cut and my doctor's only solution was to dump an old vial of iodine on it because they didn't have bandaids.

All you (and a few other comments here) are doing is proving my point. Complain all you want, but don't for a second think your problems are even remotely close to what the majority of the rest of the world endures.

I suspect the West as a whole hasn't had real problems in a very long time, so a generation is growing up magnifying their own to victimize themselves. Americans are particularly bad about this.

Have you ever been to a 3rd world nation? You have no conception of what it's like if you really think living in Flint is somehow an analogue.

The sheer lack of perspective of Americans is baffling. You have no conception of just how difficult life can be and frankly, is, for the vast majority of people.

What's with Americans constantly attempting to paint their situation as more dire than it actually is? Is it just a blatant lack of perspective on the rest of the world? Reminds me of an article I read attempting to claim that child mortality in Memphis was worse than in Bangladesh.

No, the United States isn't like the "developing world" if you're poor (and since when is Italy, the comparison country, considered "developing world"?)

Comparisons like these (which are rather frequent, I've found) are obnoxiously disrespectful to the millions of people actually living in developing world countries. The same millions who would give up their first kid (and often, in many ways, do) to be allowed into the US.

We can discuss improving the US while also still acknowledging that, on a global scale, their problems are fundamentally "first world problems". You don't need to spend hours crunching numbers finding some favourable metric to the South Sudan to make your damn point.