China’s ten-year presidential terms worked well for their people for a long time. That Xi has gone the dictator for life route is IMO a significant threat to their future direction.
Many countries also seem to be on a fine interim path to building up a combination capitalist/socialist economy and bringing up their median and minimum living standards. China is big and influential, but doesn’t have a lock on that.
the unsupported, internal format - that allows for pretty much everything - is in some way exploitable
It prevents AI summaries of the video from including all the video content. Obvious solution: remove the information missing from the summary from the video itself. Now they match! /s
Yup, small percent of people. But those 4% (or whatever it is) are the only possible audience capable of breaking free of living from paycheck to paycheck by following “tips”. And 4% of 300 million people is a reasonably large number of people.
It didn’t last. Surely there’s something in the middle that can both lift up the potential floor for standard of living through social safety net and also be sustained long term.
I don’t think the target audience here is people struggling with groceries.
There are a surprising number of households where both people pull in six figures in low or moderate cost of living areas, and they live paycheck to paycheck because they way overspend. It’s not groceries or the heating bill, it’s the extravagant vacations, the horseback riding lessons, the huge wardrobes for growing kids that need everything replaced in six months. These are all nice things, but if you can’t afford them, it’s OK to do without.
In one of the John Green history videos, he covers Viking raids on Great Britain. Often, the Vikings left after raiding an area, so the history was written by the surviving “losers”. John’s comment was that in cases like that where history is written by the losers, they are bitter about it.
I think the bitter comment lines up with your examples like the “lost cause” narrative, too.
There is a grain of truth in that rural areas get worse government service. Power outages last for longer, often they don’t even have sewer hookups and have to maintain septic systems, roads are maintained at a lower level, etc. They really do get less benefit (in outcome terms) than city folk.
I think @Greddan@feddit.org hit on the information environment as the reason they can’t see that that lower service level comes at a way, way higher monetary cost. Our information aggregators are in the business of making money from engagement, and telling people things they want to hear that sound true is the most effective engagement tool. I don’t see the problem getting any better unless we figure out a better information model.
I wear a phone holder on my belt. There are arm bands, fanny packs, flat stretchy belt-adjacent things. Products exist. We just haven’t achieved critical mass of women not interested in carrying purses who are interested in spending the extra shopping effort to find pants or cardigans or button up shirts with near-waist-level pockets (I am discounting boob pockets here).
Do you have other instances of calls or texts not going through? I ask because I had that problem, and it turned out the TMobile towers often take longer to find my phone number (the number itself - this issue persisted through multiple physical phones) than the default 15 second timeout to voicemail. I found instructions on the TMobile forums of how to increase the timeout period, bumped it up to 25 seconds, and haven’t had an issue since.
Systems keep chugging along with minimal maintenance if conditions stay the same, say like an increasing population.
Systems need a lot of well-thought-out adjustments to keep working if conditions change, say population changes from increasing to decreasing. It’s not that the change is inherently bad, but it means many pieces of society need to make changes to adapt. Writing to help explore the impacts and inspire adaptation is part of the process.
Old people unable to find caregivers and dying alone, often many years younger than they would with basic care. In isolation, I do find countrywide systemic elder neglect to be a pretty big negative. I am old enough my future need for care is starting to feel pretty real, and I really appreciate having enough nieces and nephews to have decent odds of support.
In Japan’s specific case, there are large numbers of people in nearby countries that would jump at the chance to immigrate and work in elder care, but most Japanese are so racist they would rather die alone and early. So, I guess leave them to it.
That label is used for convex mirrors that show a wider area at the tradeoff of shrinking things. You get some depth perception in a mirror (unlike a camera, as otacon pointed out), but the shrinkage in a convex mirror throws that off. The object itself (not the reflection) is physically closer to you than what your depth perception on the reflection would indicate.
I think some level of reporting is helpful for research and public understanding. I would be on board for fining the doctor (not jail!) for performing abortion for a minor reason (something like cleft palate - not minor untreated but 100% treatable) very late in pregnancy. Maybe a path to delicensing for multiple repeat offenses.
But yeah, given the senseless deaths happening in states with current jail time laws for even very early abortions, a change to no regulation would save lives.
There’s a reasonable societal conversation to be had around severity of fetal defects and very young pregnant people. I think most people would not want a late-term fetus with something like cleft palate or club foot to be aborted for only that reason. A twelve year old who doesn’t realize she’s pregnant until eight months - should abortion be available in that case even if she and fetus are healthy?
But the conservative denial of edge cases existing is so deep it’s mind boggling. When the pregnant ten year old case was made public, the conservative reaction was to deny it happened, and then prosecute the doctor for publicizing. Someone testifying to Congress stated straight faced that a ten year old getting a pregnancy termination wasn’t an abortion. I don’t know how to get out of the fantasy land that is literally killing women today.
The ProPublica series on women with wanted pregnancies who were denied care and died was hard to read. The one that got me the most was where multiple doctors shown the medical files said that if the woman had gotten care the first time she went to the emergency room, probably both the woman and her fetus would have been saved. Doctors in states where abortion is punishable by jail time make the calculation they can save more people out of jail, and refusing care to pregnant women - knowing some of them will die - is the price they have to pay to stay out of jail.
European countries have a variety of electoral systems, and to my knowledge right wing parties are gaining significant vote share in all of them. Is there a country whose electoral system you see as best helping them deal with populist reactionary figures?
I am currently a proponent of ranked choice voting - Australia is the country I know of with the most widespread use example. They aren’t magically utopian, but it seems to be helping there. Always on the lookout to learn new things, though, so interested in pointers.
Does MagLev count?
I agree what you brought up of bigger rewarding feelings from new things compared to maintaining existing things is a significant component. Politicians are more reliably elected by running on a new highway, new strip mall, new water treatment plant, etc, even when that money would provide more service to more people if spent keeping up existing infrastructure instead.
The type of hubris that creates these situations seems far from obvious to the average person. Voters, over and over, want an outsider because the experienced and knowledgeable people are viewed as idiots. The wave of states enacting term limits in the 90s died down as data came out showing they were unhelpful at best and in some circumstances harmful to the legislative process, but legislative term limits still poll as hugely popular with American voters.
At my work, we have a seemingly endless parade of managers and consultants who have to repeatedly learn why our long-running challenges are, well, challenging. And they all try to apply the same 6sigma, lean, etc. tools. And the corporate managers keep buying new people selling them the same solutions that have repeatedly been shown to not fit our specific problems.
It’s something inherent to human psychology. My hope for mitigating it with elections is ranked choice voting. Not the part at the polling station specifically, but the way it changes the incentives for campaign strategies I believe promotes more thoughtful and less fear- and hate- driven messaging. If we aren’t constantly being bombarded with ads about how awful our politicians are, I think we would be less eager to jump on the anti-intellectual bandwagons.
In any system, some people with very expensive treatment options, especially if the treatment would extend life only a few months and/or with poor quality of life, are going to be denied that treatment. As a society, it doesn’t make sense to spend twelve million dollars to keep one bedridden patient still bedridden for another six months, when that money could instead be used to improve quality of life for many people for many years.
I believe the meme is about denying highly cost effective care like insulin or basic doctor visits, which is cruel without any redeeming aspects. Just wanting the conversation to include that, while the US has drawn the line in a ridiculous place, there does need to be a line drawn sonewhere.