dev
7mo ago
You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.
Was it actually stultifying by the majority of women who actually lived through it? Or was it considered stultifying at the time by a small minority of the women who get the most press because careerist women are in a better situation to push agendas in the mass media, and then every women growing up since then has been subject to a torrent of propaganda about how unhappy 1950s housewives were and so they believe that it was stultifying.
dev
7mo ago
The reason to do a near Earth space colony or to go to Mars is ultimately to build giant solar orbiting colonies and to embark on interstellar conquest. Why? Because God wills it. Or, to put it in humanistic terms, it is the greatest possible thing the human species can possibly do, and we should strive for that.
Right, now America spends trillions of dollars a year on pure vanities. A K through college education system that is a total wreck because it is serving a hundred different mutual-contradictory goals. Trillions on healthcare to make decrepit elderly stretch out their lives another few years. Trillions on sports, games, fictional entertainment, etc.
So all your complaints that this would cost money...so what? What else are you going to spend it on?
Even if technology development by industry leaders such as SpaceX lowers launch costs by 1,000x, which I find to be an absurd proposition, that's still $1 million/day with no return on investment.
Is it absurd that it will happen within 5 years? 20 years? 100 years? Even if it took 100 years, it would still be worth the effort.
What about Lebensraum? If that's really the issue, why don't we see the development of seasteas or self-sufficient cities in otherwise inhospitable regions of earth (the top of Everest for example).
Because they are not stepping stones to settling the stars. Also, while settling the Himalayans is less challenging than space colonies, space colonies have certain areas, particularly, access to solar energy, which they have potential that is better than anything on Earth.
This one is a little bit more speculative. The West, and much of the West of the world is entering a demographic spiral, with birth rates falling ever lower below replacement. This relieves a lot of the "population pressure" to colonize space,
We don't need space exploration to handle an exploding population; we need space exploration to give a reason for elites to promote fertility. Right now, our elites, our society, don't really have any positive vision of the future and don't really believe in anything. If you are just trying to maximize pleasure, low fertility makes sense. A lot of elites have an environmentalism/sustainability fetish, and because of this are actively anti-natalist. An elite that actually believed in interstellar conquest, would want its people to be fruitful and multiply, would want its people to flourish, in order to maximize expansion.
dev
9mo ago
She certainly is earlier in the video, but we lose track of her face as her girlfriend yells at her to drive, I assume that might have been some adrenaline rush at that point that would have contributed to her bad/reckless driving. I would think there is a case for charging the girlfriend.
dev
9mo ago
Given that the other videos showed the cars wheel were fully turned, I don't think she was deliberately trying to run him down. I think she was trying to recklessly and illegally trying to escape police detainment, and between the panic and bad driving and recklessness, may have clipped the officer with her car. This is downstream of her probably being misinformed that ICE had no ability to arrest her. As I understand it, ICE cannot serve arrest warrants for citizens, but if citizens are illegally obstructing ICE operations they ICE does have the power to arrest. So she and her GF thought they could smirk and harass and insult and obstruct and then drive off with no consequences.
I think the shooting is legally justified, but I wouldn't want that officer hired to be my local beat cop. He was more careless with his positioning and more trigger happy than he had to be.
dev
10mo ago
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning.
This is true and false. It is true that pontificating over beers is not real work, and has real risk of being wankery.
However, to have a culture that is doing real artistic or intellectual work, it sure helps to have a lower cost of living so the writers or artists can spend many, many hours on the work in their homes and garages or workshops or converted lofts without having to work 50+ hours a week at a stressful job. And it helps to be around others, not because the work is done at the bar, but because you get credit for the work at the bars, you get feedback and ideas, you get inspiration and motivation.
Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Having been to many events with intellectual friends I've met through writing online, it has been a great experience. It's not a time for inventing theories or fully working out theories, but it is great for cross-fertilization, getting inspiration, learning things people weren't able to put in their writing, brainstorming, etc. etc. However, it would be a big leap from meeting up once or twice a year, to actually living with them. Not sure how that would work out.
dev
11mo ago
Also "It's relatively uncommon to sue over medical debt for a lot of reasons - including that the patient often doesn't have the money, also because it's easy to make a bogus counterclaim for medical malpractice , and nobody wants to deal with that over an unpaid $1300 invoice."
Example of someone getting wages garnished: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/ue3xgd/getting_wage_garnishment_for_medical_bills_was/
dev
11mo ago
Looks like it might vary a lot by state: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/14towop/what_happens_if_you_can_never_pay_back_your/jr5zc7b/
dev
11mo ago
Do you sign the documents at the hospital they give you where you agree to be responsible for any bills you accrue? If not, how do you talk them out of making you sign?
dev
11mo ago
My understanding from a lot of searching old reddit threads on the topic a few years ago is that it varies greatly. Sometimes they send it to collections and you can negotiate paying pennies on the dollar. Sometimes the hospital plays hardball and will get a order order to garnish your wages or bank account.
There is absolutely no reason to take this article seriously. It's the head of a trade group saying this, that is a political job, he is probably just repeating politically fashionable ideas.
Well it's not necessarily practical as an individual solution. But you have just identified the "two income trap" solution
I think that is part of the problem. Off-shoring, immigration, automation and AI have stratified the economy into high-paying niche jobs or fake jobs; and low paying commodity slave jobs. We don't actually need more people in the workforce, we have more workers than we know what to do with. But if you want to have a job that pays to the middle-class or upper-middle class standard you are accustomed to, its going to be a niche job, and that makes it quite precarious. And the precarious nature of the job makes it dangerous not to have both parents in the workforce. What if the bread-winners niche dries up? The family is screwed.
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