The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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If an American is afraid that the USA (or really anywhere) is becoming a low-trust society, and want to immigrate somewhere that will maintain/be a high trust society in the future (for future kids etc), where should they go?
Assume they have a bachelors degree, enough money to live in most places for a few years without income, and willing to learn languages/assimilate into local culture. Ideally there is a path to naturalization and that it doesn't take >10 years (i.e. rules out UAE), and ideally path to citizenship is reliable (probably rules out Singapore as hearing it's hard to acquire citizenship there now).
Where would you suggest?
How do you describe banning and confiscating guns from civilians over a weekend or over a couple week period embarking on a zero-covid strategy which required strict lockdowns for the majority of multiple years applying to most of the population as "without major swings in policy"? Or sending government thugs to harass and threaten anyone speaking against the policy? Or sending government thugs to harass and threaten any person who didn't want the covid injection? Or any number of other totalitarian/authoritarian measures NZ took over hysteria of the last few years?
If what New Zealand did during the covid hysteria can be accurately described as not a quick, major swing in policy, I honestly shudder to think of what more awaits the people there. Even if one were to accept a government which accepts next to zero deviation from strict, overnight concocted mandates could still be described as "high trust," high-trust societies and distrust in government are not mutually exclusive. And in those cases, a fair amount more distrust in government dictate and authoritarianism would go a long way.
In the late 00s and early 10s, I was considering taking NZ up on their "tech" grant/visa program by moving my small company (since sold) there and thank God I decided against it. In any case, the dogooder authoritarian hysteria which has overtaken New Zealand which could be seen in firearm bans and confiscation, tobacco use bans and comically high taxation, and the covid lockdowns/covid injection lunacy should be a big red flag to any person thinking about moving there. The same is true if to a slightly lesser extent for the behavior of Canadians and Canadian government as well.
The last few years have really been an eye-opening experience for any person looking for a new country to live.
What does that have to do with the claim about not having major policy changes? NZ has had multiple, quick major policy changes in the last few years which had a huge effect on people there.
And while many countries had big policy responses, very few were in the same ballpark of authoritarian as measures NZ took.
Countries were not flying blind. There was plenty of evidence lockdowns and other authoritarian measures were extremely costly and not effective for respiratory viruses. They ignored relevant evidence and guidelines crafted over generations in order to embark on extremely costly, authoritarian experiments which had never shown to be effective at the alleged goal let alone good policy given their extreme costs. Policymakers claimed they were based on comically bad models early in 2020. Previous tools (early treatment, etc.) which were far cheaper were not only discouraged but banned in places like New Zealand and Canada.
No amount of attempting to rewrite history will change reality. Countries around the world discarded experience earned in death for a thousand years to embark on experimental and horrendously authoritarian NPIs with little or no support to justify them beyond "scary new virus! panic!" And the critics of this leap into the unknown have proved to be correct.
Did you bother to read this before linking it? First off, "Respondents were self-selecting participants, recruited via Facebook and Instagram. A total of n=629 sample was achieved of adults in New Zealand." Secondly, an example which characterizes the sorts of questions asked is "How strongly do you support or oppose the decision to move NZ to alert level four?" Do you know what "alert level 4" means without looking it up? How many respondents do you think had a clue? This methodology is garbage and bad evidence of public opinion.
Frankly, it's very tiring how so many people use polling spams they likely didn't even read let alone analyze which they found with a basic google search to prove some comment about public opinion
Polling is notoriously nonsense and it's revealed to be nonsense every time they're expected to predict objective outcomes. If you cannot predict "X will win political race," why in the world would anyone expect you to "measure" vague opinions which are so easily manipulated with different word choices or adding in the cost of policies being asked about, i.e., the difference between "would you support welfare program y?" vs "would you support welfare program y if it mean raising taxes by 10%?" With the thing you linked being a good example of "polling" used to manipulate public opinion, not measure it.
a max security prison is a "relatively" libertarian situation compared to super max or solitary confinement, but then again so what and what an odd way to characterize this
government wasn't always "the largest and most important institution they interact with"
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