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
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.
I think things like Nebula for video, Spotify for audio, and Kobo or Amazon ebook subscriptions do this. Users pay the central management a subscription to access the library, and then creators are paid from that pool of money based on views. In some of these systems, there aren’t any ads.
I subscribe to a few news sources, but I occasionally read an article from many others. I might pay for a similarly structured news library, that handled tracking my reading and distributed payment proportionately to every source I interacted with. I’m not sure such a thing exists, but hope someone can create it and make it work.
I don’t believe this alone would solve our societal misinformation problem. Engagement-driving dark patterns work on deep levels of our brain hard wiring, and just having a healthier alternative available won’t stop people addicted to current unhealthy “news” sources. That’s a much harder problem and I have no idea where to even start.
It’s like leaking below on to the 1st floor… like if you take too long in the shower or the water splashes in a certain way, it starts leaking… no clue how that works…
The silicone caulk that seals the gap between the top of the tub and the wall may have cracked. It’s a tedious task to scrape out old caulk (fresh doesn’t stick to dried silicone, so for repair all the old has to be removed), but ultimately not a difficult one. Applying new silicone is basically squeezing a tube around the tub edge, but requires some attention to detail - can’t leave any gaps - and for inexperienced people is pretty messy, getting silicone all over fingers smoothing and pushing into gaps while it’s still wet, and it never comes out of clothes so wear stuff you don’t care about when sealing.
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.
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.
Knitted socks were a huge deal when they became a thing in the 1500s - enabled by smooth uniformly sized thin metal knitting needles, which were just then possible with metal technology. We take for granted now that socks are stretchy, but for most of human history socks were stiff like any other fabric without any elastic threads as part of the fabric blend. Or sometimes cloth wraps were used instead of a shaped garment - the Russian military didn’t replace portyanki with socks until 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jan/16/russian-soldiers-replacing-foot-wraps-socks
The somewhat similar process of nalbinding was a thing as far back as ancient Egypt, and became common for socks and mittens in Medieval Scandinavia, but isn’t as flexible a technique as knitting, and doesn’t seem to have ever been used for gloves.
That knitting (and thus knitted socks) was invented in the 200s (when the dodecahedra were made) - and was used for gloves, somehow, and not socks - and yet didn’t make societal waves until the 1500s is a wild idea.
No, but it takes years of full time labor in a time where most human labor had to be spent on subsistence. That a community at that low tech level would feed and house someone doing something decorative for that many years is really cool. And I guess to some not believable.
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.
I appreciate the inclusion of both Earth-local and deep interstellar relativistic effects.
Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley.
The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.
If the network you are in is small enough that you interact with your POs outside the ticket system, you might be able to train them to be less bad. Pick one thing on the ticket and try to work into a conversation how they could have helped you understand the problem faster. Bonus if you can go over the same thing with more than one of them, and maybe they’ll interact with each other and reinforce the learning.
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.