This leads me to wonder, do you think free trade and ad or government subsidized everything from TVs & smartphones to Internet and cellular service to content serve to keep the lot of the working classes satisfied instead of the dignities sought by the European union members & syndicalists of yesteryear?
Maybe there’s some sensible common ground between Germany and the US system where everyone is required to get a general education even though a lot of people have no interest in it which also causes a lot of problems and makes it worse for everyone.
Anecdotal of course but from my own experience and from the few teachers I know now, there are so many issues with students assaulting teachers, assaulting each other, kids who can barely read, write or do math, etc.
I strongly preferred my liberal arts classes at my university but most people in them were just checking the box because they viewed the expensive ($20k+/yr in state) school as a job training program even though it isn’t that.
I could be wrong but I think the other effects of smoking are worse for quality of life as you age and are way more common than cancer.
I knew a lot of lifelong smokers. I believe only one got lung cancer, didn’t die of it, but all that lived long enough had oxygen tanks, at least periodically, later in their lives.
Voting gives you the right to complain because you tried to accomplish something. Giving up without trying is generally viewed as a bad thing.
But talking about "beltway uniparty" is indicative of a level of lacking intellectual curiosity that's genuinely sad. You can do better than that.
Maybe if this was twitter or a dinner party and you're just going for cheap laughs, sure, whatever, but I dunno, I guess this place isn't much different? Maybe it could be though?
People sadly value feelings of (totally unearned) intellectual superiority and sense of identity over actual ability to make changes to the world. Thus the stupid subset of mostly young people who think not voting is making some sort of statement other than that they are fools.
This is an interesting thought, assuming a call center employee is paid $35k, total cost of employment being $70k, you could hire 14.25 employees for every million dollars.
If every Concast exec got paid a paltry $5M (lowest paid exec salary), they’d be able to hire around 975 more CS reps.
They have 13.6 million subscribers, so they’d increase the number of support reps by 0.000071691176471 per customer.
My thought was maybe they could reduce their marketing budget but it seems their business has shrunken by ~50% in the past 10 years.
Most people who just knee-jerk that the problem is excessive executive pay have not worked the math. This math is typical of all the businesses I've ever worked the math for. It may sound good to say "take all the executive pay" and "turn it into customer support"/"pay it to all the employees"/"drop the price of the service"/etc., but if you actually work the math typically it turns out you're trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. Such high pay may be problems for other reasons but it is not the root problem for very many large companies, if it is for any.
> Near as I can tell, the US is getting hit with massive manipulative propaganda BS, and a lot of people are burnt out and even having PTSD type reactions (See Complex PTSD) to other people because of it.
Near as I can tell, it is being very studiously avoided being talked about in the public media. Partially because it’s a bit complex. Partially because it is being done through the media and no one wants to take ownership for that. Partially because it’s too scary for people to actually address/consider.
For example - if you’re in Ukraine, it’s hard to complain about the propaganda being abusive without looking like you’re supporting Russia, and complaining about Russian propaganda isn’t going to do anything except encourage them.
It’s straightforward to make the connection if you’re familiar with a couple things though -
And then add in [https://psychcentral.com/blog/recovering-narcissist/2017/08/...], which has been done across the board by all the political parties for a long time now (they are not the same, but they are both using similar tactics albeit in different ways), plus is commonly being done by many large corporations and advertisers.
None of those links are unique or anything, there are dozens of good sources, including NIH papers saying the same thing. They were just the first ones I found that weren’t blogspam.
Because the US has been in an ever escalating culture war for well over a decade now, and it’s solidly in ‘each side thinks it’s an existential threat’ mode and is policing it’s members like crazy. Partly because it is an existential crisis for Trump now, and he’s making it an existential crisis for everyone else in response.
For example:
- all the liberal women that were told over and over again (and gaslit like crazy) when raising concerns about birth control after the left screwed up and didn’t address the legal issues or maintain control of the Supreme Court when they could have. And liberal men who raise concerns about losing their jobs due to ‘positive discrimination’ are in the same boat. And everyone who is being hurt by inflation/having economic issues right now.
- or all the conservatives that are under a constant fire hose of ‘the libs are coming to take your guns!’ panic while the right does nothing whatsoever to actually protect gun rights, and often passes even more gun control laws than the left. Same with conservative women trying to get sane abortion rules (like rape exemptions, emergency medical exemptions, endometriosis type medical exemptions, etc.). Or anyone that doesn’t want fear fear fear pumped down their throats constantly, or be pushed into a fraudster dictatorship.
Among dozens of other issues.
And the politicians are doing this because as long as they don’t actually solve the underlying problem, but look better than the alternative choice, they are guaranteed to have a lock on their constituents and can do what they want.
And when the constituents start to waver, they just need to push more emotional buttons to keep them in line.
But eventually after pushing those buttons too hard for too long, people start to break in real ways. Which is why it is actually emotional abuse, and causes things like CPTSD. Repeated violence can cause it, but also being repeatedly betrayed and lied to (with negative consequences for the victim) by those in positions of trust/authority, with no apparent way to escape or improve the situation.
For a ‘ripped from the headlines’ example - just look at the recent Presidential debate, and the various back and forth things each side is doing to police it’s members while not addressing any of the actual real problems - for either candidate.
I don't mean to come off as ignorant (so please correct me if I am wrong) but could it be that the so-called "two-party system" in the US is to blame for some of the polarization implied in your message?
As someone living in the Netherlands and being used to dozens of political parties with various ideologies and convictions, the two-party system of the US has always surprised me as being extremely limiting (e.g. if you don't naturally identify with Democratic ideologies you vote Republican or vice versa).
Edit: None of this is to imply that Western Europe or the Netherlands doesn't have major political issues, for example I'm quite disillusioned about the uptick in popularity of populist political parties (throughout Western Europe but also specifically in the Netherlands).
It certainly doesn’t help! The underlying culture war tension (IMO) is growing out of city vs rural politics and economic issues, and the two party system naturally lends itself to splitting along those lines.
And having two parties means it’s easy to play us vs them on topics.
Almost anything can be ‘maximally polarized’ into exactly two poles with enough work though - including immigration, male/female issues, business policies, import/export policies, foreign policies (isolationist vs interventionist), etc.
Populism in general is being driven by the same factors everywhere IMO, and many of them are macroeconomic.
I’m not sure if $2,200 is a lot or a little but isn’t there some non-zero cost associated with facilitating, transporting, storing and performing the autopsies regardless of whether the examiner is paid or is a student? Eg clerical work, drivers, equipment, use of a vehicle, refrigerators, etc.
That's correct. I guess a benchmark we could use is $60, which is apparently what Planned Parenthood gets paid for the aborted fetuses that it gives away. Each fetus is reimbursable for reasonable costs incurred in the "transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue." https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/planned-parenthood-fact...
Just pointing out, now these guys will never be on 60 minutes or giving interviews to popular mechanics, Rogan or Lex Friedman. Whatever testimony is made available will be all that we have on the topic.
That’s really interesting and compelling. What’s the rest of your backend stack look like? Do you get good performance from the database drivers written in dart?
