houseinthesky
Paid speeches, book deals, consulting payments and jobs for family members or after holding office are the more significant items.
We have a funny system where paying a politician $250k for a one hour speech to your company, trade group, union, political action committee or whatever is treated as a perfectly reasonable speaker fee, and totally different than just handing the politician the money in a briefcase. Or hiring a politician's 22 year old new-grad child at an executive salary.
My personal belief is that we're on a downward trend for political violence. Mainstream media acceptance of violence was very high when it was associated with BLM protests, with violence being "the voice of the unheard" and a valid reaction to an unjust judicial system. Perhaps peaking with California's Maxine Waters pretty clearly calling for violence if the Chauvin trial didn't have her desired outcome.
Fortunately, after Jan 6th, the mainstream media did a hard 180 on their treatment of political violence. Obviously there will always be fringe elements agitating and exaggerating, but it looks like the mainstream narratives now are more about fixing the system and/or working within it, rather than burning the system down or using violence to intimidate the people in the system to appease protestors.
2) Raising cattle has drastically higher emissions of greenhouse gasses than other animals. For instance, looking at the chart here: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane beef is 5x to 10x the emissions of chicken.
By my estimate, the online commentary about beef's contributions to the climate crisis feels pretty correctly proportional to their level of emissions.
We have laws and regulations around things like noise, parking, etc which apply equally to homeowners, long term renters, short term renters, guests, contractors, etc.
Does having a neighbor who rents their place on Airbnb really change your life compared to a neighbor who has frequent social gatherings or has a large family or works night shift? It seems like the correct solution here is to improve action by parking enforcement, towing companies, building security, HOA or police depending on the exact issue and severity, rather than take away the right of people to rent out their place.
The Soviet Union and other government-controlled-economy nations were sending essentially professional athletes to the Olympics while free-economy nations were sending amateurs. Removing the restriction allowed all nations to send their best athletes.
Ironically of course, there are some aristocratic motivations for why "amateur" was desirable in the first place that don't really align to modern sensibilities, but that's separate.
For some people, it's easier to take 1 day off work to go do a series of interviews than to fit 5 different one-hour interviews at different times over the course of a week.
If the company scheduled the zoom calls all in one block, then ya, zoom would still be more convenient than in person.
You must have one heck of a filter bubble of what you're seeing in the world if you're not seeing conservatives complain about child beauty pageants. There was a massive conservative backlash to a Netflix documentary about child beauty pageants and the conservative internet meme landscape is full of content against "groomers" and anything that involves sexuality and children.
If someone can say "Hey Siri, generate a picture of Alice and Bob fornicating" and get a realistic image, then neither Alice nor Bob ever need to worry about their private photos being hacked, leaked, shared, etc. They can just laugh and say the image is a fake.
It's a huge win for everyone in the long term, the perfect counter to privacy invasion - simply bury any real private information in a mountain of fakes. Oh you think got my medical record, my tax return, my nudes, my private texts, my performance reviews? Which ones? Here's 500 equally plausible alternative versions of all of those.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
I used to have a larger list, but it seems like every non-profit that reaches a certain size or age starts to drift, until one day you see their current projects or grants and realize a lot of your dollars are going to tangential projects.
The reason is because it's been denied a chance by government regulation, due to a mixture of fossil fuel lobbyists and people's irrational fears stoked by propaganda designed to make it seem scary.
The answer to "can it ever make an impact" is yes, it can, using existing technology, right now. We just have to get rid of the regulations designed to destroy it.
Here is a direct, reliable source of truth straight from the official government website in case my comment gets buried by downvotes: https://www.healthcare.gov/unemployed/cobra-coverage/
You can stay on the existing healthcare plan you had from your former employer, switch to your spouse's plan, or start a new individual plan. By default, Cobra is automatic and retroactive, so you could continue your hospital stay unchanged and then at the end of the following month pay the monthly premium to stay on the plan.
Technically of course anyone could "go into debt" for any purchase, so in a certain pedantic sense, sure you could go into debt for healthcare costs, but it's not like anyone is suddenly becoming uninsured. You have weeks to figure out which health insurance plan going forward is the best option for you. The severance payments should be enough to cover the gap until new employment begins, even for the most irresponsible people who had no savings despite drawing a Google salary.
Losing a job sucks, but as someone who's lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, I appreciate a lot of elements of American work setup that few dare acknowledge. Way more opportunities to get jobs in "risky" startups or "risky" expansions of bigger companies than the European companies that are forced to be more conservative about expansion due to their inability to contract. And less likely that your workday involves dealing with deadweight coworkers who are drawing your same salary despite not contributing, or dealing with overly risk-averse management who have an excessive bias towards the status quo.
Keep in mind the laid off folks are getting severance, will get unemployment payments after that runs out if they haven't started a new job, can choose between staying on their existing healthcare plan or switching to a new individual plan or switching to a partner's plan (and can do so retroactively- you're covered for free automatically for the month following layoff, if you need healthcare during that time you can choose to stay on the former employer plan even weeks afterwards). It's not like anyone is going to be homeless and hungry because they got laid off, they have months or years of support to find a new opportunity.
Most people's jobs aren't necessary for a functioning society. If you look at say, agriculture, transportation, energy, sanitation, infrastructure, etc, what percent of the total population is employed in those fields, 5-10% maybe?
Society will be fine for a long time with drastically dwindling population, we'll just see a contraction of the "bullshit jobs" which have become the mainstay of post-industrial societies, with a higher percent of people employed in fields which are actually producing something of value for society.
This is a lot of people's experience... and a whole lot of us really, really, really regret it years later. Alcohol is an incredibly dangerous and insidious tool to use for social anxiety. It works great at first, so you ignore the negative effects. But over time, it makes everything worse.
Drinking alcohol decreases anxiety initially, but over time causes the body to raise base anxiety levels. It also lowers testosterone, messes with the lining of the gut and gut microbiome (which can also increase anxiety and negatively impact mood due to the strong gut-brain axis of emotional regulation and signaling) and negatively impacts numerous other parts of the body.
My education around "alcohol is bad" was either warnings about bad behavior while inebriated or vague intangible health risks in the distant future, both of which were easy to ignore. Sharing because I wish someone had informed me that the drink in my 20s to temporarily blunt social anxiety would make my life so much worse by my 30s.
One thing I've learned over the years is that lots of people use words wrong, especially regarding financial topics.
After seeing the ridiculousness that gets posted any time topics like short selling, stock buy-backs, tax writeoffs or fed policy get discussed, I'd be cautious about assigning a narrow meaning to what random internet posters mean when they say "bailout".
In the greatest generation, silent generation, boomers and gen X, the rates of obesity in teens and 20-somethings was a rounding error. People varied in attractiveness, but almost everyone would have been "dateable". Today, 20-30% of the young population is obese, which is going to severely restrict the dating prospects as well as throw off some of the youthful lust-based pairings that grow into relationships.
The overall statistics and various causes are interesting, but I wish the article had further broken down how each factor impacted things, eg, how much does income, education, bmi, male-friends, etc skew the statistics on romantic relationships.
America has a crisis of obesity. Our life expectancy is actually going down despite amazing medical advancements. Our food system today incentivizes horrible health outcomes, we should be looking at cheap soda, fries and burgers as akin to cheap cigarettes, cheap vodka and cheap opium have done to populations in the past.
The scientist is specifically trying to avoid the trap of a "gotcha question" while answering accurately that the most likely outcome of lots of people consuming a carcinogen is that someone got cancer from it.
The US could feed people cheaply without using harmful additives. Instead of a $1 McBurger made possible through subsidies, environmental destruction and cancer-causing chemicals we could be eating $1 McChanaMasala or McDal or McLocalSeasonalVegetables.
Billions of people around the world eat rice, beans, legumes, root vegetables with small amounts of locally sourced cheese, meats, fruit, vegetables etc. America's poor eat high fructose corn syrup, highly processed wheat, vegetable oil and the meat from cows and chickens raised on unnatural diets in horribly unhealthy conditions. That's not an improvement.