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Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

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281–290 of 349 posts

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Seattle is Dying" video produced by KOMO, the local TV station. "60 Minutes" also ran a segment on the Seattle homeless a couple years ago. They went in looking for people who were down on their luck. They found drug addicts and alcoholics.

Your number of "90%" isn't even close to accurate: https://our.news/external/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Far...

Not really, he was just referring to Chronic Visible Homeless, your article doesn't break out SUD for that sub group but even at just the Chronic Homeless level (many who aren't on the street) it puts the rate at 2/3 having substance issues.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#282

I'll take this space to mention two simple life changing gratitude practices that I have habitualized: 1. Every morning, before I allow myself to look at email/news/etc, I think of three things that I am grateful for. 2. Every night at bedtime, my partner and I tell each other three things we are grateful for about each other and one thing that we are grateful for about ourselves. I find that bookending my days with…

Our family’s ancient religious practices also incorporate these rituals.

It’s great giving the children an opportunity every night to share what they are thankful for. My favorite was ‘blankets’ :)

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#283
post #176

Im thankful to have a job and a roof over my head and a little bit of savings. Not having to really worry about money still blows my mind now and then. Looking across the street every day in California and seeing the homelessness crisis in full swing is an ever present reminder of what this economy and this society can do to you if you slip up for even a second and / or have even a minor run of bad luck. Working in s…

Even things like not having to budget for groceries and the occasional going out to eat is something I often take for granted. I stay frugal, but have never really had to hem and haw about whether I should spring for the organic produce or fair trade coffee. "I can't afford this" is a lot more difficult of a circumstance to be in than "boy that was a dumb idea to purchase some pricey, fancy, but nasty cheese on a whi…

I could agree more with this, word for word. It still hits me almost every time I go to the grocery store somehow.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#284
post #41
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thankful for sucralose.

Maybe not the right thread for this, but it seems there are downsides. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363527/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014832/

Make sure to focus on the aspartame section, which doesn't show the same insulin effects as other sweeteners

It is hard to understand how aspartame influences the gut microbiota because this NNS is rapidly hydrolyzed in the small intestine. In fact, even with the ingestion of very high doses of aspartame (>200 mg/kg), no aspartame is found in the blood because of its rapid breakdown (29).

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#285
post #38
post #14

I like this more unusual list of things to be grateful for, as it complements well what one is usually reminded to be grateful for. I'd like a more fundamental point there, though: Gratefulness seems to be primarily a ternary operator: " is grateful to for ." (like "a ? b : c" in C). That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Bein…

> Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly? No. It means that the emotion of gratefulness isn't always a simple reduction to what you have there. Similarly, I think thwave who replied to you is also wrong. The emotion doesn't have to always follow such a simplified framework or be legibly caused. Of course it has to have some causal chain, but I think the legibil…

Actually, it depends on if there is free will, which by definition is supernatural, else we have as much choice to be grateful as a rock.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#286
post #176

Im thankful to have a job and a roof over my head and a little bit of savings. Not having to really worry about money still blows my mind now and then. Looking across the street every day in California and seeing the homelessness crisis in full swing is an ever present reminder of what this economy and this society can do to you if you slip up for even a second and / or have even a minor run of bad luck. Working in s…

I was lucky enough to have spent my youth in one of the five least expensive places to live in the United States, and I stayed. I can easily buy a home for $30,000 here, and I have done so a few times.

I was fortunate enough to find a company where I live that wrote their major systems in assembler in the late 1960's; they use UNIX/Linux to glue modern systems to a vertical wall of technical debt. This is an endless amount of fun.

I go only so far into these legacy systems (we even have an emulated VAX running VMS, which I keep at arm's distance). I should be thankful for having an unprivileged VMS account. I don't want to run that system.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#287
post #176

Im thankful to have a job and a roof over my head and a little bit of savings. Not having to really worry about money still blows my mind now and then. Looking across the street every day in California and seeing the homelessness crisis in full swing is an ever present reminder of what this economy and this society can do to you if you slip up for even a second and / or have even a minor run of bad luck. Working in s…

If you can and aren't already, maybe consider organising with less privileged workers for things like striking in unison. Or getting politically active to grow economy and society so it will be kinder and allow a slip up. One of the many reasons I would never move to the US is that in Europe I don't feel like a minor slip up or bad luck will send me into financial ruin. I'll need surgery on my shoulder soon and hopef…

If you have talent, show up, and a clean criminal record, you can make it in the US without a problem. There’s more money than talent, meaning if you have talent, there are people ready to give you plenty of money. It’s not hard in and of itself. It says something that many people’s problem in the US is getting in their own way. People in other places in the world have far less mobility opportunities than we have here. I’m thankful for that.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#288
> 11. That it happens to be a game-theoretic equilibrium to have a near-equal sex ratio, although honestly, I have no idea what things would be like if that wasn’t the case and maybe it would be fine.

Well, let's think about if this would be fine.

If there were a 10:1 female to male ratio, I think we'd expect that a modern, "civilized" society would be reasonably fine for everyone. There'd probably a lot more polygamy and polyamory than we have now, but the polygamy wouldn't be the "old school backwoods fundamentalist" type, because women would be in charge of the government and effectively make all the laws. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also a requirement that all healthy males donate at the sperm bank once a month from the onset of puberty to age 50 or so. This doesn't seem too onerous.

If there were a 10:1 male to female ratio ... it would be a dystopian hellscape that's makes me shudder just to think of it. Women would have basically no rights. There'd be an incredibly high level of violence. Nearly everyone except the alpha males would be miserable a lot of the time.

Anyway, that's my idea of how things might be like in an extreme scenario. If we're talking 1.1:1 or 1.2:1 either way it might not be a big deal, though I'd expect men outnumbering women to get bad at a surprisingly low ratio, well before even 2:1.

Note that this isn't because I think men are inherently bad and women inherently good. It's simply that nearly everyone has a very strong genetic drive to reproduce. In the world with more women than men, everyone who wants to have a biological child can do so quite easily. In the opposite world, most men cannot do so, which means reproduction is a scarce resource. And we know what humans do in response to a very strong need for a scarce resource.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#289
post #104

I've done a lot of traveling in less developed countries. That has taught me to be thankful for the fact that I live in a house with heat and air conditioning, and hot and cold running water that I can drink without getting sick. Many people in developed countries (especially the U.S.) take these things for granted, but in many parts of the world these are things people only dream of.

Oddly, I regularly think about how great plumbing is, and I've been noticing this for the past 5-10 years, I think (I'm in my 40s).

I think one day I was probably in the shower and thinking about how awesome it was to have a hot shower. Then I started thinking about how great not having to use a "night soil pot" or an outhouse is, especially in hot or cold weather.

I don't think I've spent as much time contemplating the joy of HVAC systems, but I know I've thought about them from time to time.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#290
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What science are you basing that on?

> When your body processes aspartame, part of it is broken down into methanol.

Which is also found in citrus fruits.

Do you think those are unhealthy too?

> Aspartame is one of the most rigorously tested food ingredients.[5] Reviews by over 100 governmental regulatory bodies found the ingredient safe for consumption at current levels.[6][7][8][9][10] As of 2018, several reviews of clinical trials showed that using aspartame in place of sugar reduces calorie intake and body weight in adults and children.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame

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