71–80 of 244 posts
This is quite darkly hilarious tbh. And consistent with my experience of Blackpool. I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself t…
That they forgot to close down
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This is the sort of rhetoric that harms poor people. Being poor can cause states of mind, but is not a state of mind in itself — it is clearly and simply an economic position. The article is not talking about people thinking of themselves as simply poor and therefore unhappy or unhealthy, but a much more complex relationship.
On individual scale you’re right, but on the collective level I think both you and GP are right, it’s a feedback loop. Places become poor for different reasons: shifting economic realities, fall of the previous civilization (eg USSR, which is my experience), etc. Places remain poor when people feel trapped inside vs consciously deciding to call the place home.
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Ugh. I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence. One day maybe.
> One day maybe TBH, I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your values. Heck, I'm even called 'woke' by most people around me. Yet I understand that in this day in age, thanks to cryptocurrency, money is and will be a private matter. No government will be able to confiscate your wealth, at least to the extent that your wealth doesn't depend on assets related with the government (e.g. real estate is relate…
You pay tax because if you don't some large men will come to your house and make you pay tax.
this isn't a knock on the system; without some sort of centralised governments things tend to fall apart and then recreate themselves again. Even in the most lawless places someone steps in to perform the role, and usually they're much worse than a legal system with checks and balances.
Hi, speaking from small-town India. Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger ( For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption. But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earni…
Thanks for the note on life around you. I think something you touch on here is physical health. But my reading of the Wikipedia article is SLS profoundly about mental well being and the toll of neglect, abuse, and crushing poverty has on overall health and quantity of life due to the lack of well being. Would you mind expanding your story of life in your area on that dimension? How does this harshness play out for th…
If people have never had decent health care, and their classmates from school haven’t either, then how are they meant to move into something as rarefied as self-assessed mental health? That is something that people with too much time and not enough existential threat get up to.
The UK has typically had the highest levels of income inequality in Europe. A previous Prime Minister had been quoted 'A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde', Croydon being in London and Strathclyde being an administrative area in West Scotland that ceased to exist in 1975. The quote was from 2012. WFH has allowed me to continue working from rural Scotland, to…
Although Croydon is a London borough, it's quite far outside of central London, to the point that it doesn't really feel part of London. It's also quite a deprived area. So that quote is weird on a number of levels!
Scotland isn't included, so I can't compare Strathclyde, but Blackpool's average is 5,900 — and includes 8 of the 10 most deprived places in the country.
Only one bit of London (part of Haringey) makes the top 1000. Only 106 bits of London (out of 4685) make the top 10%.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-...
I think that poverty really is a state of mind, and so SLS, as a thing separate from mental health, inadequate health care or material deprivation makes a lot of sense to me. Once you start seeing life as shit, something where no good change is possible and no effort is rewarded, you really are stuck in the shit reality. On the other hand, it’s possible to be materially very poor, but totally happy. To see life as fu…
> To see life as full of abundance, good purpose and to find joy in it. Given that most (if not all) enjoyable things in life involve some kind of a fee (however small), that’s hard to do.
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> I thought COVID would radically transform society's thinking and our requirement to be in high GDP areas for certain lines of work 1) Why did you think that? 2) Why do you assume that people are only in "high GDP areas" for work? Personally I moved from rural New Zealand to London and I work 100% remotely.
Because certain lines of work don't require physical presence but are skilled jobs. /added Also, I prefer a rural setting, no doubt others do too. Cost of living is lower also.
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Most people really don't prefer a rural setting. People go to these "high GDP" places because there is a greater abundance of opportunities there. Relationships, friends, career, networks, etc. Even if you can work rurally due to remote work, you miss out on a lot by not being where other people are.
Of my close friends from uni days, only one lives in london, and that’s by choice (her job was moved from london to somewhere in Surrey well before covid so she was “reverse commuting” several times a week. The others live in a seaside town in devon, a Wiltshire village, a Shropshire village, and one lives in a small Derbyshire town.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22860/london/population
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...
I think that poverty really is a state of mind, and so SLS, as a thing separate from mental health, inadequate health care or material deprivation makes a lot of sense to me. Once you start seeing life as shit, something where no good change is possible and no effort is rewarded, you really are stuck in the shit reality. On the other hand, it’s possible to be materially very poor, but totally happy. To see life as fu…
First time i heard about SLS was from this DW documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK68yyrKUOA which i found very good
I'd love to know the rationale for why they geoblock the UK from watching this particular documentary.