101–110 of 129 posts
We can fix it with leadership and mentoring younger people. I'm trying to do this every single day. I love the spirit of people. I love the United States and what it has given me and my family growing up. You can project positive change and it doesn't have to be such a dark place. Look around you at the beauty. Be the change for the world and ultimately yourself.
I used to travel to the U.S. every year or two for this or that and I always left thinking about just how stressed out I'd be if I had to live there. There's a sense of having to have your "guard up" so much. That someone or something is always out to screw you. That you need gates on your communities. That your kids' school is going to get shot up. That cops might be the enemy. That you'll depend on someone in a mom…
> you need gates on your communities I think that is a cause: if you are gated off in a secure area, you care less about the safety of wider society. You will want to spend less on the police etc. > That your kids' school is going to get shot up. its really not that likely. A kid in the US is far more likely to die on the way to school than get shot at school, but the former is a fear people have adjusted to. The med…
> its really not that likely. A kid in the US is far more likely to die on the way to school than get shot at school, but the former is a fear people have adjusted to.
True, it's just _so much_ more likely compared to other countries, to the point of it's not really on the radar day-to-day.
Child/teen cause of death stats https://www.kff.org/mental-health/child-and-teen-firearm-mor... call out Canada as #2 for firearm mortality in general. We've had 29 school shootings (including universities, and including "a gun was discharged in a stairwell") since 2000, with 31 fatalities.
USA is 327 with 197 dead since 2020. And yes, that's with almost 9x the population, but per capita it's still a wild outlier of a stat.
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AI will accelerate everything ? Does everything need to be accelerated? If so, why does everything need to move faster?
Because the world is accelerating and we need to keep up.
Must they "accelerate" and "keep up"? Do they truly suffer if they don't? If they're happy doing so now, will they be unhappy in the future if they continue down their chosen paths?
I used to travel to the U.S. every year or two for this or that and I always left thinking about just how stressed out I'd be if I had to live there. There's a sense of having to have your "guard up" so much. That someone or something is always out to screw you. That you need gates on your communities. That your kids' school is going to get shot up. That cops might be the enemy. That you'll depend on someone in a mom…
[N] That you need gates on your communities.
[Y] That your kids' school is going to get shot up.
[Y] That cops might be the enemy.
[N] You'll be part of the wrong tribe.
[N] Medical event away from financial catastrophe.
[Y] Medical insurance, they're trying to screw you.
[Y] That healthcare is tied to employment.
[N] That your government really wants to !@#$ you.
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Right, because socialist and communist states were shining beacons of morality, compassion, and abundance.
Your argument is silly. Europe is more content than the US and a big part of that is the social protections such as universal healthcare. I like accelerator pedals on cars, I do, but I also like the brake pedal.
Also, many homeless people are content, along with those in jails and small children (whether they are well cared for or not in many cases unfortunately). It's not a remotely good metric for anything other than how agreeable a person is and how low their expectations are.
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Not to defend the down votes, but it's not just one thing. The article praises the attitudes of Mexicans and French folk, both of which are also capitalist countries. It's capitalism to an extent, sure, but it's also the culture of a country.
There are few, if any, countries which have taken capitalism to the same extremes the US has. The concept of a country which is so at the mercy of capitalists that people will beg you not to call an ambulance for them when they’re injured is incredibly foreign to me despite living in the UK, a country renowned for its financial sector. Which I guess is to say yes, it is the culture of a country, and the culture of th…
It's the American emphasis on individual freedom that results in a lack of government mandates for healthcare. Nearly everyone has healthcare, adding the small percentage who don't to the existing government-run system would not be a major financial burden, and cases like the one you cited are effectively (but not literally) zero.
Historically, there's been a tug of war between people who feel like you should be able to take the chance of financial ruin over an unlikely event and those who think the state should be protecting those people from themselves, leading to the disaster of a system we have currently. That's pretty much the explanation.
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I agree with the need for an empirical reality check, but have grown really skeptical about these kinds of cohort-level well-being measures. I wouldn't say they're meaningless, but there's a lot of studies suggesting they don't really change much over time, and my sense is they don't change in tandem with events that should change well-being, except in extremes like widespread genocidal war. There's even researchers…
As someone who does _very_ related research, I'd push back on your skepticism. I recommend Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness". It very accessibly addresses almost every point you raised. In particular, people have very bad intuitions about trauma and loss. Humans are shockingly adaptable and bounce back to full functioning and happiness almost all of the time. Provided you don't have a biased sample (such as people s…
What I'm referring to are correlations between group-level variables at the level of nations or states.
There's a kind of disconnect in that on the one hand, you end up with these models of why disruptive political change happens — because people are deeply dissatisfied and having trouble making ends meet and so forth (cf the price of eggs etc) — but then on the other, end up concluding that well-being is inelastic to external events. So which is it?
Maybe it has nothing to do with aggregate level measurement? Even the trauma example is sort of telling: someone can end up being deeply impacted and their reported well-being remains the same (or even increases), but that story is very oversimplified at some level.
Sometimes I feel as if this line of reasoning leads to absurdities, like there's nothing wrong with traumatic harm or abuse because people are resilient and it doesn't matter to their well-being. I'm being provocative on purpose to make a point — I don't think anyone really thinks that — but at some point you have to wrestle with the implications of what is being said, and at that point it kind of starts to become internally inconsistent.
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Where are you from, and where are you visiting? Nearly everything you said is inaccurate for the vast majority of the US, and it's obvious you have projected a lot of vaguely accurate online news reports across the nation as a whole.
Ontario -> DFW a bunch, San Diego, Bay Area, NYC, Boston, Buffalo, Nashville, Orlando, Atlanta, Numerous rural nowheres in Wisconsin (it's a long story), DC. Just what comes to the top of my head that I've visited as an adult for longer than a week. Admittedly I haven't been in a few years. Maybe things have been getting much better there!