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Shit life syndrome

en.wikipedia.org

111–120 of 244 posts

Re: Shit life syndrome

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most UK seaside towns lost out to cheap flights to Spain. There's very little reason anyone visit Blackpool over Málaga. For the price of a depressing hotel in Blackpool you can get a modern resort in Spain with warm seas and reliably sunny hot weather every day. There are a few seaside towns that managed to hold on, such as Brighton. They're mostly in the South where the climate and sea temperature is a touch more b…

There's a second-order problem related to their decline as tourist resorts. The B&Bs and hotels that were no longer viable as tourism businesses became cheap accommodation for the indigent. Perhaps inspired by happy childhood memories, a lot of people experiencing crisis decide to move to seaside towns and find a ready supply of cheap accommodation. The most severe deprivation in Blackpool is highly concentrated in a…

UK tourist towns were highly seasonal. No one wants to go to Blackpool in December. Providing accommodation for asylum seekers or whoever was year-round money with cost savings as those people's complaints could easily be ignored.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#112
post #61

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…

And this is what neoliberalism does to a brain. Notice that when communists are discussed, the same sayings "communism has killed millions of people". Well, so has capitalism. Probably even more than communism. Except, capitalists always rephrase this to point blame towards the individual. Homeless rising? Should have worked harder! Don't have medical? Should have worked harder! Medical privatized and going to shit?…

And this would be the same tired refrain of every tankie who will justify atrocities committed under communism by pointing out that bad things also happen under capitalism.

I'd call myself a neoliberal (for lack of a better term), but I agree that the OP's comment is naive and is the kind of things that almost always comes from people who have never experienced actual scarcity or desperation for more than a second of their lives. But the idea that any form of communism can be put forward as a general solution to scarcity would be amusing if it wasn't so common.

Capitalism is shit, but it's shit for the same reason that every communist system ever instituted ends up shit. Because every system is vulnerable to exploitation by a small group of well-positioned individuals, and if those individuals are shitty (or become enthralled to a single shitty individual) then your whole system turns to shit under them.

Communists (and libertarians) seem to only learn enough history to speed-run through all the same mistakes... It's the same mentality of people who design a new framework/language believing it solves a bunch of problems in existing languages/frameworks, while naively ignoring the problems that those existing bloated languages/frameworks had been designed to solve... usually problems of scale, fault-tolerance, and reliability.

And to be clear, there isn't anything wrong with designing new languages, or frameworks, or economic manifestos. These are all good exercises that more people should take on, if only to learn for themselves how difficult and complex they can be and to disavow themselves of the notion that who came before must have been corrupt and/or stupid.

Imo, there is no "one size fits all" framework for good governance and we'd be better served by talking more about design patterns, anti-patterns, best practices, potential vulnerabilities/exploits, and how well each system we've seen implemented implemented their solutions... is the pattern itself bad, or the implementation? Or maybe it's a fine pattern that is just really hard to implement and doesn't scale reliably because of certain properties of the underlying language we're using or the machine architecture we're deploying onto?

Re: Shit life syndrome

#113
post #5

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…

(beautiful writing, as others have said!)

> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK

I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.

Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?

It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If so then this some next level captain obvious stuff. m What a weird take, we should avoid naming things because checks notes they’re obvious??? > Give the addicts, the hobos and and the mentally unstable cash and good information/guidance on their options. That’s some next level captain obvious knowledge that you never give cash to hobos and addicts if you want to fix root cause of their problems, how could you n…

Many would assert that the lack of cash is the root problem. Sort of the thread theme here.

Sounds like a good opportunity to apply the Five Whys approach.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#116
post #5

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…

You've summed up Blackpool perfectly! It really is a microcosm of Britain - a neglected, dilapidated shit-hole :(

Re: Shit life syndrome

#119
post #5

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…

(beautiful writing, as others have said!) > the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous. Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London? It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make…

The advent of cheap flights made holidays within Europe affordable to most people. As a consequence, traditional UK holiday destinations became much less popular. Over time old-fashioned guest houses, B&Bs and cheap hotels transitioned into very low cost housing for people with 'problems'. The inevitable doom spiral began...

Destinations on the South Coast were not affected in the same way though and have remained a popular choice with more affluent clientele.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#120
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is what neoliberalism does to a brain. Notice that when communists are discussed, the same sayings "communism has killed millions of people". Well, so has capitalism. Probably even more than communism. Except, capitalists always rephrase this to point blame towards the individual. Homeless rising? Should have worked harder! Don't have medical? Should have worked harder! Medical privatized and going to shit?…

And this would be the same tired refrain of every tankie who will justify atrocities committed under communism by pointing out that bad things also happen under capitalism. I'd call myself a neoliberal (for lack of a better term), but I agree that the OP's comment is naive and is the kind of things that almost always comes from people who have never experienced actual scarcity or desperation for more than a second of…

> And this would be the same tired refrain of every tankie who will justify atrocities committed under communism by pointing out that bad things also happen under capitalism.

Oh look. The name callings begin almost immediately. Isn't there some badly applied rule here on HN about insults?

Anyways, I never said I was communist either. One can critique capitalism AND communism both. And this is about capitalism and the abdication of any responsibility of the capitalist rules that cause poverty. I just find that capitalists can never actually talk dispassionately about the sufferings their system costs. It's always the "best-est-est system the world has ever known".... except for all those thrown away by capitalism. However capitalism does what it's best at, is by externalizing those human costs and blaming the individual for systemic choices.

Then again, that externalization is what is going to get our world baked, literally. (Climate disaster, not cannabis)

Try *being* homeless, or permanently injured, or born in the wrong family, or in a location that has high unemployment and no way out, or hunger, or countless other reasons. All of these can be solved with various amounts of money.... but by being in poverty (or "shit life syndrome"), they do not have.

And to the point, read the linked article. It mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder :

     Social murder (German: sozialer Mord) is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. The phrase was coined by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working-Class in England whereby "the class which at present holds social and political control" (i.e. the bourgeoisie) "places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death".[1] This was in a different category to murder and manslaughter committed by individuals against one another, as social murder explicitly was committed by the political and social elite against the poorest in society.
"Shit Life Syndrome" is just a euphemism for capitalist social execution of the "undesirable group" aka a group that can't be profited on. But again, it's just easier to blame the individual for systemic choices, and not do anything to help the situations. And gods forbid if you're a man - you're doubly expendable.

(As an aside, communism ala China and USSR, etc all traded shitty capitalist dictator for a shitty government dictator. I don't count that as a win in my book either.)

EDIT: I'm not going to spend a comment to refute a poorly constructed No True Scotsman fallacy. Sure there's 'less bad capitalism', but that's not the article subject, is it? And it's obvious we're not talking about the willful choice to eradicate Finland's homelessness like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197785 ... Which are choices NOT to implement... Hence Social Murder.

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