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The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

nytimes.com

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Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#201

Post by semi-extrinsic »

ad_hominem wrote: post #178
pavlov wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m Finnish too. My entirely anecdotal experience of both Finland and USA is that America is about 40 years behind in responding to poverty. To see men sleeping in trash boxes in freezing weather, you only need to walk a few blocks around midtown Manhattan in the winter.

The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.

Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college.

To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas.

But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#202

Post by mrb »

adrianN wrote: post #61
mrb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a practical thought experiment that might help you: picture yourself many years from now, on your deathbed; would you have more regrets of having gone down path A or B?

That is not very practical, as you don't know how the future will turn out. If they start a startup and succeed they'll likely be happy about that decision. It's very hard to figure out expected outcomes for actions, and it's not very productive to think about worst-case (or best-case) outcomes.

I don't think I explained myself very well. You don't need to predict the future. You just need to estimate the amount of regret you would have by NOT doing something.

Living a fulfilling life is about minimizing regrets. People regret not trying to initiate relationships with potential soulmates. People regrets not trying working on a business idea that could have been very successful. People regret not spending more time with family. Etc. The regrets you will have on your deathbed are probably regrets you will have carried your entire life, and thus regrets that will have haunted you and hampered you from living a fulfilling life.

It turns out that in many cases, regrets are independent of the outcome. For example you may not know whether a relationship with a potential soulmate will fail or succeed. But you will probably have more regrets by NOT giving it a shot at all.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#203

Post by madeuptempacct »

ptaipale wrote: post #121
k__ wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here in Germany. My grandparents were born end of the 1930s. They grew up in the second world war and lived through the rebuild. The mother side in the west the father side in the east, so they even lived through socialism. Their views on life were so removed from what I encountered in the world...

Even a smaller generational gap here: my father was born in 1920, my uncle in 1918, at time of civil war in my country (Finland). The family was not the poorest but getting food on the table was a concern. Boys went to work in the forest at the age of 12. Uncle went through prisoner of waonr camps in Russian in 1940, father spent 1941-1944 the front, looking for bread crumbs in the pockets of any Russian KIA he'd fin…

This is just being rational - measure the time and cost of keeping something. Any time you keep anything, it collects dust, causes a mess, takes up space, and costs you time considering whether or not to toss it every time.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#204

Post by bodas »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #166
bodas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs. When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blam…

Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.

Homelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage.

Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#205

Post by ameister14 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #182
danielsmay1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the only person besides my mother (born in the late 1950s in the Southern USA) that I've seen/heard mention Biafra. Her knowledge of Biafra was due to her being told a similar thing as a child, "eat everything on your plate because there are Biafrans starving."

Biafra only existed between 1967 and 1970, so it wasn’t from her childhood in the 50s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra

cool, cool. If you were born in 1958, how old would you be in 1967?

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#206

Post by emodendroket »

gammateam wrote: post #175
commandlinefan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could be simply called "class differences" Yeah, seriously. My family has been American for at least four generations. I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where - before about my great-grandparents, there isn't much genealogy to follow, and for the most part that's because most of my ancestors were trying to keep a low profile and avoid having any records that…

> I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where A distinctly American experience

I mean I think the Europeans are probably lying to themselves if they think they're utterly ethnically homogeneous within one country.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#207

Post by emodendroket »

axiom92 wrote: post #163
commandlinefan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could be simply called "class differences" Yeah, seriously. My family has been American for at least four generations. I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where - before about my great-grandparents, there isn't much genealogy to follow, and for the most part that's because most of my ancestors were trying to keep a low profile and avoid having any records that…

> I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where Try 23andme?

There are lots of issues with the accuracy of that stuff, but even if there weren't, really, what does it matter, if you don't have any sort of connection to the places your forebears were from anymore?

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#208

Post by emodendroket »

ad_hominem wrote: post #178
pavlov wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m Finnish too. My entirely anecdotal experience of both Finland and USA is that America is about 40 years behind in responding to poverty. To see men sleeping in trash boxes in freezing weather, you only need to walk a few blocks around midtown Manhattan in the winter.

The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.

In fact policies that involve the government administering social services are easier, not harder, in a populous country.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#209

Post by emodendroket »

bodas wrote: post #159
TomMarius wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe USA has way more people or other factors that make it a harder problem. Some homeless people can't be helped since they have mental illnesses and break away from hospitals (USA has 70 times more people and homeless people are concentrating themselves in population hubs - that could make the problem more visible), and so on. Let's not assume things without proper analysis.

Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs. When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blam…

In a lot of ways America is undergoing a "Caribbeanization" where there are two strata of society who rarely interact with each other except in contexts like buying something from a store and so have little concept of the other's way of living.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#210

Post by sologoub »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #201
ad_hominem wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.

Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college. To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas. But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like…

You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it.

To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make.

The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.

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