211–220 of 226 posts
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Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just about any of the trades. Any labor throughout human history.
If ypu do those for 15 years you are likely in management
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It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family / lifestyle with manual labor. Opting into working out for the sake of my health is not nearly the same.
>It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family / lifestyle Success and failure are choices. Accepting this allows us to take responsibility for the worlds we've created. Ignoring this is self-destructive act of cognitive dissonance and we pay for it years later.
Tell that to crop failures of sustinance farmers. "Oh you just chose the weather to be bad/a fast soreading disease/a severe drought. Live with your choices".
> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years. I particularly agree with this statement. I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so. As a d…
I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc. Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.
You want a modern life with some light manual labor on the side as a hobby.
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City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends. That is completely normal in most world cities. And yes, where public transport exists, city kids do use public transport to get to school, to visit friends or to go to the gym. > I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and fear that city people seem to show less. Rur…
City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends. Yes, and city kids also eat, poop, and talk. :) I think it's the degree that matters. This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those. Degree matters here too.
> Yes, and city kids also eat, poop, and talk. :)
> I think it's the degree that matters.
The degree is easy to measure. What happens on a cold winter night or generally on a day with bad weather when "play outside" and "visit friends on foot" is out of the question?
City kids can still visit friends (because they are not beholden to adults with cars) and can chose about a billion different activities (because, once again, they are not beholden to adults with cars).
Even socially city kids have a greater degree of freedom because they are not stuck with the same group of people for all eternity. A friend's kid has a more varied social life with his basketball friends than with people from his school, for example. And half of the time we don't even know where he is at any given moment because, once again, he does not depend on having an adult to drive him everywhere for any activity that is not "playing outside".
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"A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested." Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car.
You can always spot an American by statements like this. It's not a slight against you personally. It's a reflection of how completely dysfunctional United States are.
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You can always spot an American by statements like this. It's not a slight against you personally. It's a reflection of how completely dysfunctional United States are.
Well, I am european though and never have been to the US.
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> I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases. It emphasizes neither! What you've described is a mass grave. Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed! Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cu…
I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of…
I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.
I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".
Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly. And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.
This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually. And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.
> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert? Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...
Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.
Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.
Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert. At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.
Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours. And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.
Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.
Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.
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I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of…
> I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land. I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (…
I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]
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Well, I am european though and never have been to the US.
Then your reply "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car." is somewhat weird. This wasn't the case even in my own backwards country of Moldova in the 90s, after the fall of Soviet Union, much less today, when people are noticeably more civilized.
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Then your reply "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car." is somewhat weird. This wasn't the case even in my own backwards country of Moldova in the 90s, after the fall of Soviet Union, much less today, when people are noticeably more civilized.
Today are way more cars on the streets than in the 90s in a former east block state.
2. Still doesn't support your "Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car."