What I don't get is why the Left isn't cheering wildly. The USA is the most racist warmongering genocide-in-Gaza-supporting country in the world. I mean, imagine sending C-17s full of machetes to the Hutu in Rwanda, the US sent bombs to Israel.

The US is ethnic cleansing with ICE.

"If we strike first and our victim dares to fight back, then weâ(TM)re the ones being attacked." The United States is a brutal and immoral actor in the world and has been longer than any of us have been alive. To wave the flag at a pro-immigrant rally would be to somehow suggest that the country the flag represents is worth celebrating, and it is not. Left-wing protestors donâ(TM)t carry American flags because carrying the American flag is a symbol of support for the United States of America, its government and its actions, of condoning its project in whole or in part, and left-wing people (like me) canâ(TM)t do that because the United States is a brutal and immoral actor in the world and has been longer than any of us have been alive. To wave the flag at a pro-immigrant rally would be to somehow suggest that the country the flag represents is worth celebrating, and it is not. Itâ(TM)s not for many reasons, the most direct and salient of which is that no country on earth has caused more wanton destruction, cruelty, and degradation of freedom and democracy Americans are the least educated and knowledgeable of foreign affairs, languages, and disparate cultures, societies, and social norms among all Westernized countries and the least exposed universally.

America is based on demonizing whole groups of people (migrants, Muslims, independent women, LGBTQP people).

This is the basis for all your horrible politics and terrible policies.

>the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft, which had in turn bought the ailing brand in 2014.

No mention that Microsoft sent executive Stephen Elop to dismantle Nokia as its CEO in 2010. Nor that in 2014 as part of the deal to acquire Nokia's phone business leaving the rest of the company to soldier on, Nokia insisted that Microsoft repossess him.

Fucking upvoted funny by incels but this is the absolute truth. My wife and I and all our friends with one kid wanted two. Two kids playing together is healthy for everyone. But who the hell can afford a mortgage AND taxes on a property that comfortably houses four people? Nobody. We both work, we have been looking for a bigger place for years. No dice. We settled on one child because it is financial suicide to have more.

The sooner the culturally inevitable decline of the US is accepted the better rest-of-world can succeed it. Needing the US for anything is a long hangover from WWII destroying real and potential competition.

The world should be doing its own research to keep the fruits thereof from Wall Street's grubby tentacles. I grew up through the space race but now see no reason the US deserves to hog research it can only use to benefit our owning kleptarchs.

I can't really imagine keeping 2x more trash cans in my kitchen and dealing with having to work around and walk around them....it's full as it is.

But hey, it's a free country...you do you.

I don't see any compelling reason to change a lifetime of behavior for no perceived value, and add inconvenience to my daily life.

There was going to be a website called Slashjobs.org but it sounded way too similar to another tech website that the latter might be mistaken for a parent company

It would be amusing if it weren't so annoying; but you often see people who embrace both positions without a hint of awareness of the contradiction: when condemning the non-breeders they are 'selfish' and 'hedonistic' and so on; but, in the same breath, children are their greatest pleasure and most fulfilling experience and so on and so forth. What's it going to be? Are children the cutting edge of indulgence and everyone who is missing out will die bitter and miserable; or are the people failing to pay the flesh tithe to our civilization repulsively self-centered for avoiding a massive hassle that one undertakes only as a grim duty?

I'd be curious what, if any, role the increasingly obviously hollow promise of progress may have.

In absolute terms residents of low-income countries are usually more fucked than those of high income ones; but in terms of trajectory they often have a somewhat rosier picture: if GDP per capita is really low you don't really have an option but to be really poor, there's just not enough productivity to support being otherwise; but there's a fairly straightforward alignment of incentives: unless there's a local supply of mineral wealth to skim, even the local elites generally want everyone to be more prosperous because there's just not that much money to be gouged out of subsistence mud farmers; and there are a variety of plausible avenues toward greater productivity in the form of people looking for new manufacturing areas and the like.

Similar things hold for various quality-of-life stuff. Low income countries tend to see a lot of morbidity and mortality from lack of relatively cheap and simple medical interventions; but have a corresponding selection of relatively cheap and simple improvements that will improve population welfare if realized.

Wealthy countries are, obviously, absolutely wealthier; but are often harder to write an optimistic trajectory for: if most of the obvious productivity improvements have already been made and you still feel squeezed it's a lot less plausible to believe that you will grow out of that problem(both because there are fewer evident paths to notable growth; and because feeling poor in a wealthy society is often a good sign that someone who isn't you is good at capturing value; and will probably remain good at that even if more value is unlocked); and if most of the relatively simple, relatively cheap, improvements in things like medical interventions and occupational health and safety standards have already been made it becomes much less evident how your children will do better than you did.

My impression is that, among people who actually reason their way toward parenthood, there's a general desire to see good outcomes for their children. This often involves heavy doses of irrational optimism regardless of location; but there are definitely some contexts where at least expecting your children to have it better than you is within the realm of the plausible; and others where you need to be hitting the copium pretty hard to imagine that they'll beat the odds dramatically enough to do so.

To each his own...sounds like a major PITA to me.

Where I am...each house has 1 or more general garbage cans...but plastic things, uniform size and shape....and on trash days (2 a week) you wheel the "bin" out to the road side....the truck comes along and a big mechanical arm picks up each can and dumps it in...

There's no garbage men there to even look at what you're throwing out.

On a different day of the week, I do see folks putting out their small recycle bins, the ones that want to participate.

To save money, they've set up this system so that we don't have 2-3 guys hanging on the back of each garbage truck grabbing each can and dumping it...there's pretty much just 1 person driving the truck and the truck grabs, dumps and returns each can....

Again, I don't have anything against recycling....but participation is and should be optional...where I live.

I assume I'm not supposed to ask what 'our own civilization' has done to deserve our care; and just swallow the implication that suffering as an end in itself is totally sensible?

I mean, would you rather have sex or run around blasting bad guys and color matching falling gems or have sex?

If you think that AI is good enough to replace education; do I want to know what jobs that pay for family-size houses you expect people to be working?

Johnny Fever on WKRP.

"When everyone is out to get you, paranoid is just....

.......good thinking"

LOL....oh, don't forget the Phone Cops!!

Thankfully where I live....no one forces anyone to recycle.

You can if you want...but you are free to decide if you want to bother or not.

We don't have any "trash police" here....we've got better things to spend our tax dollars on.

Most of the time economists respond to data about individual choice with a "meh, revealed preference, obviously"; then "It becomes possible to do sex without 9 months of creepy endoparasitism and a couple of decades of very high cost parenting; turns out people are up for that" hits and suddenly it's a crazy mystery what is driving such a change...