Poverty by itself doesn't make you sad.
That's abundantly true. There are plenty of people that are poor and happy.

ENVY is what makes you sad.
Your neighbor having more wealth than you think they deserve, makes you angry.
We also have reasonably abundant historical examples of people of wealth, power, even kings driven to irrational acts over their envy about someone with more than they have.

So no, I don't think the money itself (or lack) makes a person unhappy, it's about their judgement of the people around them & their worth that fuels unhappiness, justified or not.

"Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice,""
Well, I guess I'd start with telling him to stop trying to "trick" people - even kids - into doing what he wants?

It's a routine fault of progressives AND evangelical conservatives: this inherent sense of moral certainty, and the instinctive justification that "pretty much anything goes because I'm doing it to HELP you".

Reading (or more specifically, the desire to read, as there are tons of people with impairments that get in the way of literally reading a book) I'd say is symptomatic of intelligence. So what we really want are people who value intelligence, who value reason. Reading will more or less automatically follow.

I'll be honest, I don't think 'reading' alone is inherently magical. Reading the sports page, or some fantasy smut about milking male minotaurs - they may both be enjoyable, but neither is going to make someone the kind of constructive, reasoning citizen we NEED in our Republic.
Well, that any democracy needs, not just ours.

Of course, then we get back to the 'certainty'. Reasoning adults need to be able to hold in their heads a fundamental RESPECT for the other person's ideas. Even if they don't agree.

So here's the funny bit for me. Kirsch suggests that we trick kids into thinking reading is scandalous, a vice. Is that really what he wants? What if they read actually-scandalous texts (according to Kirsch's orthodoxy) like something by Charlie Kirk? The Art of the Deal? Would he be as intrinsically delighted with "people reading" then?

That makes apparently 1 person in earth that believes the BBC is "too slanted to the right" lol .
Then again, as we've seen over the past 5 years, to the new rage-addled Left Marx himself would have come off as far too right wing.

Or, crazy idea I know, maybe wealthy people aren't universally - or even mostly - stuck up self obsessed narcissists, and that's just your own seething envy and sense of self justification?

If I had to choose between Walmart vs a store that literally filters out the poorest at the door, I know where I'd rather work or shop.

I'd put it another way: the "you have to pay to even GET IN THE DOOR" keeps out the rifraff.

"...describes the stores as spaces of "cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups." Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone. Checkout lines form orderly queues. ..."

Note the entire article is about how civilized an experience it is, and how "weird" that is; that Atlantic tries to paint it as "cult like" shows how utterly fucked up our Intelligentsia has become.

I'm sorry that Sad Oregonian Cunt is bad at the google. I understand. It's hard to fight deep-seated quasi-religious beliefs.

I apologize that my use of the word 'healthier' confused you. I know that enraged leftists routinely forget concepts like vernacular and idiom, retreating to semantic hairsplitting but I'm assuming here in good faith that you're LEGITIMATELY confused by my broadly using the term 'health' to include 'reproductive success'. I am, of course, talking more precisely about eggshell thinning and impact on bird reproductive health, which was flogged around by Silent Spring, the just-born EPA, and used as a reason for the global ban on DDT despite the ruling of a judge to the contrary.

Here's a much-footnoted paper that maybe helps you understand what you're trying to talk about.
https://nationalcenter.org/ncp...

To your specific accusation "This is a lie. It is not supported by your link or any literature." Well, it's literally what happened, something you could find if you bothered to, y'know, check something other than your back-library of Mother Jones magazines.

When carefully reviewed, Dr. Bitmanâ(TM)s study revealed that the quail in the study were fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 percent (a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 percent calcium). Calcium deficiency is a known cause of thin eggshells.21-23 After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels. The birds produced eggs without thinned shells.24
After many years of carefully controlled feeding experiments, Dr. M. L. Scott and associates of the Department of Poultry Science at Cornell University âoefound no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where âcatastrophicâ(TM) decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed.â23 In fact, thinning eggshells can have many causes, including season of the year, nutrition (in particular insufficient calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D, and manganese), temperature rise, type of soil, and breeding conditions (e.g., sunlight and crowding).25

And in case that's still too hard for stupid fucks to follow, let me help you:
21 Greely F. Effects of Calcium Deficiency. J Wildlife Management. 1960; 70:149-153.
22 Romanoff AL, Romanoff AJ. The Avian Egg. New York: Wiley & Sons; 1949:154.
23 Scott ML, Zimmermann JR, Marinsky S, Mullenhoff PA. Effects of PCBs, DDT, and Mercury Compounds Upon Egg Production, Hatchability and Shell Quality in Chickens and Japanese Quail. Poultry Science. 1975; 54:350-368.
24 Cecil HC, Bitman J, Harris SJ. No Effects on Eggshells, If Adequate Calcium is in DDT Diet. Poultry Science. 1971; 50:656-659.
25 The Avian Egg:152-156, 266.

My actual point, against which a very narrow facet made you so incensed, was that if malaria is an issue, we should go back to using DDT, which was banned based on lies. The fact is that Carson was a deep, deep liar, misrepresenting and mispresenting facts throughout her moronic screed. (Since you love sources and details, here's a nearly page-by-page refutation (up to around p125) of the tidal wave of bullshit in Silent Spring: https://21sci-tech.com/article...)

So, please: go fuck yourself and have a great New Year while you're at it!

Somehow this is still Trump's fault.

Slashdot: +1, insightful, obviously.

Maybe do your research, midwit.

Notice I said that the researchers realized that they'd underfed the birds calcium.
You think that might have something to do with the resulting strength of their EGGS.
Here, let me help since you're stupid: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q...

When they re-ran the experiment, feeding the birds the CORRECT amount of calcium they get in the wild, the eggs were - SURPRISE! - just fine.

SOME species do indeed show minor eggshell thinning; then again, others seem to benefit.
Certainly it's nothing like the case made to justify banning DDT.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com...

"Responding to (environmentalists') pressure, in 1971 the newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched an investigation of the pesticide. Lasting seven months, the investigative hearings led by Judge Edmund Sweeney gathered testimony from 125 expert witnesses with 365 exhibits. The conclusion of the inquest, however, was exactly the opposite of what the environmentalists had hoped for. After assessing all the evidence, Judge Sweeney found: âoeThe uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlifeâ¦. DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to manâ¦. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man.â[20] Accordingly, Judge Sweeney ruled that DDT should remain available for use.
Unfortunately, however, the administrator of the EPA was William D. Ruckelshaus, who reportedly did not attend a single hour of the investigative hearings, and according to his chief of staff, did not even read Judge Sweeneyâ(TM)s report.[21] Instead, he apparently chose to ignore the science: overruling Sweeney, in 1972 Ruckelshaus banned the use of DDT in the United States except under conditions of medical emergencies.[22]"

Need data, sources, proof? How about from the California Environmental Protection agency? Is that progressive enough?
https://www.calepa.ca.gov/wp-c...

Sometimes apparently even scientists believe dogmatic bullshit with the blind faith of a drooling Evangelical Christian.

Well, if malaria is such an issue:

1) go back to using ddt. The entire Silent Spring thing was a load of crap based on poorly designed experiments (the scientists that did the original experiment recognized this and reran the same thing except this time giving the birds the normal amount of calcium they're have gotten from natural diets. The result was that ddt was NO IMPACT - actually the ddt heavy birds were slightly healthier, albeit not statistically significantly).

2) why would the US bear the responsibility for curing 37% of the world's malaria problem by itself? Please provide an answer that's not a paraphrase of "white man's burden".

"low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship"

More importantly, ultimately, is they offer pathways to high level creative jobs eventually.
Training an ai offers a pathway to... Nothing.

Are you seriously asserting that European leadership aren't overwhelmingly and negatively focused on whatever Trump does? I'm sure it's coincidence that the EU only warns Twitter ... once Musk has bought it and freed it from the hard-woke filter engine of the left. And the EU only hated Musk because he dared to openly support Trump.

The use of the term "MAGA" is only used to shut down arguments. Anyone who uses it is clearly a clown arguing in bad faith, so meh.

I'm looking at the $50 he's already venmo'd me. LOL.

You guys are so predictable.

In other news, cabin staff on Titanic also successfully formed a union to demand fair treatment 0115 on April 15 1912.

"A human communicating with a person who develops psychosis as a direct result of the communication is blamed, and investigated for wrongdoing. " ... Or are monetized into "content" cf all social media. Or haven't you ever dived into Reddit?

It could be that part of the problem for movie theaters conceptually is that they are consensual public events. There's a strong element of the social contract to movie going; we agree to share a space to ostensibly enjoy a thing together.

Unfortunately, the technological impetus compelling us to do so has faded: we no longer need gather physically in one room because only collectively can our purchasing tickets that way fund the equipment and space capable of displaying that production at is highest quality. Now, one can (assuming a 2 person movie evening is about $100) buy a large screen, high def monitor with an adequate sound bar for as little as the price of five film visits. A single such purchase and an Internet connection and you literally never have to go to a movie theater again, ever.

More compellingly, the social contract is largely gone. COVID proved to many people that, y'know what? Larger collections of other people are increasingly tiresome. Been to a mass market movie lately? People viewing their phones and acting like selfish assholes. These people have always existed if course, but formerly this might get you a warning from an usher or even ejected. Not any longer; the theaters themselves (almost entirely today owned by some faceless conglomerate somewhere else)don't care, and a minimum-wage show house staffer certainly isn't going to risk their neck to confront anyone, god forbid they be a motivated Karen or some other victim class that could blow the theater up on social media (or worse).

Don't get me wrong, a collection of motivated enthusiasts are self disciplined and moviegoing can still be a delightful experience (cf The Trylon in Minneapolis has made an art-house scale income of it - that is, rather little compared to the efforts of its largely middle aged and older volunteers). But in that case everyone is actually there to deliberately enjoy the film in such a context. Such places proved there is still some magic to being part of a group all laughing at a joke together or gasping at a Hitchcockian surprise (even though with these old films only the few first timers responses are genuine and spontaneous). It bears mentioning that Trylon also offers reasonable ticket prices and reasonable concessions pricing, two reasons they barely limp along. Further reasons that alongside my patronage I cheerfully donate to the organization as well.

But aside from such places, I see no value in going to the movies any more no matter how recliney the seats or if they serve me (obscenely priced) pizza to it.