ravitation

One other problem is that whenever these conversations come up in "extremely public spaces" (i.e. the internet), you inevitably have a small group that strongly identifies with the textbook definitions of introvert/extrovert. Anecdotally (though this is the internet), this is almost entirely self-identified introverts; they will swear that every social interaction leaves them drained and they need a certain amount of hours alone to recover (there is almost certainly some confounding variables and bias at play here). Afterwards, those that do not see their own lives described by these definitions are generally less interested than the former group in arguing about the definitions' supposed validity.

You do realize that I'm responding to someone that made the assertion, also implied in the NYT article, that this "donation" was "done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill." Right? What you're saying directly contradicts that, which was my point...

This was very obviously not done "for pure personal financial gain..." But should billionaires be able to donate billions, tax-free, to exert political influence, which, generally (though, with rare exceptions, like perhaps Chouinard), they will use to directly benefit themselves and their family? And, should they be able to do so in a way that maintains that political influence for their family for generations to come?

Maybe Chouinard and his family have good intentions, but, like the article said, "one doesn’t want a constructed tax system predicated upon everyone being like the Chouinards."

Chouinard is probably marginally better than your average billionaire, but it was almost certainly not done in a way that didn't also very clearly benefit him, and, more importantly, his family.

https://qz.com/patagonia-s-3-billion-corporate-gift-is-also-...

That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.

A majority of the use cases for self-driving cars are either solvable, or already solved, by some combination of better urban planning (i.e. zoning and probably large-scale regulatory reform), public transit (specifically useful public transit), and public investment. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are unable to do even one of these things sufficiently well, hence the need for self-driving cars (or, in some cases, some other technological solution; e.g. hyperloop).

As someone who grew up in Austin, it was never walkable at any meaningful scale.

It's far from the biggest source of disappointment I'm subjected to on a daily basis.

I also frequently choose not to engage with ill-informed comment threads; I'm regretting my lapse in judgement today.

These are at least often informed by (overly specific) personal anecdotes.

This is also not limited to just COVID discussion either. Most things that aren't somehow related to day-to-day software development devolve into unsubstantiated, or ill-informed, "ranting."

It's a source of constant disappointment.

Bus was awful.

Exactly. Similar to the problem many adults have trying to get to work by bus, it often doubles or triples a commute time.

Finally. There are these long comment threads talking about high school students taking public transit/school buses, but that just isn't how most high school students get to school. It is unfortunate that mid/late teenagers are so dependent on cars, which often means dependent on a parent or other adult, but that's the type of cities we've built in this country.

Most of America is a serious street safety/transit problem which should be solved.

A plurality ~35% of high school students are driven to school, though not necessarily by a parent.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0739456X1772514...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/how-dista...

EDIT: This is nationwide, there's reason to believe this percentage is probably higher in California.

My point about good faith was assuming people that claim to simply be in favor of devolution of authority to legislatures or states are being truthful; and not just also saying that because its a useful and expedient defense.

This is one of those cases, where, people like the original commenter, if we assume they are arguing in good faith, will then be "surprised" when it turns out those they are electing actually aren't committed to it being a "states' rights" issue. Devolution of authority to the states is just the current tool the right have to further restrict access to abortion, if federal legislative power to ban abortion becomes available to them, they will drop the "states' rights" approach immediately.

It's really a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the United States). "States' rights," outside of theoretical discussions, has always simply been a tool, not a true guiding ideology.

I would caution people from putting words in the authors' mouths.

The correlation can be meaningful in and of itself.

Why do people all need to live in SF?

No, the serious question is why aren't more people living in SF, instead of the sprawl of low-density suburbs and pseudo-suburbs that surround the Bay Area?

The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size, but the fall off in density once you leave the county (which occupies only the tip of the San Francisco peninsula) is precipitous.

People act like it is, the reality is different.

No, people act like it is, because it really is... When you're talking about building high-density housing in the actual city (or medium-density in the suburbs with reasonable transit options)... Which is literally always what they are actually talking about. No one is talking about there being problems building low-density housing in the middle of nowhere.

San Francisco is fairly dystopian.

If it is dystopian, it is not because of density. There are numerous higher density parts of the world that do not struggle with the issues San Francisco does. It has nothing to do with people's inability to see cows. It has to do with the US' refusal to support the things that facilitate living in cities.

This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.

The idea that increased suburbanization would have any positive effect on wealth inequality is completely absurd.

I found it essentially impossible to read.

Great note/outline format, if I already know the key ideas/takeaways and where they are relative to each other, but really awful to follow reading it for the first time.

I mean left on the political spectrum, and certainly far more left-wing than mainstream Democrats or "center" left (even in a British or European context). Additionally, I use the term skepticism here similarly to how the term euroskepticism is used to encompass varying degrees of criticism for the European Union (including criticism that involves full withdrawal of all member states), just in this case in regard to NATO. As I said in my initial comment, I'm well aware that many on the left want to see the dissolution of NATO.

I don't think I would describe myself necessarily as pro-NATO, I just don't think its dissolution is reasonable, and I think its actually quite arguable that NATO dissolution would be a net negative. With that in mind, it's not uncommon for people, who are otherwise very far off from one another on the ideological or political spectrum, to agree (or at least agree in policy outcome) on individual issues (especially foreign policy ones). That's the nature of using a relatively one-dimensional spectrum to describe a complex system of beliefs.

You've vastly oversimplified the politics of the American left and right, which are themselves varied. Just because Trump criticized NATO member states and potentially weakened NATO with his rhetoric, does not mean it was ever actual policy of the mainstream Republican Party, or really even the Trump administration, to dissolve NATO. In fact, Trump himself now claims that, if not for him, there would be no NATO [1]. Trump is a president that ran on no clear platform (e.g. his 2020 presidential campaign did not even publish one) or real coherent policy.

With that in mind, here is an article from 2018 in Jacobin, a left-wing magazine, saying that, regardless of Trump's comments, NATO's continued existence remains a valid question [2]; in fact, the Democratic Socialists of America (the primary progressive/socialist/labor party in the US) has calls for the US to immediately withdraw from NATO as part of its stated policy, even after the Russian invasion of western Ukraine [3]. These are among the most well stated positions regarding NATO skepticism on the American left, but similar opinions were expressed throughout left-wing independent media in the months leading up to the invasion (and earlier).

1. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-seeks-rewrite-role-bolsterin...

2. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/07/nato-donald-trump-putin-c...

3. https://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-russias-invasion-of-ukr...

As a younger millennial on the left, I am routinely frustrated by "anti-imperialist" attitudes (especially among my generation, and younger). I think "anti-imperialist" is one of the least useful labels for a political worldview in contemporary politics.

Prior to the invasion, there was rampant criticism of NATO, and calls for its dissolution, on left-wing media, as an instrument of American imperialism, despite the fact that Russia has a history of aggression against post-Soviet states (e.g. Georgia) in the 21st century. With the outbreak of the war (outside of east Ukraine), some have walked back the more extreme aspects of those statements (as NATO's potential usefulness has been illustrated), but American imperialism via NATO is still discussed in the same breath as Russian imperialism via a military invasion and territorial annexation.

The truth is we have very little choice in our great powers or global hegemonies, and I will always take the NATO brand of "imperialism" (e.g. where countries literally ask for American military bases to ward against actual aggression) over the Russian brand. Should we be skeptical of NATO? Of course, as we should with all power structures, especially when they engage in actual violence; but to not have a nuanced discussion about what actual imperialism looks like in the 21st century, and to simply be blanket "anti-imperialist," is juvenile, and I'd argue probably detrimental to those that actually feel its real world effects.

There is this contemporary absurd narrative that businesses, business owners, and/or corporations only recently became greedy, and that this development (of greed), not the system itself, is the root of essentially all the problems with the modern economic system.

I think it is quite possible that you were more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord (partially because incentives were more directly, and forcibly, aligned) than find a corporation willing to put profits as anything other than first.

No offense, but I think you are looking at "culture" through a pretty narrow lens (or just not talking about "culture" at all)...

Regardless of if you are "[hiring] way too fast" or "finally [getting] rid of subpar performers," layoffs are still, by definition, firing a bunch of people's coworkers. Simple work efficiency, which is what you'd theoretically be improving in both of your examples, has relatively little to do with company culture, so your examples aren't very compelling evidence.

I've been through numerous rounds of layoffs, both of entire teams and of select individuals or roles, and it has never had a net positive effect on culture.

Large-scale layoffs very rarely (i.e. never) simply cut people that are "bad at [their jobs]."

That's also fair. I think my initial reading of the top comment, and some of the replies, was overly assumptive; and my take on the nature of the cause was a direct result of my already pessimistic view of contemporary American political structures.

I guess for me, the fact that the political reality makes infrastructure "hard" is profoundly obvious... And, while the specific details may change with the city, that reality is quite common throughout the US (even the relatively specific economic conditions discussed earlier in the context of Pittsburgh are not really that unique)...

Pretending like this type of infrastructure decline is somehow unique to Pittsburgh, which, at least implicitly, the top level comment does, does a great disservice to actually finding solutions to the problems with that "political reality on the ground" - and not just in Pittsburgh.

I'm amused that people are willing to contextualize this bridge failure within what is essentially the entire 20th century economic history of Pittsburgh; and then act like that history somehow excuses the complete failure of local governments over that same time period to either repair or eliminate unsafe infrastructure. It's honestly nothing short of absurd.

No one is honestly expecting the local governments throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan area to eliminate 150 bridges (or some other arbitrarily large number) by 2023... They expected the local governments (and the state and federal governments) to behave competently and never let it get to this point. The decline of Pittsburgh as an industrial hub started over half a century ago... They've had plenty of time to address things like this in that context.

The fact that keeping infrastructure safe is "political suicide" or "costs too much money" is essentially the entire problem - and it's a problem that is not at all unique to Pittsburgh.

You've missed the point. Very obviously working in an Amazon warehouse isn't a trade. The point isn't that working at an Amazon warehouse is a trade, nor the job's actual wage...

The point is that two jobs with superficially equivalent wages can be far from equivalent in things like the toll it might take on one physically...

The same could be said for the starting salary of graduates with undergraduate accounting degrees and entry level plumbers ($40k-$50k annually)... Similar in terms of wages, far from equivalent in terms of physical demands...

1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education?

Exactly.

These types of post often ignore the actual work being done.

A graduate student might make a comparable hourly rate to an amazon warehouse employee, but he or she can also go to the bathroom and sit down.

I mean... I think there's a couple things here...

First, as I said in my comment, the man in your example is likely not working in order to "stretch [his] abilities" as was the context of my comment...

Second, I'm not sure that doing something out of boredom is equivalent to a "need," regardless of how one might describe it.

Third, it seems to me that many people's only source of purpose is work (partially because they must work exhaustively to survive), so, when the need or ability to work is removed, they have nothing else; the idea that "work" is either a necessity or a noble pursuit in of itself only serves to reinforce this outlook and the resulting behavior (i.e. deriving all purpose from work).

I don't want to push too hard, but it should be somewhat self-evident who might benefit from a culture that perpetuates a myth of work as necessity.

Just different definitions of "work".

I'm going to disagree on this simplification. There is a common definition of work, e.g. the definition used in the context of work/life balance (i.e. the context of the original article), that is widely used; redefining it to be as broad as you've described is detrimental to the conversation.

Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.

Essentially everything can be made to fit this definition, making it, I think, not very useful.

You're right. This is clear had I actually noted that disclaimer, and was simply an oversight on my part.

With that in mind, I'll just agree with your analysis, redefining "work" to include "non-employment" is detrimental to the conversation. When people discuss work/life balance (i.e. in the original article), they are (almost universally) not talking about balancing intellectually stimulating hobbies and the rest of life. We are, from the onset, talking about jobs, i.e. employment.

Additionally, I think my original comment is still useful when discussing the more common definition of work.