ryfia

News outlets calling it a "mental health crisis" is just sleigh-of-hand, obscuring the root causes. It's natural to feel more stressed, anxious, or depressed if you're losing hope in life due to inflation, lagging pay, expensive healthcare, sky-high real estate costs, etc. Not to mention the general greedy nickel-and-diming that is present from most corporations, hedge funds, investors -- all of these small cuts and bruises add up to a very wounded animal.

I recently read a NYT opinion piece that very eloquently laid out this idea: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-...

Btw one favorite quote from that NYT article:

If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.

I don't think the math is quite right on this.

Assuming there are 200,000,000 people in the US over the age of 18, and assuming that each of them gets $1000/month for 12 months, we have 200,000,000 * 1000 * 12 = 2.4 Trillion, which is similar to what we actually spent. The problem is, instead of uniformly distributing that 2.4 trillion among our citizens, we added complexity (and waste due to overhead) by giving money to special interests (airlines for example) and big businesses in various ways.

Email sent as well

Sorry for the dumb questions, I was just trying to understand the precise architecture and solution here.

So the "local application that generates static files" is the one used by employees of the restaurant when a customer makes an order? Or is that used just for maintenance purposes when changing formats of the orders customers can do. But what I was confused most about was what "polls for orders" meant in this context.

The other thing I was confused about was the generation of "static files for customer ordering". So the application generates these files, which are presumably an html form (and/or corresponding PHP script) and uploads them to the server. And the server's html static pages that are used to order are accessed either locally on the box itself or through another computer on the local network connection (since you mentioned that it can run even when internet is down). Is my understanding correct?

I actually agree with you on this.

Despite getting accepted to many top-tier universities (Berkeley, Yale, Rice), I chose to go to an in-state school with a generous scholarship so I could come out of school with very little loans. I sacrificed going to a really great school like Berkeley (and living in California!) so I would save money and not end up in so much debt.

While I fully think that debt is a nondesirable thing to have, and that we do not educate people about debt enough, I don't know if loan forgiveness is the answer. I have personally paid off a close friend's student loans and old medical bills, and guess what? Even after all that she was just as financially irresponsible as before.

As a related situation, I know a few people who come to me asking me for help with rent or medical bills. When I ask them, why don't you have any money, they say it's because their hours were cut, or something else. But when I step back and look at the whole picture, I realize that because they went on an expensive vacation, and went to the bars every other night, and spent lots of money on clothes, that's the real reason they didn't have money. So when they asked me to help pay their rent, they were really asking me to help finance their vacation.

In a similar way, if we (collectively, the taxpayers) pay for the students who can't afford the student loans, we're actually subsidizing whatever the people DID spend their money on, or their choice to go to more expensive schools when less expensive schools are available, perhaps at the cost of those who, like me, chose to save money by going to less expensive schools.