I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:
1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.
2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.
3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.
You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.
It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.
It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey about the past here. A small educated set was different in the past but probably the bulk of the population has always done something like this - now you can hear them online easier.
Not as tuned for engagement as now, but we had to have yellow journalism laws for a reason too. There's always been lots of propaganda and manipulation and bad actors in journalism.
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
> Compounding these issues is the omnipresence of cameras and social media, which has made privacy more precarious.
Buried in an article about shifts in attitudes towards nudity and porn is the actual cause. As a child of the 70s I've never given nudity in the locker rooms a second thought but now, no thank you. For my daughter? Out of the question.
I'll bring up the third rail. I am, despite all my ultra-liberal blue sensibilities, uncomfortable with individuals with XY chromosomes in my locker room. I can put in a bunch of qualifiers - if they're on hormones, if they're post op, if there's really no physical difference then I'm not concerned but there is no guarantee of course. If I look over at the locker next to me and see a penis, I'm out.
This doesn't excuse the engineer as "just obeying orders". They are making a tradeoff between being ethical and being unemployed/unemployable, which understandably can be a very hard decision, but it's still their decision and they aren't guilt-free if something happens.
If you are talking about voting in the US than you haven't been following all the efforts to manipulate voting in the US. Turns out the party in power has all they tools they need to make sure that the people who don't like them can't vote.
I read an article about a similar WWII woman's service and more than anything these women's jobs were to be warm and friendly to a bunch of young scared solders who far from home and wondering if they'd make it back.
So they'd smile and they'd flirt and they'd charm and they'd dance and maybe the boys would feel less afraid or less homesick and maybe they'd have something to look forward to.
I'd bet just that was enough for some appreciative solders to give her a pin, if only to remember them by.
The majority probably didn't want to secede prior to the civil war. Fortunately for those who did want to secede, a massive proportion of the population didn't have the right to vote.
>South Carolina became the first state to formally secede in December 1860
>At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War.
I mean, the whole reason for the secession was the fear that at some indefinite point in the future they might be prevented from keeping a large portion (~30%) of the population in chattel slavery, so, yeah, there was a substantial disenfranchised portion of the population who probably wouldn’t have been on board with the cause of secession were they consulted on the matter.
This sort of revisionist history helps nobody. It wasn't a "might" it was an "all but certainly". The election of Lincoln was kind of the nail in the coffin for slavery because it meant that the anti slavery interests would at least be able to do something that ended slavery if not immediately then at some point in the future via the votes from the new free states being incorporated from the territories.
Now, it would've been a lot nicer if they didn't start a war over it, but slavery was done for one way or another and everyone knew it.
> The election of Lincoln was kind of the nail in the coffin for slavery because it meant that the anti slavery interests would at least be able to do something that ended slavery if not immediately then at some point in the future via the votes from the new free states being incorporated from the territories.
I mean, in an alternate universe where the modern cloture rule existed and somehow at least one extra free state was admitted while the South was not paying attention to block it, sure, that’s almost plausible, but...
You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?
They progressively outlawed slavery over the course of 1870 through 1890 without a civil war. The US probably could've done just about the same over a shorter period (because the US was richer and could have paid its way through a lot of the opposition faced in Brazil).
Lincoln favored projects of emancipation with compensation to the slaveholders. In a letter of March 14, 1862, he writes that the paying off all claims in Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri, at $400 per head (his term, not mine) would cost less than the expense incurred in eighty-seven days of war. The project went forward only in the District of Columbia.
I'm intrigued by the premise - I have my own large burden of health care costs and my own suspicions about where it is going - but does anyone else find their charts unreadable? I'm trying to parse the first one and I keep trying to put the pieces together. "Health care services" is 60 out of 101bn ... excess profits?
The second one I can hardly start on, "health care services" is a medium circle ( circle size = combined market capitalization ) with the second highest "Aggregate return on invested capital" and in the middle of "median weighted-average cost of capital".
I know its called "the economist" but they usually make their articles readable by people without a econ degree. If I had a suspicious mind ( I do ) I'd think this was deliberate obfuscation.
Also "health care services ... such as hospitals and the system’s true money-makers: insurers, pharmacy-benefit managers and other middlemen taking advantage of its opacity"
That is a lot of different interests bundled together. How can they say insurers are the true money makers when they are not even broken out?
Looking for The Cause of autism and The Cure for autism is exactly as absurd as looking for The Cause of cancer and The Cure for cancer. I think most people understand that there are many causes of cancer and many treatments that cover a range of different use cases.
The whole concept of a cause and cure is really damaging to the autistic community and just flying in the face of any sort of intelligent diagnosis and treatment.
1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.
2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.
3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.
You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.
It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.
It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
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