I don't know how to really accept the fact that America is becoming a dramatically more corrupt country at the population and political level. It reminds me of growing up in the third world where the line between cop & bandit was blurred.
The entire piece keeps telling you to ignore the people in question, their statements and their preferences. It wants to push this doomer narrative of left behind people, while ignoring that communities are putting these banks together & the government is actively supporting them.
I think mischaracterizing this as a sign of collapse (a word that I'd only use for the result being a permanent state of affairs), it does point towards a sort of extreme economic distress that's difficult to overstate.
this seems overly polemic. My parents live on a small farm and heat their home with firewood. My dad likes splitting wood, and it’s marginally cheaper since they own a plot of woodland. Although, they have a brand new heat pump they prefer to use their wood burning stove. It’s fairly common but in my experience it’s primarily a lifestyle choice not economic . People who chose to live out their also like the resiliency given their libertarian/prepper tendencies. it’s annoying because this entire piece is predicated on ignoring everything locals actually say.
I'm burning wood for primary heat, and I agree with the thrust of the article - despite its poor job of making the case with data or even anecdotes.
There is so much work fundamentally involved in handling firewood. It's much different to be burning wood when you have the resources to make handling it easier, or when you're doing it as a mere option for supplementary heat. For example, as I split (log splitter) or it gets delivered (from someone who owns a firewood processor), I stack it in IBC totes to sit around and season. I then move those with a tractor so they're right next to an outdoor wood boiler. So I basically touch each piece twice, with optionality for whether I am going to make a project of cutting down trees or just pay for it. Or I've got a few friends that get it all delivered, stack their own big wood piles, then move it to a smaller thing to carry it indoors, but only to supplement central heat which they keep lower.
Whereas when you're doing it out of necessity, and trying to conserve even then, there is just so much more human effort that gets used. It does make sense to view it in terms of societal collapse, or at the very least poverty. This fall, I saw a bunch of houses in denser areas - grapple loads delivered to tiny front yards, and they're out there making sense of it with just a chainsaw and hand tools. I presume they were going to burn it this winter, too. That doesn't seem like a good use of anyone's time, effort, or risk appetite.
A good litmus test: what kind of vehicles are people picking the wood from wood banks with? If there are a bunch of people loading their car trunks and whatnot every few days, that's not a good scene. If the same volunteers are delivering truckbeds (and stacking them) to needy older people who had burnt wood their entire life but are having trouble managing it now, that's less dire.
they rolled this out to NYC a month or two ago. They were airport shuttles with an initial price of $10 and will go to $25. It was dramatically more comfortable than taking the subway and then transferring to the air train and the normal price is honestly fairly competitive against the subway + air train (~$12).
Uber Shuttle leaves from Atlantic Terminal, which is also the home of the LIRR. It's a train that goes to the airport on a fixed schedule. More comfortable and reliable than the Subway for $2 more.
I have a place near Penn Station and take the LIRR to JFK almost religiously. But the most expensive part of the journey is the Uber to Penn. Having a shuttle that picks me up at my apartment and deposits me in Jamaica would be a solid pitch against the LIRR.
I had to get from JFK to midtown during peak hours. It was Airtrain ($8.50) + LIRR to Woodside ($11) + Subway 7 train to midtown ($2.90) = $22.40. (I didn’t know LIRR had city ticket, it would have been $16.40.
the extremely unpopular but logical next step in managing change would be to induce development by increasing property taxes. Basically compel people to move and sell their land to developers who build up the land.
So, what if it were you in that position? What if your income was reduced and now the Government increases the property tax so you can no longer afford to pay for it? And let's add in the Government has a large tax on capital gains, which will kick in if you sell that property, and now you can't afford a new property somewhere else?
1. I’m being descriptive not prescriptive. property taxes being used to drive urbanization and development is a standard urban planning practice and was used to be used in LA during they heyday of its growth.
2. Your issue with what I said seems very dependent on something you chose to “add in” — Why am I being asked to defend something I never said?
There's likely an element that's certainly cultural, or a biologically based differences, but it seems like there are some very straight forward explanations for this.
There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?).
There is also significant difficulty in even articulating these issues as its been broadly taboo to discuss biases that advantage women, such as a positive bias toward women in education[1]. That being said, the mere fact that this is now a publicly discussable issue seems to imply our standards for discussion are changing.
Two things to consider when thinking on your points:
On no initiatives to get straight men into HR, is there a great clamoring to get into the field of HR, or nursing (the other often cited example), do you perceive them as high prestige or high paying? You’re probably referencing subsidizing efforts to get into law, med school, finance, etc which are high paying and prestigious.
Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men. Which to your final point of difficulty of discussion, the structural biases are well documented but often derided when brought up in a discussion against complaints about the overt support provided to women.
We definitely need to address the issues about “the boys are not alright” but re-establishing old basis is not the way.
There are initiatives for women to get into things like firefighting and many trades that aren't super high paying jobs. They exist because these jobs are deemed to have 'too many men'. But the opposite is never a problem. An all female board of directors is lauded as being the best thing, while an all male one is considered exclusionary. All these messages are being received by young men.
Would the AAMN be allowed to offer scholarships for men to enter nursing school where only men are eligible for the award in the same way such awards can be made women-only for male-dominated fields?
> Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men.
I don't see much effort to balance scales in areas where women have had much greater assistance and support available for an extremely long time while men have had little if anything. Parental rights, domestic violence, criminal justice, and physical and mental health, etc.
In many of these areas the "old basis" was mainly favoring women and there's been little effort to change that situation.
As a gay man, why specify straight men? It just shows your subconscious thought of gay man = femmy = hr. Most gay men are just average dudes and you'd never be able to tell, no matter how many overly dramatic portrayals of gay dudes there are on TV.
But primarily, I've not seen a single diversity initiative for gay people in my life. Based on skin colour, sure, for women, always. But not once have I seen anything prompting or requiring hiring of gay employees ever.
> As a gay man, why specify straight men? It just shows your subconscious thought of gay man = femmy = hr.
I can't say if it was intended that way, but that's not how I read that comment.
I took it to mean that there's a popular cultural attitude that straight men (and more specifically straight white men) are "problematic" and undesirable generally, while gay men are considered different enough from straight men that they're often given a pass in certain circles. In my experience, how many "diversity points" being gay earns you vs the deduction you suffer for being born a man varies widely from setting to setting. It's also been my experience that being gay doesn't carry the same weight in those same crowds that it did decades ago.
I have seen workplaces that promote hiring for diversity which explicitly included LGBT folk as well as racial minorities. Depending on where you live these types of employers may be much harder to find, but a good place to start might be sites like this:
> Most gay men are just average dudes and you'd never be able to tell, no matter how many overly dramatic portrayals of gay dudes there are on TV.
Let's not be obtuse. You're acting as if most gay men are completely straight coded in society. That's just not even remotely true. Most gay men I know are "obviously" gay to straight women because straight women find most straight men to be a threat. Code switching like that is very common within the gay community when present around women. Very much being more flamboyant than they would otherwise as to make women feel more safe and allied with them.
I have dozens of gay male friends (yes, dozens) and I have rarely ever met a man and thought, "wow, he's gay? I never imagined! Seemed straight to me!" It happens but it's very uncommon.
> straight women find most straight men to be a threat
What do you mean by this?
I have many female connections and don't think any of them perceive me as a "threat".. my wife never indicated this either, yet I'm clearly heterosexual.
I don't think acting civil with the opposite gender has anything to do with one's sexual orientation.
What you're seeing is called confirmation bias. That most of your gay male friends are flamboyant says more about the company you keep around (Which is great btw, and not a judgement call) than all the other gay and bi guys just going about their day, unnoticed.
Whenever I've tried to discuss this in cases of obvious tokenism and what I call "reverse discrimination" (which is when minority groups are particularly favored for their PR value), my language has always seemed to appear charged with privilege or something which causes people to attack me for it. I absolutely do not mean to come off that way though.
Someone once asked something relating to a literal "diversity quota" that they had to specifically hire only minorities in order to meet, and I was removed from that entire community for raising concerns of preferential treatment. I believe my exact words were "isn't that just discrimination in the other direction?"
So I think, this is still very much taboo? Either that, or I just suck at communicating. (Which is fair.)
The issue with "diversity quota" is that it only target "visible" diversity. But I guarantee if you want your SV tech startup to be really diverse, your next hire should be the white man from Pocahantas conuty, WV rather than the black man from Mill Valley, CA [0].
Anyway, i'm largely against quotas, i'd rather have blind resume and have hiring stat done on really big companies to prevent them from gaming too much. If you want to hire diversity for diversity sake (which in tech is a good thing, you want multiple point of view), hire outside of your zone of control, seek people who won't send you a resume.
[0] I've been twice in the US, and visited both places, i guarantee the culture is extremely different, although the National Park crowd is the same (i.e: extremely cool and interesting) in both place.
Diversity hiring has the specific goal of equalizing the mix a little bit, which requires hiring particular people. Same as education quotas which aim to bring in more students from unprivileged backgrounds, an attempt to correct historical discrimination over generations.
Your question demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of this, which could be obtained in half an hour of reading; from this perspective being kicked out of the room is not an unexpected response.
I do strongly agree with the principle that any discrimination is still discrimination, but reality is more nuanced than that.
Agreed, and I think a key thing to note here is that discrimination against marginalized groups/minorities has historically run much deeper than hiring strategies, and so hiring strategies themselves provide a pretty superficial picture of how close we are to "solving" inequality.
It's not always this dramatic, but sometimes you can chalk up the difference between two people's opportunities in life (at least partly) to the fact that Person A's great-great-grandparents had a thriving family business, and each generation was able to provide a safety net for the next, versus Person B's great-great-grandparents who weren't allowed to own property. There are other factors, obviously, but advantages or disadvantages can accrue over time like compound interest. If Person B gets a good job, that's beneficial for them, but it might be exponentially more beneficial for their own great-great-grandchildren down the line—it just takes a while to see that change!
So my impression is this: in a vacuum, if everyone hired only minorities, then non-minorities would be at a disadvantage, instead of minorities being at a disadvantage. Your argument seems to be that since there is still so much discrimination against minorities, some companies only hiring minorities serves to make the job market as a whole more fair for them, by "balancing out more" against those who only hire non-minorities. If those companies "only" treated everyone equally, then everyone else only hiring non-minorities would have even more of an impact, and the job market would be even more unfair for those minorities. Do I understand you correctly?
(Also: sorry for constantly using the term minorities/non-minorities. I don't have a better word to use here. I know talking about things this way could be seen as being part of the problem.)
You don't suck at communicating. The people who want to discriminate against you want to do it badly and don't care what you think about it. They don't believe in a colorblind society and equal treatment under the law, they believe in getting what they can get at your expense while crying victim. I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice to people, because some of them might legitimately feel disadvantaged by their minority status. But keep in mind that some of them know exactly what they're doing to abuse our sympathy.
Same with nursing. Of course there is discrimination against men, but there are so few that it's mostly based on other things (like which island you're from).
In Poland it is opposite. Public Health Service raised salaries for nurses, since average age of nurses was around 54 years old. This is seriously demanding job, so I assume not a lot of people were willing to take it. But when salaries were raised more men appeared.
It's a very demanding job, physically and emotionally, as well as, specialized training and liability since you literally have people's lives in your hands. You have to deal with people at their worst. Pay is quite high, and it's challenging to get into a nursing school program, but still only ~10-12% male (and about 1/3-1/2 are gay). Social dynamics are really different in nursing from school, to work, to supervision and management.
> There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?).
Or we might no know of the efforts that is made to recruit more men for these female fields because most people on this site work in tech which is male dominated?
In education for example the lack of male teachers has been seen as a problem for years. Teaching here is a well paid job but men here don't want to do it, despite there being active measures to recruit more men for this profession. It's basically the opposite of tech.
My take is for young women there are a bunch of real economic and social benefits to women that go to college and so they do.
The oldest of them is you go to college to meet men. It's the old 19th century reason. Send your daughter to college and next thing you know she's engaged to her roommates older brother a son of a wealthy industrialist.
Don't discount four years of college is four years of not being under anyones thumb.
College educated women have high social status. And job opportunities that don't involve gross low end work normally done by women.
Maybe it's just because I have to work with the HR department a lot, but I know plenty of straight guys in HR. HR attracts gregarious people, sexual orientation doesn't play much of a role.
How? If you enter into a contract with them, it has to be litigated in their tribal court. Who do you think is going to win? The chief sits on the court as the judge and jury.
> Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
Tribes are sovereign under U.S. law. In most cases when you sign a contract with a tribe (or under tribal law), the tribe is free to modify it ex post facto.
Looks like they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties.
> they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties
No, the New World figured out empires, exploitation and abrogration of treaty obligations all on its own. The Maya are notorious. But there is a reason even e.g. the Navajo call the ancestral Puebloans the Anasazi [1].
The USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times. Anyone who signs an agreement with the USA should really expect at most 3-4 years of validity, depending where in the election cycle it was signed.
> USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times
Uh, not really. We basically have a pattern of countries with excess power-projection capabilities going on a rampage as soon as they can. Russia in Ukraine (and Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Europe). China in Tibet and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and entire UNCLOS treaty system and now Taiwan. Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the region; same for Iran and Israel.
The U.S. was sort of with Europe for a few years on trying to hold the rules-based international order together. Now we're jumping into the international-law-doesn't-matter pool.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is a massive war crime and against international law (specifically, it's against the international law of aggression, the specific one for which the Nazi leadership were hanged). But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade - Russia last promised in a treaty not to do this in the 1990s, when Ukraine agreed to renounce the nuclear weapons the USSR kept there. So it's *not great", to put it extrmelet mildly, but at least that treaty lasted for 20-30 years.
In contrast, look at the Iran nuclear deal. That went into effect in 2016, and the US unilaterally withdrew from it and reinstated sanctions in 2018, not even two years later (they claimed some breach, but no other party to the treaty agreed that the breach existed, and the EU even tried to block the US sanctions to try to keep the deal going).
Or look at the Paris climate accord, which the US has signed twice and withdrew from twice in the last few years.
Or the USMCA agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, which the USA has violated in 2025 by seeking to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
And these are just some of the bigger, better known ones, with the clearest terms. Even Trump's actions on Ukraine right now are a clear breach of some less formal deals made by the previous administration a few years ago, when they were urging Ukraine not to seek a quick peace treaty with Russia - but it's less clear there what the deals were and to what extent they've been breached.
Whenever you'll look at a US deal, at least in the past few decades, you'll have a better than 50% chance it was broken by the USA within at most a decade.
Again, this is separate from the new era of ignoring international law by many powerful countries, and it coexists with the times when the USA was one of the biggest proponents of the rule of international law.
> But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade
I don't think that's true. In fact, I think in the last decade (or, 11 years), the russians have done this ~25 times.
A standard russian tactic appears to be to ask the enemy to lay down their weapons, and then when the soldiers comply, the russians shoot them in the face anyway.
Those are slightly different things than treaties (as the articles you quote show, many of those ceasefires were unilaterally declared by Russia, not the result of an agreement between the two parties). Still, I don't mean in any way to praise Russia here, or even to claim that the USA is just as bad as Russia on this.
As bad as many of the US unilateral cancelations of treaties I mentioned are, they do not in any way compare to the horrifying aggression that Russia is showing in Ukraine, both at the basic level of invading a neighbor to steal their land, and in the details of how they are pursuing this illegitimate goal. Putin and his general are war criminals to a degree that few others in the last decade could be described (Netanyahu and Assad probably being the main "competitors", and Assad was only able to do what he did with Putin's help).
you can expect a country that is controlled by its people voting to be a bit schizo to some degree when it comes to treaties. surely, you cannot expect something that is meant to have large effects on domestic policy like the Paris climate accord to be stable in the US when there is a lot of difference of opinion domestically over it.
Of course you can. If a country commits to signing an international treaty, the normal expectation should be that it considers itself bound by that treaty, for some time at least. A normal president can't just go and overrule the previous president's words unilaterally, for the very simple reason that I illustrated: it makes it impossible to take anything the country signs seriously. Why would anyone accept a compromise deal with Trump on anything that has repercussions beyond 2028 knowing that the next president will just ignore it?
I should note that, on this particular ground, I don't necessarily blame Trump as the one who backed out of the deals. It's very much possible that the blame should rest on Obama for signing a deal he knew had insufficient support in his country and wouldn't be followed through by his successors. If he were an honest man, he wouldn't have signed the deal in this case, even if he believed (as I do) that the deal is critically important for the future of the world. Falsely committing to do the right thing is no less dishonest than going back on a word you gave.
Treaties specifically have to be approved by Congress and have approximately the same force of law and durability as the Constitution. Lately we mostly do "executive agreements" instead, which do not require Congressional approval and can pretty much be ignored on a whim by the next president. We could go back to treaties but considering Congress has given up so much of their responsibility to executive agencies because they can't even pass laws, it seems unlikely.
I couldn't find details on any such agreement, I'd be curious to see it. The only treaty signed between the two countries from that period I could find was the leasing to Russia of the Sevastopol naval base in exchange for preferential gas prices to Ukraine.
Still, to be very clear, I don't mean in any way to claim that Russia has any justification whatsoever for invading Ukraine and stealing their land, with or without some treaty.
Not really, unless there is some higher jurisdiction that can assert power over both parties. Maybe america can do that to the tribal nations, but no one wants go near that quagmire, unless there were huge issues at stake like the survival of the country or something of that magnitude.
Change the euphemism from government to private insurance to satisfy capitalism gods and keep their giant foot from squishing us… still “on the books” as a co-mingled pool of funds to shift around to solve problems.
Aw …sad… other people exist and need resources too. Not just about your first world skin suit playing temp host to a run of the mill electromagnetic field effect.
People choose where they live, and should bear the cost relative to the amount of risk they chose to take.
Government funding is not a magical blanket that somehow makes it moral to take from someone who made good decisions and give to another who made poor ones.
I get that we're on a tech forum but the vast, vast majority of people in this country don't have the financial ability to just move wherever they want. I'm not saying that means that Floridians shouldn't worry about this, but this bootstraps narrative is ridiculous. Everyone here makes substantially more money than the average Joe.
Agreed in general, but is it reasonable to say to people living in multi-million dollar houses on some of the world's most coveted real estate that they are should assume the risks of it? Or move?
The dutch aren't insured against a dike breaking (Which has its own history).
But the dikes have been collectively maintained through laws and regulation from a local semi-democratic system for 800 years (separate from government). It was a necessity as 1 delinquent could screw up everything.
The point is that the costs (to build the dikes) are fully internalized by the people who live there, rather than being cross-subsidized by people far away.
