The Republican and Democrat parties are fundamentally coalitions though.
We pretend they represent some sort of Left vs Right split, but really that's a post facto justification or narrative around an arbitrary coalition of sub-factions.
There are a bunch of largely unrelated issues that people care about- immigration, cost of living, abortion, gun rights, crime/policing, foreign policy and various "culture war" issues around race, sexuality, religion.
There is really no reason we group them together as we do. There could be a parallel universe where a liberal "unborn rights movement" grew out of the prior women's rights, black rights, LGBT rights etc and saw abortion as an exploitation of the most vulnerable human rights and said they deserved protection.
There could be a parallel universe where pro-business, pro-market based solution conservatives want completely open borders to allow workers to freely move to work or start businesses where they want.
The parties themselves change over time too. The populist Trump/MAGA faction that has taken over the Republican party has little in common with the "Religious Right" Christian faction or the neo-conservative factions that were influential to the Republicans in the 90s and 2000s.
"Facebook" is a corporate entity that does not have the ability to "care about" anything.
Employees, board members, shareholders, customers, suppliers and users have the ability to care about things and to influence the actions of the collective. Presumably most of those people care about the same things today they cared about yesterday.
But we're about to have a federal government which is openly corrupt, vindictive and indifferent to the law. People who find themselves as targets of the new regime face existential threats if they don't show fealty, deflect blame or find some other way to survive. Giving a million dollars to inauguration and putting one of the cronies on the 13-person board is probably a rational response to the threats.
Controversial stance, but... almost any big company, as long as you don't care too much about promotions or the social hierarchy of your coworkers.
Get a $150k job as a senior software engineer, show up to meetings, do good-enough work and be polite and friendly to your coworkers and you'll basically be fine.
At performance review time you'll get the low-performer raise of 3% instead of the high-performer raise of 4%, but your hourly wage comes out ahead. Maybe you'll be a little more likely to get laid off in lean times, but those are sufficiently arbitrary that you could work nights and weekends and still get laid off.
Plenty of people have lived happy, well-rounded lives putting their energy into their families, hobbies and self-fulfillment while coasting through their career as a lower-than-average-performer in a series of 1-4 year stints at different companies.
> show up to meetings, do good-enough work and be polite and friendly to your coworkers...as a lower-than-average-performer
I'd argue that this shouldn't be considered 'lower than average' performance. It should be considered average. And based on some companies I've been at, that should probably be considered above-average.
I know that's often not the case by managers and executives (hell I just saw an article about a CEO that is running an AI startup and tells people in interviews that they're expected to work 84 hour weeks[1]), but employees should really push back and insist that this should not be considered 'below average' performance.
You are right, but Microsoft (a small local site of a few years ago) disagreed- "meet expectations", which in my eyes is close enough to average if the expectations were set correctly, was consistently treated as bad or lower than average.
There are tons of common foods and food additives that are known to interact with medications. Grapefruit juice for instance has a large and diverse set of drug interactions, some potentially very dangerous: https://www.drugs.com/article/grapefruit-drug-interactions.h... but that doesn't mean it's illegal to sell or consume.
If you're intentionally researching and developing an additive that weakens the effect of a prescription medication and you're not telling people the. You're effectively poisoning them.
> Before the pandemic, she says, she might have done two disability tax credit forms; last year, she did twenty
Did Covid cause massive disability? Did legislation change to make claiming a disability easier or more lucrative? Are people claiming disability in response to inability to get jobs that meet their expectations?
It's not the point of the article, but a 10x increase in requests for "disability tax credit forms" seems like a very significant sign of something deeply concerning.
I wonder how many people seeking disability are more accurately described as disenfranchised. If people are looking at bleak prospects of low-paid jobs with limited possibilities for advancement, alongside soaring housing and other costs, how many people with previously manageable impairments are throwing in the towel and using a disability designation to escape the rat race.
Yes, Covid did cause massive disability. The colloquial term for it is Long Covid. I know at least three people suffering from it —- along a spectrum from slight to severe impairment of daily functioning.
> Covid did cause massive disability. The colloquial term for it is Long Covid
I know a previously-healthy guy who got an early variant that went for his pancreas. He now has Type 1 diabetes, a condition one is normally born with and for which there is no cure, just chronic, expensive and time-consuming treatment.
> He now has Type 1 diabetes, a condition one is normally born with
Type 1 Diabetes isn't something someone is born with. Rather, it's something that you generally get when young (and, in fact, it used to be called Juvenile Diabetes, vs Adult Onset, which is what Type 2 used to be called), but it can happen later in line, all the way into the 20s (or later, I believe).
There is a genetic component, but it's also completely possible to get it with no family history.
Didn't realise it was autoimmune. Nevertheless, in his case it was directly caused by Covid attacking the pancreas. That said, he got it in 2020. The virus got milder over successive generations. (Intrinsically and due to broader vaccination and antiviral administration.)
There's actually a couple different "types" of Type 1 Diabetes. For example, you can get it during pregnancy (Gestational Diabetes), etc. So it doesn't surprise me that it's possible to get it from Covid. I seem to recall someone getting it from an injury that damaged the Pancreas enough to prevent it from generating insulin. I don't know if that still "counts" as Type 1; but it certainly has the same effects.
Even for the first person described in the story, her search for a doctor is not primarily described a search for medical care, but a search for someone who can create a paper trail to ensure her child's eligibility for benefits.
The HN crowd is far left but they would never admit it.
Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections.
There was a time in America where the notion of an income tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your home were considered far-left authoritarian and unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property, the government surveilling our communications and finances, government oversight and permission required for all activities.
Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and people's notions of what those terms mean is variable. But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.
In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal progressives "won" and became the center and the establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist today.
Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I can think of where America has stayed the same or moved right since WWII.
The US is the most right-leaning country out of the first world.
> but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property
Many of these originating from the right. Because the right is not, and has never been, a party of small government. They want big government, just their big government. That has meant historically enforcing slavery, then segregation, suppressing women's rights, suppressing abortion, dictating what you can do in the bedroom, and on and on and on. These are all conservative policy - and all HUGE government.
> it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously
Yes, this is called the progression of time. This is why people who are unable to change their mind over time end up falling behind and sounding crazy.
Have you ever asked an old dude about how they feel about black people? Whoa! Clearly they grew up in a different time. Some let that shit go like they should, some don't. Those that don't are destined to be left to the past.
Just a few decades ago a slight right winger might be anti-integration. Slight. A far right-winger would be lynching people in their neighborhood. So you're correct - we've moved past that.
And, in 40 years, if I personally don't change my beliefs, I will also sound crazy. To conservatives that's scary or something. To me, that's how the world works. I say either adapt or be relegated to the insane.
I think you have it backwards. Open borders are a right-wing goal. See Bernie Sanders comments on the subject circa 2015. How the Koch brothers want open borders to weaken labors leverage.
The wealthy and powerful don't benefit from citizenship. When you have wealth you can just pay for what you need or want. It's the common person who needs the benefits and protections that come from citizenship.
You're on the right path, pointing out how counter-culture liberals won but they are in fact right-wing. They LARP as liberals/leftists.
The best thing was that the internet was made by and for smart people.
It was an incredibly unique dynamic- access to incredibly diverse people from all over the world, but simultaneously tilted towards the intellectually curious and tech-savvy. It was maybe a little bit like the vibe of being on a college campus, even if you were talking about sports or the weather, the default level of knowledge, intelligence, openness and curiosity were far higher than the default in "real life".
There was this unique culture of "the internet" as a place separate from "the real world" that was heavily skewed by the demographics. It was a world where nerds were 50% of the population instead of 1%.
In my biochemistry class at MIT during undergrad, the professor showed during the section on the krebs cycle that the pop-culture concept of "ketogenic diet" is almost never actually doing what people believe.
To force your body into a purely ketone metabolism, you'd need to restrict not just carbohydrates but also protein. If a person is eating a high-fat, high-protein diet, their body will make glucose/glycogen from that.
Not to say there isn't value in a low-sugar diet. There's a whole cascade of other things happening metabolically in response to blood sugar. Just that the notion of "burning ketones instead of glucose" is a medical myth, like "depression is because you have too little serotonin in your brain".
>To force your body into a purely ketone metabolism, you'd need to restrict not just carbohydrates but also protein. If a person is eating a high-fat, high-protein diet, their body will make glucose/glycogen from that.
That is expected and fine. It wont make glucose/glycogen in the same way/manner it would do from carbs though, and it's not really a problem for getting into ketosis and staying there (as shown by ketone measurements).
That professor was making a pedantic argument it seems.
Ironically, "building more housing" still solves this problem.
The corporations are buying and renting because it makes business sense. If we just keep building houses, the market values for rents and home prices will reach an inflection point. Investment companies aren't going to keep buying houses if they have a high vacancy on existing stock, they're going to start selling houses or lowering rent.
The fundamental problem is "too little supply". Regulating the demand side is at best a bandaid. The solution is to change regulations to allow faster, cheaper, easier building until the equilibrium market price of housing is something reasonable.
>> Ironically, "building more housing" still solves this problem.
Raising interest rates may help too. How many of those purchases are financed? I'm guessing a lot. The commercial side got screwed when they needed to refinance underperforming properties at higher interest rates.
As long as cheaper lines of credit (or straight-up massive amounts of cash on hand) remain more available to RE corporations than regular people looking for their first home then no, building more housing will never solve the problem.
There are structural problems with the demand side that also need addressing.
> building more housing will never solve the problem.
It only seems that way because in many popular metros around the country, demand has far outstripped supply for decades.
The problem is "solved" in areas that aren't as popular, with zero regulation on who's allowed to purchase homes; ordinary people can buy ordinary homes on ordinary incomes. But aspirational young people don't tend to move to such areas.
Why has this been the case in every area in our country? Because we have a policy at the national level that encourages speculation and hoarding. The problem is not just supply, we have a national aversion to shaping demand.
> The problem is "solved" in areas that aren't as popular,
The problem is absolutely not solved, in any place in our country[1]. You used to be able to maintain a minimum standard of living on a single wage earner's salary. That is not the case, literally anywhere in this nation any more.
SpaceX and numerous other companies were able to draw in billions of dollars of funding for R&D to chase after US Government contracts that could only be won by proving massive technological feats (reusable rockets, etc).
Hypothetically, it seems we could do something similar for drugs. Instead of "If you make a medicine that works, you get a monopoly to sell it for X years" it could just be "If you make a medicine that works, you get a check for $X, and then the drug is immediately generic".
The regulations are different. The FDA only gets in trouble if they approve a drug that turns out to be harmful, not if they fail to approve (or delay approving) a beneficial drug. On net, the FDA has caused far more harm than they’ve prevented. eg: Banning the importation of infant formula from the EU, or delaying the approval of new beta blockers by a decade.
We pretend they represent some sort of Left vs Right split, but really that's a post facto justification or narrative around an arbitrary coalition of sub-factions.
There are a bunch of largely unrelated issues that people care about- immigration, cost of living, abortion, gun rights, crime/policing, foreign policy and various "culture war" issues around race, sexuality, religion.
There is really no reason we group them together as we do. There could be a parallel universe where a liberal "unborn rights movement" grew out of the prior women's rights, black rights, LGBT rights etc and saw abortion as an exploitation of the most vulnerable human rights and said they deserved protection.
There could be a parallel universe where pro-business, pro-market based solution conservatives want completely open borders to allow workers to freely move to work or start businesses where they want.
The parties themselves change over time too. The populist Trump/MAGA faction that has taken over the Republican party has little in common with the "Religious Right" Christian faction or the neo-conservative factions that were influential to the Republicans in the 90s and 2000s.
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