If you have to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer.
Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell.
Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills from the internet to improve their lot, and perhaps some will. I think most people on HN (especially me) are so insulated from the reality of working poverty that we just look for technical solutions. I wish there were some.
> to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer
Your statement sounds like what would be typically written in an attention grabbing first paragraph of a news article in order to draw people in w/o providing any context as far as how common all or even most of those items you listed even exist. It is not realistic in any way at scale common sense says that. You are highlighting almost certainly an outlier not what is typical to make your point.
Let's take a look in particular into 'suffering just so your family isn't hungry'.
- Riding a bus for an hour in itself isn't suffering.
- Four hour shift isn't suffering
- Stressful minimum wage job? Any job can be stressful having a job pay more does not make it less stressful.
- Manager is abusive. Abusive? This sounds like some characterization for impact to make a point. How realistic is it that the vast majority of jobs have people who are 'abusive' managers (as opposed to a percentage of them let's call it 10% arbitrarily).
- Workplace is unsafe? Where? In the US? You think 'all' or 'most' workplaces are unsafe? Or there are perhaps a percentage that are unsafe?
- Your mental health may suffer. Sure ok that one is fine. But maybe you are in the position that you are in the first place because of your mental health.
Due to how many North American cities are designed with urban sprawl and separation of living areas (suburbs) and productive areas (industrial/office zoning laws) it should actually be the norm to have a lengthy commute to work.
Hell, I live in a suburb with quite good public transport and it would take me almost 30 minutes to go to the grocery store by bus.
When I was a teenager and had no car, it took me about an hour to get to my minimum wage job by bus due to transfers. Once I could afford a car (because I lived with mum and dad and could save) that commute got cut to 20 minutes.
You're right, we probably should have said longer, maybe an hour and a half. I definitely know people that commute a long time for low wages. Or did. They're in better places, now.
One of them used to stay really late at night at a Denny's because the buses didn't run when he needed to get to work, so he would spend the night (basically) at a Denny's so he was at work on time.
In my experience, they are often young and at the beginning of their career. They are still medical doctors, not to take anything away from them, but I mostly rely on them for referrals to specialists as needed.
One Medical removes some friction from the overall system, which as a non-American I find incredibly frustrating.
Fwiw some studies show that young doctors have better outcomes. Maybe because they have been to medical school more recently, when evidence based techniques were taught with more rigor. E.g. https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2286. Now this study only concerns hospitalists, and it's just one study, so it shouldn't make you avoid older doctors necessarily. But definitely what there is no data for is a bias against younger doctors.
It isn't perfect, but the Mighty (bemighty.com) is basically an iPod Shuffle that you can download Spotify offline playlists to. It filled that niche for me.
At first I thought book was in Slovenian or something, until I realized there was some DOM level decryption happening. I simultaneously wanted to open it up to figure out how it worked and close the page because it was so broken and counter to the supposedly simple idea of displaying words on a page that it infuriated me.
I hope the book is good, but I guess I'll never know.
They have something like a 5-minute per-24h free preview of the entire book. It confused me too, the first time I came back to a tab I’d left open for a book I wanted to check out. Ultimately I wasn’t able to get a good idea of the book quality, so I never purchased a book from them, but maybe it works for some people.
Why is it infuriating? It gives you a preview before you have to purchase the book. What's wrong with that? If anything, it's better than some publishers.
What do you mean you'll never know? Your parent comment said it was pretty good. A single data point is not authoritative, but it shows a pretty solid trend toward "pretty good."
You already know the book is pretty good, you just wanted to complain about DRM, I suspect. I hope that's not the case.
A single data point is not authoritative, but my comment shows a pretty solid trend toward "pretty good." I expect you'll run out to go find some rotten carrots to eat now?
It's funny that you think that reading a book of unknown quality and eating a rotten carrot, which is guaranteed to be rotten, are comfortable in any way whatsoever.
I hear this line of thinking a lot, and I still don't understand why Uber would be the one to rake in all the self-driving cash. What do they have that a new self-driving debt-free startup won't have?
The self-driving tech, presumably, and a ready-made userbase, brand, and presence across the globe. They could then seamlessly have both self-driving and human-driving delivery/transportation.
I was in the neighborhood the weekend it opened and strolled through. Thing that struck me was that there was no seating almost anywhere. People were sitting on the floor and it felt like a weird refugee area.
There's no seating because you're not meant to sit. A lot of public space these days is designed to be hostile for that use, so that undesirables like the homeless don't linger, but in the process it becomes hostile to everybody.
A lot of public-facing plazas are meant to be ornamental or monumental and nothing more, which is quite sad.
He literally filmed what people actually did in public spaces, and came up with great guidelines to make them enjoyable.
Architects study this is school. As you say, whenever it isn't implemented, it is because they specifically chose not to, not because they don't know better.
And the parks will give you a ticket if you sit on a bench after sunset. I've gotten them for taking a rest on the way to walking between work and my parking garage.
There's absolutely no entertainment there whatsoever. No movie theater, no play-centers for your kids to play, no public seating... and you need a ticket to walk around the structures. What drunk architect designed this place?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3JeYfBTcY