It’s a good book. I would argue that although he had a hard go of it, and long days, his life was much more fulfilling than 99% of the lives that people live these days; probably more fulfilling than the lives of the people that lived during his time as well. There’s a reason people love escapism.
Thomas Paine posited that if a man, unencumbered by society, could meet his basic needs (food, shelter, etc) in x hours of work per day, then society owed that same person the same basic standards of life for working that same x hours per day. Where I’m from, the Native Americans had to work about 2 hours a day to meet their needs, and so became really great artisans with their “free” time.
Closer to present, my parents were able to buy a comfortable suburban home while working relatively low paying government jobs. That includes my mom taking off approx 6 years to take care of my sister and I until we started elementary school.
When Europeans first came to America, there were schools of cod off the coast that you could literally dangle an empty hook into the water and catch fish. Passenger Pigeons darkend the sky for days on end with their migrations, and the thundering of huge buffalo herds could be heard and seen throughout a good portion of the continent.
[Life expectancy] fell to 77 in 2020 and dropped further, to just over 76, in 2021. That’s the largest decrease over a two-year span since the 1920s. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835
Sure it’s not all bad. But it’s far, far from all good as well. Sometimes bitching is just the sign of an unhappy person, but often there are some real truths behind the complaints.
When I was a kid, I got pissed at my dad for something and reset all the stations, thinking it would throw him for a loop. He noticed what I had done almost immediately, fixed them all in about 5-10 seconds and looked at me like I was stupid.
When I was a union rep there would be people that would bitch about the $70 bucks a month or whatever the dues were. I would explain that without the union their pay would be far, far less (not even bringing up the benefits of work hours, vacation days and whatnot). Like the “all taxes are theft” morons, the words often fell on deaf and willfully ignorant ears.
I need to emigrate.
Are you talking about the same book?
It was fun to spell aloud when I was 7.
We, at least in the US, are living in a “post factual” world. So this makes perfect sense. Like when my kid was small and everytime he thought he “lost” at something he would declare it Opposite Day. Fuck it, why not? M$ being the most open OS makes no sense, so it makes total sense. War is Peacetm
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” - Dementia Felon trump
I guess it’s OK what he said because, hey, they aren’t all bad…
They are also on here instead of reddit, so they are really in much more rarefied air.
Thanks for explaining to dude. It’s so frustrating talking about anything with politics here in the US. A big part of that is we don’t have shared definitions of what terms mean. That’s not even taking account of the just pure, willful ignorance of a good percentage of the population.
I think Liberals kept him off the ticket.
I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but I just bought the biggest 5400rpm HDD that was in my price range when I set up. Might notice the slower speed when doing a big data dump, but for streaming purposes you can run many 4k streams concurrently and the bottleneck would probably be your network speed before you hit a drive read bottleneck.
Just search for “kneeling pad” or “gardening knee pad” and you’ll find a bunch of pretty durable options for around $10. Or, hell, just get a pair of skateboarding knee pads. You might not be the pinnacle of fashion, but your knees will be well protected.
Yeah, that’s fair. US mindset, I’m just still processing our shitshow.
Theoretically, sure. Pragmatically, we just elected a fascist insurrectionist, and it’s not going to happen in the near future.
Clinton left a booming economy and projections to reduce, if not eliminate, the national debt in 10 years. Then came another Bush. Bush left a shitty economy for Obama, through bullshit tax breaks for the rich during a time of bullshit military spending among other dumb actions. Obama fixed things. trump inherited a booming economy from Obama, and slowly (maybe quickly) ruined it through gross incompetence. Biden inherited a shit economy and inflation from that moron, trump. After dealing with fallout from stupid trump policies (that’s being generous), Biden managed to turn things around and the economy was once again doing pretty good. Now that dipshit trump will give his idiot voters and the rest of us another shitty economy that the next Dem will have to try to fix. The wheels on the bus go round and round.
I’m in that country and can’t disagree. I was just paraphrasing the line from the Joker movie to a friend of mine,“We’re going to get exactly what we deserve.”
For me that is much more than a pet peeve.
The word my family uses for that is “mom”.