And why rural Appalachia and small, highly religious towns across America are absolutely ravaged by meth and fentanyl and the crime around it, which you really should not ignore.
You’ll find a lot of “lock em up and throw away the key! … But not my son. Or my daughter. Or my nephew and his children and my former coworker. Or my pastor’s children. But everyone else, yeah”
Overly-liberal cities (SF, Vancouver, LA, etc) are killing far more of their citizens with failed drug policies than COVID, and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people, telling dealers they won't be arrested, and never institutionalizing against their wishes.
The difference between approaches isn't "lock them up / don't" or "my kids / their kids". It's not a left/right or conservative/liberal divide, it's on another axis - more about the philosophical difference of personal vs group responsibility and meaning vs nihilism.
We need to look at the path these front running cities are taking, and where everyone else will be dragged, to see the difference. The same cities which refuse to lock up a violent junkie will lock up a parent who complains too loudly to the school board. It's not that they aren't authoritarian, often more than conservatives. It's that they don't feel there's any degradation of the individual which is ultimately wrong. Like, an individual can "choose" to be a street whore and die painfully from heroin. That's valid. This is how all junkies eventually live and die, and without a strong moral consensus that this is all bad - for the junkie and society and that we must stop it, you can't make progress on the base issues.
Vancouver will leave a junkie in their own vomit, to continue hitting the drugs that almost killed them, because "nobody should be committed against their will" but it will fine or confine an otherwise fit college student who drinks in public, or who commits any of the other offenses the junkie is committing (littering, starting fires on the sidewalk, having a violent dog, openly carrying a weapon, and so forth). The junkie has somehow "chosen" his or her role and now it's a beautiful thing, like a butterfly, that should be left to unfold, unmolested, in the parks.
Portugal, often held out as a utopia for drug users, has a "not even once in public" policy where they will jail you and assign you to a multi-year rehab program. They know nobody wants to die in their own vomit, in the street.
We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress. Once we all look at things that way we can see that our policies won't actually be too different, or rather, it doesn't matter if they are and we can work in a spirit of cooperation from different angles rather than fighting about the issue itself.
Ultimately, Portugal is a more liberal society (for drug users) than Vancouver.
"and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people"
Fentanyl is cut with other drugs and there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source? The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
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Here's a DEA warning about mass overdose events from Fentanyl
"Fentanyl-related mass-overdose events, characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location, have happened in at least seven American cities in recent months, resulting in 58 overdoses and 29 deaths. Cities impacted include Wilton Manors, Florida; Austin, Texas; Cortez, Colorado; Commerce City, Colorado; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; and Washington, D.C."
I don't' see SF or LA mentioned here. I'm sure some of these are Democrat controlled but You are claiming that liberal policies cause an increase in overdoses. Do you have a source for your death rates?
"We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress."
Ant-conservative backlash? Republicans, as in elected officials, are calling their political opponents pedophiles and communists. They claim guns are going to be taken away for the last 40 years guess what actually gets banned? Abortion. Multiple Republicans are still lying about election fraud and you wonder why there's a backlash?
> Multiple Republicans ... and you wonder why there's a backlash
I'm generally not in the USA so I'm trying to speak of things more internationally, and broader than just the divisive Dem/Rep mob.
And no, the backlash I'm talking about is the last eighty or more years. The hippies are boomers, after all.
> Top 10 states by drug overdose ...
I'm not talking about deaths but deaths that society encourages. What would happen in that area if you tried to shoot up in front of a cop?
> there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source?
The programs aren't very well documented because they're "just" a doctor treating their patients, many of whom they never meet. The newspaper articles aren't great. Here's a transcript of the Alberta government examining Vancouver's drug situation for the purposes of setting their own policies. There are also other days of testimony and citizen input if you look around. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/committees/ess...
> The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
Yeah. The dealers intentionally kill a few every now and then as an ad for their product and they manipulate the potency in competition with other dealers. The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago.
You provided a link to a Canadian program. If you don't have other sources then why do you think it happens in the us
"The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago."
This is a conspiracy theory. Evidence?
And about your first comment, I'm showing numbers of deaths, you're claiming that some part of that is encouraged and that percentage is higher for liberal cities. But the death rate doesn't correlate either way. So it doesn't make sense, even if it was encouraged apparently it's not making things worse
Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper in another country.
> You provided a link to a Canadian program. If you don't have other sources then why do you think it happens in the us
Because the cities literally follow the same public policy. Don't arrest for "simple usage", camping on the streets is allowed, etc. They're getting advice from the same people. But yes, the USA does not that I know, have vending machines for drugs yet, that's still afaik a Canadian thing. In the USA you have to go to a "clinic" and ask a worker for your dose by hand and generally they want you to consume the drug there.
> [Street doses growing in strength] is a conspiracy theory.
Not even a little. I'm not talking about the why or the who. When tested the bags sold contain more active drug and many first-time users are reported dying when generally opioids (read erowid, etc) don't do that.
> Evidence?
Your googling fingers are busted but the ones you use to complain are working?
> Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper
No, I've provided enough evidence to show that things are run by people who don't know what they're doing and are misrepresenting the studies to the city. If you can't find the public documents talking about your own cities you aren't trying hard enough.
> in another country.
Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders.
We're also discussing drugs and the lib/con divide which aren't in the article either. I didn't respond to you originally, you responded to me which means you adopt the discussion at that point - or did you intend to reply elsewhere?
Also, this is how you stay uninformed. Refusing to look to countries who are a few years ahead of you on a policy cycle. Drugs are drugs no matter the country.
> [not my job] to provide evidence for your arguments
You don't have to. I fully supported my argument, it's not my fault you can't read Canadian.
It's as valid for me to quote Vancouver as a model for SF and LA as it was for Vancouver to reference Amsterdam twenty years ago.
My favorite aspect of lua is that it gives you all the tools to implement anything and do it simply. Python, C#, and many languages push you to find the “right” way to do things, and spend time searching through documentation to find the shortcomings of each option and which method may be optimal for your situation. It’s like walking into a hardware store with a specialized tool for everything—you spend your time worrying if you’re really using the right thing. Lua feels like a garage workshop with all the basic tools you need to quickly implement something on your own—master a few and only go hunting for something new when you’ve got no other choice.
That is an odd take on Python particularly, which has been widely lauded as a good language for exploratory coding - easy and quick to put something together and iterate on it. You seem to be claiming the opposite here.
> That is an odd take on Python particularly, which has been widely lauded as a good language for exploratory coding - easy and quick to put something together and iterate on it.
I think the point your parent was trying to make is that, at least in Python, there is a lot of emphasis put on doing things the python way e.g. list comprehensions over loops.
For myself, the python experience is... mediocre.
Ruby feels so much better. Between the embracing of functional programming and the pry gem, it feels much nicer to use. Sadly, it's not the strong horse in the race.
Lot of emphasis by whom? Yes, certain constructs are subtly encouraged (by documentation, community blogs, etc.), but there is no python police to enforce the One True Way(tm). You can still write your quick&dirty prototype using not-quite-pythonic-python if you prefer, allowing you to move and iterate just as fast as in Lua or Ruby.
At least that's been my experience with Python (after reluctantly getting used to the indentation as part of syntax :) ). Of course, different languages will appeal to different people, so I do not doubt your claim that Ruby suits you better. But the post I was replying to above was putting Python in the same bag as C/C++, which to me seems very inaccurate.
Alternatively, “We’ve found certain genetic markers correlate with these specific quality of life issues, and now we can investigate ways to overcome it.”
We know certain people have genetic dispositions towards sickle cell, skin cancer, Tay Sachs, and so on. If it turns out some group is genetically predisposed to struggle a little more with math, then as a society, we can find a way to help them better overcome that. Burying our heads in the sand won’t benefit anybody.
You’re not going to find a race or subgroup that’s all around better at everything, if that’s the worry. Every animal on earth that’s good at something is not good at something else.
Clueless people will happily trod down this path and not see where it leads. People who’ll say things like “people should use their real names online and be held accountable!” go silent when the places mandating this are the ones killing people for saying the leader is a flawed human or because someone didn’t properly cover their hair.
VPN bans make the oppression inescapable. You see who the real dangerous people are when those who’ll still defend it come out.
It’s easy to think these dangers are just “over there.” It’s important to remember these things will happen here if we’re not careful.
Air Koryo apparently offers more leg space than most Canadian airlines, and I have a feeling any staff getting caught stealing luggage would be in some deep shit. Food pics look decent too.
I've had decent experiences with "crappy" poor country airlines--oftentimes they compensate with decent food and seats often feel relatively spacious. Probably more likely to crash and die, though.
The story was huge news when it broke. There wasn’t a conspiracy by journalists to hide it.
The problem was people as a whole didn’t care. I think it’s only very recently that more than a small minority of Americans became aware of the reality that the police and justice system aren’t always people out there doing good—they’re normal people, for better or worse. Up until we got daily police videos of cops killing innocent people, it was assumed that arrested=guilty, throw them away. Even in the face of video evidence lots of people won’t budge from the idea that the justice system had a good reason for doing heinous things.
These people believe that there is corruption in politics and politics in the workplace.
But for some reason they think that corruption in the justice system is impossible. Usually they think the same about assosiated organisations like FBI
That's during a conflict with Russia, a country where all power was seized by internal security services
The motivation of holding these beliefs is very simple, if bad things are done by the justice system to innocent (or not particularly criminal people), then there's a chance that one day the justice system does the same to you through no fault of your own. That's an unsettling idea hence rejected.
I think this is another "just world fallacy"[1] adjacent idea running rampant in our society. You see this fallacy it pop up in a lot of "woo" self-help ideas like "manifesting" or "sending out positive vibrations" as well as things like faith or spiritual healing. The basic idea being that people get what they deserve so people who experience hardship - whether legal, medical, or social - deserve it. While people who do and think good things are safe from these forces.
IMHO, this is a kind of pathological extension of "internal locus of control"[2]. Internal locus of control is good for mental health and achievement, but once you start to project it onto other people without sufficient consideration of their circumstances things quickly get problematic.
People dont care about the economics of free messaging apps or "tech monopolies", but plaster it enough across enough articles across many years of publication and suddenly it becomes an issue.
I'd argue that the NY Times and other media are the ones who dont care. They get to decide what people care about.
> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.
At the same time, I think there’s growing awareness of the “quality” of a lot of tech giants. Once the market gets flooded with people who are too bad to even be retained at companies like Facebook or Google, it may merely end up being a black mark on your résumé.
Similar to how some people choose to leave the specifics of their degree or some unscrupulous jobs off their history when looking for jobs, people may minimize time at a FAANG if thousands of them are entering the market all at once.
When you’ve got 5 applicants who twiddled their thumbs at Facebook for 5 years and all with similarly overinflated work history, someone with a decent GitHub profile and a visibly launched product from a tiny Midwest shop doesn’t look bad.
Yeah, I've found a sizeable portion of these people will gladly stall a project indefinitely by bringing a "but does it scale" mindset to a deployment that fits on an instance and a few AWS services.
Like no really, we don't need to argue about a 5 page git branch management and deployment policy for 4 developers. We don't need datadog or whatever for 100KB of text files. Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time. etc.
What we do need is something that generates revenue and an engineering philosophy that mainly comes from the rest-and-vest crowd isn't it.
No see, some guy from Heroku wrote a blog post about comprehensive build artifacts so now that's what we have to do. What don't you understand about comprehensive build artifacts? Maybe we can get on a long, long, long call to discuss how I'm right and you're wrong, I did work at $HUGE_COMPANY after all.
We can't possibly do things the wrong way, no matter how dumb our current practice is.
It already is a black mark since years if it was your only relevant employment.
Not because they are bad employees, but because they to used/focused/conditioned on Big Tech work. Which has often very different requirements and processes. Or in other words for such employees it can be especially challenging to onboard them. Which historically seem often is combined with an increased risk of them leaving your company not to long after on-boarding, weather that is for a different startup which now takes them or for founding their own company because they have the money reserves to risk it.
Or in other words, it's in general a risk you don't want to take when hiring.
Exceptions include: You have problems to hire anyone qualified. The person can somehow show through other qualifications that this isn't really a risk (pre "big tech" work, sometimes open source contributions but not always, etc).
I think reality will hit lot of these people. Similar thing happened in Finland with Nokia. A massive company for location, with compensation and internal politics and culture of big company. Many found it hard to adapt in new environment. Thus outside connections it not necessarily being positive thing on resume.
But the ex-FAANG engineer grinded leetcode harder than the guy with 1000 GitHub stars on a passion project.
Person with 1000 GitHub stars likely gets wrecked in leetcode style interviews. Just ask the creator of homebrew (yes, THAT homebrew) about what happened to him when he got an interview with Google
Anime and games target a similar crowd as K-pop. Although anime mostly targets single (lonely) males with obsessive characteristics, K-pop goes mostly after the female parallel.
Looking at the 2021 sales figures, this seems false. While one might argue that Uma Musume, Tensura and Love Live count, the other top-10 grossing franchises of last year are Haikyuu, My Hero Academia, Shingeki no Kyojin, One Piece, Tokyo Revengers, Jujutsu Kaisen and Kimetsu no Yaeba. From this, what anime mostly targets is pretty obvious: School aged boys who read Shounen Jump.
And when you decide to check the offer and not just what some people buy, you have content for a lot of people. Shojo targets young women, Yaoi is not really aimed at a young heterosexual male audience either.
You want diversity in picture books? Mangas have been doing it for more than 40 years. Some of their more successful authors are women.
A genuinely high quality anime takes time and money to make. Otaku fan service can be churned out along with loads of cheap knick knacks. There’s also the whole gacha game industry which ties into those series.
K-pop is similar. People obsess over a band and not only buy an album, they buy an overpriced can of coffee with a picture of their favorite star, a shirt, a bracelet, order a bag of cookies they shilled on their Instagram, and so on.
A school aged boy has to beg his parents to buy him a tshirt with an anime he likes. An adult Fate or Love Live fan has no problem throwing down $500 for a new figure or $80 for a “limited edition” Bangladesh-made bag. They’ll happily do it monthly.
The only two examples you listed are primarily gacha games though. If you meant to draw parallels between K-pop and gacha, why mention anime when they're never the primary medium? And even then, the real money still isn't in the goods, it's in getting people to waste their life's savings gambling for JPEGs.
Both of the games are based on anime franchise, though.
Even aside from that, here in Japan it is not uncommon for enthusiastic anime fans to throw multi-thousand $ for goods (including fan-made "doujin" items), live concerts of voice actors/actresses, travels to model locations and so on.
I don't see any difference between their mind and K-pop fans'.
You’ll find a lot of “lock em up and throw away the key! … But not my son. Or my daughter. Or my nephew and his children and my former coworker. Or my pastor’s children. But everyone else, yeah”