The kid sounded like he had a plan of his own and was working towards it, so it might just be as simple as mom has a car and he doesn’t, or it’s his first apartment and she knows what to look out for when moving into a new one, which he’s never had experience doing. The article doesn’t make it sound like he’s some totally dependent man-child, but it also doesn’t elaborate enough to really say why she went along.

In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.

I do, you’re just taking an asinine position on the topic. Society should absolutely help these people to the extent they can, but we cannot change someone’s mind against their will. We can’t just go committing people to a mental hospital for being misled into believing stupid stuff, or even actively harmful stuff. They need to be amenable to at least listening to other people with an open mind. Beyond a certain point, the best we could really do would be implementing measures to be able to disregard them, but that’s predictably a rather unpopular idea, given how anti-democratic and open to abuse it would be.

Answer me two questions. First, what, if anything, could other people do that would be enough in your mind? You’re real quick to shoot down everything and anything as insufficient, so what do you propose would be adequate? Next, at what point does the obligation to help such individuals get outweighed by the harm they do to the rest of us by holding everyone else back?

You cannot endlessly blame other people for failing to undo that indoctrination. They need to be open to at least considering other view points, you cannot enter their mind and flip a switch for them. Either way, that’s an entirely separate matter from your original claim, that nobody has told these people.

So…when they won’t read articles on the topic and won’t listen to news coverage outside the very media that’s designed to convince them to vote against their own interests, it’s still other peoples’ fault for not educating them, somehow? That is just willful ignorance on their part. That’s like saying nobody has tried to educate young earth creationists on the Earth being older than 6,000 years, because we just have articles in text books and scientific journals they don’t trust, but really, we need to get it into the bible for them to read.

Also, way to move the goalposts there. We went from

Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

to, “Well, yeah, someone asked them to read, and people they don’t like tell them, but you need to get the media empire that convinces them to vote against their interests in the first place to tell them that’s what’s happening, or else it doesn’t count.” At what point are good faith efforts enough for you, when these people aren’t interested in them to begin with? Do we need to strap them into one of the rapid-learning machines from Battlefield Earth and just shoot the knowledge straight into their brain?

At this point, you’re just being disingenuous. Like, where have you been? Two seconds searching will give you article after article after article on this very topic. This has been a subject of public commentary since before people fell for trickle-down economics, and to pretend otherwise is to be entirely dishonest.

I would have more sympathy for them if these were new issues, but they’ve been perennial problems for more than three decades at this point. There comes a point where it’s either willful ignorance, or being so woefully stupid you probably ought to be declared a ward of the state and get a minder to make sure you don’t get caught off guard by your own saliva and drown in it.

Like, it’s utterly stupid on its face. If you have the right to vote, you’re struggling to afford to keep a roof over your head, yet you keep voting for the politicians who block the very affordable housing that your continued ability to live in your community depends on because it’ll let the “wrong kind of people” move in, or “dilute the character of the neighborhood” and bring down property values, yet you cannot understand how this is voting against your own interests without someone breaking it down for you, you make a very compelling case for the shortcoming of democracy with universal suffrage. Even then, these are topics that have been gone over to death

Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

Emphasis mine, but the public has been told over, and over, and over again. At what point does it stop being everyone else’s responsibility that they just don’t want to hear it, or are willing to ignore it if it hurts someone else?

Individually, no, but this is the decision people have been making in aggregate for decades with the people they vote into government to represent them. You can still see it happening when people oppose any attempts to build out public transportation when they believe it would either personally bother them in some way, or give poor people an easier way to access their communities.

Heck, you saw it earlier this year where municipalities around NY have fought and ignored the mandate to build up more dense housing, or the congestion pricing being walked back now. Housing costs being unaffordable is a serious issue when it impacts them or their acquaintances, but that’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make if it keeps poor people and minorities from also being able to afford to live in their town. Something needs to be done about traffic and air quality in Manhattan, right up until it means they would either need to pay up or take the train.

The governor is taking most of the heat for these policies, bud meanwhile, people keep reelecting the same local and state officials that aggravate the problems that the public is chronically complaining of. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot if it means they can hurt others too.

I would wager most people don’t actually have no choice but to make a massive commute. Often it just comes down to policy choices. As a country, we’ve made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit, just as we’ve decided homes should be treated as investment vehicles. If we built out and maintained more trains, buses and light rail, congestion could be cut down and more people could travel much more rapidly and efficiently. If we didn’t obsess over the idea that property values must go up without fail and encouraged building affordable housing, people could actually afford to live closer to where they work, rather than being pushed ever farther into the suburbs and countryside in search of a place they could afford to live in. Some people make insane commutes chasing higher pay in a neighboring region. I knew of people at one company who commuted from Philadelphia to Brooklyn every day, because NYC pay was higher and Philly rents lower. That said, that’s absolutely a conscious choice those people make.

Likewise, not every job is capable of being done from home, but many are, yet workers are still forced to come into the office anyway. This is a choice by company execs, not an inevitable fact of life.

I’m sure there are some jobs that are relatively remote, yet need to be done in person despite the long commutes. Let the people doing them be compensated accordingly, but this is absolutely not something that should be normalized for the population at large.

People are wild these days. My wife and sister have both, working in different industries and companies, come home and informed me they were freaked out and a bit repulsed to discover coworkers in the bathroom, audibly having a bowel movement of some sort, with an iPhone on the floor of the stall facetiming their partners. These were both work places that skewed younger, but people have just been going feral. My last job, I walked into the bathroom and heard what I assumed was the Smack, smack, smack of somebody jerking off, only to find out it was a guy near his 60s doing clap push-ups in front of the urinals.

The accompanying text is

The human body cannot adapt to the civilized model, which gives us war, hunger, climate change, and numerous illnesses caused by our eating habits and way of live out of measure with our needs.

Our bodies are inflamed, there are plastic fragments in our blood stream. And we’re completely regressing with our habits.

The consequences show with time, and civilizations die out from time to time. Be it naturally or owing to human action. We’re facing a disfunctional and hysterical state, and the populace is incapable of noticing this precisely due to its automatic and simplified lifestyle.

as best I can translate it in one pass, but it’s not my first language. Should do fine in general, I think.

I think you just underestimate how awful public transport is in the US. Beating what’s available here is not a high bar to clear, especially when it’s nonexistent in many places. It can also vary pretty widely across and within regions. I imagine public transport in London is a different beast from public transport in Manchester, for example.

When I was visiting Manchester in March, it was pretty great. I could get around the city via bus, tram or walking pretty easily, and trains between Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds were all pretty clean, even late at night, and the most I paid for two round-trip tickets was £48.40 going to Leeds and back. Everything else was below £30 for two people, round trip.i Wherever I got off, I could get an Uber to where I was going for less than £10 if I didn’t feel like waiting for a bus, or there wasn’t a bus nearby. For a similar trip here, for one person going from NYC to Philadelphia and back would run me in excess of £100 with Amtrak making the trip in about 90 minutes, or closer to £30 round trip, but with each leg taking nearly 3 hours without any delays on NJ Transit. A 15 minute Uber here to work would routinely run me close to £20 each way, before accounting for a tip.

Nobody was screaming in my face asking for “donations,” there weren’t people with amplifiers blasting music, or homeless folks left to stew in their own filth keeping entire cars unusable for anyone else due to the stench. Even walking about the cities at all hours of the night, I had a grand total of 3 people ask me for money in a week. Residents apologized a few times about how awful things were there, but it was absolutely lovely, even in the parts they thought were local embarrassments for allegedly being unbearably dirty or run down. Granted, it was nice and cool, so I didn’t get to see if Manchester gets the same lovely summer effect that NYC does, where every outdoor space smells like hot piss and garbage once the temperature clears about 27°C.

Granted, spending a week in a city as tourists isn’t the same as living there, but from folks I know who’ve made the move, it was a massive upgrade in terms of things like public transit and general quality of life compared to life in the US or Canada. I ran the numbers, and it would actually make sense for me to take over a 50% pay cut if I could move there. Heck, it was cheaper for us to eat out for every meal for a week straight for two people and me buying several coffees out a day than it is for me to shop and prepare every meal at home and make all my own coffee here. Even if things aren’t as good as they used to be, they’ve still got us soundly beat in many regards.

Maybe I would try an Android version, but Linux would be a pass, nothing they would come up with could displace MPD+ncmpc++ for me at this point.

Damn, you got me, I missed the part where I said not to vote for Biden under any circumstances.

Way to prove the point. Elections are not today, there is no reason not to continue to criticize Biden and pressure him to change his position in a meaningful way in order to make him more electable for those who won’t support him if he continues his current policy, and along you come with the same tired shtick to say “If you don’t bend over backwards to sing his praises, you’re a Russian plant!”

If Biden actually changed his stance in a meaningful way, there’s still plenty of time for him to win back those voters, but you folks come along running to shout out “But Trump!!!” once anyone suggests that maybe giving him unconditional support no matter how shitty his stances are isn’t the best way to convince him to not be just as awful while he still has time to do so.

And people are gaslighting themselves happily to suck up to the Dems instead of saying: “We will vote for you, but only, when you end this genocide and bring justice and peace to the people.”

Not just that, but they’re twisting themselves into knots to try and convince people that unconditionally supporting Biden is the better option than continuing to pressure him to stop this and calling out his terrible stance here. Sure, everyone can vote as they please come election day, but we’re a touch under 6 months out and people are all over this site browbeating anyone who doesn’t toe the line and going “Don’t you dare criticize our savior, Biden! If you say he needs to stop enabling Israel’s genocide, you’re just a Russian disinformation agent trying to keep people from voting so that fascists take over and murder all the minorities in the US. They’ll probably double murder Palestinians, even!”

When you think he might finally be correcting course, he just immediately goes and undoes it.

Especially if you aren’t financially that well off or on a good career track, I think it’s really appealing just for the stability it affords. My current landlord has been a pretty good guy for us, but if I owned my apartment rather than renting, I wouldn’t have to worry that I’ll suddenly need to pay a ton more money if he dies and his kids decide to jack up the rent, or worse, having to uproot my life entirely and move out because of someone else’s whims.

I think curation implies more depth and selectivity to the collection and perhaps a certain amount of active effort to obtain and maintain it. You’re talking about hearing a song you like on the radio and clicking “buy,” where the sort of person who would talk about their curated library would spend their weekends digging through crates looking for the final LP released on some random record label in 1985 they need to complete their collection of what is, to them, the pinnacle of early house music as released in Yugoslavia prior to the fall of the USSR. Even if it’s not as hyper-specific as that example, I would expect them to at least have things meticulously tagged and organized.

Pretty sure staff at places that handle Western Union payments are already trained to warn people when they try to send money for similar reasons, and I’ve read that plenty of people just refuse to believe it and act like the lady working the desk at Walmart is trying to keep them from getting the big payout the nice prince from Nigeria is going to give them.

It also makes it harder for employees to do things that would give them a chance at getting a better job. Can’t go to college anywhere that requires attendance as part of the grade if you’re on a shift like that. Also can’t get another job that might turn into a better opportunity, they won’t deal with your constantly changing availability.