lol

An estimated 40% of Native American women (60,000–70,000 women) and 10% of Native American men in the United States underwent sterilization in the 1970s.

scanning chinese media and english and chinese wikipedia the tldr seems to be: there were state incentives for having just one child wrt healthcare, retirement, etc. After first child it’s mandated that the woman has an IUD or one of the partners is sterilized. After the second child, sterilization is mandatory, and there is a hefty fee (multiple years of rural income) for the second child for the state to support them.

There were a decent number of exceptions: rural populations could have 2 if the first was a girl, and in sparsely populated provinces, rural populations could have 2 no matter what. Critically, ethnic minorities were exempt, so it only applied to Han people. The enforcement was primarily in urban areas. There were other exceptions too and they changed throughout the course of the law.

This was my childhood 🥺 damn i’m old now

It’s nice to see traitors get what they deserve

Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a banger

The London and Paris metro stations are even older and don’t look half as bad. To be fair though, the picture is Chambers Street station, which is renowned as one of the worst in the system. There are some nice stations for rich people though, like in Hudson Yards

I can’t believe the Australian state exists, as in the “concept” of the Australian state. The idea that a bunch of people from a faraway archipelago in a completely different climate would come to annihilate the original people of an entire continent on the opposite side of the planet that could hardly be more different than their homeland is nuts. The whole thing just feels like some kind of fever dream of historic fiction, but yet it exists. What are they even doing down there? It’s like if Fordlandia in the Amazon rainforest actually worked out. So incongruent

Arthur Verocai - Arthur Verocai

manifest destiny vs. the holocaust

I really admire that you are here despite your parents. I can relate with my family encouraging me to buy a place just to rent it before I even own a place of my own. I have friends who do the same to subsidize their rent. When people find a convenient and socially acceptable way to siphon wealth for thenselves, you can bet that they will defend it ideologically tooth-and-nail.

Trying to convince someone to reconsider their lifestyle at their own expense seldom goes well. I think the biggest gains you could make without alienating them is arguing for compassion when it comes to evictions. Consider arguing to them about the damage that eviction will incur on those families versus your own.

It does appear there has been an uptick in southern border crossings the last couple years due to citizens of countries the US has destabilized seeking a better life in the US (Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Ukraine, etc.). The xenophobic domestic reaction to that has thrown fuel on the fire to create a full-blown humanitarian crisis, with, of course, the vulnerable migrants suffering the most as a result of the mismanagement. As for why there is so much hatred? That one’s easy: the migrants are overwhelmingly non-white, which presents a threat to the white supremacy central to USA politics.

At this point I’m ranting, but the political showmanship of Texas shipping migrants to NYC is straining the city’s ability to care for them due to lack of facilities in which to house them, and this is something I can personally confirm from city connections. The use of these migrants as political pawns is disgusting.

Some of the content is quite unbelievable. I take some solace in that a lot of these guys (and yes they are overwhelmingly guys) are being eliminated in an Orwellian fashion (verbal-only, forced, “voluntary resignations” behind closed doors because management unilaterally changed their employment contracts to new locations) because the labor laws are completely declawed in the US. All the pro-union voices reacting to that are being shouted down because everyone seems to think a union would limit the amount of money they could make because they’re so much better than everybody else. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens once all tech workers are proletarianized like the rest of the economy.

obsidian is cool. I used it a bit. imo, fewer dependencies are better. so if you’re going for something as lightweight as obsidian, you may as well just maintain a folder of markdown files for your notes

great takes here. thanks for your perspective!

I saw both too and really enjoyed them! There were things I didn’t like about both but on the balance they were fun, exciting movies with decent messages. Frankly, I was expecting Nolan to trash the Berkeley Communists a lot more. And of course there’s the corporate involvement tainting the Barbie movie, but I look past that because taking a step back, we live in such a patriarchal, chauvinistic society. Women hardly ever get anything in media that pushes back against that as hard as a film this big could without alienating a general audience. Even with the iconoclastic lens this forum has, I really enjoyed both, especially Oppenheimer.

My life is on paper really great. I’m doing well in most domains of my life. I am employed at a notoriously anti-union firm though, and my social circles are running extremely bourgeois recently. Maybe I’m just a champagne socialist. It’s weird knowing people who embody a banal evil through their capitalist ambitions. I am very much in the belly of the capitalist beast. I have become more radical over time realizing that the open fields of a career ahead of me have walls much closer in than I thought. I can’t do what I want. I can only do what pleases investors, or face a life of precarity, poverty, destitution, etc. So I guess irl my thoughts are converging on living well and “playing the game” while privately advocating for socialism and communism.

Just trying to help - the proven best way to lose weight is via diet shift, not exercise, although exercise confers basically every health benefit besides weight loss. Try a whole food, plant-based diet. Think bean \ vegetable soups, hot whole grain cereals, leafy green salads, etc. Best of luck

There are a lot of thoughts here. Doomerism is obviously not productive. If it helps, antarctic sea ice is not what we should worry about - the southern hemisphere is relatively more stable due to less land and antarctica itself. The blue ocean event (no north pole sea ice) is the one you should worry about, probably late 2020s. Because once ice finishes melting the energy goes into increasing temperature instead of state change from ice to liquid. The good (dubious) news is, the global capitalist economy is much more fragile than it might seem. In my opinion, industrial civilization would collapse before we would surpass 4 C warming, which still leaves most of the planet as “habitable”. I believe economic growth will turn negative much past 2 C warming, thereby limiting subsequent warming. Because we’re warming the planet so fast, the system destabilizes at much lower temperatures than we have on the fossil record. At the risk of being sanguine (ok yeah this whole post is sanguine), it’s kind of nice that the heat accumulating at the ocean surface will not have time to interact much with deep, cool ocean water. So we’ll wind up feeling much more heat in the short-term than we’d feel in the long-term, which could spur humanity to actually do something. Overall, communists should feel optimism in the face of economies running up against planetary boundaries. Humanity’s survival depends on global cooperation. Replacing capitalism with socialism would be a (the only?) feasible way to achieve this. We’re already seeing beastly temperatures and extreme weather worldwide. I would bet that the children being born today will see these horrific weather events and start movements that will make Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil look like tea parties. If we don’t blow ourselves up in the next 30 years then, I’m fairly optimistic. But perhaps I underestimate the ability of capitalism to assimilate young minds

did you guys watch the movie? maybe I’m naive, but I don’t buy it; it feels like manufactured outrage. the “map” in question had the entire north american continent labeled as United States 💀 . Basically every landmass was hopelessly deformed because it was conveying how little barbieland actually knew about the real world. In the scene, they talk about the “Country of California” and “State of Los Angeles” or something like that…because barbie was trying to get to LA. Asia doesn’t even look like Asia! Please let me know if this just went over my head. I think people are reading too much into this nonsense. Vietnam probably banned it because it was shameless western corporate propaganda or something like that.

After taking LSD a few times, I gotta say it’s pretty fun. I enjoy experiencing the world through the eyes of a kid again. It’s also enlightening to see your life in third-person, as if you saw your life from a friend’s perspective. It definitely makes interacting with people interesting because you’re so attuned to the minutest signals: you can read people like a book.

Relevant to this forum, I had an interesting revelation while tripping that we exist at a non-exceptional time in history. The feeling that we are existing during what will be just one more page in the book was palpable. I think that gives me a lot of hope, even though things seem so dire at the moment.