Lots of men in the US. That’s definitely not the norm in Europe

I went through Penn Station more times than I would have wanted. Arriving and leaving from there twisted my stomach in a knot, I wouldn’t be able to handle it every day.

I could never live in NYC… the homelessness problem is too widespread in pretty much all of US cities.

First time I saw them I felt like someone was playing a massive prank on me… in a random supermarket, by putting clearly alien veggies in the veggie section

Thanks for the chuckle! Considering the health advise is specifically about two beers, saying a couple in context seemed confusing. Thus the quotation marks.

I’m a social drinker, so I’m more likely to drink “some” drinks once a week than a little every day. The latter is really not appealing!

I would like to know if, health wise, it’s the same to drink 2 drinks per day or four every second day (excluding the obvious short term effects)

Thanks for explaining why I “love” green+purple, but somehow always shy away from it… looks great, feels odd

Seriously?? Wow, a friend had been talking my ear off with brassicacea fact and failed to mention this? Thanks for sharing!

That’s the theory, but we see the practice being different. And I ask how you plan on fixing it. A job with a lot of requirements, very demanding, that you propose to underpay with respect to the private sector and that, after wrecking your life for a couple of years, kicks you out. Other than martyrs and corrupted people, I don’t know who would apply for it. And corruption is more widespread than martyrdom

Incredible how much changed in 20 years! Thanks for sharing!

Adding to this (not wanting to engage on the main post): allergies have been increasing also because our environment is getting more polluted by the day. Unfortunately, allergies not being known and detected earlier means that good studies on the “real” increase of allergies are really hard to make. Same with mental health issues, that “didn’t exist” some decades ago (people either could bare it or committed suicide, that was incredibly often covered up by the family because it was shameful)

And even looking away from any sort of disability, money can pay for chores being done, for faster transportation, for better resources. That also impacts the “24 hours”

So you are talking about a full overhaul of the system, not just a change on how the politicians are payed.

In your view, who would be a good politician? Because a short-term self sacrificing position works in the context of a “noble” ruling class that has the skills and connections to rise to the occasion at any time. But I doubt that is what you are advocating. So, I don’t see how a middle class could produce enough talented-but-not-career politicians. Would you mind discussing that?

As someone that followed that mindset, and got stuck in positions that are much lower payed than the private sector, that refined my skills to an absurd level just to get payed around median level… that’s why I’m looking for jobs outside the public sector, that’s why basically all my colleagues feel burned out and unappreciated. A good read in this aspect: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

A bit of sacrificing is okay, but as a politician you are already sacrificing a lot of your personal life (long, constant trips that make difficult to maintain contracts outside of work, lots of after hours events that affect your social life, often having to full on move for your job…) How far does self sacrifice need to go?

As a side: I also would like all other public sector jobs to be much better payed.

The problem with low salaries is that it makes the job less appealing, so it attracts more corruption. (In theory) if you are payed a lot, you don’t care when someone offers you a little more, while when you are payed little, a little money can make a big difference. Then again, this theory clearly failed, so… who knows

There is a huge difference between deciding for yourself and deciding for a big group of people you don’t really know.

The first can be solved by intuition and emotional thinking (I don’t want to have surgery because I’m more worried about it more than about taking medicines for a much longer time, I want a two story house because it looks good…). While taking care of a nation is wildly different. You are confronted with massive, intertwined systems, in which many people that live life completely different than yours are affected. You have to constantly challenge your assumptions and compare them to a mountain of data. Yes, you have advice, but each advice always relates to a small section of the whole problem.

While such critical thinking skills can be learned in many ways (and they often elude our politicians) it usually require a higher education degree and quite some experience after that to develop. People that have honed this skill are valuable in the job market, and therefore should receive appropriate compensation.

I see… thanks for explaining where you were coming from! I honestly only vaguely remember the times when Global Warming was the naming, and here countries are mostly springing in action when talking about the ramifications of Climate Change. Even if we hardly tackle the root cause… :/

The science is still very unclear, both from a modeling perspective (what are the pieces of the puzzle and how to connect them), a simplified perspective (what pieces are most important) and a theoretical perspective (what typical behavior should we detect close to the collapse).

Unfortunately, the latter one’s answer seems to be that close to bifurcations in statistical differential equations the variance of a system increases. Decrypting the math: close to a sudden change, we should experience a wider variety of events that usual, in particular more extreme events. This seems to be happening to the AMOC, but support for the claim is still weak and unclear (because the modeling is unclear, so we don’t know what pieces should be included in the problem).

As the other commenter said, Global Warming fell out of favor because it underlines only one part of the full problem. The weather in most places is getting warmer, but other things are also happening connected to it: extreme events are becoming more and more common, such as drought, flooding and forest fires, that might not seem included in the wording global warming but is clearly described by climate change.