Added to that, how do the people enlisting know and trust the program will actually be there at the end?
I'm one of the people with a ton of student loans, and I was also one of the people who consolidated my loans when the Biden admin rolled out SAVE. Now the government pulled SAVE but did nothing for those of us who consolidated to take advantage of it. We were told one thing, and it was almost immediately reversed.
The US government is unreliable and sees no need to keep the promises it made a few years ago. Why would anyone sign up to be in mortal harm's way for relief that has a decent chance of not even happening? They've lit their integrity on fire. The promises of something after a few years means nothing.
The executive branch didn't really back out of SAVE. States sued and court decisions agreed that it was unconstitutional. There are definitely problems in the federal government, but yours is an inapt comparison to this hypothetical pledge which would likely be part of signing contracts for the million soldiers.
There are absolutely people with bigger problems than depression. For example, I have MS, and my mental health is absolutely one of my less concerning problems. There are so many options for mental health + the treatments are much easier to access than a lot of my symptom management meds + DMT. People undergoing chemo. People with ALS. People with bipolar (who can't take a lot of first line depression treatments) or other more complex mental health issues like schizophrenia.
None of this is to downplay depression, but there are absolutely people for whom 'just depression' would be accurate. Migraines suck, but someone with cluster headaches might call them 'just migraines' and they wouldn't be wrong.
I'm not the GP; I'm a separate person who was providing potential context.
Something can be a huge problem and still be small potatoes to people having catastrophic problems, and often those of us in very, very dire circumstances are tone policed to within an inch of our lives and have to constantly consider normal people above ourselves (and make no mistake, people with MDD are closer to normal than somebody with ALS or severe cancer). We're never allowed to express anger, never allowed to talk about having it harder, have to stop and attend to the feelings of others while ours are ignored, etc.
Also, no offense, but depression can end up making people very self-centered. It's your illness that makes you think that what you're going through is more important and worse than what anyone else is going through, and it's not. (And it's not for me either: there are definitely people who have it worse than me and could say they wish their problem was 'just' MS. I just wouldn't get offended by that.)
I was on Cymbalta for a while for non mental health related issues (nerve pain caused by MS).
I absolutely had withdrawal when I needed to go off of it, and I can say with certainty that the mental effects of going off of it were not just the reappearance of the underlying mental health issues since there weren't any. My emotional regulation was in the toilet, I was extremely irritated, I'd cry constantly, I was horny as hell, etc.
My theory is generational and knowledge shifts, namely that now we're seeing the first substantial cohort of non-techies with a decent understanding of tech culture and politics. This is also why we see a lot more anti-AI and anti tech CEO sentiment among the young than the old in defiance of our previously held assumptions.
This is about the right time for the children, nieces, and nephews of the first and second big generations of post-Web software engineers, IT workers, etc. to be getting old enough to become a political force. There's been an explosion of tech workers since the mid-90s, and that means an explosion of people related to them as well. The kids who watched their parents be stacked ranked at Amazon, saw the difference in how MS treated contractors and employees, listened to their corporate IT parents talk about how hostile MS is, etc. all learned that the big tech companies are not anyone's friend even if the specifics of the tech go over their heads. And while the workers themselves might keep their heads down and be quiet in public for the sake of their careers, their kids and relatives are less constrained.
And they can talk to each other and find that it's a common sentiment. Since they don't necessarily have technical careers or hobbies, they're also able to export this sentiment to a wider variety of people through overlapping hobbies and interests (e.g. the IT guy at a school in suburban Ohio has a kid who's a theatre nerd, and the kid is good at communicating their anti big tech position to this 'new' group of people).
The distribution of knowledge about how tech companies operate is shifting and diffusing into channels and communities it didn't before.
That's one thing that I find so confusing about this. Even if we assume that the administration genuinely doesn't care and does want to annex/culturally subjugate Canada, it's really not easy to separate the two cultures and escalating this to a certain degree is going to prompt domestic backlash.
I was born in America. About half of my ancestors lived in Canada on both sides of my family, I know my Canadian cousins, I spent time in Canada growing up/was taught Canadian history as well as American history, I have a Canadian education and half of my professional network is Canadian, etc. I'm eligible for dual citizenship and am pursuing it now, as are other members of my family, whereas we never bothered before because the separation never seemed to matter. With the recent change in Canadian citizenship laws, I'd estimate at least 25% of the Great Lakes population is eligible for dual citizenship at this point.
One of my parents and some of my siblings are Ojibwe/Anishinaabe. My paternal cousins are all French Catholic. (My dad's parents were Protestant but my aunt married into an old French Catholic family and converted.)
I don't even really know how I would separate out the two nations' influence, and that's true of a lot of people, especially those of us whose families have lived here since before America and Canada existed.
I was just in Paris and I never had to pay for the public sidewalk toilets. Where did you see paid ones? I didn't get to all the arrondisements, so I'm curious.
That makes sense; I didn't spend any time in the 14th. I did notice a big difference in public bathroom availability based on arrondisement, but all the ones I saw/used were free. (The ones that weren't closed or out of order, that is...)
Because you have to pay a ton more for a lot of digital copies of books if you're doing any kind of lending and you're competing with existing libraries. So you both have higher costs (e.g. you have to pay more for a digital file that may have DRM, be required to self destruct after a certain number of uses, doesn't allow multiple lends at a time, etc.) and your prospective consumers have a free option so convincing them to pay is going to be difficult.
Netflix has a larger market base (far more people watch TV and movies than read books, particularly at a level high enough to justify a subscription) and a market base that is far less likely to already be aware of the free alternative (most serious readers of the sort that go through that amount of books are already aware of their local libraries, whereas serious movie/TV watchers are less likely to be so).
Additionally, modern Netflix is a streaming company, and even DVD Netflix was sending the materials directly to your house, which is a differentiator versus the library, whose materials need to be picked up. There's a convenience factor as an incentive to pay. Library streaming exists, but it's awful - very limited library and very limited watches - versus Netflix where once you sub you can watch as much as you want.
Probably due to a combination of undiagnosed autism and some very mild bullying in middle school (due to me growing rapidly and people making fun of me for wearing "short shorts"), I have been almost exclusively wearing jeans for everywhere but the gym since eighth grade.
The hoodies are a more recent thing and are more miserable. I'll check out linen clothing.
Yeah, there are linen pants too, so you don't have to wear shorts if you don't feel comfortable showing your legs. Linen in general is a great option if you want to not die of heat and you don't feel like showing your whole body to the world.
Since you're autistic, you might want to buy them in person: the tactile sensation of linens can be pretty different, so you might want to touch them before buying if sensory issues are a clothing concern.
One thing to look out for is that a lot of clothing that will come up when you search for linen are linen blends, which are better than a hoodie by far, but aren't going to have the same breeziness as 100% linen. Also, 100% linen wrinkles, so you've got to hang it right out of the dryer if you care about that.
I don't really have sensory issues and I don't get too picky about the textures of clothing. As I said, never actually diagnosed as autistic, I think I'm more borderline if I am.
Anyway, I'll take a look at some linen stuff. Probably worth an experiment if nothing else.
By hoodies do you mean the cotton ones with fleece linings or a lightweight breathable one? If it’s a thicker cotton one I can’t imagine wearing that in summer
I would bet on the sunscreen being a better protection since it also protects against reflected light, but UV umbrellas are so much more convenient. Takes 2s to take out rather than 5min to apply sunscreen properly.
(except when it's windy. Rain usually follows the wind, sunlight does not)
Good point re: wind. We don't really get substantial wind + sunlight where I live often. Definitely something to keep in mind.
I'm not sure re: the sunscreen being better. Maybe as a platonic ideal, but it's really easy to miss places when applying sunscreen, whereas a UV umbrella does cover everything with no fuss.
UV umbrellas should be woven tighter to block out more sunlight, but even a non-UV umbrella will block a significant amount of sunlight.
I bought one of those UV-C detection cards that also detect UV-A and UV-B. Both a UV umbrella and a non-UV umbrella blunted the midday sun down from very high levels to low/medium levels.
I also bought a Japanese umbrella (brand Wpc) that is rated for UV and it blocks the UV levels down to zero.
A lot of plastics aren’t great at blocking/absorbing UV. And normal umbrellas, not being designed for UV, may lose a lot of their strength with heavy UV exposure from what they do absorb.
> Big tech wants this, so they can continue on with business as usual abusing adults' psyche and personal information.
I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do.
OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe.
Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle.
Yes! And this dovetails into a point I really should have made as well. The thing about "age verification" (ie identity verification) is that it puts the decision of what kids should access wholly in the hands of corporate attorneys. For example we can easily imagine a "Facebook4Kidz" website that has many of the same terrible dynamics as regular Faceboot, but that Faceboot's attorneys can justify as being legally compliant. As a parent, you would really want to block this too - while all of these proposals for identity verification and site-based-control claim to solve the problem but leave you with no way to do that!
This ties into your comment because as a kid approaches adulthood, as a parent you also want to loosen those restrictions so that they can develop these skills - gradually while under your supervision. Whereas the corporate attorneys will just say that they're strictly off limits, right up until it's then open season as you're pointing out.
And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!'
Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money.
Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up.
Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use.
To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not.
I'm sharing this experience just to share, not suggesting or making any claims about what people should do with it:
One of the best ways to get through airport CBP quickly without being overly hassled is to be overtly, clearly sick in a gross way. If you're about to vomit or have horrible diarrhea, they do not want you in that line any longer than you have to be. If they're the type to want to take people down a peg, they won't bother with you because they're already miserable, and if they like picking on the weak, they're probably going to go for a solo young female traveler who isn't ill.
Nobody wants to risk getting vomit on their clothes or in their work area, having to close a line and shuffle people around while their coworkers glare daggers, or subject themselves or their coworkers to the very fun smells of human bodily fluids.
At the same time, it isn't purposeful so it's not read as malicious.
I'm one of the people with a ton of student loans, and I was also one of the people who consolidated my loans when the Biden admin rolled out SAVE. Now the government pulled SAVE but did nothing for those of us who consolidated to take advantage of it. We were told one thing, and it was almost immediately reversed.
The US government is unreliable and sees no need to keep the promises it made a few years ago. Why would anyone sign up to be in mortal harm's way for relief that has a decent chance of not even happening? They've lit their integrity on fire. The promises of something after a few years means nothing.