Our US city (pop 180k, metro 600k) is just about to lose the last downtown grocery store.
Generations of city councils have allowed (or encouraged!) the demolition of all housing in the city core to replace it with parking lots.
There’s almost no one left downtown so the city itself is dying. It’s just kind of rotting away. There’s currently at least some effort to reverse the trend, but the vice grip that car oriented everything has on people is terrifying to politicians.
I had a similar experience, but managed to hold it together long enough to make it out in 4.5 years (with some summer classes). Knowing how to do things, but not really able to stay steadily on track to achieve goals is a rough combo.
Could be a partner, roommate, coworker, or somebody you volunteered with. They could have stopped for any reason from leaving, getting sick or hurt or even dying to just getting sick of doing that one thing and stopping.
I’ve got a kid who is nearly out of school. There’s a real sense that his idea of the future is eternal summer vacation at his parents’ house earning just enough money to hang out with friends. It’s a struggle to decide how to deter that pattern of behavior. As parents we want to be able to do anything for our kids, but we also need to do what’s best for them, not just what they want.
The kid is going to learn a lot about what we do to keep the house in reasonable order and stocked for life. We’ve been trying to teach that as we go, but it doesn’t always seem to sink in.
I’m well aware of how hard it is to get to anything resembling a healthy independent living situation in the US these days. It’s completely stacked against everyone not already in wealthy starting positions. We have other kids working to build more than a hardscrabble financial situation and we’re more than happy to help as we can.
We’ll help this kid too. What I’m not interested in doing is providing them a roof, food, clothes, doing their dishes, and paying for their hobbies for the rest of my life. This is an intelligent, capable, and healthy young man. The issue is the attitude we’re seeing that he doesn’t seem to see what it takes to be an independent adult, even if he’s still relying on some help while he builds up the resources to get by in this incredibly shitty society we’ve allowed to accrete over generations.
Yes, the economy was way better when I was a young adult. I also had some fortunate happenings (bought a house in a stable local market going into the 2008 banks fraud crash) and unfortunate ones (graduated college right into the Dot Com Bubble burst. 3 months of work, then layoffs into years of dead job markets, yay!). I am extremely scared for my childrens’ futures because of how anti-humanist the US has become. Letting this kid in question fuck around for a few years while I take care of everything for him and hope my next heart attack (that’s one of the unfortunate issues) doesn’t kill me before he figures out how to be an independent and self sufficient adult isn’t something that I feel will serve either one of us in a positive way.
Yeah, we’re working out how to have that chat and to put some agreed upon goals into place so that no one is suddenly surprised by unspoken expectations. It’s hard, though. We’ll get through it.
Oh hell no. My partner and I are in no way interested in just kicking anyone out. The reason we’re trying to work on the attitudes and trajectory now is to have time to set goals and work together to build up his skills & resources to enable independence, which is a far cry from a kick out.
I’m sorry to hear that I happened to you even once. We’ve had some friends of our kids end up being treated that way, so the kids ended up at our place briefly while they found their feet.
Interesting strategy, and likely one that has some merit. Though, I’d point to similar problems in Japan where it’s not rare to have incredibly tiny homes/apartments, but a very high rate of youths staying at their parents’ places well into adulthood.
The US has reached around 50% of young adults continuing to stay with their parents beyond school. It’s up to a similar rate as the Great Depression era. We’ve priced our kids out of independence to try to satisfy a few billionaires’ desire to be ever richer.
We’re moving to more of this for the whole household (there’s a couple kids at home still). They’re all able to generate meals and do chores. The requirements are being ratcheted up across the board. My wife and I are busier than ever trying to make ends meet, so the work is trickling down to the whole household one way or another.
More efficient manufacturing, falling battery costs and intense competition are lowering sticker prices for battery-powered models to within striking distance of gasoline cars.
Building up our modern railed transit network and expanding people powered transit together is the only solution we have that’s been demonstrably successful for cities in the long term.
I love to use trains to get around. I don’t need to do the work of driving, which puts every aspect of safety, navigation, and stress on me the whole trip. On the train I can sleep, do computer work, eat in a relaxed space, or talk with my kids without having to yell in each other’s ears to be heard.
Driving is a huge energy, stress, and time sink. It’s a plague upon our society. I’d rather have a train style space, but at least a self driving car would give a few of the benefits of the train. It’s a over technical inefficient and halfway there option compared to real transit, but it’s better than making me do it all myself.
I don’t usually speed much. It barely saves much time at the cost.of safety and mental stress. I’m also often tusing trains that usually go much faster than a car anyway, and sometimes up to 200+ mph. A self driving car (or any reasonable car) can’t even begin to touch real transit.
He did just sell a jet for $10mil+ to raise money to pay legal fees. It turning out that the sale has some possibly illegal parts so now it’s turning into the latest criming on his docket to deal with, though.
As a species we have the tools, technology, education, knowledge, cognition, and intelligence to override an animal instinct to reproduce willy nilly. We’re more than that now. People should know what it means to choose to have children and weigh the benefits vs the costs to their lives.
Have children when you want to and when it makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, then don’t do it. Humanity will survive thinning down to many billions fewer humans sitting around consuming resources. A person who never existed in the first place because healthy adults decided to put their time and resources into something else shouldn’t be lamented, but a choice respected.
My family has a long history of not having many children. Our family tree is one of marrying in people and then just not growing larger generation to generation. We have plenty of childless couples in the tree and they make the coolest aunts and uncles a kid can have.
Hey look, that FO stage of FAFO is well underway. Hold onto your butts people, there’s going to be some serious self punishment for our generations of polluting the world for personal convenience and money.
Very much so. It’s completely unjust and we (me included) have been beyond wasteful in spending the Co2 (and other climate altering materials) irresponsibly for far too long.
So very true. The vast majority of the climate damage has come from the US, China, and Europe, but more equatorial regions are going to be crushed by the heat for an unknown time. The cost to humanity is likely going to be beyond anything our models have projected.
Percentage wise, Pakistanis and other peoples living in equatorial regions definitely aren’t the major contributors to this catastrophe, but they’re going to be the spearhead of the FA phase. It’s going to be one of the most unjust repercussions of the actions by the most industrialized and wealthy nations upon the less wealthy ever in the history of mankind (and maybe the end of mankind in the process).
It’s never claimed to be a democracy. It’s not a monolith, either. Some projects have forms of input and/or voting, most don’t because it’s just a few people writing software that they want to write.
Get over yourself if you think that people working for free should be required to listen to you. Just as in anything else, pay them if you want a guaranteed response.
Otherwise, recognize that the key element of Open Source is that you have the source code. If a project isn’t doing what you want then fork it and build it yourself. That’s the whole point of this community and philosophy.
It sounds like some enterprising capitalist should be building out energy storage to be paid to take the surplus and sell it back when the sun’s not out.
The crazy part is that climate change is going to drive the largest human migration ever as regions become less habitable. The people in arid equatorial regions are headed north and the immigration to nations in northern latitudes is going to be epic. The immigration trickle we see now is nothing compared to the flood we’re creating by continuing to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems.
What's something you want to stop doing but can't actually stop?
Those of you who did not graduate, why?
What vital task did you not realize someone was doing regularly until they suddenly stopped?
Could be a partner, roommate, coworker, or somebody you volunteered with. They could have stopped for any reason from leaving, getting sick or hurt or even dying to just getting sick of doing that one thing and stopping.
GOP senators warn judge against sentencing Trump to prison (thehill.com)
Electric Cars Are Suddenly Becoming Affordable (www.nytimes.com)
More efficient manufacturing, falling battery costs and intense competition are lowering sticker prices for battery-powered models to within striking distance of gasoline cars.
Self-driving cars will never be popular as you can't speed in them.
Given how many people treat speed limits as suggestions, at best, having your vehicle obey the limit would turn some people off of them.
Protect yourself friends. (lemmy.ca)
Syphilis Is Getting Weird (www.theatlantic.com)
The disease has been on the rise in the U.S. for decades, which can mean rare symptoms appearing more often....
Donald Trump found guilty of hush-money plot to influence 2016 election (www.theguardian.com)
Donald Trump has been found guilty of using a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election....
Americans shrug over falling birthrate (www.newsweek.com)
Temperatures in Pakistan cross 52 degrees Celsius — that’s more than 125°F (edition.cnn.com)
Brodie Robertson: Open Source Software Is Not A Democracy (www.youtube.com)
“Open Source Software Is Not A Democracy”. Brodie Robertson. 2024-05-26T21:00:18. YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gphY5Okx_vs....
Germany has too many solar panels, and it's pushed energy prices into negative territory (markets.businessinsider.com)
Study says Europeans fear migration more than climate change – DW – 05/08/2024 (www.dw.com)