Making fun of and mocking a belief in God/Jesus is harmless compared to some the stuff on the extreme rightwing - now who had a noose for "traitors" at their political rallies.
You don't see lefties burning crosses, displaying Nazi symbols or parading with signs i.r.o Jews now do you ???.
People proudly display the hammer and sickle, because Hitler was an evil man, whereas Mao and Stalin were just extremely unlucky or something.
Antifa and BLM don't assault people or destroy property (If people deserve it, it's not assault or something like that. At any rate it just can't be domestic terrorism.)
You can't be racist against white people, because they are the only racists by definition!
I wish some people had a shred of intellectual honesty.
Two of our neighbouring countries has an AK47 on their national flag (Zimbabwe/Mozambique).
If you knew about their tortured path to emancipation for the black majority and to statehood from colonialism then it makes sense why it is so.
The same for my country - things are nuanced - hammer and sickle is hardly as offensive and can be placed in the same category as the Nazi symbol it does not represent the misguided Mao (killing of sparrows led to locusts = failed harvests) and the nutcases that was Stalin/Beira.
> things are nuanced - hammer and sickle is hardly as offensive and can be placed in the same category as the Nazi symbol
Even if you completely buy into the narrative that it was a giant mistake, what is nuanced about the fact that tens of millions of people died needlessly? That fact alone makes any display of the flag reprehensible.
If 'misguided' is how you describe Mao, then you do not know Chinese history, or you're talking about a completely different person. At the very least, Mao was directly responsible for the millions of landlords that were killed, along with academics and critics. How on earth can you justify that morally?
This earlier article is far more interesting; most importantly it contains the words the professor actually said; the quote in the headline of the article you link is disputed.
(Interestingly, both articles have the same author.)
It's a long story about an ambitious academic losing at university politics, to the point of being fired from a tenured position without, allegedly, due process.
OP understands neither science nor complex systems. Science is never ”ready” so by their logic nothing would ever get published, and something as integral to human ”system” as the gut microbiome being reduced to half can have dramatic nonlinear effects to health, making an alarmist approach 100% valid
> OP understands neither science nor complex systems.
This seems like an uncharitable take.
I can't imagine how an alarmist approach is "100% valid" when there are not any known problems caused by this.
The article is only stating that living in urban environments is correlated with a decrease (by A Lot) in gut microbes.
Even if it is true that a significant decrease in gut microbes is a Bad Thing, the article does not argue that well.
Indeed, it seems to intend to argue that with little or no substance.
> Consider [OP's] comment as feedback from an editor to the author.
If the comments are just criticisms about the content in the article then they seem apt.
Many of the points hold up when I am critical about the article's arguments.
It's possible to argue that position and also be in favor of publishing this information.
Lifespan is a poor metric for quality of life. You can be alive whilst being plagued by multiple illness. Healthspan is what is important (how long you can live without suffering from a major ailment) and that is where gut microbiome plays an important role.
Because some people (as in, a vast majority of the global population) live their lives in a low-income bracket and one could consider it a very unpleasant thought to live your entire life sharing bathrooms with strangers.
The grandfathers point was that shared bathrooms would decrease costs of building new apartments, which is good for poor people with less income. Needing to share a bathroom with someone is no problem compared to not having a place to stay.
So would sleeping halls. Both models exists, yet in the developed world we tend to see either as a worst case crisis accommodation not as a viable alternative for long term accommodation.
So yes, it solves problems in those places where lack of any accommodation is a big housing problem. That is important, but it affects a relatively small proportion even of the homeless (most homeless are not "rough sleepers" who end up sleeping outdoors, but people who bounce between temporary housing exactly or crash with people; e.g. in the UK rough sleepers seem to make up in the region of 5%-10% of homeless people).
It may vary by location, but at least in the UK, for most homeless and poor, the problem is not that they have nowhere to sleep, but that they have the kind of substandard accommodation that people in this thread seems to think will solve their problems, and that they lack security - e.g their accommodation is temporary etc. because even this kind of substandard accommodation is not easily accessible to them in ways they can afford.
Sharing bathrooms is not the same as "substandard accommodation". That's the point. You can (and do) build perfectly modern, clean, safe high standard living quarters with shared bathrooms. You can also find terrible slum apartments with private bathrooms.
"Substandard" is not the complement of "luxury". And nobody is saying that middle class people won't pay the extra cost of private bathrooms, clearly they are doing that. The point under discussion is if it's inhumane to give poor people free housing where they have to live like European middle class students and share bathrooms, and the answer is a very clear "no, it's not inhumane".
No, substandard implies it's below the expected standard, and it is as demonstrated by the fact that the market expectation is to have bathrooms. How many places do you see on the market without a private bathroom exactly?
EDIT: In fact, many places you'd struggle to even get approval for places with communal bathrooms without special exemptions, as it's so far below expected standards that these expectations now often violate government set standards as it's come to be seen as entirely unacceptable to impose it on anyone. E.g. in Norway, the standard rules for a permanent dwelling requires a bathroom with few exceptions, and sets minimum requirements for the size of the bathroom.
The places you see on the market are not free housing, so it doesn't really say anything about what we are discussing.
> entirely unacceptable to impose it on anyone
This is just silly. Nobody wants to impose anything on anyone. We are talking about housing that is provided for free, I don't think anyone is proposing round up people and force them to live there.
> The places you see on the market are not free housing, so it doesn't really say anything about what we are discussing.
They tell us what is the expected standard of housing. You're of course free to believe that poor people should be subjected to conditions most people opt out of, but to argue that this is not the expected standard in developed countries like the ones discussed is disingenuous given that this is demonstrated both by the lack of any serious volume of alternatives most places, and the fact that in many markets it is not even permitted to offer housing with lower standards.
> This is just silly. Nobody wants to impose anything on anyone. We are talking about housing that is provided for free, I don't think anyone is proposing round up people and force them to live there.
If the alternative is no housing, it's disingenuous to suggest there's no pressure involved. Lower the standards, and many people will be without a choice - this is part of the reason why it is outright illegal to provide the kind of substandard housing you're arguing for, because it'd encourage a situation where more people are left without a real choice.
Most of the comments in this thread also makes no mention of free housing. Indeed the comment that started this whole sub-thread made no mention of free, but about providing housing for the poorest cheaper. Your answer to that person made no mention of free, but simply argued there was nothing wrong with sharing bathrooms. My responses have focused on the fact that there are clearly a whole lot of countries where this is considered so far below acceptable standards that it's either not allowed to even provide such housing, or that there's minimal demand for it.
You're of course free to argue for changes to such standards and the provisioning of such substandard housing to poor people rather than to provide for them what is considered the minimum bar of acceptable housing in these places today, but don't pretend you're not arguing for lowering the standard well below what is in many markets the worst housing possible to legally offer.
What you can “expect” when you pay the full price of something is not necessarily the same as what you should expect when you get something for free.
If you work in Norway you “expect” at least €2-3000 in monthtly salary, but few people argue that this is what you should expect in welfare if you don’t work.
Even in our social democratic paradise, the rule is usually that things you get through the welfare system, paid by taxpayers, should be adequate and humane, but not to the level of someone working full-time.
So those arguments are meaningless. Instead we have to ask if it is adequate, and most people would say that it is. Especially since so many people have lived like that as students.
If you’re not talking about free housing, then it’s just a market economics question, how could then anyone be opposed to more affordable housing? If you don’t like it, don’t rent it. But when someone says “we should do X for the poor”, they are usually talking about the welfare system.
The question here is - is the cost difference of a shared bathroom versus a private bathroom the (or a) major factor in not building affordable housing and the answer is almost certainly no. If it's not, then this is just elitistic moralizing from the ivory tower.
Happy to be proven wrong by the way. (non-sarcastic)
Elitistic moralizing? The only ones moralizing here are those that think dorms are inhumane.
Anyway, in most countries we do build social housing, it's not a question of not building at all, it's a question of being able to build more if you spend less on each unit, and that is obviously the case. As you probably know, bathrooms and kitchens are by far the most expensive rooms, so you can definitely save a lot of money if you share them.
Why would you be _more_ averse to sharing a bathroom if you're low income? I think it's more about American germophobia or new members of the middle class feeling that sharing bathrooms is beneath them now that they've made it.
In most places being poor doesn't mean you live in squalor, it just means you have less money. You are still doing your best to keep your place clean etc.
And obviously your neighbours won't be strangers for long.
The original point, although not fully written out, was that the elite schooled grandfather thought it would be more effective to build housing with shared bathrooms, but he neglected the humane aspect(s) of living.
Somewhat ironically you are falling into that same model of thinking.
Different people have different views on what privacy is. In many cultures it's considered normal to have your parents in law living with you, here it's most people's worst nightmare. Some people think it's important to have your own car, others see no point at all in owning it.
There are obviously people who absolutely don't want to share a bathroom with their neighbour, but the "model of thinking" that is the issue is when you're projecting that onto the entire world population. People just have different priorities.
When stereotypes make people uncomfortable, it's almost always a class of people viewed as commonly persecuted and usually a heavily US-influenced culture pointing it out. As the poster does not mention skin colour, we can assume it is white (given the US-centric context). As such, it has to be a Jewish stereotype. I am basing this on the fact that the discrimination that makes US citizens uncomfortable is generally against jews or black people. There is a certain segment that thinks discrimination against white people is an issue, but there are no dogwhistles to indicate that (and I'd assume skin colour would be emphasised more).
Serious question: do people want HN to turn into a safe space then? I always preferred the blunt tone of the forum, because in practical terms you can flesh things out faster that way, and anyway it's literally pixels on your computer - they can't physically hurt you. Hell I'm even guilty of fanning the flames further sometimes, but again I always thought it's part of the conversational culture here in order to gauge every possible angle to a subject as effective as possible.
I certainly don't want the "forced nice" tone being policed here. It will likely kill the entire charm of HN.
As a complement to your points - it's worth pointing out that "blunt" != "intentionally rude" / "personal/character attacks".
I've seen lots of people on HN who are straightforward, but don't verbally abuse others when correcting them (although they might get a bit terse) - complaining about them is very different than complaining about those who actually start attacking you personally when you disagree with them.
(I, personally, try to be a polite form of the former, but as most people who have extensively commented on the internet can tell you, it's a slippery slope)
It's difficult to read sentiment and know whether you're being sarcastic or not so please take no offense from my tone, but this is the complete opposite of "beautiful" - it is the first steps in turning humans into units of production with every action being optimized for you and leaving little to no individual freedom.
It's communism 2.0 except the government doesn't only dictate production quotas but also "life quotas." It's an absolute nightmare and seeing what a spectacular failure communism 1.0 was, everyone should be more than freaking out about this.
It's not communism rather that same tendency that both communist and non-communist powers often display once they reach a certain size: the tendency of large bureaucracies towards increasing their own power and influence at the expense of the people they're supposed to serve. By declaring this tendency communist we blind ourselves to the fact this can happen to any bureaucracy whatever labels it gives itself. This can happen to the most cut-throat capitalist business as well as the most oppressive communist state, it's the nature of large organisations in general.
The British government hasn't built an illiberal surveillance state because it sits in the private clubs of London dreaming up ways to oppress the plebs for its own sake, it's done so because there's a lot of bureaucratic incentives towards this behaviour and the sum of millions of individual cogs without malice is the path of least resistance. It's why the police go after people over jokes made in poor taste on Twitter while burglaries might go uninvestigated, signals intelligence is far cheaper than actually investing in proactive policing and boots on the ground. Add that to the fact that people are easily scared and gaslit into giving up their liberties for promised safety and it's easy to see how these things about. Nothing to do with communism, although historical communist regimes often displayed this behaviour to a high degree.
The cure in my opinion is a government based on the principles of subsidiarity, decisions should be taken as close to the people they effect as possible at the lowest practical tier of government. Decentralising government as far as we can (preferably to council or even district level) and making it intentionally difficult for government entities to consolidate power in a meaningful way is how we prevent abuses of power to begin with, we must treat political power as we treat enriched uranium: incredibly useful and vital for civilisation but also very corrupting to biological life if not handled with extreme caution. The road to Hell isn't just paved with good intentions but sign-posted and landscaped with them too.
> everyone should be more than freaking out about this.
Yet nobody does. Because everyone is living too comfortable a life to dissent.
Just ask the Chinese. (general populace, not the government)
And that's basically a reason why I'm a libertarian, but unfortunately I don't see the future as more libertarian, unless there's a massive paradigm shift. The general populace will put up with whatever governmet oppression or tracking or whatever, as long as they can keep living their cushy, comfortable lives.
People can still get jobs if they want. In fact, most people probably still will. Otherwise nobody would be working in countries where welfare isn't capped, which obviously isn't the case.
Also just think back to all the rich trust fund kids and financially independent people you know (eg. multimillionaires). What percentage of them don't work anymore? In my experience, most continue to work even though they could just live off of their savings/investments. That's because they are free to work on what they themselves enjoy, rather than simply having to sell their labor to make ends meet.
I wish everyone had that freedom. If it were not possible, then at the least it should be a goal we strive towards.
I dont understand the logic in this at all. Is the idea to have some sort of free flowing money pool a la UBI that ensures all people can obtain basic necessities? If so, then what will ensure those necessities exist in the first place if the intent is to remove money as a tool of trade? You cant just make supply and demand magically disappear.
This sounds just about as superficial as the dude on fox news who wants to walk dogs and teach philosophy as their profession. Surprisingly or not, none of the antiwork activists are queuing to work in rice fields or other gritty but absolutely necessary jobs.
So lets say 50% of farmers quit and become philosophizing dog-walkers, please explain how you avoid a global famine and / or how you distribute food to people and simulatenously take five minutes to think what happens to food prices when its suddenly a scarcity, and what happens to the value of your monthly universal income
Protip: we’re experiencing the same effect right now thanks to liberal money-printing for ”covid relief”
Most anarchist philosophy starts from the idea that "general populace" is a bad idea to begin with. People should be living in small, hyper-independent communities. They sidestep the scalability question by asserting that a community of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) is already unnatural.
(Not a philosophy I agree with, but one that I observe as pretty cornerstone).
Localism should be encouraged more, I agree, but I just get the vibe these antiwork activists arent arguing for that, but rather for some subjective right to spend their days doing what pleases them while someone else provides the basic necessities for them.
