It's always fun to read people's justifications for brutal occupation.

Lots of countries have one or more official languages. What's different is the purpose. Most sane countries define one to facilitate clear communication and transactions. China's forcing this to extinguish a culture.

Also "deranged white thought" is a pretty racist take when the flag bearing "white guy" countries of the United States and the UK both do not have an official language while most of the rest of the world generally does.

You raise another good point. Some people are simply not cut out for raising kids. Or interacting with normal people, for that matter.

I think you read my comment backwards. I guess to follow your analogy, social media is "soma" and is a problem today.

You're correct that my comment was not inclusive. That was not intentional on my part and I'm sorry if I offended anyone. However, this is a distraction from the main point.

It was not a strawman. I was making a statement about how society is right now, not how it should be. "men can be house spouses", etc is true but until we have better workplace equality and in absence of daycare, the vast majority of prospective families are going to do some very simple budget math to figure out who can afford to be a stay-at-home parent. It is exactly the "kitchen" crap from years gone by but with some populist indirection to avoid calling it that.

If Nascar can ban the traitor towel, this should have been a completely trivial thing for Glasgow to pull off. That this decision caused this much stir tells you all you need to know about this place.

I've noticed some people here practically yearn for disasters because it might hurt the rich. The absolutely staggering collateral damage to everyone else is ignored or waved away. It's very much a desperate "nothing left to lose" philosophy that's both sad and scary.

Sure, but people wanting families are facing these decisions right now. They don't want to wait for society to get its head screwed on straight. The root comment was "stay at home parents! no more daycare!" but sailed right over all the macro and micro consequences of that.

The food analogy is great. But I think there's a quantitative difference in effort and long term commitment between what to have for dinner and how you'll afford to raise your family.

At a coarse level, children from families with more money are better off so I disagree. Daycare is a small part of a child's life. Really 3-4 years out of 18 and of those, only 9-5 at that. In exchange, you afford a nicer, safer town with better schools. If your family chooses a stay-at-home parent, you won't afford those places when competing against dual income families.

Are you seriously claiming that we're done with equality in the workplace (positions, salary, respect)? No? Then stop misrepresenting what I said as some neanderthal spiel. We need daycare to give people options. Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.

If you're going to boil it down to bare economics, daycare should come out ahead. 2 people can take care of 9 babies versus a stay at home parent taking care of 1 or 2. And realistically today, advocating for a stay at home parent is telling women to go back to the kitchen. It's regressive, unnecessary, and not actionable advice.

I would instead argue that modern life is not supportive of real-life, tight communities and lasting relationships. Online social lives are a starkly inferior substitute for real life but they're easier to access and give the equivalent dopamine hit.

Is someone actually proposing that we're simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it's unknown, not impossible.

This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don't know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.

That's not what net neutrality is about. NN is about carriers and ISPs treating all services and websites equally. Don't feature creep NN. It weakens the arguments for why why we need NN.

You described a straight up better product. That's not convenience. You said it yourself: alternatives have worse quality.

That's Matrix. End to end encrypted, decentralized, and open source.

Bridging opens it up to other services as well, like how Pidgin/Adium/Gaim used to work.

Signal is a chat app. It uses phone numbers for identity verification and friend discovery but messages go over an end-to-end encrypted protocol. While open source, it uses a centralized network and a single client.

It's somewhere between Matrix and WhatsApp. Open Source and friendly, but still centralized and anchored to phone numbers.

You're demanding to view this as "good team" / "bad team". Fix that first because it stops any hope for peace.

I must have missed history class where the Warsaw Uprising attacked a peace festival.

Being oppressed is not a license to become a monster yourself. I refuse to condone cold blooded revenge (both Hamas and IDF).

It's far cheaper than your first car and arguably more important. You find a way when you have to.