This book speaks to it better than I can: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs/

Specifically take a look at

Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1)

If your eyeballs are missing, I can make an assumption that your vision isn’t great just by looking at you. That’s not a moral judgement.

Doesn’t mean blood tests are useless, and in fact it means we have some idea where to start investigating a potential health problem.

Yes, I agree that there’s bias against folks who are overweight, and also that there’s a range of risk associated with being overweight. It’s pretty clear, however, that obesity is a health concern that we should take seriously. If someone smokes five pack of cigs a day, I’m going to make an assumption about their lung health. There’s always outliers that live to 100 smoking and not doing exercise, but it would be a shit doctor if they didn’t tell folks not to follow their example.

I must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I’d also humbly submit Sierra Ferrell: not exactly outlaw country, but definitely in the vein of old school country, and she has a voice that is absolutely hypnotizing.

One of her most popular songs that is about love with a healthy dose of morbidity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2W8kCk1qnU

An absolutely legendary display of what she’s capable of with her voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Aha_GwFt4

My apologies, since wells are hardly “free” to build and maintain I had assumed you were talking about collecting it directly via a harvesting system. I’ve used wells the majority of my life.

My general point is that wells or direct capture is not viable for dense urban areas, and while you’re saying it’s a choice, the majority of folks in the USA live in urban areas. Big urban centers aren’t going away any time soon, so we should consider how to meet people where they are, when possible. The larger point I wanted to make though is that we (at least in the USA, and all the Latin American nations I’ve lived in) have good public sanitation and water systems precisely because it’s seen as a right. And those systems aren’t cheap, but we do it. As I argue we should do more for re: housing.

That’s the crux of the biscuit: I just think more should be done to help people afford these basic necessities. I think we should (as a nation/planet) fundamentally rethink the way we approach housing, for the same reasons water and food are subsidized (and they should be further subsidized IMHO, but that’s another point entirely). I’m not going to claim I know the answers, or that it would be easy or cheap, but I think it’s something we should all try seriously to solve.

Hahaha awesome, do you get the majority of your clean water via collecting rain? Do you think it’s a viable source for folks living in dense metropolitan areas?

Water is tangible though. Clean, safe drinking water isn’t cheaply and widely available (in the USA, anyway) by accident: it’s a huge endeavor that requires tax money to maintain public infrastructure. See the ongoing crises in places with tainted water to see how challenging it is to maintain.

Housing is harder than water, but public water and sanitation systems are incredibly expensive, so I wonder what the comparison would be like against more public housing.

Can they murder people on their property? Or is there some limit to their ability to make rules?

Compromise time: he’s a (mostly) retired Batman, and we can have a younger actor as Batman Beyond?

I had an enormous reply essentially “yes-and’ing” your reply (I agree with it, but wanted to add a “but” in a few places), but…into the ether it went. I’ll listen to that podcast mini series.

One thing I wanted to add is that I grew up in Atlanta, so I agree that plenty of folks should leave NYC and LA. However, there’s plenty of folks there necessary for the city to function, and I think that legislation is probably the only viable way that things will change for them, since lower-income folks are just being squeezed from all directions, given how much of a commodity real estate has gotten since the last big housing bubble burst.

Again though, I’m not an economist, so my ideas are certainly not immediately viable, and I agree there’s little chance of “solving” most of this under the best of circumstances. I just think there’s too much greed, especially related to housing, that can be improved. We’re a rich enough nation that we can do better. Also I just wanted to be sure to give your nice comment a thoughtful reply, because the internet is too toxic in general, and we need to try to make it otherwise. Have a nice end of the year

Because plenty of folks would have a solid down payment, or better credit score, if rent wasn’t so damn high. Likewise affordable rent would make it easier for folks to move to places where they could get the type of stable job necessary for a mortgage, etc. It’s not the only reason folks don’t have the economic resources at hand, but it’s usually the biggest expense in ones budget, no?

Greedy landlords are the problem, imho, and unfortunately every landlord except exactly one I’ve rented from (out of about ten in total) have been greedy assholes.

As for a fix: housing is a right, imho. I’m not an economist so anything I offer will be full of holes, but some way of securing that people have stable, safe, comfortable housing is essential. Making sure people can’t exploit the need for shelter is a big component of whatever fix we need.

I appreciate you taking the time to say that! Thank you. My favorite song by him is probably Desperados Under the Eaves, if you’d ever like to hear the best of his music.

Reminds me of what Warren Zevon had to say about rich people problems, off Preludes. It came out a few years after his death, and the back half of the album has snippets from some radio interview(s?) he did. Neat musings by a complex dude: he was creative genius in a lot of ways, and a titanic asshole in a lot of other ways (he asked his ex-wife to write his biography, and to not go easy on him - alcoholism, violence, absentee parenting…it’s all there).

Anyway, that’s a preface for the folks who don’t know about him: he probably could have been a bigger financial success had he not been a disaster of a human, but maybe his dirty life and times gave him enough material to feed his creativity…who knows.

WZ: I was real lucky, because I always had some kind of work that came along - at the last minute, anyway.

I was always able to make some kind of living as a musician

I also never really got rich, and that might have been lucky too, ya know?

Interviewer: in what way?

WZ: Well, because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich

they’re like the issues of being famous

they’re not real issues

so they’re not real life.

Interviewer: And it leaves more time to be creative?

WZ: There’s more of an exchange - a human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant, and if you’re rich you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant. it’s necessary, I believe.

I know I’m happy and that means I must be lucky. That I know.

EDIT: this is not to say I wouldn’t be grateful for more money, myself, but I chose the life of a biologist - in ecology and evolution, no less. I’m happy to make a living, and it’s always a little shocking to see folks make double/triple what I do and say it’s “not much these days”. Those of us scraping by have a wildly different perspective, and I’d love to give folks a tour of what it looks like long-term.

I’ve got some student loans…

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt