My wife (early 30s) was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer and it's been absolutely shocking to hear how many other young women just in our social circle have also had it.
Honest question - if no one is going to change their life, shouldn't we then be focusing on creating a future where they don't have to change? If you gave people a choice between paying higher taxes to achieve abundant clean energy, carbon sequestration, new biodegradable packaging etc. or fundamentally changing life as we know it to slow down emissions, which is more likely to happen?
Is it naive to think we could prevent the impending ecological collapse and international conflict with mass fusion power? Unlimited energy to remove carbon from the atmosphere, oceans, etc. You also don't need to sell the rich on a life of austerity, as that kind of electricity would allow us to continue and even increase our current Western way of life.
Here in LA the fad seems to have ended around the start of covid in 2020. I used to see dozens of people a day riding them and now I rarely see any, and if I do it's usually a personal scooter not rented from Bird, Lime, etc. I still see scooters from those companies clogging up the sidewalk, I just never see anyone actually ridings them.
Similar story to where my wife went to high school, just outside NYC but on the other side of the Hudson. Multiple kids diagnosed with cancer shortly after high school, including one that died of a very rare form. My wife herself was just recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer 15 years later.
I'm not even talking about mass-affordable, I just mean being able to buy a home on less than a $600k/yr income. Do wages and housing prices continue to grow at 20% YoY indefinitely in cities like this, eventually pricing out everyone except the ultra high net worth?
My assumption is that a large percentage of the people who fled NYC/SF in March 2020 are either 1) going to miss the city once it fully reopens and they remember why they lived there in the first place; or 2) their "remote forever" job is actually going to become hybrid and they won't want the 2 hour commute.
I haven't really seen much written on this (maybe I'm just not looking) but what does the future look like when only the top 10-20% can afford a home? Do 80% of families rent forever with no real possibility of being able to buy a home near an economic center? What does that look like for the broader society when so much of the American dream and self-worth is built on being a homeowner?
I live in LA and I think about this a lot when I see the only homes for sale here going for $3-4+ million. How much longer can this continue?
Do you expect things to get better in the future? I'm not in the market to buy right now, but I'm trying to understand if the current situation is the new normal or still a reaction to covid upheavals. My gut tells me that in 2-3 years things will be much closer to normal as rates rise and people that fled to suburbs decide to move back to the city.
I had a similar reaction after reading this book. I spent a good part of 2020 and 2021 in a deep dive of learning about psychedelic culture, science, and cultivation/synthesis. Regardless of how the science relating to mental health develops, I think these substances are crucial tools of personal exploration and should me more widely (and responsibly) used.
This book changed my thinking on so many different topics - the US healthcare economy, the rise of Trumpism, and the erosion of the industrial Mid-West. This book really opened by eyes to those communities that have never recovered from the Great Recession and explains so much of what we have seen politically since 2016, including the current left-right Covid split. Highly recommend for anyone who wants to get even more angry at the current state of our healthcare system.