I worked in another profession for 15 years before becoming a professional developer. I can't say definitely that empathy is much lower among devs than among other people I've worked with. But I got used to it.

> See, it's as if the US military trains soldiers how to hide in the Appalachian, raid local villages, and steal food and ammunition from trucks,

You should hang out near Fort Bragg sometime. The Special Forces train exactly as you describe.

Also of note: most of them are very unhappy with the way things are going in the US. I disagree with them frequently, but they also have some good points.

What are their complaints with "the way things are going in the US?"

They are very upset with what they see as growing authoritarianism from the government -- particularly wrt many covid interventions. (for what it's worth, I mostly disagree but I do see signs of growing authoritarianism among many on both the left and right)

They weren't required to get any other vaccinations when they enlisted?

> their theoretical ability to fight their government with small arms adorable and misguided

Taliban? Vietcong?

The whole argument that small arms are of no comparison to tanks and nuclear weapons are made by people who have no experience with firearms, fire fight and perimeter and assault tactics, or any type of military strategy. To even get to this point you would have to assume that the US would devolve into a civil war, in which you can also safely assume that many in the US military would be defectors (leaving a lot of empty tanks and airplanes, if not turned to the "other" side). You would also have to assume that you could safely identify gun owners that would be willing to combat - if there's anything the US attempts to avoid (and with good reason) it is attacking non-combatants (it would be very easy to blend in to the normal population as we've seen in the Middle East). The difference here and the Civil War of 1865 was that there were clear demarcations between the sides. You would also have to assume that whatever resources you employ to launch this war would not interfere with any other outside enemy that may use this time as an opportunity to launch their own assaults (i.e. it would be a great opportunity for another 9/11). Mostly, this is a lazy half-thought-out argument.

> To even get to this point you would have to assume that the US would devolve into a civil war, in which you can also safely assume that many in the US military would be defectors (leaving a lot of empty tanks and airplanes, if not turned to the "other" side).

This is totally speculation on my part, but it could be important to have a armed civilian resistance to create a "permission structure" for military defection. My understanding is that military strongly inculcates loyalty and obedience to the organization. Those seem like they'd be hard feelings to overcome, especially in isolation when the defection would be solitary and likely pointless. I'd think that in a lot of cases people would just muddle along for lack of options. Having a group to join and take your equipment to seems like it would make the decision much easier.

Keep in mind that a lot of the military are your neighbors: reserves, national guard, and the like.

> To even get to this point you would have to assume that the US would devolve into a civil war, in which you can also safely assume that many in the US military would be defectors (leaving a lot of empty tanks and airplanes, if not turned to the "other" side).

I hear this a lot from the right, and I think it's hogwash. The Biden administration has already begun ideological screening of military personnel. If the government is forced to go to war against its own people, it will be mostly aging, out-of-shape fanatics on one side and highly-trained, highly-motivated, younger loyalists to the legitimate government on the other. It'll be a rout.

The 'highly trained' part I doubt. Our military has been crashing its destroyers into cargo ships and bungling withdrawals lately.

This notion is a meme for good reason.

There's a very different record of homegrown dictators vs. foreign occupying powers in this regard.

VC was supported by China. Taliban is supported by Pakistan and Russia. They don't have "small arms", they have the backing of major powers.

Presumably in a war where the US government fought its citizens there would be world powers that would support the citizens, whether they wanted to help the citizens or simply weaken the US government.

I don't necessarily see that happening. No other country came in on the side of the Confederacy during the US Civil War.

If they have serious backing why aren't they lobbing ATGMs at each other the way we see nation state aided militias doing in every other conflict this century (Syria is a great example)?

The Taliban is "backed" by external powers to about the same extent the IRA was.

Taliban never had the backing of Russia, what is this bs you're spreading?

The NY Times spread some misinformation that Russia had offered a bounty to the Taliban for killing American soldiers [1].

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/remember-...

You just shared a article saying the had contacts with them. South Korea has a contact with North as well, that is how countries operate.

Who cares if they are backed. Are they fighting with small arms or not? The answer is yes.

Did VC and Taliban have tanks, planes, or warships?

The VC were conveniently for the North used up in the Tet Offensive, after that it almost entirely the regular forces of the North. Who didn't need planes or warships for their second huge armored invasion after support US was withdrawn for the South.

Excellent examples that will undoubtedly be shushed away.

I disagree that they're excellent examples when you consider the difference in terrain, infrastructure, the cultural and religious differences between the combatants and the status of one side as foreign occupying force.

That seems like just shushing them away by saying they aren’t the same, when in fact those factors don’t make a difference.

There's really no way of knowing for sure, because you can't deny that many of the Talibans fought so fearlessly because of the certainty of their faith and religion.

There at plenty of people in the US who have certainty in their faith, whether it be Christianity, or the desire to confront oppression.

Long covid often includes easily quantifiable issues such as lung and heart issues.

This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning.

Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.

Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed" coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and work there.

I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the right.

My wife worked for several years. She stopped working when we had our 4th and child care was too expensive.

Now that she is a stay-at-home mom, our quality of life has improved a lot. She has more energy in the evening to read with our kids, she follows up with friends and we are both more social, she makes better food than either of us could do before.

Having a stay-at-home parent is DEFINITELY a luxury and a good decision IF you can afford it.

The thing is, for those parents who can afford one parent to stay home, in 99% of cases it's the mothers who end up as stay-at-home parents, and their careers (and with it, their post-childraising perspectives) go down the drain.

The current world abuses schools as whole day care institutions so that both parents can be exploited and worked to the ground, and when parents and children are home they are so tired they lack the energy to do anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed food, play a round of video games, and go to bed.

In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage would have 20 hours so that both parents can work four hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in the afternoon.

You claim correlation but that's not causation.

My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder.

Also, the stigma against stay at home moms is nothing, nothing, compared to stay at home dads.

> My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder.

That was pretty much my point.

Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.

> This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor

Any women's shelter will disagree with you here. The rate of women that go back to abusive partnerships is immensely high among those who don't have any other option to survive.

I didn't downvote, but what does this have to do with what I wrote?

> and ultimately it didn't make it in

Well, it's clear from the movie Marion was very young when they had an affair. We don't know exactly how old, but she says, "it was wrong, and you knew it" and "I was a child".

I love the movie. This was one of his big flaws. He's not supposed to be a moral paragon - he was a grave robber and antiquities trafficker, after all.

Edit: Supposedly, the actual script says she was 25 when they meet again, which would have made her 15 at the time.

It's ambiguous in the film. Karen Allen was 30 when Raiders was made so we could be talking college age which still fits with the dialogue for an affair with a 10+ year older man at that age.

Of course, it's not really remarkable in the film because, in addition to both of them being 10 years older, it's very much a norm in Hollywood to have younger (so long as not too young) women and older men.

> We had Bosnia during Clinton years.

Oppose them or support them, it was literally American bombing campaigns that stopped the Bosnian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

Admittedly the Yugoslav wars are not my strong suit in history, but if protecting genocide is all that is American, it makes you wonder where have we been the past decade when it came to Yemen. Same with the Uyghurs in China. Same with the civil war in Syria. I can list a few more...

Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.

> Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.

There was a lot of pressure to "do something" in the Balkans, and the military wasn't averse to showing off its goods, so something was done. Imagine the media pressure with Yemen x1000. That was Bosnia and Kosovo (probably mostly because it was in Europe).

Also, US military has intervened militarily in Syria, many times, and even with troops on the ground. Did you miss it?

The Uyghurs are a poor analogy, because despite the intense oppression they're under, they're not being mass-murdered. And a humanitarian intervention in China due to Uyghur situation is just not in the cards, because realism.

So sure, Bosnia+Kosovo interventions weren't just "benevolence". It was a convergance of factors (power dynamics, US President open to idea, media+public pressure, limiting intervention to air campaign, etc). But it wasn't an oil pipeline or some ridiculous conspiracy, either, like I sometimes hear.

Back in my 20s, having spent HS and part of college running track and cross-country, I’d pass guys all the time in their bikes that cost more than my car in my $200 used bike that didn’t even have clipless pedals.

Those days are long gone now, but it was highly satisfying to see the look of panic on athletic, rich banker’s face when some punk kid in a t-shirt, shorts, and cheap bike passed him going up a hill.

> How was I ever going to afford a kid’s college fund? How was I ever going to afford a kid’s college fund?

Uh, lady, you’re 37 years old. If you seriously want a kid, you need to approach finding a spouse with the same seriousness and intention you (admirably) now approach finances. Otherwise, it ain’t gonna happen.

But I guess that’s another article.

Plenty of people adopt

I had my first kid at age 34, and part of my deeply regrets not going sooner (wife is much younger). I had some serious health issues by 45, which impeded by ability to raise my kids the way I wanted.

Adopting in 40s? Will the parent even still be alive when the kid graduates college? With good luck, genes, and good diet/exercise, yes. Otherwise, likely not.

They often don’t even let you adopt at that age. I knew some 40+ yo families that adopted overseas due to age restrictions. One family adopted from China and one from Eastern Europe.

Life expectancy for a 40 year old in the US is ~80. It is very likely that with an average lifestyle the parents will be around after the child has graduated college.

Yes, that would be:

50%: some combo of good luck, genes, diet, exercise

50%: some combo of bad luck, genes, diet, exercise

Unless you live in bad parts of Africa I suspect living to 65 is not an unreasonable goal....

As someone (~50) who has spent much of the past 2 months suffering in pain in some hospital, I endorse your decision. Several hospital-issued medication issues there that set me back.

I’m now at home, where I’m slowly healing just as well. As long as I can eat and drink (and failure to be able to do that is what sent me to hosp to begin with), I stay here.

I’m going to come out of this more healthy, I’m determined.

If you’re younger (or older!), I strongly endorse avoiding the pharma industry to the extent possible. The side effects will almost aways catch up to you at some point, usually during a crisis or other sickness. Work on your weak spots “naturally” (eg, if you’re anxious, master meditation and physical workouts). If you’re on a chronic drug, always carefully re-evalulate risks/benefits at least once a year, and find out if there are any new non-pharma approaches.

With a very few exceptions, pharma is about temporarily soothing symptoms while doing nothing for the underlying disease.

The challenge with such recommendations is that the reader must be able to understand which medicine can be safely skipped. I do not believe most people can make this choice safely.

For many conditions, such as arthritis, taking daily medicine is required and skipping that would decrease quality of life dramatically.

However, if you've a sore head then potentially skipping some medicine is fine.

>> With a very few exceptions, pharma is about temporarily soothing symptoms while doing nothing for the underlying disease.

I think you're quite mistaken. Pharma is about improving the quality of life and health outcomes for the patient. Some diseases cannot be magically fixed with drugs, e.g., Parkinson's, etc.

> such as arthritis

Which arthritis med, exactly? So many have been pulled off the shelf by the FDA.

But Levadopa for Parkinson’s (which I’m highly likely to get if I live long enough), and its newer analogues, may be one of the few worth the trade. Grandparents on both sides w/Parkinson’s.

99% of the other drugs are not worth the tradeoffs, for most people.

When I said Arthritis I actually meant Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), where Sulfasalazine is the recommended and effective drug treatment. I don't know much about osteoarthritis (OA) so cannot comment on it.

>> But Levadopa for Parkinson’s (which I’m highly likely to get if I live long enough), and its newer analogues, may be one of the few worth the trade. Grandparents on both sides w/Parkinson’s.

I'm very sorry to hear that. Are you taking any "precautions" to (potentially) delay or mitigate the onset of Parkinson's, e.g., healthy eating, exercise, etc? Do you think knowing what you know has had an impact on how you lead your life currently (#Yolo)?

Note: I'm a researcher in an adjacent field (digital health) and so please don't take anything above as medical fact.

I'd say don't underestimate and write off medication.

You can master the art of balancing medication intake to fit your needs.

Sadly, the biggest roadblock in that case is having to deal with doctors and pharmacists who just won't give you what you need.

That’s how I felt in my 20s. What’s above is my opinion in my 50s, after multiple hospitalizations and serious chronic illnesses.

Best option of all is to stay fit. Some of mine were out of my control (genetics), but some were probably not. And the extent to which the genetic ones expressed was probably somewhat in my control.

Well, yeah, I'm talking after regular exercise and a good diet.

I've seen people give in to stuff like wrist magnets and rejecting vaccines because they didn't like "chemicals in their body".

Why have this whole industry if people reject it?

I personally have the opposite problem - I can't get what I need.

I managed to a few times and can tell my life is noticeably worse without medication. So I guess this is the result of my experience so far.

Seeing people with access to prescriptions or suppliers who simply refuse to try "chemicals" because they can't be arsed to experiment or even learn how they work makes me sad.