America is harder to live in the poorer you are, and it’s on a steeper scale than in other industrialized nations because there are fewer and less robust social services, especially health and child care, and declines in union membership have paired with a rapid increase in wealth inequality that is forcing the shrinking middle class downward and stomping on the poor even harder.
You can live a comfortable life (for now…) if you are firmly middle class and up. Your higher salary than your counterparts in Europe is eaten away at by higher costs, and you deal with risks that they don’t in the form of transportation being car dominated (more accidents and less walking exercise) easy access to guns (the most dangerous being the one in your own home, to you) and less strict food safety laws. Compared to those in Eastern Europe, however, your likelihood of suffering from a foreign attack is drastically lower, not that it was ever very high to begin with.
One thing that Americans take pride in (and rightly, mind you) and full advantage of is our First Amendment right to not have our speech be curtailed, so a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns). So there’s a cultural element to it that may or may not exceed the truth.
Given that the AI we have is prone to making things up because it “fits” according to the models it trains on, how much faith would you have in a translation done by an AI on writings made by people who lived millennia before said language models were developed?
My cat is deaf, so there have been a number of “Oh! It’s you!” startled “mrrrrAAAAAs” directed at me when I come around a corner.
She’s quite talkative, with lots of greeting (and aforementioned startled) trills and meows that can range from normal level to “causes ear bleeds at close range” level.
You improve at what you do often and with mindful intent. You’re already doing that; what’s tripping you up is the guilt you feel at getting things wrong because it feels like you’re being dismissive of people.
But you’re not: you’re actively working on a problem you’ve identified you have, and for partially personal but also kind, interpersonal reasons. There’s no timeline or final grade to worry about, so just focus on enjoying your media and discernment will come to you.
I don’t want people to be kept in check because they fear being slapped, and I don’t believe most people become their better selves through experiencing or fearing pain. So no, I don’t see Karens as presenting a solution to the problem of managing poor behavior.
That being said, what I do think is a problem for the Karen term is that insults are invariably misused in ways that hurt innocent parties. The women who are inconveniently or inarticulately but legitimately angry have reason to fear being mislabeled by those who want to shove them into a mental box and out of sight.
Ranked choice voting is like the little brother of March Madness brackets, and plenty of people take part in that every year.
This is entirely about wanting to force strategic voting so as to not lose power for the mainstream within their own party.
Whoda thunk the difference between current me and successful me is a hatred of sniffly noses and a preference for sci-fi.
It’s amazing how so many MBAs can tank a business. I’m seeing the same thing in my organization: as the number of people who have ever worked in the field decreases relative to the MBAs, things get worse, in both cultural and functional ways.
Be careful, next they’ll argue that since you could theoretically get a paper cut from the foil wrapper that it’s a safety risk and needs to be reevaluated.
@Lemmylefty
@lemmy.world