Set my phone face-down on my leg for a moment while watching porn… the picture I was looking at was sent to 3 of my Snapchat contacts. I was able to delete 2 of the 3 before they were opened, but the guy who saw it was my ROOMMATE at the time and was IN THE NEXT ROOM.
Hard to live down.
From my perspective in academic science, Covid has stifled the brain drain. For a long time, it was hard for young academic professionals to enter the US, even if they were trying to get an education. My lab has made several hires that proceeded to have to move on because they couldn’t get into the country. It’s a damn shame and a waste of talent.
I’ll quote Steely Dan here: “Unhand that gun, begone. There’s no one to fire upon.”
As infuriating and frustrating it is to live in a world plagued with systemic issues, it’s important to recognize that many of the world’s problems can’t be traced back to a single person, government, organization, or ideology. Some things are just nobody’s fault, and can’t be solved be a mere change of leadership.
Every society in the world today, no matter how it is structured or who it is lead by, will be subject to a list of inevitable problems. Scarcity. Bigotry. Violence. Crime. Incompetence. Selfishness. The uncomfortable fact is that nobody knows how to structure a society such so that all citizens meet their basic needs in exchange for an amount of work that they find tolerable.
This is true of the United States, of Europe, of the Soviet Union, of China under the CCP, and of every other country to ever exist. Some countries are, of course, worse than others. But in many countries you find that people and politicians try in earnest to improve society and simply fall short, sometimes because they misidentify the core issues, and other times because they don’t have good enough ideas for solving them.
I encourage everyone to look at politics as groups of impassioned people with strong opinions about how their lives might be improved. At the end of the day, those of us with kind hearts are trying our best to defeat a common enemy, and merely differ in approach. I think a lot of people would do good to realize that.
What do you think the death toll of flight attempts was before the Wright brothers finally got it right? Certainly not in the millions.
Whether or not you like communism, “keep trying over and over until it works” is a bad plan when failure has historically cost lives.