its_pizza
The $1M salary is really typical of California tech job postings, and it is essentially meaningless. Under the new transparency law, employers have to list the salary range on job advertisements. For many of these speculative or open-application type roles, it’s common to list $90k-$900k as the range.
It makes great headlines, but nobody in that job is actually going to make 900k.
The 3 drug cocktail worked, but it was often a minimally-trained technician charged with placing the actual IV lines. I know most of us have had an IV sometime in our life with relatively little pain, but that seems not to be the case for some inmates. Anxiety, old age, obesity, dehydration, and myriad other reasons can make it more challenging to place a catheter.
Look how many jobs in the private sector also require a security clearance. Most things in aerospace, but also a lot of enterprise/cloud/telecom computing will have a “federal” arm, and they need cleared workers for that. Amazon, Google, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft and many other big names have divisions that do classified work. They pay a premium over regular positions because the clearance is a PITA for everyone involved.
No stores, markets, and services also translates to a low availability of jobs.
As a high schooler, you almost inevitably need some kind of “boost” to get out on your own. Maybe college, but at least a car or help signing for an apartment. Without at least some kind of help, it’s easy to get literally “stuck” at age 18 or 19. No money for a car or apartment, but no close access to employment without one of those tools.
I see parents moving to the suburbs to give a safe life for their kids away from “bad things” in the city. Meanwhile, parents may not be home until 6 or 7 pm due to leaving the city in traffic, and bored suburban teens can get into just as much trouble as their urban counterparts. Unless the parents are also able to commit some serious money to other involvement for their teenagers, the suburban life may not play out well for them.
Something that really struck me, particularly in Northern Europe, was that the young adults seemed to be a lot more self assured. There are probably a lot of reasons for this that I do not notice, but I wonder how much results from having a practical path to an independent and productive life. This in turn opens up so many other doors socially.
Putin took some steps to strategically wreck any semblance of politics in Russia. One of his advisors, Vladislav Surkov, secretly funded a variety of opposition parties, ranging from “green” environmental parties to openly Nazi groups. They let these groups grow in an organic way before “leaking” the information that they were all funded by the state/FSB.
This type of move, and similar actions, have made true political engagement very difficult. That march, protest, Facebook group, or underground newspaper? One has no idea whether it’s legitimate grassroots movement, or purely astroturfed campaign. Unless you have significant time and resources to study the issue, it is impossible to tell.
This was the exact objective: to basically make politics inaccessible for 99% of people. Sure there will be 1% who do have a good picture of what’s going on and who try to create movements, but their voices are drowned in the confusion. The average person may simply find that it’s too difficult to participate in a meaningful way. Even someone with full intentions to learn and participate may find themselves sidelined into a fake movement and essentially neutralized from a political perspective.
Reminder that “suicide” has a lot of gray areas, and when less stigmatizing labels exist, officials may choose to apply those instead.
On one hand, we have deaths such as by overdose or auto accident that may be labelled as accidental, but were in fact a suicide.
On the other hand, there are deaths which may be quickly closed as a suicide, but where the details suggest some other kind of foul play.
All this to say, that any comparison between to between countries is to be taken with a margin of error, because specific interpretations and data-collection methods may differ.
That’s pretty normal for meh-tier kind of jobs in the US, though usually you “graduate” to two weeks sooner, like after a year.
In many workplaces there’s a culture of taking as little as possible of the allowed vacation time. Sometimes it can lead to a small bonus when those days get “paid out” at the year end. Other times, the only encouragement is just pressure from the boss or coworkers. Note that there is neither a legal minimum for vacation days, not a requirement that employees actually use the days they have.
Not just East Germany. If you dig enough, you will find mental health abuse in every country on earth, whether historical or ongoing. Of course in the USSR as you mentioned, also in China, the USA, and elsewhere.
“Abusive” in this case can mean abusive treatments, or treatments against things that are not diseases, such as homosexuality, promiscuity, or unfavorable political ideas.
In the US, read about the published papers of the mkultra project, and look as well into the ongoing existence of centers such as Elan school (now closed) and the Judge Rottenberg center (still in practice).
In my experience, having friends go through mental crises, the modern US system is hard enough to navigate even when one desperately needs and wants care. Try finding yourself a therapist when in such a depression that you can hardly get out of bed, much less search out who takes your insurance, has openings in their availability, and is a good match for your personality. Meanwhile true inpatient care seems reserved for either the fully disabled, or those who have already attempted suicide. Can you imagine if a profession like dentistry made care this difficult to access?
But for people who are either marginalized or truly mentally disabled, this is a harsh system that can make one suspicious, especially when the history of lobotomies, electroshocks, hydrotherapy, and other abuses are within living memory.