shikitohno
It’s not like they would actually go extinct entirely, they would just evolve in a different direction and have much smaller populations. There are wild bovines, turkeys, swines, etc. If chickens were cut loose to live in the wild, they could probably do alright for themselves, but you might see other traits favored than maximum egg-laying capacity or rapid growth that only serves to maximize farmer profit by reducing the time to be able to sell them off, for example. Local populations would likely collapse until they reached a more stable level, too, given they would have more limited food available, absent someone constantly feeding them.
One thing this article overlooks that also contributes to this problem is the jobs that are available for these generations. Unfortunately, there are only so many jobs available in fields that offer an actual possibility at having a career, like being an engineer, programmer or getting into some well paying finance role. Lots of people around my age are stuck working jobs in the service industry, other “unskilled” labor, or turning to unstable gig economy jobs, and it’s not exactly easy getting out of them and landing a job that offers the financial stability and security that would let them become more independent. When you’re stuck in a job that doesn’t even pay a living wage and half the country goes full commie hunting mode at the mere suggestion that we maintain even the very minimal and highly means tested social safety nets we have, it’s no wonder younger people are finding it challenging, if not impossible, to make it on their own.
Just look at SNAP benefits eligibility in NY, one of the supposedly more progressive states in the country. If you have two newlywed millennials who are struggling to make ends meet, they’re disqualified from receiving SNAP benefits if they make more than $25,644 gross between both of them. To stave off any, “But don’t live in NYC if you don’t make much money!” lets assume our hypothetical couple lives in the middle of nowhere upstate, somewhere like Colton, with a massive population estimated at 1,434 people. Since NY is backwards as hell, for some reason there are 3 different minimum wages, depending on where you live, and they drew the short straw living in the zone with the lowest minimum wage of $15/hour. If either one of them worked full-time, they would be disqualified from receiving benefits for making too much money. Upstate is not known for its robust public transportation, so in all likelihood, they would need to have at least one car between them to get to and from work and any other places they need to go, keep up with gas and repairs, pay rent, pay for groceries and pay utilities, without working more than 65.75 hours a week between the two of them on average if they are to have a chance at receiving any benefits. Say they do this, but don’t even have a home and are sleeping in their car, grossing $2136 a month and just pay for gas and a phone bill, what do they qualify for? An absolutely princely sum of $135 a month!
That’s hardly enough to live on, even in the parts of the state with the lowest cost of living, and you can’t even realistically expect it to be enough to save up and move away somewhere else with better job prospects. It shouldn’t really come as any great surprise that young people are finding it difficult to survive without support from their family in these sorts of situations, much less so in areas with a higher cost of living where wages are not that much better to make up for it.
I read it out of spite because of how often any random nonsense in my high school English class would be call a metaphor for Jesus and I wanted to be able to call BS on it when appropriate.
Suggested to my mother that she might want to read it sometime, seeing as she taught catechism classes for the local church and she gave me the most confused look and asked me why on earth she would want to do that. The very same lady who insisted I had to continue attending mass and catechism classes until I got confirmed right up until the nun in charge expelled me from their catechism program.
I have a TV for when I have time to play games on my PS3 or PS4 these days, but I watch the vast majority of my stuff on my computer. Unless I’m watching something that’s available in 4K that I feel is worth it, why would I bother going to another room just to watch stuff that is streaming off my NAS and accessible on my computer anyway?
I feel like a lot of people just don’t have much reason to turn on their TV to watch stuff unless they still have cable and want to watch live sports.
Even running Arch for the last decade or so, I largely don’t have issues that wind up being any more complicated than downgrading a package every so often. Most of my config editing occur in one of three situations. First and most common, initial setup of a program to telling it where to find any files it needs and change any default settings I have a different preference on. Second, it’s a program I use constantly and want to tweak it to work just so, adding to it as I discover new features that catch my interest, like tweaking my ncmpcpp and tmux setups. The last case is procrastination, where I get obsessively focused on something because, clearly, the reason I haven’t written my 5 page paper due tomorrow has nothing to do with the fact I’ve been screwing around and not keeping up with my coursework for the last week, and can instead be squarely attributed to the fact that I have discovered some aspect of my emacs setep that needs to be refined, like realizing I dislike how biber formats my references in Auctex and needing to spend hours finetuning my reference style to m’ exact preferences.
For most general use cases, like browsing the web, listening to music, watching movies and maybe firing up a word processor, this is entirely unnecessary. To give an example, I got tired of having to periodically spend a night purging my elderly mother’s laptop of myriad viruses and uninstalling the dozen or so IE toolbar she kept infecting her system with. Clearly not a techy person. I put Linux mint on it, changed the desktop shortcut for Firefox to the Internet Explorer icon, ditto for Open Office’s word processor with Ms Word, and she was happy as could be without really noticing a difference. I would just remote in and periodically update it. Worked fine for her until she got a new new computer, by which point she’d realized she could, in fact, live without all that malware taking up half her screen in IE.
In the Northeast, it’s often cheaper, and pretty much always faster, to fly than to take Amtrak, unfortunately. My family tried to get me on a last minute family gathering over the holidays, for example, and Amtrak was going to be over $400 round trip, and a round trip flight was less than $200, and about 2h30 quicker each way. If I look up the same trip saying I want to go from NYC to Boston today and return Tuesday, taking Amtrak at crazy early or late hours would let me have an 8+ hour round-trip come out to $285. Round trip flights would run $427 pretty much any time of day and take 3 hours in total. For me, as a younger guy often travelling solo, it might make sense to just wake up stupid late and be on a 2am Amtrak train to save some money. For people with kids, elderly folks, or anyone who has time commitments that mean they can’t do that, the $427 flight at 10am sounds a lot more appealing.
It only gets worse as the distance goes up. NYC to Montreal is only a $153 round trip on Amtrak if you book in advance to snag one of the cheap seats, but it takes 11h41m each way. Round trip flights going direct run $242, but going and coming take only a quarter of the time for going one-way on Amtrak.
Oddly enough, going south, Amtrak actually makes sense. Booked far enough in advance, I can go from NYC to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, DC. for between $30-$50ish, last time I looked. Flights are more expensive and only save me about 90 minutes on the longer legs. I have heard that outside of the NE Corridor, Amtrak is much more affordable, but I don’t know how true that is.
Needle exchanges, methadone, nalaxone. All the things that let them keep using instead of getting clean.
2/3 of these are just things that let them not die as a result of use, and methadone is generally used to facilitate getting clean and minimizing withdrawal symptoms, so what exactly are you going on about here? People will use heroin regardless, but if you would prefer more entirely avoidable deaths, sure, get rid of needle exchanges and nalaxone, and enjoy community transmission of HIV and Hepatitis going up along with overdose deaths. That’ll really teach 'em, I’m sure.
These aren’t programs that facilitate ongoing use amongst addicted populations, they’re just stop-gap measures that mitigate the worst outcomes within these groups, which impact everyone. If you think people are just going to stop shooting up because they can’t get a clean needle or might OD on something that’s been cut, I don’t know where you’ve been for the last 40 years.
Making it seem like it’s predominately something done by middle-class men, or even rich people, helps to undermine public support for it because of the image people have of a stereotypical male cyclist, ie a well-off person riding a $1400 bike with a bunch of lycra clothes and tech gear pretending they’re training for the Tour de France while they go through their midlife crisis. It’s much less relatable an image for many people, who might say “Well, why do they need to ride on all the roads? They can just go on the paths in the park, or if they have so much money, they can go to a purpose-built facility.”
If you frame it as though it’s just going to benefit a bunch of people perceived to be living it up, you can drum up opposition from poor people, who don’t want their taxes going to fund some BS project that only benefits people who are already doing alright. Your aunt that’s busting her back trying to make ends meet and is trying to get back and forth to work and the shops on a bike one step up from a Wal-mart special can be much more relatable for many people who are struggling to keep up, can’t really afford their car payment and might even use a bike if there were dedicated bike lanes. So people looking to discourage building out bike infrastructure will naturally prefer that everyone thinks the only ones who would benefit from these developments would be some middle-manager who owns his home, rides a bike that costs more than your rent and that has gone on more vacations in the last year than you have in the last two decades.