I'm not going to stop responding in reasonable, human, and direct ways to comments.

I'm also going to note, yet again, your highly biased enforcement:

Nothing to someone who did insult me, just random dog-piling based on your whims because you happened to notice an emotional outburst.

That's terrible community management.

Because that's what you did say. (:

I (as you mighy expect) disagree with your assessment of what makes a functional community.

I can only imagine it works fine on dev machines with much faster quad+ cores and 64GB of RAM or whatever.

Just as an aside, it's done a lot to have the tablet be my primary "fiddle-at-home" machine: keeps me really conscious of resource limits, including ones I normally don't think of like screen size. (Most websites render terribly in landscape on a 10" tablet.)

And if anyone is looking for the book (like I was), this seems to be a more recent edition (with better availability):

https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/14516638...

People can (and often should) resist what society decrees, because it's only through that dynamic tension of conflicting forces in society that we can reasonably advance.

> I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.

You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you.

Pitching society-uber-als when society has made the choice you like is really cheap partisanship.

> Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right.

These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.

The problem stems from the fundamental fact that a very small percentage of people are assholes, a faction of people are intent on forcibly silencing and harming assholes for being assholes, and a faction of people are intent on not permitting that second group of people to do so.

That's the problem: two groups of people are prepared to use force to enact their contrary visions, while a third (relatively small group) is catalyzing the conflict.

This is actually pretty good advice for any time you're trying to manage people -- and kids are just little people.

"You can't argue with the math!"

"Well, hold on now, I think you left a whole bunch of things out!"

If you don't know where the problem in the math is, despite there being an extremely obvious problem, many people will ignore your objections. That's why they use math, to paper over their obviously poor behavior.

Being able to strip that bare is useful.

They compute fine -- most models are just "lying with math" by excluding the value of those things from their calculations.

It's not different than a friend who ignores those things when using words -- of course it doesn't make sense why you don't move if you don't account for the full value of where you are at present.

I think if we accounted for the destroyed social value that most of these economic models have inflicted, it would be the obvious massive negative that most people anecdotally tell. I think it's very telling how rarely you see these kinds of things modeled in economic theory despite how obviously part of the way humans value things they are.

Economics is merely institutionalized fixation on money, and produces precisely the psychopathic models you'd expect from that.

If you wanted to build complexes to stimulate the economy, you'd probably need on the order of... $100M in buildings, and another $100M in endowments for operating expenses/grants/risky loans.

So 200M is a lot, but it's also only the retirement wealth of 100-200 upper-middle class families, of which there will be thousands per major metro (and perhaps a million or so across the US).

I think it's mostly a logistics problem -- in those million families, there are probably 10,000 that are interested in resettling to the middle of the country and would be willing to move half of their wealth into local investments on a generational scale (while keeping the other half in say, the market).

That means we could do 250-500 self-sustaining mixed-use complexes backed by endowments for operations costs, which is probably enough to target 50-100 towns.

The question becomes the organizational aspects of those people finding each other, building trust (between each other and with the involved communities), and finding the appropriate legal instrument to manage the money on that scale.

These are all much harder problems than finding money or media attention.

Here's some anecdata:

I've been that shitbag without integrity, it's not actually any easier. (I actually think it's much harder.) Whatever energy you think you're saving by just going along with it, whatever profit you think you're getting out of it -- you're spending way more than that on maintaining the status quo.

I think a lot of the materialism and obsession with things like nice houses stems from the fact that when we step out of the shower and look in the mirror -- when we make eye contact with ourselves for that moment -- we're forced to admit that we just don't like the person we see. So we make the decorations around that moment nicer, obsessively, as if that will somehow change the encounter. This feeds into a cycle of needing every bigger fixes at ever greater expense to yourself, digging you deeper and deeper into dependence on it.

Whatever amount I'm "losing" in pay is worth it to change that reaction when I see myself -- to make the only required relationship in my life healthy and vibrant instead of toxic.

That said, I actually make more by being a trustworthy human that cares about the consequences of what he does, because it turns out that there's a) a need for that, since selfish behavior rapidly turns destructive in an organization and b) apparently a shortage of people willing to take the "easy" path.

Do facts like almost every American wants a more fair system change it? No, because the governing structure has itself been corrupted after decades of abuse.

Therefore, it seems the most effective means of causing change -- given that what you suggest has failed for decades -- would be to cause direct financial harm to those who are actively corrupting the system for their benefit, as that changes the calculus for them and incentivizes stopping.

This is a downright civil way to do that when society breaks down -- the poor used to just stab people over bad tax law.

This is really the crux of why it's a First Amendment issue -- because that amendment is meant to protect discussion from that sort of manipulation by government.

Every statistic I've seen seems to indicate that modulo life choices that seem correlated with gender (ie, on average women prefer different things to men, though individuals vary greatly), there is economic parity between men and women (in most developed nations, but I'm most familiar with the US).

There are some very real issues with the direction that women are steered by society, but there are also some real issues that men face (eg, school, legal system, etc).

However, there's also a non-trivial number of women (in places like the US) who blame sexism for the consequences of choices they've had to make in life between things that they want, and seem to treat it as an affront to their gender that they're not treated as catered princesses by the world -- getting to have every want. And then hide that behind talking about "economic parity".

> The exact details may vary a bit, but the feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason.

Doesn't this mostly have to do with poor women being forced to carry the economic burden of many children in developing nations?

It's also definitely not a common term to use -- which makes me think that you likely have a biased view from hanging out in a very polarized, niche crowd.

> But I feel pretty worn down and hopeless of late.

As a fellow human, are you sure you're not inventing a narrative that's worse than the truth, and then stressing yourself out battling phantoms? (This is something I do all the time, on issues small to large.)

There are real issues in the world -- quite serious ones, at that. But modern charities and other social purpose organizations deploy weaponized psychology meant to send you into an emotional state in order to boost their funding (or membership, but really power), and the consequence of everyone doing this "for the right reasons" is a completely toxic society, polarized in righteous anger over every issue to the point its emotionally burnt out and fragmented. This habit has even been exploited by foreign states to attack the nation. (True for virtually every country, and definitely all of the European and "Western" ones.)

This is quite possibly the best of times on any of those issues, so instead of worrying about how you're going to feed every woman in Africa with too many kids (hint: you won't), just try to focus on what's the next small step that you can take to fix one of the issue a little. Then do that.

That's something you can actually do right now, won't exhaust you even if you have to do it for the rest of your life, and would completely fix the problem if everyone would just stop panicking and do that.

Specialists aren't as good as generalists at integrating the work of specialists across domains (almost by definition). A lack of generalists can then lead to a situation where specialists are all making locally good moves, but the overall direction is negative -- something akin to Simpson's paradox (though, in the other direction).