> Certain weekend days, particularly Saturday, July 19 (63%), also ranked among the happiest for Americans in 2014.

Could be a mistake on both ends though. But June 19, 2014 was not a Saturday (it was for July 19 though) nor do I believe many businesses or localities were allowing employees a holiday on Juneteenth in 2014.

Probably not this:

> 2014 – Gunmen in Egypt's western desert province of New Valley Governorate attack a military checkpoint, killing at least 21 soldiers. Egypt reportedly declares a state of emergency on its border with Sudan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_19#1901%E2%80%93present

Edit:

For real though, this is kind of a strange article once it starts comparing 2019 and after.

> A recent gallup poll noticed a slight downturn in satisfaction with Americans’ personal life during the last 20 years.

> [graph showing a tick down in this poll on satisfaction from somewhere around mid-60s to ~50 from 2019 to 2020]

Gee, I wonder what happened from 2019 to 2020 that caused a dramatic shift in Americans' satisfaction with personal life. Hmm. Let me think...

> Notably, the amount of leisure is one area that people say could be be improved upon.

Changed from 42 up to 43 from 2019 to 2023. Personal health went down from 54 to 41, family life from 76 to 66, community as a place to live from 61 to 51.

I don't know why the article presents this data at all because it doesn't support focusing on leisure. The dramatic tick down is quite clearly people pissed off or affected by COVID-19 and government's response to it (both impacted people negatively). Given that data, leisure seems like a non-sequitur. Leisure definitely is important and has been consistently poor regardless of COVID-19, so why present this particular data? Just talk about leisure.

I'll add that one thing I think about leisure in the US is that without longer vacations, our leisure time is used in a worse way as well. A lot of peoples' leisure is filled with consuming television. It's like the junk food of leisure. Heck, if you're watching TV shows where characters are frequently angry and yelling at each other or committing murder, I'm going to guess that might actually have a more negative impact on the viewer's mental health. To each their own of course, but I find that when I listen to sad or angry music, it makes me sad or angry. It's like the Bill Burr bit on his dog's temper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnjGyOQ7FcU). Not suggesting we need to regulate how people use their leisure, I just think this is probably another piece of the puzzle when discussing Americans and our dissatisfaction with our lives in terms of leisure.

When I lived in SF, I saw this constantly btw. I probably saved on guy's life who saw a walk sign turn on at an intersection, proceeded to look at his phone, and stepped into the intersection. Meanwhile a car was running the red light at a fast speed (it was crossing Market somewhere up near 2nd Street), so I had to tug this guy by the back of his shirt to prevent him from getting creamed. And he actually gave me an annoyed look. This was sometime around 2015 though, so just an anecdote that doesn't have much to do with the data in the article.

You can assure me of that? Really?

Edit: If you're going to downvote me, how about you instead provide an explanation of how this can be assured? Or, you know, GFY.

Madoff also was not ultimately caught and his scheme ended because of the accounting fraud being revealed (i.e. the fraud was not that important). That happened later. He was caught because a market downturn resulted in him being unable to acquire new victims for the Ponzi scheme, which would have otherwise perpetuated it by taking new money in and using that to pay out existing investors.

There are so many awful things going on in the world that you must provide a convincing reason for telling me, "Look over here... China is doing X!" If I can say, "USA also does X," or "USA does similar thing Y," then I think it's fairly clear you need a convincing argument to try and make me care about this instance of China doing it.

Same thing applies when Democrats do X or Republicans do X. It applies across the board, but this is with the caveat that I mostly do not care about things that happen in the news, and I require sound reasoning for why I am supposed to care. If I point out [I don't care because] X happens all the time, and your only response is "whataboutism," then all you're doing is attempting to make me look stupid on the internet, another thing I don't care about. I walk away feeling like I still don't care. You walk away feeling like you somehow proved me wrong because (China | USA | Democrats | Republicans) are still bad because whataboutism somehow makes me wrong.

Basically, anyone who sincerely argues "whataboutism" on the internet should probably have their keyboard taken away.

And, furthermore, the finding is akin to a form of survivorship bias. 'We found they stopped talking to each other and promoting hate online.' Okay, and what did they do next? Did they just stop hating people? Did they figure out a way to start meeting in person without Facebook to mediate the conversation? Did some of them become increasingly isolated that they decided to act out? Did some people who weren't members of the hate group happen to see this form of censorship and start to change their own minds? I'm not saying any of these outcomes are what happened or are inevitable, I'm wondering how they can call this real science when they don't even bother looking at the other effects outside of their water-is-wet conclusion.

They know that "hate" can be redefined in any manner as they wish, and if they can correlate hate <=> censorship is beneficial, and they can correlate anything-I-don't-like <=> hate, then they can correlate anthing-I-don't-like <=> censorship is beneficial. But they want to pretend you're the "sea lion" in some moronic comic as an ironic shorthand to disrupt and short-circuit a serious conversation on censorship.

1: https://theconversation.com/the-inherent-racism-of-anti-vaxx...

2: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/eric-clapt...

3: https://www.theedgemedia.org/purebloods-anti-semitism-white-...

Why is it not the best idea? It's a great idea. Fine them more money and let them go bankrupt. Let companies that did not go under for such awful practices pick up the pieces. Why is bankruptcy acceptable for Kmart but not 3M? Be specific, no nonsense about how they are the only company in existence ever capable of creating some mysterious chemical yet also only have a $50B market capitalization (if their chemicals were so rare, impossible to produce, and highly sought after, market cap would be higher).

> The taxpayer CAN NOT be the one to be on the hook for corporate misdeeds time and time again.

I don't understand. You think the taxpayer cannot be on the hook, yet you also think we are obligated to bail out the business by nationalizing it? What do you think nationalizing a business entails? It would literally place the taxpayer on the hook for that business. Nationalizing it would not imply any guarantee the business remains profitable, and future losses would be owned by the public.

I do agree that execs should be punished more severely though. We are absolutely on the same page there. And I don't care if the current execs are not the original execs responsible. As far as I can tell, they've allowed the problem to continue if not get worse.

And yes, I agree we should be an expert in something. Harping on binary seems like a waste of time, however. I would certainly like that people are interested enough in the field that they spend their time learning as much as they can about CS, but I'm under no illusion that I'm going to automatically be more productive or better as a software engineer because I know bit-fields.

PS: Thank you for downvoting me.

I'm guessing 80% don't even know bit-field flags and never have to use them, despite them being relatively simple. It would also take someone moderately capable at understanding math less than an hour to "learn." I learned them when I was 13 because I fucked around with MUD codebases, and I don't think I am special for it.