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What is something that you consider a "necessary evil"?
Take the term "evil" lightly if you wish -- it doesn't have to be the worst of the worst but instead can just be something that you don't like or support. Despite this, you also think yields value or is something you/we can't do without, which is what makes it "necessary".
The question is open to any field or topic, and any example, big or small. It can also be situational as well, rather than absolute.
A simple example for me would be flossing, which I hate doing but which is great for dental health. (This is also somewhat contrived since I actually love using my water flosser, but that's beside the point).
Explain what you chose and why you think it fits the description of "necessary evil".
Driving. It's absolutely necessary (in most of the U.S., at least), in the sense that the great majority of people have no access to work, goods, or recreation otherwise. Driving is enormously wasteful, risky, and isolating.
The COVID-19 risks of public transport (where available) notwithstanding, I'd rather not have a personal vehicle.
Ah, but what if your vehicle was truly personal?
One of the recent initiatives of the Italian government
wasis the so-called "Bonus Mobilità": a fund reimbursing 60% of the price of a personal vehicle (bike, e-bike, electric scooter), up to a maximum of €500 per person. It might have already been in the works, but the Pestilence definitely helped on that front.From what I can see, it has been very effective: e-bikes and scooters are mostly sold out on Amazon, and even if I swing by the nearby Decathlon almost every week their bikes aisles has been empty for months. Even if the bonus doesn't cover every Italian city - IIRC they limited it to residents of capoluoghi, città metropolitane, and 50k+ people cities - I think this will definitely change things in the coming years.
That said, I agree. I live in a city now, and even if it might be awkward public transportation and a good pair of shoes can bring me almost anywhere - but I know intimately what living in a rural area without a car means. Even if the various towns were still within ~15-20 km of each other, I don't think I'd have fancied biking or scootering anywhere on those roads: our cars have a duty cycle that is approaching 50% because of how often potholes & co destroyed their wheels.
I've lived in, and been a happy visitor to, a number of cities where transit and good shoes are all you need - it's mostly fantastic, even in places where transit is "dangerous". Extreme weather is hard to deal with, though - I've gotten near frostbite or heat stroke in outdoor shelters when the buses ran late. There's often an implicit curfew when the system shuts down. The costs can still be overwhelming (in a way that car-sharing isn't) if your income is limited. It's an unfriendly experience at best for many people with disabilities.
It would be great if more locales could support the addition of bikes and scooters, up to a point.
I've seen the chaos that ensued when some countries allowed nearly unlimited interactions of cars, trucks, pedestrians, motorcycles, scooters, and human-powered vehicles, while failing to develop public transit. Ill-built or poorly maintained road infrastructure just compounds the problem.
Bending a city towards cycling is a complex endeavor. It's not just a matter of suitable roads and signage, it takes holistic planning that implies planned spacing of destinations, adequate secure parking (!), a culture of cycling, and so on.
I think the place I live now is only "bike-friendly" in the sense that there are some country roads with wide shoulders, a few paved rural bike-only trails, and a couple of streets with marked bike lanes in the town. Winter human-powered travel is recreational-only, with fat tires that aren't commuting-efficient. It's not like there's an extensive network of bodegas and shops to support short-hop travel, either.
Agreed. Having worked for Ford for a time, there where a lot of opinions flying around about AV's (Automated Vehicles) and how they would impact society. They ranged the entire spectrum from "I'll never use one, I love driving" to "I hope I never have to drive again". Statistically one of the top causes of death in the US is a car crash, being higher than falling, drowning, fire, or guns.
So the sooner the robots take my car away (and everyone else's) the better.
I also learned years ago that commuting any distance is hard for me to do by myself. My schedule drifts, I feel way less motivated, and it's just boring. So I recruited people to carpool with to keep me company and keep me on time. I became such good friends with one to the point where we actually ended up carpooling together to a job interview and moving jobs, and I later officiated his wedding.
The ironic detail is that I've currently got a 50-mile round trip for work. The trip is so scenic and remote that I only wish I could take my eyes off the road to enjoy it. It's a temporary job, it's summer, and thus tolerable.
Is that normal in the US? A 50 mile round trip for work sounds actually insane to me haha.
This is completely normal in the U.S. It's on the long side of what I've personally tolerated, and I wouldn't do it if it didn't include 10 miles of f'ing gorgeous lake shore and 15 miles of woods and farms.
I've been acquianted with people who didn't blink at having devastatingly ugly 50-mile commutes each way.
This article based on 2018 census data has average car commute around 26min. The state with the shortest public transport commute is 29 min, longer than all but four of the states' car averages.
Heh, depending on where you live, 26 minutes might be only four miles by car, depending on traffic volume. When I was biking a great deal, my 24-mile r.t. bike commute was somewhat faster than car travel for the same distance due to the traffic backups en route.
That's nuts. The first thing I did when my job changed was renting a place nearby so I could walk. 10 minutes distance
I say confidently that living this close to work, gym and the supermarket and being car free was a huge quality of life boost for me.
I want to move to Amsterdam so bad for several reasons, but one of the big ones is just being able to bike everywhere.
Any Dutch company hiring Americans?
I can relate to this one so much. I bike everywhere that I can, but even living in a fairly urban environment (old neighborhood outside downtown), it can be difficult depending on the terrain and weather. Public transit here is pretty awful. I’m considering an e-bike with pedal assist to cut down on even more of my driving.
I'm in a theoretically bike-friendly town, but the major stores and employers are on dangerously busy streets with poor markings and sight lines. I've been in two serious bike/vehicle crashes, and I'm not eager to risk that again. Public transit is also limited and unsafe right now.
My greatest hope is that more businesses will foster work-from-home, and that more mixed commercial/housing development will be created to eliminate the worst of the long commutes. Driving is an evil that should be reduced or eliminated where possible.
I feel ya on the getting hit part. I’ve been there once (not commuting related, and I was not at fault, for what it’s worth). Fractured pelvis is no joke!
I’m hoping to move closer to downtown so I don’t have to take the busier streets to get around, but that’s a few years down the road. I was already WFH 4/5 days a week, although I made use of a nearby coworking space twice a week. Hoping their new location (10 minute bike ride from me on quiet streets) will make that option even more enticing.
Anything done to stay alive in a developed country, pretty much. "No ethical consumption..." and all that jazz.
On a lighter, less all-encompassing note... uh.. hmm, I'm not sure. Driving in Los Angeles?
You want libraries, effective policing, health care, even a universal basic income to take the sting out of capitalism? Maybe some money directed towards anything at all that isn't immediately profitable, like pure scientific research or maintaining your roads without Jersey-levels of tollbooths every mile? Want an infrastructure you can be proud of and that your children can depend on when you're gone?
Then pay your taxes. The oldest necessary evil outside of war.
Stick to property and sales/vat for the tax revenue. Drop the rest and make up the difference from those two, which are simple to administer and impossible to avoid no matter what means are at your disposal. Did you buy or sell anything? Tax time, be it property, stocks, bitcoin, lunch, a hat, a jet, you name it. They fall harder on those who consume the most, which is where the tax burden belongs.
Stop overcomplicating things. Simpler is better. Tracking this stuff used to be hard in the days of pen and paper, but in the electronic age, administering taxes at the point of sale and the point of value-add has become almost trivial.
The lion's share of tax revenue needs to go to local government, with a much smaller slice for state and yet again much smaller slice for federal, who make up the difference in the size of the area where they collect their taxes. No more of this nonsense where tax type A goes to one org, tax type B goes to another, etc. It's one big pot, not fifteen thousand obscure rules that exist just to let people game the system. All money in, appropriate shares come out.
Once the government reclaims all the stolen tax revenue we can start working towards all those other things people want from their government. It's never going to happen until the tax system actually works. If your entire tax code can't fit on an index card, you're doing it wrong.
If you want to be generous, you can exempt necessities from taxation and fund universal income - you'll have to decide if the total elimination of poverty is worth the trouble of those two sources of market distortions. Some things just might be more important than the almighty profit motive.
I get into it with other libertarians over this. Many of them just don't get it. People take their institutions for granted without a second thought.
I agree, but I'll have ask for context on this:
I agree that the state and federal level are geographically large enough that they can reasonably stilll have a lot to go off of even if they only get a sixth or a twentieth of total tax revenue, but why prioritize local?
(I will fully admit the city I live in (São Paulo) is a full quarter of my state and twentieth of my country's population, and if you count the metro area, a half and a tenth.)
Just for the simple reason that you are more present and active and concerned with your own local community. That's where your own self-interest naturally falls heaviest.
You'll have more of a say in how and where your own tax dollars get spent this way. Local projects are going to be better managed as a general rule because everyone paying for them also lives right there and can become involved in whatever it is the money is paying for - roads, bridges, schools, etc. You can go to your local town hall and talk directly to the people who got most of your money - and hold them accountable for using it wisely.
Compare that with state and federal, who have vastly different concerns at the top of their priority list, and are far harder for you to reach or hold accountable than your own local officials.
Fair, enough, and it is very simple and adapted to
our shrimp-sized, paleolithic brains that deserve nothing but shame for their incopetence to adapt to the world they createdhuman nature.In which case, what do you define as 'local'? Under 100,000 people? 100 Km2?
Honestly I haven't thought it down that far. All the local governments already exist in the US, the majority of property/school taxes are already going to them, seems like we'd just build upon the existing system. For the local regions that are underdeveloped or underpopulated where they can't generate enough of their own revenue, state and federal spending can step in to bring them up to speed like they've done in the past.
Fair enough. Here in Brazil we do have ~-56-hundred local "municipiums"/municipalities but mine has 12-14 million people in it and is around 1500 square kilometers in size, which just doesn't feel local, because it really isn't. There are the prefectures and they do feel local, since they're like, 10km2 but I don't know how much power they hold.
Google. Switching to Apple is an effective way to de-google (some may also consider Apple a necessary evil, but I currently do not. That may change in the future), but I still rely on gmail and google domains. I may switch registrars once my renewal comes, but we will see. Gmail provides the automatic filtering into categories, which is invaluable for how I use email. I have highly considered a provider like Hey, but they currently do not allow custom domains, and $100/year is insanely steep for someone who uses email a handful of times each month.
I'm surprised you value GMail's feature set so much when you use email so infrequently.
I just put up with the lesser feature set of protonmail.
I get lots of email newsletters that I do look through from time to time, but I don’t want notifications from them. I also want to have semi-permanent access to status emails such as receipts. Gmail makes it super easy to access these as needed, but not be alerted about them. Also, gmails sorting is really, really good. It is far better than any complex sorting rules that I could make (I tried when I used protonmail for a bit). Gmails sorting isn’t even set and forget, because it is already setup by default.
I do my best to unsubscribe from, or filter out, email streams that aren't important to me. But even with that I need to clear things out (I try to hide every seen email) every 2-3 days to keep things manageable.
Have a look at Fastmail. It provides filters, custom domains, and is much cheaper than Hey.
I switched over to Fastmail last fall. I loved it so much during the trial I paid upfront for three years. Speedy interface, no ads, calendar and contacts. Couldn’t be happier.
On the registrar front I've used Namecheap for years and never had any problems.
Namecheap's prices are creeping towards twice what they should be based on wholesale and costs. There are numerous well run, reliable, feature rich registrars that charge only pocket change over wholesale for domain registration (which is what's fair as costs are low once infrastructure is in place).
There is no reason to use Namecheap or Godaddy anymore.
Do you have one that you'd recommend, or that looks particularly promising to you? Namecheap's been my default for a while.
Mentioned elsewhere in this thread by @jackson: Dynadot. Bought all my domains through them and they've generally been pretty cheap.
There are a lot of solid options. I've been happy with Porkbun, OVH prices are usually close to wholesale, last I saw Dynadot prices were also pretty low... and of course CloudFlare started offering no markup domain registration a couple years ago. No doubt others will follow.
Things to look for:
For reference: .com wholesale price is currently just under $8, set to potentially go up a bit later this year.
Registrar-wise, I like to do my initial registration at Dynadot and transfer to CloudFlare for renewals on eligible domains. Dynadot is usually relatively low-cost, and CF already manages my DNS so it's nice to have an all-in-one management pane. CF also charges the wholesale cost for domains, but only does renewals for now.
I feel the same way about Google as a search engine. Every alternative I try seems to lack a feature regarding verbatim search or just ignore it when I use quotes to search for an exact phrase. 😑
Hmmm I dunno... therapy? I really need to sort a thing out, my hatred of flying.
My husband wants to, once Covid is over etc etc, to fly somewhere for vacation - and I do to obviously. But after burn-out ten thousand and the agoraphobia, flying is the one thing that really kicks off automatic panic attacks.
The thought of it, just writing this down, makes the hair in my neck stand up and I have to remember to keep breathing normally, and when I am about to actually board a plane I have a hard time even thinking - everything in my head screams. It's like standing in the middle of a fire works show - bright lights, explosions and never really knowing when the next one will go off. Even on massive amounts of calming medication I am teetering on the edge of complete loss of control and the months leading up to a flight is beyond horrid. I don't sleep because the nightmares (I think that level of it is called "night terrors"). I have constant and recurring fantasies of suicide etc etc. I think the medical expression for it is "complete shit show".
So obviously CBT is needed badly but at the same time its pretty tricky to do. It would cost stupid amounts to "train to fly" - and after talking with the local air port they made it clear that they have no ability to allow me to just "hang around" in the check in area and further.
Aaaand with anything CBT its scary AF.
That sounds terrible. I hope you find the courage to get therapy for that.
Well its a combination of energy, courage, and accepting of being totally bored as a positive. CBT therapy is either scary af, tiring af or, when it works horribly horribly boring.
Sorry to hear about your struggle with the panic attacks, and getting therapy for it. I recently bought "The CBT Handbook" by Pamela Myles and Roz Shafran [1], and it's been really good so far. Maybe it won't take you the whole way you need like sessions with a proper counsellor, but a good book on CBT and trying by yourself or with your partner might be a good next step. Good luck on your journey! :)
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/CBT-Handbook-Comprehensive-Depression-Self-Esteem/dp/1780332017/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2E0EV3FAOM6OS&dchild=1&keywords=the+cbt+handbook&qid=1595405932&sprefix=the+cbt+handbook%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-1
No sorry's needed friend. I have a broken bone, but in my brain. Its treatable.
Will check out the book <3
FYI everything from the "ref=" and after is not necessary when linking stuff on Amazon. The rest of it is analytics tracking parameters.
In fact, the only part that actually matters is the product id in the
/dp/1780332017part. You can even leave out the book title or replace it with any random garbage and Amazon will just ignore it eg:https://www.amazon.co.uk/asdfadfsadsfasdfasdf/dp/1780332017(although maybe their analytics will be confused).Cool, thanks for the tip :)
My apologies if this brings up uncomfortable thoughts, but I'm having a great deal of success with EMDR and burnout/claustrophobia. [I've got problems being squeezed in a crowd or confined space, or being touched by strangers. 😰 The peculiar thing is that flying is uncomfortable, but not triggering in the way you describe. Elevators, stuffy packed rooms, and crowded events were white-knuckles and nausea-inducing long before COVID-19.]
IANAT, but it seems like this might be relevant to fear of time on aircraft, and it's a shorter course of treatment. In all honesty, though, EMDR is more frightening and draining than CBT in the short term; I'm not sure I could have handled it if I'd been working at the same time. And the results aren't really testable with COVID-19 in the picture.
Hey no apologies needed - I know my own illness, and that it IS an illness not a long lost buddy. If you treat an illness like a friend it never leaves. Our illness (seems like you have a similar thing like me) is an alien enemy. For me talking in front of people is hard and that is SO annoying. I LOVE talking in front of massive crowds and I know I'm good at it too (I've done it professionally and for events etc) I know that I can make people lean in to their seats or out when needed and the sensation of being there dancing on a minefield, trying to keep one part of my brain ahead of the crowd so I can freeball what Im going to say is... ooof I seriously sometimes cry missing it.
One thing I had when I had to do a talk a while back (with agoraphobia) with a friend was him basically going "give me a signal and I will make a scene so loud they have to call the cops on me and ban me from this conferance". Every now and then I would look out in the crowd, see him, and know... he would do it too. (if you ever have the luxury of going to Barcelona, hang with the FOSS/Linux group there, awesome people to a one)
Will check into EMDR. Ty! <3
Also - fuck our shared disease ("shared" sorta kinda, but you know what I mean). We are so much better than it! <3
Apparently the new Microsoft Flight Simulator supports VR. Although a VR capable rig would probably cost only slightly less than an amateur flight school. I assume there is also more to CBT than just exposing yourself to anxiety triggers over and over again. Like, it's probably supposed to be guided somehow?
That is a good suggestion BUT - for me its the fear of boarding and being locked in. I mean if there was a boarding simulator that would be perfect.
(I have this recurring fantasy of being rich enough to employ a MMA trained nurse to fly with me who basically sits there going "if you panic and get violent trying to flee the plane, I will knock you out and then bandage your broken nose no worries" oh oh and another is if I EVER get back to New York try to find the woman sitting across from me on the subway out towards Coney Island. This woman who looked like the most competent person on the train. A person who could handle everything. Just her presence made my freak out stop directly. So if anyone ever see this middle aged black woman, with a face like iron and lace, in a nurse uniform reading a book - high five them from me!)
Ah so it’s more like anxiety around confinement? Do Trains bother you too then or does being in the sky add the extra layer of panic? That seems like something a travel clinic should be able to prescribe Xanax or something for if you’re comfortable with the medication route.
Trains aren't as bad. Which is good since I use them often, its sort of the same sensations when boarding a train though but far from as bad. The airtravel thing I think is due to flying a lot in business before and its mostly the boarding. When I'm on board I tend to mellow down or shut down at least.
When I see it I think of computer-based training. Online or packaged classes for training up as a random four letter tech cert, they've all got them.
Thanks, I was a little confused. The internet has ruined me, haha
Hahaha <3 ty yeah so what I was planning to do was NOT to delve into BDSM but instead the therapy form...
Sorry, I just genuinely contextualize "CBT" in this context first (although I had not read that article, only indirectly heard of it through memes.) There's a list of "CBT" here if you're bored.
Don't worry - tbh considering how rough the therapy form is the times I've done it, I honestly don't know which is worse :D
("worse" = for me, no kink shaming obv)
Really? Damn, just how bad can one weird syndrome or whatever can get?
No, that's not actually my kink, lmao. I'm just citing some meme.
[TRIGGER NOTE: if you get fekked by reading about phobia reactions and terror, this post aint for you. Skip ahead.]
Well the point is to expose yourself to your fears triggering the panic attacks in a somewhat controlled way, and increase the level of fear bit by bit or just dunk you in to overexpose you to it so your body/brain relearn that the thing that terrifies you isn't worthy of getting your body and brain in to this tail spin.
The fear is there and its uniquely terrifying. So I've had terrifying moments in my life when I was scared for my life but there is always a release when the adrenaline pumped in to you have done its job and you get out of the scary situation. But with these things there is no way of doing that, the fear just keeps going.
So imagine for example bungy-jumping. The truly terrifying part is standing on that ledge, on that bridge, facing the abyss.
Your entire body screams in terror because to it, you are standing near something that our species have learned to fear and it doesn't understand the bungy cord etc that will make it safe. Your brain on the other hand does but the more your body reacts to the terror the harder your brain tries to justify that terror - it starts creating scenarios in your head to make the fear reasonable. "Maybe the dude who strapped me in was drunk and forgot to tie it to the bridge" or "maybe I've gained weight" or whatever.
Those scenarios feed back in to the fear - your brain demands MORE adrenaline etc since these scenarios just popped up in your head. The increased adrenaline makes your body even MORE terrified and round and round the fear goes. Increasing constantly, keeping you in this horror until you do one of two things: Jump, or step back from the ledge.
If you step back from the ledge, the next time will be trickier since you are getting a smaller hit of endorphines and teach yourself that avoidance is the only method pushing your brain in that direction next time.
When you jump aaaaall that adrenaline gets released, the endorphins slosh through you which is why you will react with "again again again!" as they haul you up. And next time it wont be as scary. Your brain and body has learned that "oh THIS specific scenario is an OK version of this scary ledge! Cool!"
A phobia is different for many. It doesn't stop. There's no ledge. The way you can "step back from the ledge" is "hiding yourself in your bathroom, hyperventilating" or sadly as is sometimes the case - "end it all quickly".
There's no ledge as I (for example) board an airplane. But since my body has due to a slipup somewhere, learned that its scary it starts filling me with adrenaline. Pumping me full of it. But since theres no ledge my brain (a brain evolved to find patterns of danger to improve my ability to survive "spotting tigers" etc) starts trying to find what the hell is scary and it starts creating scenarios for me to handle or avoid. Fiction in my head that doesn't go away as my body does the same thing as the bungy jumper and keeps filling me with adrenaline. Each fantasy my brain dream up releases more and each release demands more justification from my brain until I am so incapacitated with terror, stuck in a loop of ever increasing levels of fear that I can't move, my teeth grind audibly as I try to somehow get myself out of it. Every single muscle in my body tense so hard due to the chemicals being pumped in to it that it physically hurt. My eyes are scanning the area for somewhere, anywhere to flee - while at the same time a tiny voice in my head is trying its hardest to convince the city-state of my body and brain to relax and not be scared.
But there isn't any ledge. No action can be done to solve the problem and danger in a completely fictitious scenario. There are no actions to release it except fleeing or fighting your way out and you know, even in your total panic, that that is possibly even worse. Every second is an hour as your now hyper aware of everything, your entire body is not on alert but beyond it. The longer you wait the more the fear gets you, round and round it goes and at the end you are so terrified that if someone handed you a pistol you'd use it without hesitating just to make the terror stop.
So even if you get past it. Even if I manage which I have a few times, to board that plane and get on board - the adrenaline is lowered but theres no endorphins. You just sit and stew in the ripples of your past fear as they dissipate. In my case trying to think of something else than the fact that I am locked in to this giant coffin with other people for a few hours.
When you land you're happy but not ecstatic because now your brain is thinking "Oh right in one week you will have to go back to this scary place" and for the rest of that trip you will wake up sweating, in nightmares thinking about this thing.
Now imagine that as a therapy.
At that point if someone said "Hey instead of this, can I kick you in the nuts repeatedly?" I would without a doubt say "sure, lets get started"
I am asking this in the spirit of genuine enquiry, not some passive-aggressive bullshit thing - who are you worried is listening to you and why?
Even if any specific person doesn't have much to fear from near constant surveillance by governments and corporations, the collective diminishing of privacy and private spaces can only be a bad thing, in my opinion. There is no way of knowing how the information being collected and stored now will come back to haunt us in the future. Which opinions that we express safely now between friends will be a black mark on our future careers and prospects? (This isn't a phenomenon without precedent - people who attended Communist party meetings when it was "ok" in the 20s and 30s found themselves persecuted in the 50s).
Privacy is a modern invention, but one that I should rather like to keep.
There is a fairly vast difference between "my phone has a microphone in it" and "near constant surveillance by governments and corporations"
If the state wants to spy on me they're doing that regardless of whether I carry a phone or not. Spy tech is so advanced these days it's basically unavoidable if they want you. That's a huge "if" though. The state don't want me. I am one of countless millions of very boring people. (also if I did want to hide things I'd hide them in such a way that surveillance wouldn't matter because that's just basic good sense and has been for long before the internet was a thing)
I'm pretty sure Google/Apple/etc aren't surveilling me at all. A relatively simple database of stuff I like so that adverts can be anonymously targetted at me is not at all the same thing as surveillance.
I have plenty of privacy. If I want to keep things private - and I do have such things - I don't share those things in non-private places. It's pretty easy.
I strongly disagree.
Also, 'relatively simple' is quite the understatement.
Whether it's an understatement or not really depends on what sort of datasets you deal with, but OK.
Faceboogle's advertising system is certainly a very big database but it's not particularly complicated in the grand scheme of things.
For me the issue isn't so much a worry about who specifically is collecting data on me and why in this particular moment, it's more about the potential for harm that this data could do versus the benefit. I do not think that maybe a, what, 10% additional click-through rate for an advertiser is worth having this "toxic waste" in the hands of strangers.
It is stored indefinitely, or at least there's no reason it can't be. And there is no guarantee that the people who have this data now will always be the sole proprietors of this data. The company may sell the data, or the company itself may be sold. The data could be leaked or stolen, an employee could get access to it inappropriately, or they may be compelled by a government (not even necessarily MY government - stuff that I do that is legal in my country is definitely illegal elsewhere) to hand over that data.
I don't like, regularly commit crimes or anything. Certainly most reasonable people would take no interest in me. But not everyone is reasonable. And the political and social climate lately has really drawn into sharp focus that there is no guarantee that the freedoms I enjoy now will always be in place, or that the norms of behaviour now will remain so into the future.
As I understand is the 'data' is basically just a list of domains you've visited - the actual site information being encrypted since https everywhere - and information you have chosen to give to whatever account is being investigated (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc). It's sort of hard to imagine a situation in which someone having that information is particularly bad news. In the unlikely event a government want to ruin my life it would be far easier and just as effective for them to simply invent a stack of 'evidence' of stuff to do that with.
But y'know, whatever people are comfortable with. As I said, I'm not judging anyone else here. I am genuinely curious because I've been being told that "my data" is at risk for nearly 20 years now and I haven't really seen a problem come up as a result. I know what all the various companies do and it just doesn't seem that bad to me.
For a specific individual, yeah, there's more effective and invasive methods that can be used to spy on you or get you in trouble by whatever organization. But those methods get expensive, labor intensive, and harder to conceal as scale increases.
What if, instead, someone could gather less data, but about everyone all the time, for relatively little cost? With enough data, you can start looking for patterns and spot outliers. Maybe in isolation domain A, B, and C are perfectly fine and commonly used, but are often used in combination more by some risk group than the general population. Or frequency of visits to a social media domain spike among people you've already loosely profiled as high risk. Now correlate it with the other dimensions of data you've gotten for free and you can find all kinds of interesting patterns and profiles. The org doesn't need to be super precise with the findings of this system, just enough to narrow the set of targets needed to invest in the more thorough investigation to within affordable/acceptable limits. Maybe the org doesn't use all of this data themselves, but sells it to others (and not just the "good" buyers like an ideal government) or it gets stolen.
Most of us will never individually be the targets (beyond ads), but all of the data someone can freely get off of us helps build the surveillance tools.
Yeah, I've heard the arguments. I don't really find them particularly convincing, by the time you reach the point where there's a problem you're just too deep in hypotheticals.
The thing is, the only remotely believable use case for doing such large scale pattern analysis is at the state level as part of law enforcement/state security and if we are to believe Snowdon (which I do, fwiw), there's very little - if anything - we can do can avoid that level of surveillance. Me not being on Facebook isn't going to make any appreciable difference to 5Eyes hardware interception devices, nor, according to the rumours, to their existing patten matching software. A malicious state will always find a way to achieve their ends anyway, it's not like actual truth is a requirement.
But the idea that a private company might be dedicating huge amounts of resources to this sort of thing - and there are vast storage, processing and engineering requirements for the level of data capture you're alluding to - is where it gets unconvincing. What benefit is there?
Facebook have a small dataset about some sites my profile likes to visit (although I block tracking cookies and FB runs containerised). Google have a slightly bigger one (not all my searches are on google, but I do use a lot of google services), Amazon know some of the things I like to buy, as do Paypal, etc. There is, I admit, a hypothetical situation in which all those discrete and (allegedly) anonymised datasets are somehow acquired and combined in what would be the biggest corporate buyout/merger of all time, and all of that is done by a malicious actor with gargantuan resources who then uses the resulting data for evil - but is that really a risk I should worry about? It seems astronomically unlikely. Even if it did happen, would me leaving Facebook and losing contact with some people I love make any measurable difference to that Bad Guy's database? Enough difference to be worth losing friends over?
I side with the people who value privacy in this debate, but don't wish to engage too much due to being tired talking about this.
Anyway, just to give an example of creepy behaviour that happens to my SO and her brother a lot of times.
We are talking about something in person and when her brother picked up and unlocked the phone, the advertisements and suggestions were exactly about what we were talking.
Even if you find a way to disable those things, they never really turn off. It's a black box, there is no way to know.
I care about this and saw what data theft did to some people recently in my country. I surely don't want people (specially my employer) knowing if I buy BSDM stuff, talk about suicide or what medications i buy.
Remember, Facebook stored passwords in plain text.
If you don't wish to engage that's fine, but if you're replying to me then I'll probably answer you. Best way to avoid that is not to comment.
The ad thing is an example of the frequency illusion (also called the Baader-Meinhof effect). Nobody's listening to your phone's mic all the time. People come up with this all the time but as far as I know (and I do know people who have worked at both FB and Google) it's never been shown that it's actually happening. I've seen quite a few people saying it definitely isn't.
But let's assume that is happening. What's creepy about it? A computer is matching one pattern to another. It's not like there's a person transcribing your conversations (and if there is, how is that creepy?). The entire thing is completely rational in the sense that all the company wants to do is show you ads you might click on. There's no ulterior motive. You might not like the idea of targetted advertising, but it's not creepy. It makes perfect sense.
On the other point I couldn't give a fuck about what people know about me. Doesn't impact me whatsoever. But if do you want to keep that stuff quiet, it's not hard to do. Again, it's not like your employer has access to your google history and whatever Facebook might think about password security (and let's remember a LOT of people used to store passwords in plain text) they are very, very serious about keeping their advertising database secure because that information is literally their only way to make money.
I don't think we will see eye to eye on this because we simply value this differently. Like you said, you don't care if people know things about you. I care.
A company won't hire me if they know i'm depressed or suicidal. And i stay unemployed and the depression takes hold. Without a job, i don't have money or coverage to get help here in Brazil.
Since privacy configs in phones and services are not optional (and those that are are opt out and hidden away), most people won't ever do anything about it and they don't even know that it's happening.
The example of Facebook storing passwords in plain text is just to show that when they say they keep things secure, you can't know for sure.
Not long ago a bank here in Brazil had a lot of data from accounts stolen. It was a bank and not secure at all. One could argue that the bank needs this because it's literally the only way they make money (in the case of this bank it is). And it happened anyway.
I know facebook or google safeguard those things, but i really don't know. I just assume.
One of the issues I have with this line of argument is that by the time a potential employer is looking up your google searches or facebook comments or whatever, you're already a very long way down the chain of hypotheticals to the point it just seems vanishingly unlikely to ever happen. First google has to have a massive data breach, of their most valuable - aka most well secured - data. An absolutely stonkingly enormous data breach, likely petabytes or more. Then they have to have been lying about their search database being anonymised; then the data needs to get formatted out of whatever esoteric storage format google are currently using and released in a usable form without getting instantly taken down by google's legal team, not to mention delisted from search so it's hard to find unless you're actively trawling the dark(er) web; then your potential employer needs to have found, and chosen to use, this illegal data; and finally they need to give a fuck about your private life in the first place. There's far too many "ifs" along that route for it to be a serious worry, even if I did care about people knowing things about me. It seems more likely you'd get hit by lightning on your way to the interview (those odds are about 1-in-700000, fwiw)
Anecdotally speaking I've been on the hiring side of the job market more often than I've been applying for jobs and I could not care less about what people do outside of work hours. My dad hired far more people than me (for a much bigger company) and he didn't care either. Nobody I know who's ever been involved in HR has done. But anecdotal evidence being what it is, of course it might not apply where you are or the jobs you're after.
I understand your point and i'm not saying you are wrong, i'm just saying it happens. As it happened with the bank here in Brazil (that i linked the article). The data was sold to third parties and used for criminal purposes.
The only point i made is that the "most well secure data" and "esoteric storage format" is just "faith". You don't really know that and there are chances that it is not that esoteric at all, since, like i said, Facebook was storing passwords in plain text.
It just needs to happen one time.
Google and Facebook are huge companies, but they are all people.
It will probably never happen. There are a lot of ifs in life, but i still try to prevent. I don't go walk in a storm even if the odds are small.
A employer probably doesn't care, but maybe some bully might. Who knows. It depends on the person.
We know with reasonable certainty that Google use systems like BigTable, Spanner and F1, developed in house, on their own custom linux builds running their own filesystems. A good friend of mine used such tools when she worked there and I trust her as much as I trust any other friend I've had for 20 years. Same goes for Facebook (where I also have friends working). These huge companies don't use off the shelf software.
The point I'm making is that if your route into the data is gaining access to a single system or even a physical location you're going to encounter a load of unusual files which are part of a massively sharded set of data which you might not have the tools or skills to interpret, even if the files you recover are any use on their own (which from what I know about Spanner et al works, probably wouldn't be). This isn't the same as gaining access to a smaller company like a bank and copying /var/mysql/*
I'm not saying it's a certainty that these highly skilled and/or extraordinarly lucky hackers wouldn't be able to find their way, I'm just saying it's one more "if" standing in the way of this being a significant risk to your well-being.
If the 1-in-700000 risk of a lightning strike is too much risk for you, probably don't look up how dangerous crossing the road is because you may never leave the house again.
You could buy a Google Pixel and flash it with GrapheneOS which is a more privacy aware and privacy respecting OS than Google's Android offering. See: https://grapheneos.org/
Could you explain a little more about what you mean? Like how they've improved civilization? I'm curious about your reasoning!
Caffeine and alcohol would be the two most influential ones. Both have had volumes written about their impact over history, both socially and (at least in the case of coffee) from a military angle.
/u/vegai might have other ones in mind, but those two are far and away the most impactful.
I don't know if this is what @vegai is referencing (please correct me if I'm wrong!), but the version of this I've heard is the Stoned Ape Theory.
Facebook. It remains my only way of keeping in touch with a lot of people I would otherwise not be in touch with. I like the sort of interaction it provides, it's very good at the people bit. My feed isn't full of hate and nonsense and spam (which seems to be a common complaint) because it's made up of people I like and respect, and those people are the thing I like Facebook for.
But everything else. Yeesh. Especially, given how much damage it's becoming increasingly apparent is being done, their lack of action on misinformation and non-curtailment of the rise of the far right. Zuck in particular (I do have friends who work at FB and there are good people there who want to make it better - but to some extent the fight is against Zuck and his dreadful politics). By comparison, despite how much I really dislike the platform in terms of user experience, Twitter/Jack Dorsey seems to be making some admirable progress on this front.
Facebook are not yet bad enough that I'm prepared to lose family and friends but I really wish those people would join mewe/disapora/whatever instead.
Not to pull a Blizzard/Diablo announcement line, but... Do these people not have phones?
If I was on facebook, like you, I wouldn't have a feed full of hate and nonsense either simply because I don't know those sorts of people. I have known that type and I simply cut them out of my life as they aren't worth the effort to keep around. The people I do like, respect, and keep around all communicate via messaging as none of them have a facebook account either.
I assume most of them have phones. But only about half of them live in my timezone. Many of them won't have IM services, especially the older people. Also I can't really do one-to-many communications with my phone. I mean I suppose I could set up Whatsapp (don't, I want to use Signal too but y'know) groups if I were to chase everyone for their number. But there are people who don't have consistent phone numbers (my cousin doesn't have the same number for more than a few months, for reasons). And there are Facebook groups I'm a member of which I can't replicate on a phone. Also there are people for whom IM would be too intimate. There's a good handful of people who I know and like and I want to see a once-a-week post on FB to let me know they're still alive and happy (or hear about if they're not) and that's as much friendship I want with them. I don't want more, or less.
Plus time is a increasingly scarce resource and many of my friends simply don't have time to engage in other means of communications just to please me. If Facebook shut down tomorrow we'd find some other way but right now if I ditch Facebook I'm making demands on people's time that I know some of them can't accommodate.
Then there's all the peripheral people. The friends of friends who I encounter via other people's posts. Some of them are cool. Some of them are now my friends. That doesn't happen in the walled gardens of IM, and I like that secondary human contact. Most of the time.
Facebook has issues in terms of their politics and their business practices but as a means of group communication it is very well designed and nothing else really comes close. MeWe is pretty damn good but nobody is there so ultimately it's useless. I have Whatsapp groups but WA is a different sort of communication. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp together are a great way to easily keep up with a large number of people. People who aren't my best friends - those people I'd put the extra effort in to reach by other means - but they are still people I care about. I've accrued a lot of those people over the years and as of right now, Facebook isn't enough of a bad guy for me to walk away from them. That might change one day, I don't know.
You don't need Facebook to feel connected to your friends. I've found that keeping in touch outside of Facebook is more rewarding anyways.
Depends who it is. Sure, my closest friends I'd put the extra time in via other channels (and they'd probably reciprocate) but there's a larger circle of people who I realistically can only keep in touch with via Facebook. I simply don't have the time to email/text/whatever everyone individually, and I wouldn't expect them to either.
Intellectual property. On the one hand it hinders innovation by denying basically everyone the ability to build and improve on an idea. On the other hand, it's hard to convince people to spend millions of dollars and hours into developing the idea if they're not going to be able to profit from it.
I've often wondered if we're doing this just slightly wrong. Copyright is when the government grants you a state-enforced monopoly on your work. Patents grant you a monopoly on your process rather than just the idea when that's appropriate, with some exceptions such as procedures for heart surgery where the public good takes precedence.
What if, instead of making it about copies and processes we made it about profit instead? Profit-right, not copyright. The simplest way to put it is whenever these processes or ideas generate revenue, the rights holder has claim on that revenue.
Perhaps that's an exclusive claim, perhaps we could invent a more sharing-oriented model where the rights holder gets the majority of the revenue, but the people generating it also get enough of a cut to make it worthwhile. I feel like the latter would do more to develop the properties and ideas. We could even offer both options at the creator's discretion.
This Life+75 years nonsense needs to go, too. Most properties make the lion's share of their revenue within the first fifteen years. I'd be in favor of a tax here to continue to secure the monopoly rights rather than a blanket 75+ year term. The first term for fifteen years you get for free. Then the property goes into the public domain, unless you pay for a renewal.
The cost is small for the next fifteen year term, and then it continues to rise again with each new fifteen year term granted - and rise substantially with the third and subsequent terms with the intent to pressure the idea into the public domain. Probably best to base it on a combination of the past term's revenue and projections of the next term's revenue, or on a flat fee if those aren't high enough. Charge a higher rate for exclusivity, lower rate for the revenue-sharing model.
This busts the current rent-keeping model that allows corporations to just sit back on their lazy asses and bury ideas or keep collecting revenue on shit like The Beatles rather than continuing to innovate and create new inventions and new properties. I have a hunch it'll strike a blow against piracy, too. Waiting fifteen years vs Life+75 is a big difference. Seems like it'll kill patent trolls too, since now they have to pay to keep those patents.
This won't work for everything (such as GPL software) because there it's not about the revenue, but we could define special cases like that separately. Open licenses could just skip the entire renewal process and exist in perpetuity, or have much longer protections.
War.
Just a few examples:
Interesting that you include WWI on this list, as it is one of those that I would consider a truly pointless war. The others I can see a grim calculus leading to the conclusion that they were necessary, though I would probably disagree in some cases. But WWI seems to me completely senseless.
Four empires collapsed. Several countries became more democratic.
Well, many millions died, many millions more were orphaned or extremely traumatized, and the conditions were set for more bloodshed to come in WWII. I'm not convinced nation building is a sufficient justification. I'll grant that the effects were manifold and it was probably naive on my end to consider only the causes in deeming it pointless.
Isn't WWII also senseless, then? Many millions died or were orphaned then too.
You’re just described every war.
Death. Not unnecessary death. Just the mere fact that we all have to die. Or maybe I have read too many sci fi's on the perils of immortality.
I remember the topic coming up while I was talking with a friend, back in middle school. We were maybe 11-12. I was horrified when he said "oh, I don't think I would want to live past seventy".
This... deathism gets pushed on us so early and so hard that a 12-yo not only thought death inevitable, but desirable. I know that religion helps some people cope with it, but I won't ever stop hating it for this.
We already have too many people on this planet. It can support more, but that doesn't mean it should.
And we aren't exactly great at making difficult decisions for emergencies that are happening right now.
We are absolutely terrible at making difficult decisions about long term things like destruction of flora and fauna and pollution e.g. CFL's, plastics, carbon dioxide, space junk.
You can play "what if" with any necessary evil, but I would argue death is evil and it is currently necessary.
How do you judge what is 'too many people'? Also, many first world countries are seeing declines in birth rates. Perhaps if we come up with immortality in 50 years, underpopulation may actually have started to become an issue.
Along with that, while immortality may take the form of some sort of drug that halts aging, I suspect it'll be something closer to slowly migrating one's brain to some sort of computerized system. These people most likely wouldn't take up very much space or consume as many resources.
Definitely true.
Yeah, and wouldn't that be solved (or at least helped) by having people who have more stake in the future?
I used to be a fan of this idea, but I've become less convinced that it's a realistic achievable goal. Science is constantly discovering new things about the human mind that continue to compound it's complexity. I think we're more likely to build a computer that can perfectly imitate a human long before we are able to digitize a human mind.
io9 isn't the greatest source but here's some reasons why
I do think we're likely to see some very interesting mental augmentations in the next few decades. Devices that can be implanted and enhance or regulate certain mental abilities and treat certain illnesses.
I think that as mental augmentations get developed, and as computing power increases, inevitably we'll figure out how to simulate a neuron. At the beginning we'll probably only be able to simulate one or two. Imagine a person with one simulated neuron, no one would call their brain an uploaded consciousness. But now imagine 10 simulated neurons, 100, 1000, 10000? Maybe certain sections of the brain are more important to consciousness than others, maybe you only have to simulate 1/8th of the brain and you can reconstruct the rest later.
Hopefully, if technology keeps progressing, that number will increase until it is possible to 'port' the human brain to a simulation.
Then you run into a Ship of Theseus type question. If my mind is copied/uploaded to a digital construct, am I still me? If a machine is capable of perfectly emulating my conscious mind, is it actually conscious? If my body dies, am I still "me"?
True to some extent, but I imagine (I hope, at least) that my consciousness ("me") isn't necessarily made up of the cells in the brain, but instead the electrical patterns that run through the neurons and connections that make up my brains neural net. This means that if I slowly replaced the neurons in my brain with simulated neurons--perhaps over a somewhat long time period--as long as there wasn't any interruption to the electrical patterns and processing, I would still be me.
Although honestly, I'm not all that worried about the biological me dying if there could be a simulated me.
I just hope we are the ones running it, or else we're gonna end up in an RTGame video of the Sims.
Hey now.
Time for a hot take.
Children/parenting. The idea of needing to get something to crawl out of your vagina (and if they don't grow up in you uterus, it can kill you) and then doing practically everything for it like wiping their shit, carrying them around, feeding them (if without the teeth, it needs to all be soupy), getting them to speak and walk (we literally made preschool and daycare so mothers could do something other than this) for the first ~-3 years and them explain to them and get them acclimated to the world (after 10 years of this at least, time in which the world could go to shit, as we're seeing now) and deal with a bunch of their own problems and only after 20 years if you're well-off, actually let them live their own life. (or with sufficient bad luck, anti-abortion legislation or bad housing policy, maybe even never.)
Just so you're aware, this reads as very misogynistic language to me. It's reminiscent of a lot of discourse I see online from people who paint pregnancy and childbirth in really dehumanizing and demeaning ways, usually as a way of undermining women or motherhood. I understand the point you're trying to make but I encourage you to consider how this phrasing could be considered offensive and casts your message in a mean-spirited light that I'm not sure you intended.
Funny, I'm a woman, and although I've never been through childbirth, this is exactly how some mothers I know talk about the experience. Then again, context does matter!
Oh, okay. I very much admit that while pregnancy and such things don't sound appealing to me, I could absolutely imagine an antifeminist douche doing this the way you described while obviously ignoring that outside of some really consequential scientific experiments, the man is the one who starts the whole parenting thing (at least when it comes to the moment, "nothing about us without us", after all)
I admit the "hot take time" thing is kinda a nod towards the opposite too. When I wrote "we literally made preschool and daycare so mothers could do something other than this", I hesitated a bit and hoped someone who actually parents has something more serious to say to me, but so far noone has.
If anyone wants to engage with my post in a more genuine manner them here's a TL;DR:
Children, they seem to be far more effort than they're worth IMO. If the jobs that do a parents' work weren't the very lowest, least respected and valued of jobs today, I think people would be a lot less opposed to outsourcing far larger parts of parenthood until the late teens.
No it's definitely worth it. When you're a parent you're biologically meant to love your child, so if it's happy, you're happy. I don't know if you have a pet cat or ostrich or something, but it's kind of like that, except more.
I have a pet cat (or rather, 3) so yeah, I can kinda attest to it but that seems like one hell of a post correction, as if all children were an accident of nature and that's kind of clumsily coping with it by using creeping normality on you.
(I've also read reddit comments how there is a hormone that makes the pain of childbirth lesser and that some hypothesize nostalgia was nature's way of convincing women to have more than one child. Obviously these are reddit comments and a Google search for these things yielded little of value so I assume it's either rumors or lies. I also admit the creeping normality bit is quite mean.)
Parents' feelings about their children are often anything but rational, once you've seen young men lose their life savings in court just because they don't want to give up on a child they were tricked into having with a manipulative ex you realise this isn't something you can grok with cold hard logic and economics.
Yo dude, you can't just go around redpilling people on how /women/ trick men into having children with them and then take them away with the money, if you do, you might get name-called as one of those stinky MGTOW and be banned /s (the slashes are supposed to indicate an overgeneralization, kind of like how far-righters use triple brackets to indicate an euphemism. Also I know this is crass as shit.)
More seriously, I don't see how that goes against my point, which is that children seem to be too much trouble to be a good decision. Also the scenario you gave is not really about the children, and even kind of implies fathers are mentally coerced/traumatized into liking them.
The point is the last phrase. If you approach this from an economic POV and leave out sentimentality/emotion you're sure to hit a brick wall. Men aren't "coerced" into liking their kids, I'm... honestly kind of unsure how to respond to that, does your mind just immediately go there?
And I mean, at the end of the day, if "getting some kind of irrational emotional pleasure or feeling of attachment" isn't enough of a reason for you then I think you're edging very close to nihilism
I mean... why are alive? You are nothing but a collection of fleeting moments of irrational pleasures and pains that ultimately just fade into nothingness, what's the economic calculus that makes you go "oh yeah this is worth all the effort I'm putting into it"? As far as we know the ultimate payoff is death anyway.
Mentally coerced or traumatized (I did not drop those words), because the character you built has, from my interpretation, gone through a lot of financial and emotional trauma of an abusive ex taking the money so he could keep a kid and because of that, kind of closes in and just... blindly loves his child because he can't "grok it with cold, hard logic and economics", because of the trauma of "losing all his life savings on court to keep his child from an abusive ex".... doesn't let him? Kinda like PTSD.
Your starting example was "men losing their life savings in court just because they don't want to give up on a child", so I'm assuming you're talking about something like trauma, not any kind of love or even contempt. (Hence the crass MGTOW joke)
And again, the beginning point is that the ex tricked him, so this wasn't about love.
EDIT: I read the thing again... the child wasn't supposed to be his or even be at all, and the cold, hard economics bit is for me, not your character so...
Unless there are no orphanages in his area, the only reason to take the child would be to defend them from a terrible mother (and your thing about how it's not that hard to live with a child implies it's not that hard, but given the life savings bit, yes it fucking is) but really, he should leave the child with her since she tricked her into having it and she should face the consequences.
Yeah, I think I'm talking the nihilist label, because this feels dumb. That's not how this should work.
You're putting a lot of mental effort into arguing against something I'm not saying and I'm not sure what you're getting out of it, but knock yourself out I guess.
That man is a real person, a friend of a friend of mine who I see regularly when we go out, that's how I am aware of the whole story unravelling.
I'm honestly a little offended about you suggesting this person just flat out doesn't exist. Where do you get off deciding whether other people's lived experiences are real or not?
Sorry, I misread that completely and just edited this thing to reflect that:
If this whole thing comes from what I can only (angrily and emotionally, this is obvious by now right?) judge to be a biological placebo from pre-history, I'm taking the nihilist label, because to me, that doesn't feel like a good reason.
I'm sorry, I can't for the life of me see why would your friend of a friend do that and if your answer is "that's whole point, it was never about reason, because there is none, it's emotional", I don't know what to say either.
You don't need to say anything per se, all I was trying to tell you is that if you want to approach it from the angle of reason you're never gonna get a satisfying answer.
I don't have a lot of sources to draw from but I'm fairly certain this is not correct. This might be more true for older institutionally upper-class families where mothers were expected to also perform certain duties tied in with their social status, but even during the industrial revolution it would be quite some time before professional child-care became available to women as a whole, and even today women can find themselves stigmatized for not devoting enough time to their children (unlike men, who are generally more easily excused for this). I remember learning that in Japan, especially, it was seen as a huge societal taboo for mothers to be anything but completely devoted to raising their children.
More to the point: most of what I've found about early concepts of more general, socialized childcare focuses less on the parents and more on the children themselves and concerns with giving them "proper" education (often including some kind of moralising dimension as well). It's probably no accident that some of the earlier institutions are either religious in nature of affiliated with local religious groups. The modern evolution of this is that daycares are generally far more important as a place where children develop social skills, learn how to "behave" as individuals in a collective and are intellectually stimulated to promote their cognitive development (I hate to admit that I can't find my sources back on this but I've seen it said often enough that access to high-quality daycare/preschools for children from well-off families seems to correlate heavily with an ability to perform better academically and socially later in life.)
Daycares also tend to be expensive as all hell when they're not part of any kind of socialized service. In most developed countries if you just want to be rid of your child for a while you're usually better off either paying a baby-sitter or just dumping them on a family member or friend. I actually remember that being quite common with lower-income families who couldn't afford daycare: they'd either organise to take care of each other's kids in solidarity or leave them with grandparents as much as possible.
Also, it needs to be said: it's not actually very hard to integrate a child into daily life other than working at a job where you're expected to be 100% available and productive all the time. It's fairly healthy for children to see what daily life is like and it's not all that hard to learn them very basic chores, most of the time they appreciate the stimulation. From what I've seen, anecdotally, with family and friends the harder part is usually just getting used to children's biological rhythms until they start aligning with those of their parents (which means things like night-time waking or mid-day naps).
This is a kinda hot take, although definitely not as hot as the first one.
The vast majority of improvisation is, by definition, papering over some issue with a weird fix because the powers that be said no (hence why it has it's own words here in Brazil called Gambiarra, since Brazilian corruption is far more covert and people far poorer, we can't get the reasonable/normal solution, so we need to bandage this stuff a lot.) While some improv is funny, like taking a full 13 keyboards to add in every emoji (look it up, by Tom Scott) IMO, most of it is just coping with being too impoverished to do things the normal/formal way. (I would know, since I'm using a phone with a pirated battery which thankfully doesn't last ~-3 hours.