You should probably pity OP more. They lost the genetic lottery on this one. I haven’t had COVID. I’ve been actually harassed and bullied because of the protections I took.

So fuck antivaxxers.

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Let’s say the answer is yes, are you truly here to do a victory lap?

Yep. And if the answer is no, then I’ll offer my condolences and probably do some research to see what opportunities for treatment they have available - so that I can help in the way I know best.

Those are some nice legs…

If they fell for it, then they’ve effectively destroyed their own life. I’m not going to be sympathetic towards antivaxxers. The whole world worked as fast as possible to get people protected. If this person then rejected all of that work, all of that effort, and ended up like this? – Then they did it to themselves.

Lemmy - “But muh palestine!”

Did you get vaccinated? Please say you did, and that you weren’t one of the dumb ones falling for all this bullshit. The vaccines, even if they don’t keep you from falling ill - greatly reduce the effects of Long-Covid, and the problems they cause with the body.

I mean, the mermaid is missing the part I like the most…

How anyone took my reply to mean anything different than this is fucking wild on Lemmy. You seem to have understood, but holy crap. Look at how many people thought I was being disparaging…

Lawyers are NOTORIOUS for using wording to flip the meanings of things, and with the supreme court packed the way it is, this could easily be flipped on its head to discriminate against people.

change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity through counseling.

I mean, has anyone ever thought that this could also be used in the reverse way?

I know everyone is like “yaaaay they’re doing something good!” - but every time I see this, I think to myself that someone – somewhere – is going to sue a doctor or therapist over allowing some kid to transition. Because technically, hormones are a ‘therapy’, to help ‘convert’ someone to the other gender.

We should have walkable neighborhoods, mass transit of gleaming efficiency, bike lanes as priority, we should be encouraging socializing and creating spaces for people to gather that aren’t profit-driven, but with plans to create comfort and recreation to better the people and foster a sense of belonging to a community.

Not everyone wants to be packed like sardines. That’s the beauty of individualism. You might think this sounds like some sort of utopia, but to me this sounds like hell.

The MOST anti-immigrant fucking people I know, are immigrants from India…

It’s so WILD to see the cognitive dissonance they display.

because fuck people who link paywalled sites

If there’s one thing Americans have in common with much of the developed world, it’s that they’re frustrated by the rising cost of housing. But there are a few outliers. In Japan, for example, most people are actually quite satisfied with housing costs.

That’s according to Gallup’s annual World Poll, which surveyed more than 37,000 people across 38 OECD countries between April 2023 and January 2024. The survey asked respondents whether they were satisfied or dissatisfied with 11 topics, including their standard of living, opportunities to meet people, the quality of healthcare, and the availability of “good, affordable housing” in their area.

Housing stood out as the topic where respondents were the most frustrated, according to a Financial Times analysis. The Gallup data shows that in 24 of the 38 countries, respondents were more likely to be dissatisfied than satisfied with the quality and cost of housing.

Israel, Turkey, Slovenia, and Portugal ranked last in housing satisfaction. The United States was tied for No. 21, with 39% of the more than 1,000 respondents saying they were satisfied, down from 61% in 2020 and 71% in 2013.

The only country in which more than 70% of respondents were satisfied with the availability of “good, affordable housing” was Japan.

In recent years, rising rents and home prices driven by a severe housing shortage — coupled with elevated mortgage rates — have caused Americans’ housing costs to soar to near-record levels of unaffordability. In response, politicians have pointed to various solutions for bringing down housing costs, including building more homes, cracking down on abusive landlords who use algorithms to collude with each other to jack up the rent, and aiding first-time homebuyers.

To be sure, solving a decades-old housing shortage will take a multi-pronged approach, experts say, including cutting red tape that limits construction.

Some experts have pointed to Japan, where housing costs are lower than peer countries, as a potential model for solutions the US could adopt. While Japan’s abundance of housing isn’t entirely a positive story, when it comes to Tokyo, housing experts say there are many lessons the US could learn from its ally. Why Japan doesn’t have as severe of a housing crisis as the US

Japan is something of an outlier when it comes to housing affordability for a few major reasons: population decline and deregulated, standardized land-use policies.

Japan’s low birthrates and restrictive immigration policies mean its population has been shrinking for decades, which has left about 10 million homes vacant across the country. That falling demand, of course, means lower home prices and rents. At the same time, the country’s population is becoming even more concentrated in its big cities. Many small towns and villages are at risk of becoming abandoned ghost towns.

Tokyo is the exception. The city’s metro area is home to about a third of Japan’s population, and it’s growing. But the megacity has managed to keep housing quite affordable, as Business Insider reported last year, in part by consistently building a ton of new housing.

Unlike many other industrialized countries, Japan’s national government controls its land-use laws. This means zoning regulations and other rules that determine what gets built where are relatively simple, consistent, and not subject to much community pushback. Because local elected officials don’t have control over zoning, they can’t be swayed by their constituents’ NIMBYism — the anti-development “Not In My Backyard” thinking — which so often stifles development in the US.

Those uniform, national zoning regulations tend to allow for more mixed-use neighborhoods, denser and more multi-family housing, along with faster and cheaper construction. Additionally, developers aren’t held back by burdensome regulatory processes that slow down construction and inflate costs. It helps that most Tokyo residents don’t own cars, so parking doesn’t increase the price of housing as much as it does in the US.

Japan’s penchant for building is also born of necessity. The country is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, which means that newer homes that abide by safer building codes are more attractive. While American homes tend to appreciate over time and are thus seen as key investments, Japanese homes tend to depreciate as they age and become non-compliant with building codes. This means Japanese homeowners aren’t as invested in keeping supply low and home prices high.

So what, if anything, might the US learn from Japan?

Birthrates in the US have steadily declined over the past two decades, and unless immigration makes up the gap, the country’s population could grow more slowly in the decades to come and potentially decline later this century.

While a population slowdown could help moderate housing costs, some experts believe a substantial population decline would have big economic consequences in the long run. A significant drop in immigration would also hurt the housing sector, economists say, as immigrants make up a disproportionate number of US construction workers.

But the US could learn a lot from Tokyo’s approach to building. While housing policy is largely controlled by states and local governments in the US, housing experts say the federal government should do more to incentivize construction, while simultaneously subsidizing lower-income renters and homebuyers. And American states and cities could adopt looser land-use laws that facilitate the kind of rapid home construction they desperately need.

But I’m not seeing them hurt! Neither are you! You’re seeing news reports and things that are spun to make you feel bad. You aren’t over there right now witnessing it with your very eyes.

I bet you’ve never even witnessed real combat death or even so much as a violent car collision.

So again - stop, fucking, putting, words, into, my, mouth.

I find no enjoyment in hurting other people - which is why it doesn’t bother me; Because I’m not doing it!

Is not the same as

I don’t enjoy hurting people but also don’t care when I see them hurt

It’s simply not. You’re adding the seeing part to the equation. Learn to read. Learn to understand.

I don’t fucking watch TV. I don’t ingest tiktok, or facebook, or fox, or cnn, or msnbc, or instagram, or much social media at all. I don’t see it. I don’t care about it. It doesn’t show in my feeds. It doesn’t affect my life.

And you know what? The same goes for you. There’s a million atrocities going on in the world right now; you’re ignorant to 99.9999% of them. And you don’t want to know about them. Because you’d be so overloaded your head would spin.

The difference between me and you, is that I know that I don’t know about them, and I prefer it that way. I don’t need to fight for every single cause that passes in front of me.

How about: Signal is better? Though, they recently were caught with some unencrypted shit on the desktop client.

“I dont enjoy hurting people but also dont care when I see them hurt.”

Again – Not what I said. Re-read it. Stop putting words in my mouth.

You clearly suffer from pathological altruism.

You also are suffering from the dunning-kruger effect when it comes to the belief on how much effect you have on things by shouting words on the internet.

Well then you don’t own your home. With that argument, nobody does. Because the government has the ability to take your home from you, then you don’t own it.

Ownership has granularity to it. You’re failing to see the grey spaces in between, and only seeing black or white.

Most humans cannot enjoy food if they were watching someone starving to death in front of them, let alone knowing that person is dying and they could feed them to save their lives.

Yeah, same for me. But that’s NOT what’s happening, and you’ve let your hyper-altruism cloud your judgement. Nothing I do changes anything that happens over there. So why worry about it? Why upend MY life, and put MY life in danger for it? Normal people don’t do that. You’re a bleeding heart - most people don’t care. That’s just normal humanity.

And again - with the rape argument…what in living fuck? You think I consider myself responsible for what my government does? HELL fuck no I don’t. You have absolutely no effect on their decisions, so why do you think you do? You’ve used Hyperbole to make your argument seem stronger than it is.

It’s simple. Americans have a good life. There’s no reason for them to leave their good life, to go fight for a people who have nothing to do with them.

Again - bleeding heart. You’re so concerned about shit that has nothing to do with your day-to-day life. Shit is far too stressful for me to deal with, I’m busy enough trying to keep my head above water for some middle class gated community bleeding heart to tell me I should feel bad for something I – Have no part of, Have no effect on, cannot change, and that doesn’t affect my life whatsoever.

I find no enjoyment in hurting other people - which is why it doesn’t bother me; Because I’m not doing it! Humanity are a bunch of violent apes, and there is not enough time in anybodies singular life to concern themselves with every fucking atrocity being committed. I’ll be more concerned with helping the homeless in my own country, than shit going on half way across the world because a country allowed a terrorist organization to run rampant.

Maybe Hamas shouldn’t have attacked Israel? – why aren’t you talking about THOSE lives lost? Why aren’t you concerned with the lives THEY have taken? Probably because you’ve been taken by Iran’s online psyop.

But, they could, anything could happen, and then you don’t have that library anymore. Physical is the only way to truly own.

That’s exactly my point. Steam has allowed me to OWN Half Life longer than I would have been able to with physical media. Those CDs don’t last that long. I’m not that careful.

So the balance is “own my own stuff and all the problems that come with keeping it pristine so that it continues to work, taking up space in my house” - or the infinitesimally small chance that STEAM goes belly up. Steam has allowed me to own my games for a lot longer than I could have kept them myself. So the argument of “oh they could go away!” doesn’t really hold any water for me. Especially for games with an online component (which is all of them now) – What’s the use of physical media when the game requires some servers that vanished long ago anyways?

Imagine giving your life up for something that doesn’t affect you. I get the whole being altruistic part, but with these people it goes too far.

You don’t see multi-generational Americans going over there and protesting for this stuff, because they are detached from it. Race doesn’t have anything to do with it.

yeah a true pure-blooded American shouldn’t give a fuck if a genocide was on half way across the world even if their hard-earned tax was directly paying for the salaries and equipments used in those war crimes, and their country weapons were dropping on refugee tents burning hundrends to death in the most horrific ways.

Yeah. Basically. The US Military is the our largest employer. Arming other nations has benefits for us - We still get to fund our military, we still get to produce weapons, and we aren’t risking our own soldiers lives in conflict. Is it inhumane? That’s arguable. On a personal/individual level, yes - on a larger scale, it’s pretty par for the course. I’d argue that the liberties that Muslim countries strip from women, lgbt, etc is a large enough negative that replacing it with a more tolerant one is a net positive.