Perhaps you are asking a variation of the “genetics vs. environment” question. If so, there are many answers on the subject. Also, money is somewhat attractive to almost everyone, to some degree, for practical reasons.

That’s true but I think irrelevant. People are posting examples of things that used to be bad and have improved. If you want your science fiction framing, just consider the timeline where those things didn’t improve, and you have your answer.

Because so many of us didn’t interpret the question properly at first, maybe the question could have been written more clearly, and it wasn’t and that’s okay, but I hope people looking for answers would be willing to do a little bit of logical reasoning.

There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.

In the last six months, yes. It suggests short cuts that can create long delays. Shorter by miles, but often worse in the end.

I probably wouldn’t describe them as flawed, because the goal wasn’t and couldn’t ever be perfection, so then everything is flawed, but then is it really a flaw? It sounds like more of an issue of what’s useful in what type of situation.

I mentioned it in another comment, but that really is the name of my RSS reading software. It’s a package that’s been around for over 20 years, written by someone (not me) with contributions from many people. I believe there are hundreds of people who have started on GitHub, which means over the years there have been presumably been thousands or tens of thousands of users. (Update: There are far less than hundreds of stars, although you can find several forks on GitHub and elsewhere.)

Certainly that open source software package is far less common than the traditional use of the word, but it is a very legitimate and non-dirty use of it. Perhaps the original developer had his mind in the gutter, that was his choice to make, and now we all have to live with the consequences.

This was your deck. Now it’s your new cat’s deck.

What, you mean kids won’t learn dirty words properly if they don’t hear them from their parents? That’s one theory of development.

That’s the name of my RSS reader.

I’m not a professional code monkey although I’ve done a fair amount of coding, and every time I tried to do parsing myself, I later regretted it.

But telling people that they’re doing it wrong is rarely met with positivity. :-)

I think there’s an element of responsibility that some people feel when they respond. If you’re asking for a very niche solution that is likely to create other problems in the future, should anyone else look at your code or refactor it or rely on it, or should you forget how it works, perhaps people are going to be less inclined in helping you craft it.

If you still want to craft it, that’s okay, but you have to expect that some real percent of the answers are going to be those folk who know what the tried and true solution is, often because they’ve lived through the reality that you’re attempting to create and they’ve dealt with the aftermath of doing it special and different.

One thing that struck me as an adult is that I grew up learning about some ancient civilizations, but in school I never learned that Mesopotamia is a location in present day Iraq. It just feels weird that we could study about ancient cultures and not learn where they are on the globe today.

You still have spending wars. Politicians are bought and sold every day, and any large company probably donates to politicians of multiple parties.

I don’t see the problem originating from Congress necessarily being polarized. I think the problem is that corporate and big money interests are too strong, and they fund politicians that will try to divide the people on social issues so that they can distract the people from badness happening on the economic front. In other words, I think we’re seeing a problem with corruption that’s expressing itself as polarization.

Even the term “polarization” can also be used as a trap, because it tends to be used in a way that frames politics as a linear spectrum, and your views are somewhere between these two end points. In reality everything is far more complicated. People have highly nuanced views on many different subjects with good reason, and there’s no way you can easily capture it on one single sliding scale.

Nothing. Discovered mine long before.

Maybe you’re confused because the etymology is not clear to you. I see the term “wedding ring” and I think it denotes that person A and person B are being wed to each other. Joined to each other. The ring symbolizes that joining. In other words, I don’t think the ring is named after the event. I think both the ring and the event are named after the verb. In which case it’s a very normal name.

Another interesting point is that in some cultures it’s quite common for people to get married months or years before they have a wedding. They can go to City Hall and get married, and then later when they have time and money they can schedule their wedding celebration party. If that’s the case, then the ring that you use for the first time at your wedding might be reasonably called the “wedding ring”.

It’s not “all of a sudden”. And it’s not “the world”. And it’s not even “America”. Rather, you’re now consuming media that’s exposing you to thoughts that have always been around, often on the fringes.

Remember, bigots have always existed, and polite bigots toe the line as much as they’re forced to. They aren’t going to disappear, ever. (That being said, we can make them less relevant and powerful.)

I think that’s what they were asking for.

What kind of jobs are you talking about? People speculating in real estate are doing so for passive income, not for employment. I just don’t see this job loss concern being legitimate.

Maybe some property management folk would have to change to slightly different aspects of the service industry, that could happen, but it’s just not large scale. In comparison, we hear stories everyday of people who can’t pay their mortgage or can’t pay rent, then they become homeless, and then they lose their job as a result.

Which is to say, I don’t think politicians believe for a second that high housing prices are keeping unemployment low. Also, you mentioned economic statistics, but for some reason you feel that homelessness isn’t included in them. That’s a peculiar choice.

This confuses me. If you grew up in hardship, what made you think that the future was going to be better than the present?

Also, your description sounds overly general. Nobody has a life that consists entirely of nice moments. I’m not sure why or how anyone would ever have expected otherwise.