Being around too many antagonistic people is stressful.

“The impact of election stress: Is political anxiety harming your health?: Psychological science shows that politics can harm our physical and mental health, but the positive aspects of political engagement can lead to greater well-being”

“In polarized communities, they found that bonding ties, or bonds between people who are similar (in this case, politically similar), were linked with better physical and mental health (International Political Science Review, Vol. 75, No. 3, 2022). Bridging ties—connections with dissimilar people—were associated with worse overall health for people who were politically isolated.”

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/10/managing-political-stress

There’s a big difference between analyzing your enemy and letting them shout at you constantly. I can research conservative evangelicals attitudes without having to let one set up a loudspeaker next to my house.

The conservative troll types are also the ones most likely to try and argue about echo chambers because their style of rage farming doesn’t work if everyone avoids them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/01/owning-the-libs-is-the-only-gop-platform/676692/

My guess is the music goes into the past, leaving echos in your memories.

I think it’s more fair to compare average income versus average life satisfaction. (using a scale of 1 to 10) (On this scale Finland is the happiest, and Afghanistan is the least happy)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness

Average satisfaction for Costa Rica (6.61) or Mexico (6.33) isn’t that much lower than the United States (6.89) at roughly 1/4th the GDP.

South Korea (5.95) doubles Mexico’s GDP ($45.5k vs $20.25k) but has a lower life satisfaction.

Or Hong Kong (5.31, $58k) is close the US ($64k) in GDP but less happy than Russia (5.66, $27.4k).

Costa Rica is at the 1.5t per capita probably safe emissions and has a life satisfaction of 6.61 compared to the US’s 6.89.

Our world in data also has life satisfaction versus CO2 emissions and central america looks to be doing fairly well for themselves. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-satisfaction-vs-co-emissions-per-capita

Most of the young adults in America currently can’t afford kids, housing, or cars.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds

Dark Sky is a group working to protect the visibility of the night sky. https://darksky.org/what-we-do/advancing-responsible-outdoor-lighting/

They’ve got suggestions on both limiting use of lighting and using lights that don’t point upward, automatically dim, and don’t generate a lot of glare

There’s some weird links between american christianity and oil. At the very least a bunch of the people who got rich off of oil also tended to be devout christians, and used their money to support evangelizing christianity and oil dominance.

There’s a number of different reviews for “Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America”

This is an especially detailed one. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kim-phillips-fein-anointed-oil/

I found the book and it’s reviews after noticing just how biased toward the republicans the owners of the oil companies tended to be. Other large businesses tend to play both sides in politics, but the owners of the oil companies really seem to be really into the traditional gender hierarchies.

darktable used xmp, and that looks like an alternate metadata format, it looks like exiftools might be able to work with the xmp standard, and it looks like there’s some face tagging features in xmp.

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/106410/how-does-xmp-define-the-face-region

I blame the young earth creationist christians who think that humans are incapable of destroying gods creation, and that the increasing planetary instability means that god will return and put them in charge any day now.

I feel it’s unfair to be blaming phones, social media, and multiplayer video games for being the way teens get some peer socialization in a world that is so deeply unfriendly to teens having independence.

danah boyd spent a bunch of time studying teen use of earlier social media, and then for personal reasons moved on to help run teen crisis text hotline.

Her thought for why US teens are struggling are the lack of non-parent trusted adults in their lives.

“Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again” https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2024/04/19/struggling-with-a-moral-panic-once-again.html

There’s also some evidence that it’s mostly teens on wealthy English speaking countries that are the most depressed.

“America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety: English-speaking teens are spreading their problems abroad.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/mental-health-crisis-anglosphere-depressed/678724/

I have long thought modern American kids have too little freedom to go places on their own.

“This article is more than 8 years old: The popsicle test: what makes a city good for children?” https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/21/city-good-children-popsicle-test-crime-property-play

I think some players have used a mithril chain shirt as a sleep shirt, which i think is technically legal.