I'm an American living outside the US. While this is true it feels a bit like how pedestrians have the right-of-way at road crossings: you're legally protected, but is right now the time to test how much people are going to respect that?
I crossed the US-Canada land border with a non-US friend to go to a birthday party a while back; they sent us to secondary so my friend could get their passport stamped (their previous visa had run out). CBP took the opportunity to search our car and tried to convince us they found weed before letting us go (neither of us use it).
Another time my wife and I (both citizens) were crossing and the border agent gave us a hard time for having different last names.
I can't imagine what it's like for people with less privilege than I, but I'm already to the point where I stress about crossing the border. I bring a spare phone, wiped of anything interesting, I let my partners know when I'm at the crossing in case something happens; Paranoid? Possibly. But the potentiality of something going horribly wrong is through the roof, and there's increasingly little recourse. Yes, citizens especially should be insulated from this, but we're seeing egregious violations on so many fronts I don't want to trust that to hold.
> 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun
What is a "reverse commute"? Is that just going into the city at the opposite time of day from normal work?
Also, 45 minutes one day (1.5hr total) is a rather large chunk of the evening to spend in transit for "evening fun."
> I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
It's funny, I remember thinking that people buying in 2020 were nuts because none of us knew what the economy was going to do, and it turns out that those who did buy came out ahead. I cite this among friends as one of the many ways in which I feel like being cautious with money has been the wrong choice (e.g. maintain 6mo-12mo emergency fund, don't make large purchases in periods of uncertainty, etc).
45 minutes both ways to the city is just what being in the suburbs is like. I grew up outside Chicago, and that's how long it'd take to go into the city and see a game or show or museum or whatever. Usually I'm spending 6+ hours in the city (we catch an early dinner at 4 or 5 and then head back after our event at 10 or 11) so it feels worth it to me.
And yeah, that's what reverse commute means. Seattle traffic is awful if you're going where everyone else is, but Tacoma to Seattle in the evening is not busy at all.
I typed out the response below but I'm not sure I have a coherent response as to why the secular zeitgeist of death is less intimidating to me than the religious context of it. (Though, I'm not who you're replying to.)
I think it comes down to the sheer amount of pressure I felt within religion to be a certain way while also being told I could never be that way enough to achieve satisfaction in the eyes of god, and outside of religion I'm just another person in a flawed world trying to do my best.
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At the risk of being redundant, death within religion isn't an end, but yet another beginning. Eternal life is the reward for being a diligent disciple, where that means internalizing one's inherent flawed nature and inability to be redeemed but through death in devotion to god... which is a hell of a weight to carry throughout ones' life!
The Christian ethos is woven through with constantly being judged. And forgiven, yes, in theory, but still there is a constant undertone of "you cannot avoid making mistakes, and the mistakes you make are so offensive to god he wouldn't want you anywhere near him, but for magic religion reasons you've been redeemed by god doing something so terribly debased that it outweighs all the awful mistakes you've made."
Death (and "everlasting life") is no reprieve from this, but a form of stick that weighs heavy over you all through your days. You must work to save those around you, or they'll be eternally lost. You must cleave to the teachings of god, or at the very least belief in him, or you'll be eternally lost.
Since I left the church so many things of import that I felt I didn't understand now make much more sense; I struggled to comprehend how god could allow suffering, but now I see that the universe is just absurd and uncaring. While that may seem less comforting, I find the notions of bad things happening randomly less upsetting than there being an all-powerful being who cares about me but chooses to let me suffer for reasons that were never convincing, and as I've grown older sound more and more like an abusive relationship.
Through that lens, death is just a natural consequence of the world. Scary, yes, in the sense that I may not live up to all I want to be before my time is up, but I'm not pre-marked as eternally flawed and only redeemable through processes that do not make sense to me. Instead I know that I can only do my best, and that has to be enough, because I can't possibly do more.
When I first encountered this description of grief it really resonated, but it's felt less poignant as I've gotten older, partly because I find myself grieving people who still live, and are simply too different from how I remember them or how I thought I knew them to support the relationships I want to have with them.
I suppose the principle still holds: the "love" I have for those versions of those people cannot go anywhere, but that feels dissonant with not wanting to know these people as they are, or knowing the relationship I'm wishing for is otherwise ill-fated. In either case, the relationship cannot continue, and that drive the sense of grief anyway, so maybe I'm just splitting hairs.
Such is the complex nature of grief and of human relationships, I suppose.
> I didn't think any part of linear algebra was boring.
My formal linear algebra course was boring as hell, to me. The ~4 lectures my security prof dedicated to explaining just enough to do some RSA was absolutely incredible. I would pay lots of money for a hands-on what-linalg-is-useful-for course with practical examples like that.
(If you work through the prerequisites and use "understanding this post" as a sort of roadmap of what you actually need to know, this gets you about 2/3rds through undergraduate linear algebra, and you can skim through nullspaces --- all in the service of learning a generally useful tool for attacking cryptosystems).
I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.
Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).
There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.
Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."
So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.
Startling lack of mentions of Minneapolis and Chicago[1]! Minneapolis has an extensive "Skyway" at the ~third story of a bunch of downtown buildings. It's kinda one extensive mall, but also makes it possible to meander without freezing. I interviewed once many years ago during November-ish and it was quite lovely. It's the closest to cinematic urban cyberpunk vibes I've felt in the "real world", where you've got throngs of people transiting an enclosed space with food vendors and shops and a backdrop of terrible, terrible weather.
Chicago also has an underground system ("the Pedway") that's also mall-ish, but it's in fairly crap condition. It's got incredible liminal vibes, but is not the most pleasant to exist in.
[1]: To be fair, a commenter did mention Minneapolis
I crossed the US-Canada land border with a non-US friend to go to a birthday party a while back; they sent us to secondary so my friend could get their passport stamped (their previous visa had run out). CBP took the opportunity to search our car and tried to convince us they found weed before letting us go (neither of us use it).
Another time my wife and I (both citizens) were crossing and the border agent gave us a hard time for having different last names.
I can't imagine what it's like for people with less privilege than I, but I'm already to the point where I stress about crossing the border. I bring a spare phone, wiped of anything interesting, I let my partners know when I'm at the crossing in case something happens; Paranoid? Possibly. But the potentiality of something going horribly wrong is through the roof, and there's increasingly little recourse. Yes, citizens especially should be insulated from this, but we're seeing egregious violations on so many fronts I don't want to trust that to hold.
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