Is it not true that non-illegal immigrants are experiencing more harassment from ICE? And that foreigners entering the US are more likely to be detained, especially if they have anything that might be perceived as anti-Trump on their social media?
I don't live in the US, so I have no direct experience (though I travel there for work once or twice a year)
My dad is in the early stages of Alzheimer's and it's made me think of what I'll do if I find myself in the same situation
Assisted suicide sounds like a fine option until you think of its impact on your loved ones. Imagining putting my wife and kids through my deciding to die, and the process of them bringing me to the place where it happens - or imagining one of them doing the same thing - just fills me with horror
Death comes for us all. It’s okay to cultivate emotional fortitude to die on own terms, at the place and time of our choosing, with grace. Would you rather them remember you as a shell of who you were, long dead mentally while the body continues on? Death is a part of life we cannot avoid, nor should we.
> If you wait until a life is "obviously no longer worth living", it is already too late —- Kahneman
Live your life in a way that it is worth living until you no longer can, I suppose. To exist is hard, do your best.
One of my friend's parents had a neurological disorder in his later years and was considering suicide. I don't know the details, but I know he had mentioned it to my friend. I believe he was convinced to try one more procedure that the logistics never lined up for. He ended up dying anyway a short number of years later.
He kept to himself, so I didn't know him well. I did know that he was an independent and thoughtful man who hated that his tremor got so bad he couldn't feed himself. I remember talking with his family about if those self-balancing Google spoons might help.
There are two kinds of people for whom suicide sounds appealing: those in poor health who don't want to experience it getting poorer, and those for whom the difficulty of being alive outweighs the joy of it. If you're in the former camp, that pain is coming for them anyway. If you're in the latter camp and still make the decision, maybe you don't have those close bonds that make you want to persevere.
Death happens to all of us. I’m 51 and as far as I know have no terminal illness. I stress to everyone that I focus on “living a good life. Not a long life”. My wife and I balance living every year like it might be our last and saving for a long life. We don’t put off traveling, concerts, hanging out with friends and other experiences so we can “retire rich”. If we can’t afford expensive travel in our 60s because we spent our younger healthier years traveling - so what? Statistically we won’t be healthier in ten years than we are now and we are both gym rats.
I “retired my wife” at 46 in 2020, eight years into our marriage so she could enjoy her passion projects and I have turned down more lucrative jobs that would have required me to work harder and be in an office so I could work remotely from anywhere - but realistically in US time zones.
Everyone who knows me, knows that I would die with no regrets. As far as my wife who loves me and my grown (step)kids who I know also love me, I don’t owe physical suffering to anyone. Assisted suicide because of Alzheimer’s is more tricky than something like cancer though. What can you do? Sign something in advance where once you can’t pass a cognitive test three months in a row - kill you?
Seeing someone else experience something is not the same as having it happen to you, and those who wish to instill their opinion on others often have the smallest worldviews and ability to think about what it might be like to experience what someone else is going through.
Please stop assuming you know what suffering I’ve had in my own body and my own life. I don’t wish to discuss it here, but I don’t think it needs to be discussed. My experience doesn’t matter in the logic of the argument.
I am saying it’s relevant because suffering is suffering. It has the same source so it does not matter if it’s a big suffering or a little suffering. Understanding suffering does not need a degree of suffering. It just needs suffering.
The man in the original article was not suffering at all yet he killed himself. What kind of suffering was that? It’s not that he was suffering. He didn’t wanna suffer at all. He didn’t want to suffer shame. This man knew so little about suffering that he took his own life rather than try to figure it out and the remaining years of his life.
I’m sorry, I’m not one of those people. I don’t have “religious beliefs“. There are things I’ve learned in my rather long life and through my suffering and happiness and reading a lot of different spiritual books as well as a lot of materialist books. (my current fascination is the possibility of tubules being the source of a quantum consciousness.)
All I wrote was a remark about how suffering has the same source. Why do we suffer? Isn’t that an interesting question? Do we need to suffer? Can we have pain without suffering? These are not answers I can tell you. These things people have to understand by experience and observation.
I want saw a Whitetail deer with a compound fracture to its rear leg. The bone was sticking straight out. Probably hit by a car. But there it was walking with its herd, calmly eating grass with the rest of them.
So that’s what I do, I look at my life outside of me and I look at the life inside of me.
Suicide is not evidence someone failed to understand pain; it's often proof they understood it too intimately, lived within it until nothing else remained.
What you've attempted is a philosophical sleight-of-hand that collapses under minimal scrutiny. Your "suffering is suffering" assertion—tracing all human agony back to a singular, universal source is a fallacy of composition. I encourage you to look into this concept, as you seem like a person who would like to be thoughtful in the way you approach these subjects.
The deer example highlights that you are mashing vastly different experiential realities to avoid dealing with the contextual depth of human distress. The resilience of a wounded deer, driven by biological signaling, offers no insight into the psychic anguish, societal shame, or cognitive collapse that is often part of human despair. Pretending these are equivalent is intellectually bankrupt from the start.
Claiming the person noted the article "was not suffering at all" and "knew so little about suffering" is stunningly out of touch.
The issue here is intellectual humility: your personal framework cannot possibly encompass the private hell another person lived with - well, until they couldn't anymore.
For the overwhelming majority of day-to-day, line-of-business software, the nerds are a commodity and the project succeeds or fails on how good or bad the business folks are. They should get the blame for the failures but also the credit for the successes.
For the stuff that is genuinely pushing the technical envelope, it's possible for the nerds to make the difference. In those cases you do see the projects fail for technical reasons like "the code couldn't scale to the required number of users" or "the technical functionality never worked reliably", and those kind of failures are the nerds' fault. But that's the minority of failures IME.
I appreciate you replying. My intent was never to place blame; instead, it was to point out that while the article's author suggests technical folks need to play the game better, I feel that it won't matter and getting the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride is more difficult than just being a solid political player.
"Not to be rude" my hole. What @CalRobert said is 100% accurate - only we are allowed to criticise Ireland, and criticism is especially unwelcome from Brits and Yanks
I disagree. Irish are _much more_ receptive to criticism of the country from immigrants than most countries.
In my experience, the United States and England (not the entire UK) have the thinnest skin and some people will straight-up tell you to f-off home on the slightest criticism, especially on the subject of human rights or the expeditionary wars.
There are of course the usual suspects, the racists and "Pro-Irish" crowd, who will blame everything on immigrants and accept no criticism of their imagined Ireland, but this isn't true in general.
However, if you make grand pronouncements from a position of profound ignorance and overtly judge the life choices of your new compatriots - a speciality of the GP - you will find yourself alienated at best. This is true everywhere, not just Ireland.
> I disagree. Irish are _much more_ receptive to criticism of the country from immigrants than most countries.
Unless, of course, the criticism is someone making a personal observation about how they saw tipping culture expand during their time in Ireland, right? Then the appropriate response is to generalize that Americans love making ignorant comments about other cultures.
> Unless, of course, the criticism is someone making a personal observation about how they saw tipping culture expand during their time in Ireland, right? Then the appropriate response is to generalize that Americans love making ignorant comments about other cultures.
Unless they're factually incorrect, which is the case here.
Well, they say they did experience it. You cannot possibly know otherwise.
There’s also another commenter in this thread who says they’ve lived in Ireland for their entire life and says they’ve experienced the same thing.
Then, there’s you.
There are two likely explanations I can think of for your behavior here. 1, you are arguing in bad faith. 2, you are unable, for whatever reason, to understand that others might have a different experience in the world than you.
In either case, I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation. Have a nice day.
> Honestly something that was a bit galling was that the Irish would moan about Ireland morning day and night but the instant a foreigner made _any_ observation that wasn't rainbows and sunshine we were out of our lane and needed to shut up
Haha nail on head here. On behalf of my fellow Irish people - sorry!
I don't live in the US, so I have no direct experience (though I travel there for work once or twice a year)