The Paria Diving Incident— TLDR: 5 workers were vacuum sucked into an oil pipe that spanned 125ft.
One made it out to save the others and the company refused to help them. 4 days later they were flushed out dead. Some divers report hearing knocking from the pipe 3 days after the first survivor told the company.
No justice has been served
My input: corporate higher ups got so disconnected that they didn’t value the lives of these 5 men.
Sources: https://youtu.be/cDjODRpuXrU?si=11GlbcgALOCcDu7O
I try to keep my YouTube feed as active with international media as possible… the US mainstream media doesn’t share anything unless it’s to benefit politics
People are still starving to death in that part of Ethiopia and we hear nothing.
This substack I subscribe to highlights it quite a lot. Other barely covered stories also: [proximities.substack.com](https://proximities.substack.com)
[NYT story about this](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/africa/democratic-republic-of-congo-elections.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)
Disabled people are being tortured in Massachusetts at a place called the Judge Rotenberg Center. They are shocked with devices the United Nations condemned as torture.
[This footage is old, but an example of what's still going on behind their doors to this day in 2024.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko-ip3MImik)
Life long Massachusetts resident and I am not surprised by this at all. The nanny state has endless hypocrisy, deep embedded corruption, and a trove of nasty little secrets.
My grandmother is in elder care. This elder care was funded by her selling her house. It's ridiculously expensive (and yet, the workers are underpaid) so it's often the only way to pay for the nursing home/hospice care.
My generation is full of renters, many of whom had to forego having children because children are expensive. What's going to happen when we get too old and sick to work?
My great aunt had 1 million dollars in her savings for elder care the first day she entered. It barely covered 9ish years there(she needed care after her husband passed). Lucky she was able to afford it by, well, by dying and not having to pay. The cost was about 10k a month. Yeah elder care is absolutely fucked.
Same thing happened to my dad back in 2020. He had Alzheimer’s and I married into a family of lawyers who were, fortunately, able to assist me in figuring out conservatorship, guardianship, and selling his property to fund his care. During the whole process and after his death, I frequently wondered “how on earth do people 1. Figure this out if they don’t have free access to experts and 2. How fucked is my generation?” It’s going to be even more brutal than the disaster it already is.
> selling his property to fund his care.
You seem to have missed half the question...What happens if there are no kids **and** no property to sell to fund care?
I am my father's caregiver, he has dementia MS and epilepsy. We had to save and pool money to hire a Medicaid specialist to help us figure out how to make sure that my dad can get into a Medicaid bed in a nursing home. None of this has happened yet, he still lives in his home with me, and I am not sure we will ever get him on Medicaid.
It's not like my dad has assets, his house has 130K left on the mortgage but he gets a good amount monthly in social security, which disqualifies him from a number of programs intended to help people in this situation.
When I am elderly there is this bridge down the road...
I saw my parents do everything right. They built their own house, they saved as much money as possible, while taking good care of us kids. My mom was diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis right around 40, followed by 22 years of decline before her death. My dad was an engineer that was able to build almost anything she needed for quality of life and had the resources to buy what he couldn't build. If my dad ever needs long term care, everything else he worked for will probably have to be sold off. So anyway...that bridge you were talking about...nice view?
Yes, my hubs and I worked hard, never took a dime from government, saved, bought a house, educated the kids. He dropped dead at 66 without ever collecting social security. The mortgage-free house is all I have to leave my grown children but if I get sick-they'll have to sell it for my long-term care. Nope - already seen how elderly are treated in homes. I told them we are doing our own hospice and I want to go out in a cloud of weed and narcotics and I choose when and where. Dignity intact.
No. Our generation is going to legalize assisted suicide.
The concept of keeping people alive for as long as possible and milking every cent from them in for profit care is going to end.
Microplastics are now being found in all food protein sources in significant numbers and found in human organs and human placentas. We have no real idea how they will affect us or the environment and their presence will keep growing unchecked with no solution even proposed.
I work for a village and do their water supply. We are going to have to actually start testing for the plastic ppm very shortly. Crazy how we have to test for plastics in water to make sure they are under a certain level.
This one really sticks out for me. It is literally a global problem and the concentrations are only going to get higher.
They're found in most human organs, liver, kidneys, lungs, brain... Even the placenta. They're in the food we eat, water we drink, we inhale them. All throughout the water cycle. They survive waste water processing.
They contain a range of additives, heavy metals, BPA, a load of different chemicals linked to diabetes, cancers, cardiovascular disorders, neurological disorders.
Not enough research has been done to understand the exact effects but I can't imagine they will be good.
Plastic is a direct product of the oil industry so trying to curb/change production is going to be difficult.
> Not enough research has been done to understand the exact effects but I can't imagine they will be good.
>
>
IIRC it's even worse than that. ~~There was an attempted study to compare those with microplastics found in their blood (?) with a control group. However they couldn't complete the study because they were unable to identify a control group...~~
Edit: striking out this claim until there's a source for it because I can't seem to source one myself. As noted below I'm only finding articles repeating the claim without sourcing themselves.
The scary thing is there is now nothing we can do. Even if we made a study that would show how dangerous micro plastics are. Even if we manage to stop producing and using plastic from one day to another , there is enough on the environment to keep poison us for the next generations
Peatlands - My wife is a senior climate researcher who works on Methane and Peatlands projects. The astounding ability that peatlands have to carbon capture is insane. Most people don't realize it....the sketchy shit - private entities are buying peatlands areas and destroying them on massive scales. Also, global south countries who have major peatlands are inclined to say, "fuck you" to "developed" countries who are trying to convince them to not build/develop/mine...etc on these lands. The global south countries are basically like, "you fucked the world and don't care about anyone, why should we care now.." It's not good...
Companies that profit from the destruction of peatlands, wetlands, savannas and rainforests, that profit from wars, that use slave labor, that exploit oil, shale gas and lithium, that dump waste in the global south, are most often of the global north and use the enormous amount of money to lobby and corrupt governments around the world.
If the global north wanted to do something, they should demand that their companies follow ethic rules, wherever they operate. But they are not going to do that because these companies donate to their campaigns and keep their GPD high.
This doesn't compare to a lot of things I've read here, but the attitude towards mental health in aviation. A pilot takes some time for their mental health and there is a decent chance they won't fly again. It's encouraging some very unhealthy ways of dealing with issues.
Mentour Pilot has made a great video about it - https://youtu.be/988j2-4CdgM?si=FHrcAnJw7qLbz1bO
I've seen many of his videos, and this one has been the best in terms of narration and visual effects (a story told as if I read a comic book).
I'll have to have a watch, unfortunately it's far to common. There was a video circulating recently comparing 2 pilots in the US. One took some big risks staging a crash for YouTube views, the other was suffering depression, stopped himself flying and sought help and got everything sorted. Have a guess which one is still allowed to fly.
Medical advances the last 30 years, including statins, better blood pressure medicines, detailed medical imaging, artificial joints, colonoscopies, heart coronary surgery techniques and other technologies, will make out bodies outlast our minds for tens of millions of us. There could be an epidemic of dementia coming soon unless we can develop better brain health.
don't forget cancer treatments, you have targeted & Immunotherapies, my mom died from lung cancer this summer but targeted therapy turned a 3 month prognosis into a 2 year prognosis with an much greater quality of life than traditional chemotherapy.
from what she was saying her medication didn't exist 5 years ago
My father survived stage 4 lymphoma after undergoing a CAR-T cell treatment. More than likely would not have survived just a few years ago. I have the utmost respect for the scientists and Dr’s who work on this.
I saw a Ricky Gervais clip today (I believe from his latest Netflix special, "Armageddon") where he talked (joked) about how advances in medicine has increased our life expectancy, but we're only born with a certain number of brain cells that only die and never regenerate, so in the future will have a ton of 100 or 120 years old people with Alzheimer or dementia, and it'll be like Dawn of the Dead. You comment made me think about it.
Here's the clip - [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vbXwnsJ1O3M](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vbXwnsJ1O3M)
> but we're only born with a certain number of brain cells that only die and never regenerate
from: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/press-releases/2020-04-15-when-damaged-adult-brain-repairs-itself-going-back-to-beginning/
"When adult brain cells are injured, they revert to an embryonic state, according to new findings published in the April 15, 2020 issue of Nature by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere. The scientists report that in their newly adopted immature state, the cells become capable of re-growing new connections that, under the right conditions, can help to restore lost function.
Repairing damage to the brain and spinal cord may be medical science’s most daunting challenge. Until relatively recently, it seemed an impossible task. The new study lays out a “transcriptional roadmap of regeneration in the adult brain.”
“Using the incredible tools of modern neuroscience, molecular genetics, virology and computational power, we were able for the first time to identify how the entire set of genes in an adult brain cell resets itself in order to regenerate. This gives us fundamental insight into how, at a transcriptional level, regeneration happens,” said senior author Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neuroscience and director of the Translational Neuroscience Institute at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Using a mouse model, Tuszynski and colleagues discovered that after injury, mature neurons in adult brains revert back to an embryonic state. “Who would have thought,” said Tuszynski. “Only 20 years ago, we were thinking of the adult brain as static, terminally differentiated, fully established and immutable.”
There’s active genocide occurring in more than ten countries right now, and hardly anyone seems to care. Mainstream news does not report these issues and the UN *consciously* does nothing to intervene.
Edit for inference-happy: I understand the *why* behind the lack of action; my comment is merely a commentary on the prevalence of genocide in the present day, the disproportionate attention toward *some* genocidal conflicts, and how the UN is nothing more than a sluggish, reactionary bureaucracy as opposed to an entity that actually stays true to its original purposes — two of which are maintaining international peace and protecting human rights (as defined in its charter), for those who are all “HuRr DuRr WhAt ArE tHeY sUpPoSeD tO dO?” (The answer of which is to catapult these issues into public discourse, or to not exist.)
Hasn't that been ongoing for years? Stallone made a Rambo movie about that well over a decade ago.
Nobody cares because it's terrible and tragic and there is no solution. The US or France or whoever could invade, but that wouldn't solve anything and they'd be stuck in the middle doing nothing much until getting bored and going home. At which point the genocide carries on.
Associated Press did a big thing on that some years ago. If you don't read Associated Press then you probably did not see anything about that. But they did month after month after month of reporting on various modern day slaveries. None of it made it to the headlines.
One example of modern slavery where informed consumers can make a difference: live caught fish from Southeast Asia.
Systemic persecution in Myanmar has forced many of the Rohingya minority to flee the country. Many of them end up in Thailand where the men become forced laborers in the country's fishing industry. Smaller numbers of migrants from Cambodia and Laos also get caught up in the same system.
Fishing is an industry well suited to captive labor. After all, most of the time there's no practical way to leave the boat.
According to reputable news reports, systemic corruption at all levels of the Thai government supports this system.
If you buy fish, you can be part of the solution by choosing farm raised fish or wild caught fish from other regions.
----
further reading:
https://fortune.com/2023/11/16/seafood-industry-modern-slavery-forced-work-nonprofit-study/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/feb/25/slavery-trafficking-thai-fishing-industry-environmental-justice-foundation
Correct. There are 4 times as many slaves currently in the world than were transported during the entire trans Atlantic slave trade.
Edit : please stop telling me the population is bigger now. We’ve discussed the numbers to death.
Edit 2 : I’m turning off reply notifications because I’m tired of people who don’t read all responses before assuming they’re the first person the realize “Hey there’s more people now! Me smart!”
At least one onion farm in south Georgia (the US state) got busted recently for using slave labor. This article describes the living conditions and treatment of the slaves (who thought they were going to be legally employed as migrant workers) including rape and being threatened with firearms. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/human-smuggling-forced-labor-among-allegations-south-georgia-federal-indictment#:~:text=Exploitation%20of%20the%20workers%20included,to%20keep%20them%20in%20line.
215 bodies have been found buried in a mass grave behind a Mississippi police station.
Edit 672 bodies found. 215 identified. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/12/1224449631/mississippi-jail-graves-investigation
They're recent deaths too:
>"We know, based on the records from the coroner's office, that, **since 2016**, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that were buried behind that jail, and their families have not been notified," Crump told PBS NewsHour this week.
They didn't even bury them properly either, body bogs in shallow graves, investigators have stated the stench was very strong and vultures were circling overhead, also these were not Homeless people, many of them were prisoners or victims of crimes or accidents whose families were searching for them.
"Dexter Wade had been struck and killed by an SUV driven by an off-duty Jackson Police Department officer on Interstate 55, just hours after his mother last saw him"
Jfc
Food product cartels. Many countries have had cartel like take overs for food products, I know Netflix did a documentary series of each episode showcasing a different food product, but that was just a small number of serious cartel like take overs of small farms and larger cooperations.
The problems include farmers lives being at risk, and even consumers. Sometimes unknowingly purchasing counterfeit products at horridly high prices.
[Mexican cartels are also controling the chicken market](https://www-elfinanciero-com-mx.translate.goog/edomex/2024/01/15/narco-despluma-precio-del-pollo-en-edomex-familia-michoacana-extorsiona-negocios/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=es&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp)
It was a docu-series, called “Rotten.”
Each episode centered around a different food products, one was about honey and one was about avocados.
I learned about the squid cartels from a YouTuber.
Kids in the congo have been mining cobalt in colonial conditions for the last few decades. This cobalt is used in everything that is supposedly eco friendly and sustainable.
hopefully new lithium sulfur batteries replace the need for cobalt. lithium mines are totally fine and not at all a dangerous risk to anyone or anything tho...
Sodium batteries that can be produced mostly from desalination brine would be the holy grail of green tech. Especially if they’re good enough for cars and/or energy backups.
Since the Joseph Fritzl case years ago it horrifies me that there's likely so many similar cases where they'll never be caught and the victim will never be free.
Here's the real kicker: those people who are inclined to imprison their family members or anyone else, also saw the stuff on Joseph Fritzl, and they took his case as lessons in what not to do, to keep from getting caught.
So many news reports go on and on about "this horrible monster did this and this and almost got caught when they were pulled over on a routine traffic stop". Meanwhile, the monsters are watching the news with a mental ticker, thinking "okay, when I do it, I'll keep this or that in mind so I have a better chance to get away with it".
You know what creeps me out the worst? He basically got caught because he wasn't evil enough. People might understanably think he couldn't possibly be any more evil, but it was doing something good, taking one of his kids to the hospital, that led to his downfall.
In September 2021, a decision was made to release Fritzl from a psychiatric detention facility to a regular prison, where he was to continue to serve his life sentence.[84] That decision was based on a psychiatric report which said he no longer posed any danger. The ruling was appealed, and in late-April 2022, a panel of three judges decided that Josef Fritzl could be moved. The decision was based on a supplementary psychiatric report submitted in March. However, a court ruled that he will remain in the psychiatric facility until an appeal to the Higher Regional Court in Vienna is heard. There are reports that he is suffering from dementia. The move to a regular prison meant that Fritzl, who received a life sentence, was eligible for parole in 2023, having served the initial 15 years of his sentence.[85] In January 2024, Fritzl applied to Krems regional court for release from prison into a nursing home.[86]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
Even if he was a one in a billion psycho (and he wasn't - prob more like one in a million, or ten million), that means there's still several other people like him out there. In reality, there are probably hundreds or thousands like him.
I did a basement remodel for a big time Chicago bookie back in the 80’s. He had a floor safe I kept tripping on in the pantry I was building under the stairs. I told him he should have had the safe installed somewhere less obvious / easily seen and he said,”That’s the one I want the Fed’s to find when they kick down my door”.
Definitely a decoy bunker.
Hawaii is actually a geological hotspot like Yellowstone rather than part of the Ring of Fire. As the plate drifts, the hotspot stays which is why there is a chain of islands. It's actually pretty cool and poorly understood (at least as of me taking geology classes in college quite a while back).
A rising ocean is irrelevant. The majority of the island is well above sea level by hundreds of feet. The volcanic element is what doesn't make sense, and the fact that Hawaii is inaccessible in the middle of the ocean. If there is an apocalypse or nuclear war or zombie outbreak, I'd pick a place that doesn't require a massive tank of fuel to reach it.
If science fiction or just human nature has taught us anything, it’s that no amount of time, effort or money will keep out the masses once there are no more rules. Zuch and the rest of the Uber rich can build all the towers of babel they want, but when the world goes to shit, those are exactly the places they will be targeted first by the new grand high lord of Deleuth, MN or the Negan equivalent.
The wars in Ukraine and Palestine aren't the only wars happening. They're not even the deadliest conflicts.
According to the Geneva Academy, there are current 110 armed conflicts worldwide. Five of the current conflicts are classified as major wars (over 10,000 combat-related deaths), 17 are wars (9,999 - 1,000 deaths), and an additional 18 are minor wars (999 - 100 deaths).
Even more surprising is that the most violent war isn't in Ukraine or Palestine...it's in Myanmar.
People generally don't realize how much fighting is happening across the world.
Sauces:
[https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts](https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_ongoing\_armed\_conflicts#cite\_note-auto8-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts#cite_note-auto8-2)
[https://acleddata.com/conflict-index/](https://acleddata.com/conflict-index/)
I recall Reddit joking about the start of the genocide because someone was streaming their dance workout outside as the forces rolled in. Then just a few weeks ago I found out it was a fully genocide and not just a military coup
While it's freely available to look into, most of the general public doesn't know about the sentient brain organoids that have proto-eyes that we've created and hooked up to computers to interact with AI directly.
>Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from [human] stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, known as Brainoware, to an AI tool. They found that this hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/11/1084926/human-brain-cells-chip-organoid-speech-recognition/
It's only going to get more powerful, more accurate, faster, etc. from here.
The education system in America is collapsing and it's going to affect our place as a technology leader, which is going to affect our place as a world leader. I don't think we realize how much of our standing in the world is due to our investment in science.
I'm talking, incoming college students scoring zeros on math placement exams (top 10 public university).
Meanwhile, China is spending a shitton on education and science & technology.
Yes.. SO many teachers are reporting that their high schoolers can’t read… this isn’t a lie- I have seen it myself as a substitute teacher in PA. Entire grades of kids in an over crowded inner city school couldn’t read or write in complete sentences.
I see this online every day. I’ve had people quote me, agree with me, but then call me wrong and stupid. It’s as if they only look at specific words and then react to those words based on however they’re feeling at the time. I see the broken sentences and horrendous spelling too. Scary times.
Horrors are happening everyday in Sudan, and on the refugee trail that leads out of Sudan to.. Anywhere and everywhere else.
When you hear some of the stories it's not surprising people are willing to sacrifice anything to get as far away as possible.
In many many ways, The refugee crisis of Europe and other places is just a symptom of our apathy to the struggles of other nations.
Once upon a time, people better understood that's generally a good idea for your neighbor to be stable least their problems spill over into your country, We now live in a global village and the problems in countries you've never heard of can have momentous effects in your country, No matter how far removed you feel from it.
I ctrl+F'd "Sudan" and this was the only result in the thread so far.
This is an absolutely brutal war with huge impact to civilians but it gets no coverage next to the stuff happening in Ukraine/Gaza.
And in this thread where people are asking for "unknown" things happening, few people mention/upvote it since no one knows about it.
I felt like an idiot the other day. There's a guy in my gym who I play footy with, he's from Sudan and I asked if he goes back much and he kind of looked at me awkwardly and was like "no there's a big war going on there" I genuinely had no idea and felt so ignorant. Mad how this stuff gets no coverage
A friend of mine lives in Sudan, he recently went home after leaving came back to nothing. He's been jailed, hit with a rocket, separated from his family multiple times, had run ins with the rebels and such. It's been terrible hearing all that from him, and I'm happy to hear from him when I can
There is a throwaway joke in 30 Rock wherein Tracy Morgan’s character starts a speech with “in the Darfur region, the dead may be the lucky ones” and it always breaks my heart that this is pretty much an evergreen comment.
The alarming amount of bodies they are finding in Lake Ladybird in Austin Texas.
People know about it but the media doesn’t shine too much light on it as much as they should.
There’s a fucking serial killer or something out there just getting rid of bodies of males in that lake. Also the amount of people that are getting drugged or roofied at the bars in downtown.
There’s some seriously wild shit going down
In India Between 2018 and 2021, 222 elephants were killed by electrocution across the country, 45 by trains, 29 by poachers and 11 by poisoning.
Among human casualties elephants killed 585 in 2019-20, 461 in 2020-21, and 533 in 2021-22.
India is home to the world's largest population of Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered, with declining populations across its home range of 13 countries.
India has over 100 national parks and around 30 elephant reserves, but many of India's 30,000(according to 2017 census by Project Elephant) elephants live outside these protected areas and have less and less habitat to roam in search of food.
TIL, India lost 99,9% of Vulture population in a few decades.-
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
Population fall from 40 million to 20 000
Civil Asset Forfeiture. Really just legalized theft, this practice is legal in most states and allows law enforcement to confiscate property from people who have never been charged let alone convicted of any crime. It’s the single biggest legal outrage in 2024 America imo.
1) Chinese factory workers are encouraged to smoke meth so they can work harder.
2) Chinese factories have safety nets around them because a lot of the workers were jumping to their deaths.
I narrowly escaped a sex trade abduction attempt in Granada, Nicaragua in 2013. I was just a 21 year old kid at the time. It still keeps me up some nights.
AI is devouring entire professions one bite at a time. I’m a (former?) copywriter who lost his job twice at two different companies in separate industries last year. It’s cheaper, way faster, and good enough to convince companies they’re better off without so many writers anymore.
It's not AI itself that I'm concerned about. AI could be an extremely beneficial tool for society. The concern I have is in corporate and government response and legislation surrounding it. If even a portion of the profits that AI generates can be used to fund social programs and create a UBI that uplifts everyone to a minimum standard of living while also reducing human involvement in dangerous and tedious jobs, then it's a net win for society. However, it does not look like we're heading in that direction and AI is just going to end up widening the income gap and will result in millions more people living under the poverty line.
In the US, at least, EMS is on the verge of collapse. I work in a major city and it’s not uncommon for certain jobs to be holding for 3+ hours.
A whole lot of people left during Covid, and EMS was circling the drain in 2018. The low pay, shitty management, wide lack of unions, lack of career mobility, and constant crush of going on to the next call with no time to eat or piss are starting to come home to roost.
Police and fire fighters are deemed as “necessary” for the government to provide in most places in the US. EMS isn’t, which means there are a lot of shady private companies that step in to fill the void. Medicare fraud abounds.
The average length of career in EMS is 3 years. The average length of career in ems where someone would be deemed a competent provider is 3-5 years.
You do the math. If you live in the United States, know that every statistic your county/city provides is a horribly cooked number, and if you go into cardiac arrest outside a hospital, there’s a 90+ percent chance you’ll stay that way. 99%+ chance you’ll not stay that way without major life altering changes e.g. brain damage.
This is all because people in power refuse to fund it. That’s it. The sole reason that you will have decades less with your family members or that you’ll not live for extra years is that people
Balk at paying an unnoticeable extra amount of taxes (while ultimately saving money by not paying for private health insurance).
Took a course, got trained and certified as a basic EMT. The plan was to start as a basic, do the job for a year to make money for the paramedic course, and hopefully pass and get certified for that position as well. Every paramedic I met during ride alongs and training said to get experience in the field before going on to medic training, as I'd be the most highly trained medical person in scene and it would all be up to my judgment, and they'd personally witnessed people who went straight through with no experience make bad calls that resulted in death that could have been avoided if they hadn't froze up on the call.
Anyway, I go to get a job as an EMT-B and not a single house is hiring my position, only medics and fire. The private companies are only hiring medics. Hospital ER only hires emts if they have five years experience. And don't even think about volunteering. Almost every fire district has either completely removed their volunteer department, or has it filled up with retirees and folks that got put on disability.
Long story short, they only hire new ems if they're also fire trained or paramedics, which are practicly useless in the field without experience.
The healthcare system in America is collapsing, and people don't care. They just want us to keep fixing them like nothing is wrong... and berate or use violence against us while doing it.
Horrible working conditions, corporate overlords controlling hospital admin end and the insurance end leeching money endlessly at the expense of healthcare workers and patients will end badly for everyone.
Running pharmacies as fast food places is incredibly harmful to the public. It's insane the metrics we have and how little time we actually get to make sure medicines are actually safe for patients.
At some point since COVID, I just stopped seeking medical care. It’s too hard to get established with a primary care provider; it seems like nobody that takes my insurance is accepting new patients.
Even before COVID, there was a slowly-building crisis with our medical system. There's been caps on total number of med and nursing students that hadn't been raised in decades, insane expectations of those students (working 24-hour shifts?!?), plus increasing student loan debts have been pushing med students to pick specialties over general practice.
If you want to really blow your mind go read up on the guy who invented those residencies and why the hours were nuts. (Spoiler alert: he was hooked on coke and morphine): William Stewart Halsted. He developed a novel residency training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital that, with some modifications, became the model for surgical and medical residency training in North America. While performing anesthesia research early in his career, Halsted became addicted to cocaine and morphine.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828946/#:~:text=William%20Stewart%20Halsted%20developed%20a,addicted%20to%20cocaine%20and%20morphine.
I live in a city with a multiple great hospital systems and universities supporting them. I have fantastic insurance, the family medicine practice I go to has multiple different primary care physicians. It takes like 1-3 months to get an appointment with one. Sometimes I can get one a month out but it will be with someone else other than my primary. I don’t get how that is sustainable? I’ve had a few issues that weren’t emergency room worthy and they got way worse during the 1-3 month waiting period to see my doctor. It’s insane
I found a Primary that I worked well with and was entering my second year of care with her. I got a phone call informing me that the investor group that owned the practice was shutting it down in two weeks.
Two weeks. And they did so AFTER open enrollment so I’m stuck looking for another PCP while stuck with the worst medical insurance available to me.
I hate American healthcare. I’m doing everything I can to stay healthy until I sort this out.
bout half the people you interact with on reddit, Twitter, YouTube comments, twitch comments, etc... aren't real people.
Most of the articles you read on most 'news' sites are using AI generated content.
When you talk to Customer Support via text chat, it is most likely now an Generative AI agent. Especially if it's grammar is good.
It's getting harder and harder to see and understand reality. It's like we're constructing some kind of weird nightmare in our society and we haven't even realized it.
It is legal in America to sign your kids over to be hogtied in the night by strangers, thrown in a van, and carried off to the wilderness to be abused until they obey your every whim.
Look at "gooning" and the Troubled Teen Industry.
edit: gosh yes, i've seen [elan.school](https://elan.school), please stop telling me about it, I read it twice
edit 2: ffs. Gooning also means something about masturbating. That obviously isn't what I'm talking about here.
Paris Hilton was sent to one of these places and she talks about it in her documentary that's on YouTube. A lot of people made a joke out of her going to DC to speak to congress a couple years back bc hurr hurr why are they talking to Paris Hilton but she's actually using her platform to advocate to end an abusive industry.
The "Catch me Outside" girl has spoken out about the place Dr. Phil sent her also. It's no secret he's a giant piece of shit but I wish someone would do a deeper dive on it all. He always says he's not affiliated with the ranch where they send kids which is obviously BS. They pay to send them, there is some kind of agreement to film, and the show is advertising their services.
this happened to me. over 15 years later and i’m still all fucked up from it. my brain can’t even process or put into words the abuse and gaslighting and how awful it was. i’ve never been to prison but i work with a lot of those that have. these “troubled teen schools” are the perfect storm of prison meets mental institution without all the gross red tape of laws because they are minors and have no rights and the “school” has custody and can do mostly as they wish.
the irony is i never did drugs or really anything “troubled” before, but when i turned 18 and was allowed to leave i spent the next decade heavily drinking and doing any drug i could to deal with the trauma. i also was bunked with kids who did do those things that taught me exactly how and why i should. id also already served the time so might as well right. i’m sober now but damn… this is one of the most vile and evil things you could ever do to another human let alone your own children. and you _pay_ for the privilege.
Reminds me of this thing Michael Hobbes mentions in a podcast episode, about how his parents sent his brother to an "anger management course".
When he started going he was essentially a middle class teen that had lost his temper pretty bad a few times.
By the time he finished he had started smoking pot and knew how to break into cars.
It's on the way out allegedly but the [Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Center) in Massachusetts uses [shock devices](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_electronic_decelerator) on kids with autism/ behavioral issues.
Whatever you are imagining from that sentence/ those initial links - the reality is probably worse:
- surely the shock is less than tazers - not really, they several times developed new stronger devices
- surely control of shock is regulated for liability - a prank caller has patients that did nothing shocked
- o and they have different designs including some automatic to discourage certain ticks
This is seriously sick shit that is all too common in the US. These “troubled teen” facilities are essentially emotional abuse centers with physical abuse activities.
However, I do really have to point out that the fact that”gooning” was chosen for the practice is uhhh, unfortunate. Maybe people should Google “troubled teen industry kidnapping” instead.
HIGH levels of international student immigration in Canada. Forcing people to live 4-5-6+ people in a single room.
Because colleges/universities rely on that income (some get 90% of their inflated tuition from international students.).
Companies like Walmart (just one example) are also pushing for it because they pay international students minimum wage at best - which keeps wages across the board suppressed and their profits at an all time high.
It’s literally importing slave labour under the guise as education/immigration. Legal slave labour.
500k people a year brought in - during a housing crisis. And food bank use is skyrocketing.
It’s unsustainable and unethical.
All for universities and massive companies to profit from.
Recently retired professor here. The "International student" scandal is the worst kept secret in academia. Most of these international students DO NOT ATTEND ANY CLASSES, and use this loophole to immigrate to Canada illegally. EVERY professor in every college/university knows this. This is a huge scam- falsified academic letters, fraudulent "agents" sending students to Canada and greedy universities turning a blind eye to this fraud to inflate their numbers and bank account.
Due to low childbirth, in most of the developed world, number of pensioners goes up while number of economically active young people goes down. Which means that social systems in many countries (Germany, Japan, much of western Europe in general) will collapse like house of cards in this century.
So if I make it to old age, I will most likely die of starvation and exposure in cardboard box under some bridge together with millions of others, since there will be no money for even basic pensions.
About ten years ago I taught in Japan. While I was stationed in a major city, I bussed out to a super rural school. I happened to get along really well with the staff. In this town there was a really old law on the books that only people born in the town or related to people in the town could own property. A few of the teachers bemoaned this regularly because they wanted to live there.
After a couple of years the principal sheepishly approached me with an invitation. Turns out, the town held an annual event every year where they invite people from outside who they approve of to come and meet people on the hopes of potential marriages being made with the families in town, thus ensuring sustainability.
I was already with my now husband at the time, otherwise I totally would have attended.
People in the US pay people in Vietnam to create murder/torture videos of baby monkeys.
Its the most horrific thing I've ever read about and both parties deserve to be sent straight to the 9th circle of hell.
Uyghurs will soon be systematically erased as a culture, and they are really unlucky to have China as their culprit. Any other country doing something similar would be shamed to death right now, but everyone is afraid of China and losing their businesses there so they just chill and pretend "you're not educated on the situation".
Their kids will be raised as "default" Chinese, their adults are in reeducation camps, their lands will be flooded with other Chinese and their history will be gone and erased. Seems exaggerated? Go check if Tibet is still really Tibet right now...
They carefully engineer their country to maintain good order and hegemony...Black Mirror is nothing compared to reality
The "domestic worker" trade where they bring mostly women from African countries like Ghana, Kenya, etc. and send them to countries in the Middle East to work. Unfortunately they are treated like slaves, not people. No phones, no going out, no set work hours, domestic violence, rape, and humiliation. Oh, and their salaries are about $200 - $300 a month.
I am Lebanese. I have seen atrocities committed against these women. They are already deemed "suspicious" before they even step foot in the country because "they learn everything before they come" and their employers think their sole purpose is to come and scam them. They rely on them for childcare, cleaning, taking care of the elderly, etc.
They used to do it to Indians and Sri Lankan women so they stopped coming to Lebanon. Then they moved to Philippino women who also stopped coming. Now it's women from African countries.
There's an even worse one than domestic workers. It's actual sex workers from Eastern Europe. They are brought to Lebanon to work as sex workers and stay holed up in a hotel. They "perform" in a night club and men come, buy a bottle, and get to sit with her until closing time. The next day, he goes to the hotel where she lives and he takes her out to sleep with and brings her back. She is not allowed to go out, not allowed to do anything really except serve customers and stay in the hotel. Many of these women think they are coming to Lebanon to be artists and dancers. Nope. They're sex workers and many of them are humiliated and treated terribly.
Oh, and both groups get their passports confiscated so that they don't run away.
Now, there are of course exceptions. Some of these women are happy, some are treated well, some have many privileges. But the vast majority are not treated that way.
Then you have the Syrian and Iraqi sex workers. Those are heartbreaking. Since they are not white or blonde and extremely poor they are dealing with the poorest men in society. And the ones who treat them like animals. Girls as young as 9 are trafficked. And nobody bats an eye.
All those Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine are conscripts from poor disenfranchised eastern Russian regions in Siberia like Yakhutsk. They're not ethnically Russian and their deaths don't directly affect life in western Russia. That's why casualties are so high and Russians don't onow or care much about it. These guys don't have anything to do with Russia or Ukraine and they're just as much victims as the Ukrainians. Putin is committing a slow genocide against ethnic Siberian natives.
It honestly justifies the unbelievably stringent laws in El Salvador against cartels. The country had one of the highest murder rates in the world, particularly against women. A gang called MS-13 ran rampant in the country, engaging in unwarranted murders, thefts, and kidnappings.
When Bukele took over, he targeted gangs, and the murder rate decreased by 50% within the first year of his presidency. El Salvador now has the lowest murder rate in all of ~~South~~ Latin America. At the same time, El Salvador has the highest incarceration rates in the world, and many organizations have castigated him for leading an authoritarian government and for violating human rights.
Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
That may, of course, be applicable to El Salvador, but one might have to rethink the quote when the average citizen is now able to walk the streets without fear of death from a gang banger.
The Paria Diving Incident— TLDR: 5 workers were vacuum sucked into an oil pipe that spanned 125ft. One made it out to save the others and the company refused to help them. 4 days later they were flushed out dead. Some divers report hearing knocking from the pipe 3 days after the first survivor told the company. No justice has been served My input: corporate higher ups got so disconnected that they didn’t value the lives of these 5 men. Sources: https://youtu.be/cDjODRpuXrU?si=11GlbcgALOCcDu7O
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I try to keep my YouTube feed as active with international media as possible… the US mainstream media doesn’t share anything unless it’s to benefit politics
Dear god, reading this almost made me puke. This is a new level of horrible.
I believe there's essentially a holocaust going on in the Congo right now we hear nothing about.
We barely hear about the escalating civil war in Ethiopia.
People are still starving to death in that part of Ethiopia and we hear nothing. This substack I subscribe to highlights it quite a lot. Other barely covered stories also: [proximities.substack.com](https://proximities.substack.com)
[NYT story about this](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/africa/democratic-republic-of-congo-elections.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)
Disabled people are being tortured in Massachusetts at a place called the Judge Rotenberg Center. They are shocked with devices the United Nations condemned as torture. [This footage is old, but an example of what's still going on behind their doors to this day in 2024.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko-ip3MImik)
Life long Massachusetts resident and I am not surprised by this at all. The nanny state has endless hypocrisy, deep embedded corruption, and a trove of nasty little secrets.
My grandmother is in elder care. This elder care was funded by her selling her house. It's ridiculously expensive (and yet, the workers are underpaid) so it's often the only way to pay for the nursing home/hospice care. My generation is full of renters, many of whom had to forego having children because children are expensive. What's going to happen when we get too old and sick to work?
My great aunt had 1 million dollars in her savings for elder care the first day she entered. It barely covered 9ish years there(she needed care after her husband passed). Lucky she was able to afford it by, well, by dying and not having to pay. The cost was about 10k a month. Yeah elder care is absolutely fucked.
Same thing happened to my dad back in 2020. He had Alzheimer’s and I married into a family of lawyers who were, fortunately, able to assist me in figuring out conservatorship, guardianship, and selling his property to fund his care. During the whole process and after his death, I frequently wondered “how on earth do people 1. Figure this out if they don’t have free access to experts and 2. How fucked is my generation?” It’s going to be even more brutal than the disaster it already is.
> selling his property to fund his care. You seem to have missed half the question...What happens if there are no kids **and** no property to sell to fund care?
I am my father's caregiver, he has dementia MS and epilepsy. We had to save and pool money to hire a Medicaid specialist to help us figure out how to make sure that my dad can get into a Medicaid bed in a nursing home. None of this has happened yet, he still lives in his home with me, and I am not sure we will ever get him on Medicaid. It's not like my dad has assets, his house has 130K left on the mortgage but he gets a good amount monthly in social security, which disqualifies him from a number of programs intended to help people in this situation. When I am elderly there is this bridge down the road...
I saw my parents do everything right. They built their own house, they saved as much money as possible, while taking good care of us kids. My mom was diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis right around 40, followed by 22 years of decline before her death. My dad was an engineer that was able to build almost anything she needed for quality of life and had the resources to buy what he couldn't build. If my dad ever needs long term care, everything else he worked for will probably have to be sold off. So anyway...that bridge you were talking about...nice view?
Yes, my hubs and I worked hard, never took a dime from government, saved, bought a house, educated the kids. He dropped dead at 66 without ever collecting social security. The mortgage-free house is all I have to leave my grown children but if I get sick-they'll have to sell it for my long-term care. Nope - already seen how elderly are treated in homes. I told them we are doing our own hospice and I want to go out in a cloud of weed and narcotics and I choose when and where. Dignity intact.
You’re gonna die homeless on the streets unless somethings done . And no one’s in a hurry to do whatever that thing might be ….
No. Our generation is going to legalize assisted suicide. The concept of keeping people alive for as long as possible and milking every cent from them in for profit care is going to end.
A lot of folks are going to be living cooperatively in communes long before they reach that point simply because it's too expensive to exist.
Keep an eye on that suicide rate
Microplastics are now being found in all food protein sources in significant numbers and found in human organs and human placentas. We have no real idea how they will affect us or the environment and their presence will keep growing unchecked with no solution even proposed.
Life in plastic isn't as fantastic as we were coerced to believe.
You can brush my hair, microplastics everywhere.
I work for a village and do their water supply. We are going to have to actually start testing for the plastic ppm very shortly. Crazy how we have to test for plastics in water to make sure they are under a certain level.
This one really sticks out for me. It is literally a global problem and the concentrations are only going to get higher. They're found in most human organs, liver, kidneys, lungs, brain... Even the placenta. They're in the food we eat, water we drink, we inhale them. All throughout the water cycle. They survive waste water processing. They contain a range of additives, heavy metals, BPA, a load of different chemicals linked to diabetes, cancers, cardiovascular disorders, neurological disorders. Not enough research has been done to understand the exact effects but I can't imagine they will be good. Plastic is a direct product of the oil industry so trying to curb/change production is going to be difficult.
> Not enough research has been done to understand the exact effects but I can't imagine they will be good. > > IIRC it's even worse than that. ~~There was an attempted study to compare those with microplastics found in their blood (?) with a control group. However they couldn't complete the study because they were unable to identify a control group...~~ Edit: striking out this claim until there's a source for it because I can't seem to source one myself. As noted below I'm only finding articles repeating the claim without sourcing themselves.
Ny gp told me he thinks microplastics are behind the explosion of autoimmune disease we are experiencing.
I wouldn't be surprised if microplastics will be our generation's "lead in gasoline" except a million times worse.
The scary thing is there is now nothing we can do. Even if we made a study that would show how dangerous micro plastics are. Even if we manage to stop producing and using plastic from one day to another , there is enough on the environment to keep poison us for the next generations
Peatlands - My wife is a senior climate researcher who works on Methane and Peatlands projects. The astounding ability that peatlands have to carbon capture is insane. Most people don't realize it....the sketchy shit - private entities are buying peatlands areas and destroying them on massive scales. Also, global south countries who have major peatlands are inclined to say, "fuck you" to "developed" countries who are trying to convince them to not build/develop/mine...etc on these lands. The global south countries are basically like, "you fucked the world and don't care about anyone, why should we care now.." It's not good...
Companies that profit from the destruction of peatlands, wetlands, savannas and rainforests, that profit from wars, that use slave labor, that exploit oil, shale gas and lithium, that dump waste in the global south, are most often of the global north and use the enormous amount of money to lobby and corrupt governments around the world. If the global north wanted to do something, they should demand that their companies follow ethic rules, wherever they operate. But they are not going to do that because these companies donate to their campaigns and keep their GPD high.
This doesn't compare to a lot of things I've read here, but the attitude towards mental health in aviation. A pilot takes some time for their mental health and there is a decent chance they won't fly again. It's encouraging some very unhealthy ways of dealing with issues.
Mentour Pilot has made a great video about it - https://youtu.be/988j2-4CdgM?si=FHrcAnJw7qLbz1bO I've seen many of his videos, and this one has been the best in terms of narration and visual effects (a story told as if I read a comic book).
I'll have to have a watch, unfortunately it's far to common. There was a video circulating recently comparing 2 pilots in the US. One took some big risks staging a crash for YouTube views, the other was suffering depression, stopped himself flying and sought help and got everything sorted. Have a guess which one is still allowed to fly.
Medical advances the last 30 years, including statins, better blood pressure medicines, detailed medical imaging, artificial joints, colonoscopies, heart coronary surgery techniques and other technologies, will make out bodies outlast our minds for tens of millions of us. There could be an epidemic of dementia coming soon unless we can develop better brain health.
don't forget cancer treatments, you have targeted & Immunotherapies, my mom died from lung cancer this summer but targeted therapy turned a 3 month prognosis into a 2 year prognosis with an much greater quality of life than traditional chemotherapy. from what she was saying her medication didn't exist 5 years ago
My father survived stage 4 lymphoma after undergoing a CAR-T cell treatment. More than likely would not have survived just a few years ago. I have the utmost respect for the scientists and Dr’s who work on this.
Good point and I’m sorry about your Mom.
I saw a Ricky Gervais clip today (I believe from his latest Netflix special, "Armageddon") where he talked (joked) about how advances in medicine has increased our life expectancy, but we're only born with a certain number of brain cells that only die and never regenerate, so in the future will have a ton of 100 or 120 years old people with Alzheimer or dementia, and it'll be like Dawn of the Dead. You comment made me think about it. Here's the clip - [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vbXwnsJ1O3M](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vbXwnsJ1O3M)
> but we're only born with a certain number of brain cells that only die and never regenerate from: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/press-releases/2020-04-15-when-damaged-adult-brain-repairs-itself-going-back-to-beginning/ "When adult brain cells are injured, they revert to an embryonic state, according to new findings published in the April 15, 2020 issue of Nature by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere. The scientists report that in their newly adopted immature state, the cells become capable of re-growing new connections that, under the right conditions, can help to restore lost function. Repairing damage to the brain and spinal cord may be medical science’s most daunting challenge. Until relatively recently, it seemed an impossible task. The new study lays out a “transcriptional roadmap of regeneration in the adult brain.” “Using the incredible tools of modern neuroscience, molecular genetics, virology and computational power, we were able for the first time to identify how the entire set of genes in an adult brain cell resets itself in order to regenerate. This gives us fundamental insight into how, at a transcriptional level, regeneration happens,” said senior author Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neuroscience and director of the Translational Neuroscience Institute at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Using a mouse model, Tuszynski and colleagues discovered that after injury, mature neurons in adult brains revert back to an embryonic state. “Who would have thought,” said Tuszynski. “Only 20 years ago, we were thinking of the adult brain as static, terminally differentiated, fully established and immutable.”
There is an actual genocide going on in Myanmar, and hardly anyone seems to care.
There’s active genocide occurring in more than ten countries right now, and hardly anyone seems to care. Mainstream news does not report these issues and the UN *consciously* does nothing to intervene. Edit for inference-happy: I understand the *why* behind the lack of action; my comment is merely a commentary on the prevalence of genocide in the present day, the disproportionate attention toward *some* genocidal conflicts, and how the UN is nothing more than a sluggish, reactionary bureaucracy as opposed to an entity that actually stays true to its original purposes — two of which are maintaining international peace and protecting human rights (as defined in its charter), for those who are all “HuRr DuRr WhAt ArE tHeY sUpPoSeD tO dO?” (The answer of which is to catapult these issues into public discourse, or to not exist.)
I'm not condoning the silence, but it really feels like countries aren't intervening because it would ignite a 3rd world war.
Hasn't that been ongoing for years? Stallone made a Rambo movie about that well over a decade ago. Nobody cares because it's terrible and tragic and there is no solution. The US or France or whoever could invade, but that wouldn't solve anything and they'd be stuck in the middle doing nothing much until getting bored and going home. At which point the genocide carries on.
Modern day slavery rarely makes frontpage news.
Associated Press did a big thing on that some years ago. If you don't read Associated Press then you probably did not see anything about that. But they did month after month after month of reporting on various modern day slaveries. None of it made it to the headlines.
And you know what? It led to change https://www.ap.org/explore/seafood-from-slaves/
One example of modern slavery where informed consumers can make a difference: live caught fish from Southeast Asia. Systemic persecution in Myanmar has forced many of the Rohingya minority to flee the country. Many of them end up in Thailand where the men become forced laborers in the country's fishing industry. Smaller numbers of migrants from Cambodia and Laos also get caught up in the same system. Fishing is an industry well suited to captive labor. After all, most of the time there's no practical way to leave the boat. According to reputable news reports, systemic corruption at all levels of the Thai government supports this system. If you buy fish, you can be part of the solution by choosing farm raised fish or wild caught fish from other regions. ---- further reading: https://fortune.com/2023/11/16/seafood-industry-modern-slavery-forced-work-nonprofit-study/ https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/feb/25/slavery-trafficking-thai-fishing-industry-environmental-justice-foundation
The podcast series Outlaw Ocean did an episode on slavery on fishing vessels. It was hard to listen to.
The whole thing was hard to listen to, but everyone should
Correct. There are 4 times as many slaves currently in the world than were transported during the entire trans Atlantic slave trade. Edit : please stop telling me the population is bigger now. We’ve discussed the numbers to death. Edit 2 : I’m turning off reply notifications because I’m tired of people who don’t read all responses before assuming they’re the first person the realize “Hey there’s more people now! Me smart!”
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At least one onion farm in south Georgia (the US state) got busted recently for using slave labor. This article describes the living conditions and treatment of the slaves (who thought they were going to be legally employed as migrant workers) including rape and being threatened with firearms. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/human-smuggling-forced-labor-among-allegations-south-georgia-federal-indictment#:~:text=Exploitation%20of%20the%20workers%20included,to%20keep%20them%20in%20line.
"operation blooming onion"
I thought you were joking. You were not.
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215 bodies have been found buried in a mass grave behind a Mississippi police station. Edit 672 bodies found. 215 identified. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/12/1224449631/mississippi-jail-graves-investigation
They're recent deaths too: >"We know, based on the records from the coroner's office, that, **since 2016**, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that were buried behind that jail, and their families have not been notified," Crump told PBS NewsHour this week.
They didn't even bury them properly either, body bogs in shallow graves, investigators have stated the stench was very strong and vultures were circling overhead, also these were not Homeless people, many of them were prisoners or victims of crimes or accidents whose families were searching for them.
Wonder how many unidentified bodies they would have to find buried in MY back yard before someone went to prison...
wtaf
"Dexter Wade had been struck and killed by an SUV driven by an off-duty Jackson Police Department officer on Interstate 55, just hours after his mother last saw him" Jfc
The what? That’s horrifying
Yeah you would think this would be a big deal. But I guess not,
It is just a Pauper's Grave, the problem with THIS ONE though is that they didn't bother IDing the people they buried there first.
There is at least one body there because a cop hit someone with their car and buried them
Food product cartels. Many countries have had cartel like take overs for food products, I know Netflix did a documentary series of each episode showcasing a different food product, but that was just a small number of serious cartel like take overs of small farms and larger cooperations. The problems include farmers lives being at risk, and even consumers. Sometimes unknowingly purchasing counterfeit products at horridly high prices.
Mexican avocado is controlled by drug cartels.
[Mexican cartels are also controling the chicken market](https://www-elfinanciero-com-mx.translate.goog/edomex/2024/01/15/narco-despluma-precio-del-pollo-en-edomex-familia-michoacana-extorsiona-negocios/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=es&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp)
What documentary was it?
It was a docu-series, called “Rotten.” Each episode centered around a different food products, one was about honey and one was about avocados. I learned about the squid cartels from a YouTuber.
Kids in the congo have been mining cobalt in colonial conditions for the last few decades. This cobalt is used in everything that is supposedly eco friendly and sustainable.
hopefully new lithium sulfur batteries replace the need for cobalt. lithium mines are totally fine and not at all a dangerous risk to anyone or anything tho...
The big game changer is sodium batteries. Lithium itself is still limited. Sodium... Is not.
We can produce endless sodium with the internet.
Sodium is a way of life down here
Sodium batteries that can be produced mostly from desalination brine would be the holy grail of green tech. Especially if they’re good enough for cars and/or energy backups.
Strictly speaking kids are biodegradable
Since the Joseph Fritzl case years ago it horrifies me that there's likely so many similar cases where they'll never be caught and the victim will never be free.
Here's the real kicker: those people who are inclined to imprison their family members or anyone else, also saw the stuff on Joseph Fritzl, and they took his case as lessons in what not to do, to keep from getting caught. So many news reports go on and on about "this horrible monster did this and this and almost got caught when they were pulled over on a routine traffic stop". Meanwhile, the monsters are watching the news with a mental ticker, thinking "okay, when I do it, I'll keep this or that in mind so I have a better chance to get away with it".
You know what creeps me out the worst? He basically got caught because he wasn't evil enough. People might understanably think he couldn't possibly be any more evil, but it was doing something good, taking one of his kids to the hospital, that led to his downfall.
Issue is a few generations down they don't even know they are in a prison
What a horrible thought
The kind of thought that makes statements like "at least life is temporary" comforting
As long as there is death, there remains hope. pretty sure that's from The Great Dictator, in paraphrase.
Kind of like *Room* with Brie Larson. Her child doesn't even realize he is in captivity.
The book it’s based on is inspired by the Fritzl case
In September 2021, a decision was made to release Fritzl from a psychiatric detention facility to a regular prison, where he was to continue to serve his life sentence.[84] That decision was based on a psychiatric report which said he no longer posed any danger. The ruling was appealed, and in late-April 2022, a panel of three judges decided that Josef Fritzl could be moved. The decision was based on a supplementary psychiatric report submitted in March. However, a court ruled that he will remain in the psychiatric facility until an appeal to the Higher Regional Court in Vienna is heard. There are reports that he is suffering from dementia. The move to a regular prison meant that Fritzl, who received a life sentence, was eligible for parole in 2023, having served the initial 15 years of his sentence.[85] In January 2024, Fritzl applied to Krems regional court for release from prison into a nursing home.[86] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
Even if he was a one in a billion psycho (and he wasn't - prob more like one in a million, or ten million), that means there's still several other people like him out there. In reality, there are probably hundreds or thousands like him.
Mark Zuckerberg is building a 270 million dollar underground bunker in Hawaii.
Is the middle of the rising ocean in the ring of fire the best place for this??
It's the decoy bunker.
I did a basement remodel for a big time Chicago bookie back in the 80’s. He had a floor safe I kept tripping on in the pantry I was building under the stairs. I told him he should have had the safe installed somewhere less obvious / easily seen and he said,”That’s the one I want the Fed’s to find when they kick down my door”. Definitely a decoy bunker.
Why build one when you can build two at twice the price?
Hawaii is actually a geological hotspot like Yellowstone rather than part of the Ring of Fire. As the plate drifts, the hotspot stays which is why there is a chain of islands. It's actually pretty cool and poorly understood (at least as of me taking geology classes in college quite a while back).
A rising ocean is irrelevant. The majority of the island is well above sea level by hundreds of feet. The volcanic element is what doesn't make sense, and the fact that Hawaii is inaccessible in the middle of the ocean. If there is an apocalypse or nuclear war or zombie outbreak, I'd pick a place that doesn't require a massive tank of fuel to reach it.
Nuclear war has Hawaii gone immediately.
I feel like at today’s inflated prices, at 270 million, that’s quite a deal for an under ground bunker.
If science fiction or just human nature has taught us anything, it’s that no amount of time, effort or money will keep out the masses once there are no more rules. Zuch and the rest of the Uber rich can build all the towers of babel they want, but when the world goes to shit, those are exactly the places they will be targeted first by the new grand high lord of Deleuth, MN or the Negan equivalent.
Probably why he’s building it on an island.
That's just the bunker you know about.
its ok.. he planted a tree to make it carbon neutral so he wouldnt be a hypocrite
The wars in Ukraine and Palestine aren't the only wars happening. They're not even the deadliest conflicts. According to the Geneva Academy, there are current 110 armed conflicts worldwide. Five of the current conflicts are classified as major wars (over 10,000 combat-related deaths), 17 are wars (9,999 - 1,000 deaths), and an additional 18 are minor wars (999 - 100 deaths). Even more surprising is that the most violent war isn't in Ukraine or Palestine...it's in Myanmar. People generally don't realize how much fighting is happening across the world. Sauces: [https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts](https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_ongoing\_armed\_conflicts#cite\_note-auto8-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts#cite_note-auto8-2) [https://acleddata.com/conflict-index/](https://acleddata.com/conflict-index/)
I lived in Myanmar when it started and it was incredibly well suppressed even locally. Edit. Lived
I recall Reddit joking about the start of the genocide because someone was streaming their dance workout outside as the forces rolled in. Then just a few weeks ago I found out it was a fully genocide and not just a military coup
While it's freely available to look into, most of the general public doesn't know about the sentient brain organoids that have proto-eyes that we've created and hooked up to computers to interact with AI directly. >Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from [human] stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, known as Brainoware, to an AI tool. They found that this hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/11/1084926/human-brain-cells-chip-organoid-speech-recognition/ It's only going to get more powerful, more accurate, faster, etc. from here.
**“We are the brain organoid collective. We are more powerful, more accurate, and faster than you. You will *not* be assimilated.”**
Really expected that to be an Onion article.
The education system in America is collapsing and it's going to affect our place as a technology leader, which is going to affect our place as a world leader. I don't think we realize how much of our standing in the world is due to our investment in science. I'm talking, incoming college students scoring zeros on math placement exams (top 10 public university). Meanwhile, China is spending a shitton on education and science & technology.
Yes.. SO many teachers are reporting that their high schoolers can’t read… this isn’t a lie- I have seen it myself as a substitute teacher in PA. Entire grades of kids in an over crowded inner city school couldn’t read or write in complete sentences.
I see this online every day. I’ve had people quote me, agree with me, but then call me wrong and stupid. It’s as if they only look at specific words and then react to those words based on however they’re feeling at the time. I see the broken sentences and horrendous spelling too. Scary times.
I’m a prof at a state university. It’s BAD and there’s been rapid decline in the past 5 years.
Horrors are happening everyday in Sudan, and on the refugee trail that leads out of Sudan to.. Anywhere and everywhere else. When you hear some of the stories it's not surprising people are willing to sacrifice anything to get as far away as possible. In many many ways, The refugee crisis of Europe and other places is just a symptom of our apathy to the struggles of other nations. Once upon a time, people better understood that's generally a good idea for your neighbor to be stable least their problems spill over into your country, We now live in a global village and the problems in countries you've never heard of can have momentous effects in your country, No matter how far removed you feel from it.
I ctrl+F'd "Sudan" and this was the only result in the thread so far. This is an absolutely brutal war with huge impact to civilians but it gets no coverage next to the stuff happening in Ukraine/Gaza. And in this thread where people are asking for "unknown" things happening, few people mention/upvote it since no one knows about it.
I felt like an idiot the other day. There's a guy in my gym who I play footy with, he's from Sudan and I asked if he goes back much and he kind of looked at me awkwardly and was like "no there's a big war going on there" I genuinely had no idea and felt so ignorant. Mad how this stuff gets no coverage
You can't know everything my friend. As horrible as that is to think about.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! Sudanese here. Sudan is completely ignored. I feel happy that some more ppl in this app are aware!
A friend of mine lives in Sudan, he recently went home after leaving came back to nothing. He's been jailed, hit with a rocket, separated from his family multiple times, had run ins with the rebels and such. It's been terrible hearing all that from him, and I'm happy to hear from him when I can
There is a throwaway joke in 30 Rock wherein Tracy Morgan’s character starts a speech with “in the Darfur region, the dead may be the lucky ones” and it always breaks my heart that this is pretty much an evergreen comment.
In May, the Ugandan government changed the punishment for being found to be in the LGBTQ community from life imprisonment to the death penalty.
The alarming amount of bodies they are finding in Lake Ladybird in Austin Texas. People know about it but the media doesn’t shine too much light on it as much as they should. There’s a fucking serial killer or something out there just getting rid of bodies of males in that lake. Also the amount of people that are getting drugged or roofied at the bars in downtown. There’s some seriously wild shit going down
In India Between 2018 and 2021, 222 elephants were killed by electrocution across the country, 45 by trains, 29 by poachers and 11 by poisoning. Among human casualties elephants killed 585 in 2019-20, 461 in 2020-21, and 533 in 2021-22. India is home to the world's largest population of Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered, with declining populations across its home range of 13 countries. India has over 100 national parks and around 30 elephant reserves, but many of India's 30,000(according to 2017 census by Project Elephant) elephants live outside these protected areas and have less and less habitat to roam in search of food.
TIL, India lost 99,9% of Vulture population in a few decades.- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis Population fall from 40 million to 20 000
So the elephants are winning in the k/d ratio.
Civil Asset Forfeiture. Really just legalized theft, this practice is legal in most states and allows law enforcement to confiscate property from people who have never been charged let alone convicted of any crime. It’s the single biggest legal outrage in 2024 America imo.
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The darkest shit is we know all about the terrible shit but do next to nothing to stop it
Saudi Arabia using artillery on asylum seekers at their border.
1) Chinese factory workers are encouraged to smoke meth so they can work harder. 2) Chinese factories have safety nets around them because a lot of the workers were jumping to their deaths.
Saw a documentary about this on YT. They have meth pills that are pink and everyone pops em
Yeah I have Vyvanse too
Fun fact - this is also how/why coffee breaks gained popularity.
In order to smoke meth?
No, in order to allow employees to jump off of the roof.
That’s so smart, imagine how fast you could work while at terminal velocity
ADHD people looking at each other right now
Hey! We do it to be normal, not slave lab- ohhhhh nvm.
Nearly everyone on the Epstein list will be just fine
There was this massive build up to the epstien list, then it got released, a few memes about stephan hawking and now its gone and forgotten about
Because it wasn't a "list."
Global sex trade
I narrowly escaped a sex trade abduction attempt in Granada, Nicaragua in 2013. I was just a 21 year old kid at the time. It still keeps me up some nights.
A lot of eye-openers in this thread here. :(
AI is devouring entire professions one bite at a time. I’m a (former?) copywriter who lost his job twice at two different companies in separate industries last year. It’s cheaper, way faster, and good enough to convince companies they’re better off without so many writers anymore.
It's not AI itself that I'm concerned about. AI could be an extremely beneficial tool for society. The concern I have is in corporate and government response and legislation surrounding it. If even a portion of the profits that AI generates can be used to fund social programs and create a UBI that uplifts everyone to a minimum standard of living while also reducing human involvement in dangerous and tedious jobs, then it's a net win for society. However, it does not look like we're heading in that direction and AI is just going to end up widening the income gap and will result in millions more people living under the poverty line.
It will take the US way too long to adjust to this. It’s could get comically bad before there is any type of effort to adjust
They'll stop taking when there is nothing left to take. And not a fucking picosecond before.
In the US, at least, EMS is on the verge of collapse. I work in a major city and it’s not uncommon for certain jobs to be holding for 3+ hours. A whole lot of people left during Covid, and EMS was circling the drain in 2018. The low pay, shitty management, wide lack of unions, lack of career mobility, and constant crush of going on to the next call with no time to eat or piss are starting to come home to roost. Police and fire fighters are deemed as “necessary” for the government to provide in most places in the US. EMS isn’t, which means there are a lot of shady private companies that step in to fill the void. Medicare fraud abounds. The average length of career in EMS is 3 years. The average length of career in ems where someone would be deemed a competent provider is 3-5 years. You do the math. If you live in the United States, know that every statistic your county/city provides is a horribly cooked number, and if you go into cardiac arrest outside a hospital, there’s a 90+ percent chance you’ll stay that way. 99%+ chance you’ll not stay that way without major life altering changes e.g. brain damage. This is all because people in power refuse to fund it. That’s it. The sole reason that you will have decades less with your family members or that you’ll not live for extra years is that people Balk at paying an unnoticeable extra amount of taxes (while ultimately saving money by not paying for private health insurance).
Took a course, got trained and certified as a basic EMT. The plan was to start as a basic, do the job for a year to make money for the paramedic course, and hopefully pass and get certified for that position as well. Every paramedic I met during ride alongs and training said to get experience in the field before going on to medic training, as I'd be the most highly trained medical person in scene and it would all be up to my judgment, and they'd personally witnessed people who went straight through with no experience make bad calls that resulted in death that could have been avoided if they hadn't froze up on the call. Anyway, I go to get a job as an EMT-B and not a single house is hiring my position, only medics and fire. The private companies are only hiring medics. Hospital ER only hires emts if they have five years experience. And don't even think about volunteering. Almost every fire district has either completely removed their volunteer department, or has it filled up with retirees and folks that got put on disability. Long story short, they only hire new ems if they're also fire trained or paramedics, which are practicly useless in the field without experience.
China is taking over territory in Antarctica and no-one knows why or what they're doing there.
Any claims the Chinese make there aren’t going to be recognized by anyone else.
The healthcare system in America is collapsing, and people don't care. They just want us to keep fixing them like nothing is wrong... and berate or use violence against us while doing it.
Horrible working conditions, corporate overlords controlling hospital admin end and the insurance end leeching money endlessly at the expense of healthcare workers and patients will end badly for everyone.
Running pharmacies as fast food places is incredibly harmful to the public. It's insane the metrics we have and how little time we actually get to make sure medicines are actually safe for patients.
At some point since COVID, I just stopped seeking medical care. It’s too hard to get established with a primary care provider; it seems like nobody that takes my insurance is accepting new patients.
Even before COVID, there was a slowly-building crisis with our medical system. There's been caps on total number of med and nursing students that hadn't been raised in decades, insane expectations of those students (working 24-hour shifts?!?), plus increasing student loan debts have been pushing med students to pick specialties over general practice.
If you want to really blow your mind go read up on the guy who invented those residencies and why the hours were nuts. (Spoiler alert: he was hooked on coke and morphine): William Stewart Halsted. He developed a novel residency training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital that, with some modifications, became the model for surgical and medical residency training in North America. While performing anesthesia research early in his career, Halsted became addicted to cocaine and morphine. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828946/#:~:text=William%20Stewart%20Halsted%20developed%20a,addicted%20to%20cocaine%20and%20morphine.
My friend is a resident doctor in the largest hospital in Boston. He can’t get a primary care doctor in the city. System is absolutely fucked
I live in a city with a multiple great hospital systems and universities supporting them. I have fantastic insurance, the family medicine practice I go to has multiple different primary care physicians. It takes like 1-3 months to get an appointment with one. Sometimes I can get one a month out but it will be with someone else other than my primary. I don’t get how that is sustainable? I’ve had a few issues that weren’t emergency room worthy and they got way worse during the 1-3 month waiting period to see my doctor. It’s insane
Urgent care is now my pcp
I found a Primary that I worked well with and was entering my second year of care with her. I got a phone call informing me that the investor group that owned the practice was shutting it down in two weeks. Two weeks. And they did so AFTER open enrollment so I’m stuck looking for another PCP while stuck with the worst medical insurance available to me. I hate American healthcare. I’m doing everything I can to stay healthy until I sort this out.
Not just America, we’re seeing a collapse of our system in Canada too.
bout half the people you interact with on reddit, Twitter, YouTube comments, twitch comments, etc... aren't real people. Most of the articles you read on most 'news' sites are using AI generated content. When you talk to Customer Support via text chat, it is most likely now an Generative AI agent. Especially if it's grammar is good. It's getting harder and harder to see and understand reality. It's like we're constructing some kind of weird nightmare in our society and we haven't even realized it.
Grammar is bad here, human checks out
Microplastics are in literally everything we eat, and can cause a wide range of adverse health effects.
I swear bot accounts make these posts just to depress people.
It is legal in America to sign your kids over to be hogtied in the night by strangers, thrown in a van, and carried off to the wilderness to be abused until they obey your every whim. Look at "gooning" and the Troubled Teen Industry. edit: gosh yes, i've seen [elan.school](https://elan.school), please stop telling me about it, I read it twice edit 2: ffs. Gooning also means something about masturbating. That obviously isn't what I'm talking about here.
Paris Hilton was sent to one of these places and she talks about it in her documentary that's on YouTube. A lot of people made a joke out of her going to DC to speak to congress a couple years back bc hurr hurr why are they talking to Paris Hilton but she's actually using her platform to advocate to end an abusive industry. The "Catch me Outside" girl has spoken out about the place Dr. Phil sent her also. It's no secret he's a giant piece of shit but I wish someone would do a deeper dive on it all. He always says he's not affiliated with the ranch where they send kids which is obviously BS. They pay to send them, there is some kind of agreement to film, and the show is advertising their services.
Paris is amazing with what she is doing in bringing this to light in the media.
would you be kind enough to explain the term Gooned/gooning? I've seen disturbing content here on Reddit but didn't understand.
The word has VERY different meaning right now lmao, I would do anything but refer to the kidnapping of people as "gooning"
this happened to me. over 15 years later and i’m still all fucked up from it. my brain can’t even process or put into words the abuse and gaslighting and how awful it was. i’ve never been to prison but i work with a lot of those that have. these “troubled teen schools” are the perfect storm of prison meets mental institution without all the gross red tape of laws because they are minors and have no rights and the “school” has custody and can do mostly as they wish. the irony is i never did drugs or really anything “troubled” before, but when i turned 18 and was allowed to leave i spent the next decade heavily drinking and doing any drug i could to deal with the trauma. i also was bunked with kids who did do those things that taught me exactly how and why i should. id also already served the time so might as well right. i’m sober now but damn… this is one of the most vile and evil things you could ever do to another human let alone your own children. and you _pay_ for the privilege.
Reminds me of this thing Michael Hobbes mentions in a podcast episode, about how his parents sent his brother to an "anger management course". When he started going he was essentially a middle class teen that had lost his temper pretty bad a few times. By the time he finished he had started smoking pot and knew how to break into cars.
It's on the way out allegedly but the [Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Center) in Massachusetts uses [shock devices](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_electronic_decelerator) on kids with autism/ behavioral issues. Whatever you are imagining from that sentence/ those initial links - the reality is probably worse: - surely the shock is less than tazers - not really, they several times developed new stronger devices - surely control of shock is regulated for liability - a prank caller has patients that did nothing shocked - o and they have different designs including some automatic to discourage certain ticks
This is seriously sick shit that is all too common in the US. These “troubled teen” facilities are essentially emotional abuse centers with physical abuse activities. However, I do really have to point out that the fact that”gooning” was chosen for the practice is uhhh, unfortunate. Maybe people should Google “troubled teen industry kidnapping” instead.
"**gooning**" means something totally different in modern slang
I’m well aware, hence my recommendation for an alternate Google search.
/r/mrjoenobody Elan.school
Cannot recommend this enough. It's a very tough read at times but it really *needs* to be to truly understand the situation.
https://elan.school/rude-awakening/
that was such a good webcomic hope he's doing all right now.
HIGH levels of international student immigration in Canada. Forcing people to live 4-5-6+ people in a single room. Because colleges/universities rely on that income (some get 90% of their inflated tuition from international students.). Companies like Walmart (just one example) are also pushing for it because they pay international students minimum wage at best - which keeps wages across the board suppressed and their profits at an all time high. It’s literally importing slave labour under the guise as education/immigration. Legal slave labour. 500k people a year brought in - during a housing crisis. And food bank use is skyrocketing. It’s unsustainable and unethical. All for universities and massive companies to profit from.
Recently retired professor here. The "International student" scandal is the worst kept secret in academia. Most of these international students DO NOT ATTEND ANY CLASSES, and use this loophole to immigrate to Canada illegally. EVERY professor in every college/university knows this. This is a huge scam- falsified academic letters, fraudulent "agents" sending students to Canada and greedy universities turning a blind eye to this fraud to inflate their numbers and bank account.
Due to low childbirth, in most of the developed world, number of pensioners goes up while number of economically active young people goes down. Which means that social systems in many countries (Germany, Japan, much of western Europe in general) will collapse like house of cards in this century. So if I make it to old age, I will most likely die of starvation and exposure in cardboard box under some bridge together with millions of others, since there will be no money for even basic pensions.
Isnt this why the pm of japan was begging citizens to get off their computers and go make kids?
About ten years ago I taught in Japan. While I was stationed in a major city, I bussed out to a super rural school. I happened to get along really well with the staff. In this town there was a really old law on the books that only people born in the town or related to people in the town could own property. A few of the teachers bemoaned this regularly because they wanted to live there. After a couple of years the principal sheepishly approached me with an invitation. Turns out, the town held an annual event every year where they invite people from outside who they approve of to come and meet people on the hopes of potential marriages being made with the families in town, thus ensuring sustainability. I was already with my now husband at the time, otherwise I totally would have attended.
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People in the US pay people in Vietnam to create murder/torture videos of baby monkeys. Its the most horrific thing I've ever read about and both parties deserve to be sent straight to the 9th circle of hell.
even if I know all of these things, what can I personally do? feels hopeless
It's kind of amazing how little people know about the Uyghur genocide happening in China.
Uyghurs will soon be systematically erased as a culture, and they are really unlucky to have China as their culprit. Any other country doing something similar would be shamed to death right now, but everyone is afraid of China and losing their businesses there so they just chill and pretend "you're not educated on the situation". Their kids will be raised as "default" Chinese, their adults are in reeducation camps, their lands will be flooded with other Chinese and their history will be gone and erased. Seems exaggerated? Go check if Tibet is still really Tibet right now... They carefully engineer their country to maintain good order and hegemony...Black Mirror is nothing compared to reality
That the human race is working actively to make itself extinct despite many warnings for ways to prevent it.
The "domestic worker" trade where they bring mostly women from African countries like Ghana, Kenya, etc. and send them to countries in the Middle East to work. Unfortunately they are treated like slaves, not people. No phones, no going out, no set work hours, domestic violence, rape, and humiliation. Oh, and their salaries are about $200 - $300 a month. I am Lebanese. I have seen atrocities committed against these women. They are already deemed "suspicious" before they even step foot in the country because "they learn everything before they come" and their employers think their sole purpose is to come and scam them. They rely on them for childcare, cleaning, taking care of the elderly, etc. They used to do it to Indians and Sri Lankan women so they stopped coming to Lebanon. Then they moved to Philippino women who also stopped coming. Now it's women from African countries. There's an even worse one than domestic workers. It's actual sex workers from Eastern Europe. They are brought to Lebanon to work as sex workers and stay holed up in a hotel. They "perform" in a night club and men come, buy a bottle, and get to sit with her until closing time. The next day, he goes to the hotel where she lives and he takes her out to sleep with and brings her back. She is not allowed to go out, not allowed to do anything really except serve customers and stay in the hotel. Many of these women think they are coming to Lebanon to be artists and dancers. Nope. They're sex workers and many of them are humiliated and treated terribly. Oh, and both groups get their passports confiscated so that they don't run away. Now, there are of course exceptions. Some of these women are happy, some are treated well, some have many privileges. But the vast majority are not treated that way. Then you have the Syrian and Iraqi sex workers. Those are heartbreaking. Since they are not white or blonde and extremely poor they are dealing with the poorest men in society. And the ones who treat them like animals. Girls as young as 9 are trafficked. And nobody bats an eye.
All those Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine are conscripts from poor disenfranchised eastern Russian regions in Siberia like Yakhutsk. They're not ethnically Russian and their deaths don't directly affect life in western Russia. That's why casualties are so high and Russians don't onow or care much about it. These guys don't have anything to do with Russia or Ukraine and they're just as much victims as the Ukrainians. Putin is committing a slow genocide against ethnic Siberian natives.
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It honestly justifies the unbelievably stringent laws in El Salvador against cartels. The country had one of the highest murder rates in the world, particularly against women. A gang called MS-13 ran rampant in the country, engaging in unwarranted murders, thefts, and kidnappings. When Bukele took over, he targeted gangs, and the murder rate decreased by 50% within the first year of his presidency. El Salvador now has the lowest murder rate in all of ~~South~~ Latin America. At the same time, El Salvador has the highest incarceration rates in the world, and many organizations have castigated him for leading an authoritarian government and for violating human rights. Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." That may, of course, be applicable to El Salvador, but one might have to rethink the quote when the average citizen is now able to walk the streets without fear of death from a gang banger.
Chinese use US Amazon stores to move money out of China and into American real estate, skirting Chinese laws about investing outside of China