Tag: How We Live Now

Rainbow Family’s 50th Annual Gathering

In the Main Meadow of the gathering on Independence Day, a shirtless man with long silver hair sat in the grass with his partner, watching the celebration of dancing and drumbeats unfolding before them. He said his name was Kadag, giving an alternative moniker that many at the gathering refer to as their “Rainbow name.”

Kadag traveled to Northwest Colorado from Chico, California, where he is a father and business owner. After attending his first gathering in 1992, he tries to get to the event every year, “if life makes it possible.”

“It’s a declaration of interdependence,” Kadag said. “Living on the land, you know how to care for one another. You get into an environment like this and you see love, you see random acts of kindness all the time, everywhere, from folks you wouldn’t expect it from.”

“That renews my faith,” he continued. “Coming out here to pray for peace in the cathedral of Mother Nature.”

Rainbow Family’s 50th annual gathering draws thousands
Forest Service officials estimate that about 10,000 people were camping near Adams Park on July 4.
DYLAN ANDERSON

The C-Minus Lifestyle

Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore: an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.

You’ve seen all the headlines about the Great Resignation — “Gen Z and Millennials Would Rather Be Unemployed Than Unhappy in a Job,” Business Insider reported, nervously. Even the youth of China are embracing the virtues of sloth, with the lying-flat and sang movements. On YouTube, the faux guru Self-Help Singh exhorts, “Do nothing.” Millions are now pursuing what a punk guitarist I know called “the C-minus lifestyle.” And it’s no longer just a subcultural rumble: Companies in Britain are now experimenting with a four-day workweek.

It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam
Tim Kreider

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion

Spyk124
It’ll be illegal to have an abortion in about 50 percent of states in a week. Including if you were raped. This is a dark day.

Edit: as of now, it is illegal in Kentucky, Louisiana , and South Dakota

Edit 2: now illegal in Missouri

Edit 3: not all trigger laws go into effect this second. Some will take a week or a month.

Edit 4: NPR

Edit 5: some states that have a trigger are waiting for the AG or other state actor to certify the laws. Hints why not all trigger laws went into effect immediately

Edit 6:

Abortions are illegal today: Kentucky , Louisiana , Missouri Oklahoma and South Dakota.

Bans that will absolutely come in the next days and weeks as a result of trigger laws are: Idaho , Mississippi , North Dakota, Tennessee , Texas, Utah, Wyoming

Weeks or months: Alabama , West Virginia , Arizona , Florida, Georgia , Ohio, South Carolina.

States with no incest or rape exceptions: Kentucky ,Louisiana , Missouri, South Dakota, Tennessee,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html -provided by u/supaZT

Mega Drought in Western US

But bring up the American West’s worst drought in 1,200 years and their reverie turns to head-shaking anxiety and disgust. They may have more water than most — hundreds of miles from fallowing farms in Arizona or browning lawns in Los Angeles — but they know that on the Colorado River system, the massive, unchecked demand for water downstream is threat to everything upstream.

“It takes millions of gallons of water for a golf course,” Tharrett said. “It’s going to reach a point when people have to decide, ‘Do I survive or do I play golf? Should I have a lawn in the desert or pay a $100 for a basket of berries?'”

…

“How long can we do this?” Williams said of the Flaming Gorge releases. “It’s limited to a few years. The rest of it is going to depend on how long do we persist in the drought, and where does our water use go? We’re going to have to learn to live with the water we have, and the use we’ve sustained for the last several decades is going to change.”

The Southwest’s unchecked thirst for Colorado River water could prove devastating upstream

Getting an Abortion in Texas – Travel to New Mexico

Under Texas law, insurers are forbidden to cover abortions unless the woman’s life is at risk. At the New Mexico clinic, the appointment to get a sonogram and obtain the five abortion pills would cost the family seven hundred dollars. And, because the trip was so long—ten or eleven hours by car—they would also have to leave a day early and pay for somewhere to spend the night. The previous month, the father had ransacked his savings to make a five-thousand-dollar down payment on a three-bedroom house—a step up from the decrepit rental where the family had lived for five years. After renting a U-Haul truck for the move, paying utility deposits, and buying pots, pans, and a toaster, all he had left was fifteen hundred dollars—his emergency stash, “something to fall back on,” he said. He felt sick at the thought that he’d now be using that stash to secure a legal abortion for Laura in New Mexico.

The father understood intimately what teen-age parenthood entailed. Laura was born when he was a high-school sophomore. She was, as he always told her, a wanted child. But, after his relationship with Laura’s mother imploded and he found himself raising their daughter and, later, two younger girls, it had taken him a decade, and at times three jobs, to get his family off public assistance. If Laura had a baby, they might find themselves slipping back into the food-stamp life they’d left behind. More than that, though, the pregnancy threatened a particular dream he had for Laura: that she would press through this hard phase of her adolescence childless, and enjoy some of the fun, silliness, and high-school dance parties that he had missed.

One in four girls and women in the United States will, at some point in her life, seek an abortion. Yet, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, which, in 1973, established a woman’s constitutional right to the procedure, the long journeys to oversubscribed clinics that have become a fact of life in Texas will almost certainly become the norm throughout much of the country.

A Texas Teen-Ager’s Abortion Odyssey
The Heartbeat Act is forcing families to journey to oversubscribed clinics in other states—offering a preview of life in post-Roe America.
By Stephania Taladrid

Abortion Rallies Across United States – May 14, 2022

WASHINGTON, May 14 (Reuters) – Thousands of abortion rights supporters rallied across the United States on Saturday, angered by the prospect that the Supreme Court may soon overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide a half century ago.

The protests kicked off what organizers predict will be a “summer of rage” ignited by the May 2 disclosure of a draft opinion showing the court’s conservative majority ready to reverse the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy.

The court’s final ruling, which could return the power to ban abortion to state legislatures, is expected in June. About half of the 50 states are poised to ban or severely restrict abortion almost immediately should Roe be struck down. read more

“If you can’t choose whether you want to have a baby, if that’s not a fundamental right, then I don’t know what is,” said Brita Van Rossum, 62, a landscape designer who traveled from suburban Philadelphia to join the abortion-rights rally in the nation’s capital, her first ever.

Reuters

Tigray Protest – Denver – April 2, 2022

Haven’t heard as much about this in the news. Here’s some info from the NYTIMES:

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine-like conditions.

Forces under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias and troops from neighboring Eritrea — are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

Why Is Ethiopia at War With Itself?
Sixteen months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began a military campaign in the Tigray region, fighting has slowed but Ethiopians are bitterly divided and their country is wracked by suffering.
March 16, 2022

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War

Getting By in Denver

The_Raji
I was living with roommates when I was making 40k a year.

PandaKOST
Notice, too, “roommates” and not “a roommate.” The housing situation out here is bonkers.

Lonely-Criticism1419
Fiancé and I both work full time and we have a studio apt, no kids

ashrnglr
… I make decent money but a house still seems like a dream. Maybe one day

TheAbbott418
… I make good money and a house in this state just is not happening. Remote life is about to be for real…plan to move to a place that hasn’t gone insane.

throwawaypf2015
i make 50k. union job. on a good year maybe 55k with overtime and differential. have my own place. no debt, no kids. i’m struggling tbh.

UBsamsongz
Roommates. 3 bd 2 bt house in the Westminster area. $2200 a month. It goes up in February though

NOTE –
If you’d like to see similar discussion pertaining to any particular city, google something like this:
reddit afford living San Francisco
Results:
1 How do you guys afford to live here? : San Francisco … – Reddit
2 If “nobody” can afford to live in SF – who exactly inhabits all …
3 Is this enough money to live and save in San Francisco – Reddit
4 What do a lot of people in San Francisco do for a living to …
5 How can people afford living alone in SF? : r/AskSF – Reddit
6 I can’t afford to live in SF. : r/sanfrancisco – Reddit
7 How do people afford to buy in the Bay Area without rich …
8 How Do People Afford to Live in the Bay Area? We Asked …
9 Can someone from SF explain to me how people afford to live …

Public Restrooms in America – Shortage, Need for More

Kai Ryssdal: It’s not just me, right? I mean, public toilets have been disappearing in this country for a good, long while.

Elizabeth Yuko: Absolutely. It was something that I think came to our attention a bit more during the pandemic, especially the early days. But really, we haven’t seen the construction of new public restrooms — genuinely public restrooms, that is. So not restrooms that are in retail establishments, or theaters, or hotels, or bars, or restaurants, but actual facilities built by and maintained by either the city or the state. But yeah, the last major wave of those that were built was in the 1950s, during, you know, the expansion of the highways, and they were rest stops. In between the ’60s and ’80s, you saw a lot of closures for money reasons, because of concerns about crime or vandalism or drug use. And 9/11 really was the final nail in the coffin for a lot of the remaining public restrooms, and a lot have been closed since.

https://www.marketplace.org/2021/12/01/why-dont-american-cities-have-more-public-bathrooms/

There is a serious lack of restrooms in Denver. Most of the light rail stations in Denver don’t have any.