I can't help wondering though if this may have unexpected benefits for e.g.: sleep quality, civility in online discussions, exercise. It's hardly intended that way, but could end up being a net benefit for the well-being of citizens, particularly if it were implemented in a highly-developed country like the US.

The martial law introduced in Poland from December 13, 1981 to July 22, 1983 resulted in an unmatched birth rate increase. The 82-84 generation was big, with all the future consequences even after the fall of communism in 1989: overpopulation in schools, difficult job market, but many friends on the playgrounds. The generation of 88 and later didn't have these issues. But had others ;)

Thanks to Poland's quick economic development and rise in life quality & capacity, the 82-84 generation didn't create another baby boom, as their births were spread out over a 10 year period. Some had children at 25, some at 35. This, coupled with the 90-94 generation not willing to have kids early, of course led to an overall drop in fertility, which the current government is trying to fix by throwing money at it. The situation didn't get worse, but fertility didn't get much better either. Most don't want to have 3 or more kids these days. And that's what we need if we want to make more kids than the economic immigrants and the third world countries, so we can keep our retirement and workforce afloat. Or we put it on the shoulders of these immigrants. But then in a few decades the current western culture will be replaced with a new one. I'm not saying it's good or bad. But it's healthy to understand the possible futures. I know which one I like more, and hopefully will work towards it.

Boy did I go off-topic...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/iraq-protests-latest-...

>At least 110 people have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded in Baghdad and in the south, since security forces started cracking down on demonstrators.

And the whole world is "outraged" about HK. Here on this thread the other posters are making jokes.

If they killed every single person in the country no one would give a shit. Same way no one gives a shit about Yemen.

As a Chinese, I've personally been following Chinese forums and continue to see individuals that rationalize the behavior of the West and to try to put down flames that's only in the name of nationalistic pride, albeit few still. But it's an important theme, only if both side can put behind their bias can there be a better and more peaceful ending in the China-US conflict to bring benefit to us all. There are many intelligent and rational Americans, it's a sad story for Iraq and we wish them best, but at least the news is helpful in helping us collectively realize what the media has been doing to our brains.

While around that same time, the US accidentally droned 30+ Afghani farmers [0]. The international response to that? It doesn't exist to this day.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...

It's not that Al Jazeera isn't biased, or even that it's less biased, it's just that it provides a viewpoint which is so obviously missing from western news sources, and if you're not making an attempt to expose yourself to that viewpoint, you are only hearing one side of quite a wide variety of global political issues.

You should speak for yourself. There are people who care but that does not make a difference unfortunately (yet or maybe never).

As well you shouldn't speak in absolutes IMHO.

There is an undeniable discrepancy on how we receive and perceive information about individual subjects; Where our attention is directed, and from where it's deviated - what I'm surprised about is how this persists despite a medium like the Internet.

Also not exactly Gaza-level lopsided...

I don't have a single product in my house that says "Made in Iraq".

It's not strange that North America doesn't care much about Iraqi plight, as we have next to no relationship with them or their people.

Same as we all cannot afford to cry over every single other person's mother and father passing away, but we cry over our own parents passing.

What's your point exactly?

Is it that human nature is broken, and that we should try to compensate for it [by trying to force ourselves to care more] ?

(Because I wonder how many atrocities there are in the world, and how that scales if every internet stranger needs to be angry about every atrocity or else...)

People outside conflict areas only start to give a shit when it affects something they care about personally.

I don’t want people to be killed for protesting, but I don’t know if I care if that protest is successful or not. I’m open to ideas why I should.

It sounds like a bunch of people are protesting that their country and has few useful economic outputs, and that sucks, but I’m not sure what can be done about that.

This legitimizes the current puppet-government installed by foreigners.

I think a more appropriate term would be US-backed Junta forces.

Of course, some of us were saying this almost 20 years ago now: Don't invade Iraq, you'll destabilize the entire region.

I'm a one-issue voter: No foreign wars, period. Some of us do care about the well being of others, but it's impossible to have this kind of discussion because people are selfish. Everyone wants to talk about Climate Change, Socialized Health Care, etc, etc. Most people don't actually care about others, and it's why I want to slap anyone that discusses climate change. We have much bigger problems that we need to solve right now, or we're going to kill ourselves long before we fry the earth.

Since the day I first found Hacker News, some years before I created my account, this site and it's comment section has always been on my daily reading list. I'm a very infrequent poster, but have since then read hundreds of comments, pretty much every single day. I guess my personality leans towards trying to understand rather than be understood.

I don't really have any connection to the Silicon Valley, but from the moment I first laid eyes on this site, it felt like an invaluable resource of insight on a huge variety of issues, not just tech.

Sadly, these days I mostly just hate-read it.

On geopolitical issues, there's almost zero understanding from the commentariat, and if there is any, to make matters worse, a lot of the time you have to squint your eyes to even read it. There's a huge part of the written english webosphere, dedicated to discussing and analysing this, the most important subject of them all, <i>war and peace and prosperity</i>, from a completely different viewpoint, but you'd never know by just reading HN. Luckily you can go elsewhere, and I suspect a sizable number of past commenters have, in frustration, done so.

Here, all you get is the same tired neoliberal corporate media viewpoint. Constant denigration of the long, long, list of the enemies of the American political blob. The glittering valley’s technocrats opinions are indistinguishable from those of the shining city upon a hill.

In this dojo, the opposing voice is almost nowhere to be found, always shut down with cries of robots and unfair comparing.

Russian, Chinese, Syrian, Iranian, Venzuelean viewpoints? Forget it. All these countries have news and opinion sites in english, but never to be linked on HN. Getting those opposing perspectives is not for the HN denizen, unless it has first been approved for reading by the NY Times. HN comments have not yet reached the complete unbearable insufferableness of r/worldpolitics, but to me it seems like just a matter of time.

Sorry, but it just really grinds my gears to read someone casually say that the North American people have no connection to the Iraqi people. The US “embassy” in Baghdad is larger than the Vatican. Like all these endless wars, bombings and sanctions against the Middle East is just a minor matter. At worst a small mistake, that in the grand scheme of things is of little importance.

NO.

The consequences of the West's relentless and cruel war of destruction and chaos against the core of the African and Eurasian landmass will be the defining cause of most of the problems the United States, Isreal, Saudi Arabia and Europe will face the rest of this century. A thousand years from now, all history books dealing with the early 21th century will have The Invasion of Iraq as the focal point, with most everything else a mere footnote.

The United States has tried over and over to prevent any even bigger and stronger entities to form on it's opposing, much larger landmass. It has decisively failed, inevitably so.

In the 2020’s, whether it wants to or not, America and it’s shrinking list of vassals will have to come to terms with what roles they can have in this new world order, our shared future of mankind. If these formerly dominant parts of the world can not imagine a role for themselves that is appropriate, the rest of the world will choose for us.