you know, I at least appreciate on here that, even if you're going to be massively downvoted for basically no reason, at least there's someone here making this post and then backing it up in their comments, rather than me just having to look at the headline and be like "yeah that sounds like fishy north korea style clickbait xenophobia to me" without wanting to actually look into it.
So, good job.
Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.
I legitimately wonder if there's really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we're all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I've had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there's no cause that's really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they're doing can every really matter or change anything ever.
Then of course, none of that's actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that's all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we're primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must've stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.
I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you're naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that's morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you're causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you've basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone's time. Can't I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God's sake!
You know this kinda makes me think that it would've been funnier if they connected two cities that hate each other more than just like, dublin and new york, which I can't really think of as ever having had beef. Maybe NYC and chicago, or something. You can't really put something like this in texas or LA because nobody fuckin walks anywhere, unless maybe you put it in like long beach or like some random part of Austin or something. Seattle? Does Seattle have beef with anywhere? On the other side, could we connect Dublin with like, London or something? Maybe some city in northern Ireland?
I would like to believe in calendar reform as a goal. At the same time, I think calendars are one of the only pretty decent somewhat universal standards we have going for us, and if we changed it at all, you KNOW we would just be using two competing standards, not everyone would want to switch because people are stupid, so unless you forced it from the top down through technology, like a really advanced, shitty version of y2k, which would make people super pissed, I dunno if any of it would work.
It's basically just because he's like, a moronic ape. He is able to kind of, wear the aesthetics of your everyday college dorm bro, who thinks the dark knight is the greatest movie ever made. Or at least, wear the aesthetics of their middling 30 year old, balding, divorced versions, because that movie came out in like 2008, or whatever. You can basically put him in any context, and he's able to function as the same idiot self-insert character. He's the vessel through which they can imagine themselves talking to famous celebrities, academics, comedians, and right wing conspiracy nuts.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.
Will these exercises work on the butthole as well? asking for a friend asking for a friend
IS veganism the real solution here, or is the real solution the all-artificial, all-synthetic diet? Me personally, I'm going to down this jug of red 40, and then I think I'll get back to you
Okay somebody probably knows better than me, but what is the advantage of humanoid robots? Why are people kinda, on this, now? It feels very 20th century, as an idea. It's pretty cool, but I don't understand why this would be necessary compared to just like, specialized normal robots that do specialized normal tasks. It seems more efficient, if you wanted a robot to, say, do the dishes, to make a robot that just does the dishes, instead of making a robot in the shape of a person that does the dishes. The one that's in the shape of a person is maybe more broadly applicable to human contexts, software notwithstanding (which does seem like a major hiccup). But it's not as though there's like, an upper limit on the amount of robots which we can have, in total. You could just make more robots, and make them specialized for certain tasks, like stocking shelves or whatever, and that would probably be easier, I would think, than making one robot to rule them all. Like, one robot, with ostensibly an on-board computer and on-board batteries so it's as universal as possible.
It gives me self-driving car vibes, where we could've had them in the 50's if everyone was willing to install metal spikes in the ground every however many feet ahead, but then that maybe doesn't make any sense, because it's just kind of a shitty train or tram. Basically, that nobody's willing to front the cost of infrastructure for anything anymore, so we have to make like, a universal device, and end up quintupling the total cost while making a solution that is either less efficient or doesn't exist.
Also, what's the point of the legs? Is it supposed to go outside, or go up stairs better? We already have pretty efficient wheeled vehicles capable of doing that in most public spaces, or, we're supposed to, anyways, they're called wheelchairs. What do we need this guy to walk around for?
Edit: So far, what I've gotten is ladders, and the scalability of a humanoid design vs other kinds of designs.
For ladders, I think you could probably tackle that with a similar set of constraints what you might need for a stair climbing robot, maybe just with a couple heavyweight anchors inside of it and some gearing or something. Use the robot's big arms, the manipulators, to climb like normal, and then use the bottom wheels to sort of ratchet the robot up. Probably that could work on most ladders with some clever engineering. Could maybe also run a cable from the top of the ladder to the bottom and then have a system where the robot rappels up and down for lots of ladders, but yeah.
I don't think you end up spending all that much on a robot that has wheels vs legs, and I think probably the increased efficiency would be worth it if you want like a generalized robot here. Might be wrong, maybe a roboticist can tell me no, but I dunno. As far as engineering goes it doesn't seem any more complicated than legs. Legs seem better for, offroading, basically. Which are why lots of animals use them, cause animals don't have roads.
For the versatility and scalability thing, I dunno whether or not it's more or less efficient still. While a steam cleaning room does require some amount of consideration to build, I would think that you could really get the price down from the tens of thousands of dollars required for this kind of robot to perform a similar job. Especially if you built it that way up front, retrofits might be much more expensive considering how many bathrooms aren't built correctly. Or you could go with a kind of hybrid approach, which I totally forgot about, but would seem to make some amount of sense, especially for a larger building.
Maybe those savings build up over time, and you could just have a McDonald's staffed by like three of these at once and only spend like 500,000 on it, which does seem like quite a bit to add on top of a McDonald's opening costs. I'm assuming you gotta buy multiple to staff it as a whole and also that you have to buy multiple to have more battery capacity, but maybe one of these will come out with the clever innovation of a swappable battery if/when they come to market. I would definitely hope that'd be the case.
I'm not sure it works out economically. I'm not sure of anything here. These are just suggestions because I haven't seen a lot of FUD on these human robots, except of the Terminator variety, which seems dumb.
I suppose my biggest difference here is just one of philosophy, mostly because I've seen it reflected in self-driving cars. You can make something that's capable in any context. Wind, snow, rain, shine, heavy traffic, pedestrian traffic, intermodal traffic, different kinds of roads not created to a set standard by the state's DOT. You can make a Swiss army knife, right. Maybe there are some economic and QoL savings there if you can do rideshares or do like, johnnycabs, right, if you can eliminate the desire for car ownership and status from the American mind. Maybe you can get all those cars out of parking lots as much as possible, and onto the road, doubling, maybe even tripling the amount of traffic as cars now move from one person going from one place to another place. Maybe you can also solve traffic, if you can get all the human driven cars off the road and totally automate everything so none of the cars ever hit each other or anyone, maybe you could try to do this piecemeal with autonomous vehicle only zones and surmount the nimbys with venture capital to buy a whole local municipality. Maybe you can balance the speed with the safety so we don't have heavy traffic and we get places on time, but when a disaster strikes from ice buildup on the road in a random place, or leaves flying around your car, it doesn't kill everyone. Maybe, you can get all this to not computationally require an energy cost collectively that rivals a medium sized European country. Maybe you can also solve the wireless communication issues that would plague this system, and maybe that allows you to simplify it instead of having every car be self-driving and predictable even though probably a bunch of different companies will be trying to get in on this and will be mingling in traffic, with different softwares.
Maybe you could also make a tram, though. Maybe you could have an electric folding bike you take on the tram. That's also an option. That's just infrastructural cost, and we could do that right now.
Neither of these solutions is necessarily better, right. I mean, in this case specifically it's pretty apparent to anyone with half a brain that the trams are better quite obviously but like, as an analogue about humanoid robots, especially with the point taken about a variety of contexts as opposed to a single high friction context like cars, neither of these solutions are necessarily better. They entail different philosophies. One created a world around the thing, one creates the thing. One changes the world to suit the people, one changes the people to suit the world.
Is what I'm saying making sense, did I get my point across?
I agree with your entire comment except the end.
I'm not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we've ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they're still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I'd probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I'd imagine.
In totality though I'm not really sure to what extent it's in the US's best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.
What I think I've noticed about lemmy, I guess reddit as well, and maybe just the modern internet, is that people are very vulnerable to obvious bad faith bait. The classic strategy of "do not feed the troll" doesn't really seem to be one that most people are familiar with. I can sort of get behind social shaming strategies, which might require engagement, but I think the sad truth is just that most people can't help themselves when it comes to responding to a troll.
"uhhhh I would just say none. uhhh I would just say the indie 500."
Really? Not the british? Come on I thought this one would be easy
I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It's not true to say we've "grown up interconnected", by the 2010's, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn't a grand a unifying "american culture". At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90's could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we've all become atomized, there's a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that's not "the culture". There is less genuine engagement with a "the culture", and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.
You know, along those lines, there's also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can "coordinate", yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you're doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would've thought that tech literacy would've gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don't know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.
I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can't, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we're kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we've seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don't learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won't), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they've grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.
In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They're all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I've seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don't really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I'm wrong.
Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that's maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.
I've never seen anyone bring it up, so there's probably no chance it ever gets brought back. How come banana ice cream is so uncommon? It's the obvious secret fourth flavor, and this one was good. Why do we live on hellworld?
From what I've heard, the supreme court decision was mostly about the feds having access to the border, and the ability to cut down the razor wire, rather than any specific opposition to the razor wire existing in and of itself. I would wager this whole deal is mostly just a kind of political play, to try and egg biden into doing something stupid, while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that everyone at the head of these states is doing something dangerous, anti-institutional, and counter-cultural, even though they're all kind of inherently unable to do anything along those lines just as a matter of their positions.
Everybody's correct when they say that the political divides in this country are less clear-cut, but I also don't think that the radicalization that we've seen, as a matter of perspective from being in online space, necessarily reflects reality. I think if you look at most people, most people want social security of some kind, and want healthcare of some kind, and want drug legalization of some kind, and want us to stop fighting wars in some form. Those are all kind of generalities, because the specific mechanism by which people want those things achieved differs from person to person. It's very fractured as a matter of course, as a matter of how our political system and society is set up, and the ruling class has taken advantage of this to enact a divide and conquer strategy, where they can selectively promote whatever ideological positions benefit them the most, and cordon everyone off into a relatively small set of solutions over which they have a high amount of control. Rather than, you know, what a good democracy might do, which is come to a compromise solution, that everyone but the most extreme propagandized radicals might be kind of okay with. There is a reason why lots of conservatives like communism, as long as you use the right words. Both parties attempt to be mostly "populist" parties. This is all kind of obvious, right, but people understate the degree to which it's a deliberate thing, and the overstate the degree to which it's been successful, you know, which isn't surprising, because, again, serves the interests of the powerful. People aren't, broadly, morons, people have realized that this is all the case. That's mostly what the "radicalization" that you've seen online has been, people just realizing that they hate these shitass solutions that aren't really compromise solutions. See how everyone is cripplingly disappointed with the democratic party, and also how, likewise, conservatives are consistently disappointed with their own party, as well, and for many of the same reasons, barring the extreme radicals.
Most people are focused on how the internet divides people into radicalized swaths and conspiracy theorists, which is true, but even the mainstream monopolized internet is kind of a good tool for mass mobilization. See the occupy movement and the arab spring for older examples, for more recent examples, maybe the george floyd protests, or the french retirement protests. The only risk of these is kind of that they more easily get co-opted as a result of their visibility, i.e. "defund the police" gets turned into an argument for "fund the police". If you were an asshole, you could cite charlottesville, or jan 6th, for examples of internet mobilization, but those are relatively smaller scales of things, compared to the others, which were more popular, they just got disproportionate media attention relative to their size, and had disproportionate political effects.
I think if we're looking at the true, extreme political radicals, we're seeing them come about as a result of a kind of well-oiled engine. I'm not gonna say that this is an institutional kind of thing, and it's maybe more of a third level effect of active decisions, but it's still something that, nonetheless, has been deliberately constructed. 4chan is funded by a japanese toy company and a hands off japanese internet techbro, and is administrated by some former american military freak who's deliberately organized the site. The more radical offshoots, that use the same source code, tend to be funded by oil money, and political action committees, but through second-level effects, where they fund some small level conservative actor, and then they prop up the space. Which churns out some radical terrorists that are capable of your more fucked up bombings, and shootings, and controlled and coordinated protests. And then you kind of get military people at almost every level of this, in lower numbers, who act to control the space.
I dunno what I mean to extrapolate from all of this, but yeah. There's probably not going to be a civil war.
It is now year-round bulking season, and I'm loving every minute of it, jerry.
Biggest difference between your conventional fat dude and a sumo wrestler is the nature of their fat deposits. Regular fat dudes, no exercise, have what is called "visceral fat", where the fat is beneath the skin, and exists in between the organs. Sumo wrestlers have subcutaneous fat deposits, just right beneath the skin, as a sort of layer between the organs and the skin. It truly matters less whether or not you're fat, and more whether or not you're active, and have a good dietary composition regardless of potential caloric excess.
The only major limitation on this that I might qualify is that overweight people will probably have to put more effort into flexibility and strength exercises, especially in their lower body, their ankles, their knees, for the same reason that extremely tall people tend to have similar injuries. There's also the problem that it tends to be harder to cut back later in life, and so you can kind of see a huge onset of lots of visceral fat if you keep up the same lifestyle choices while cutting back on the activity, or even keeping the same level of activity as your metabolism slows down, so that's something to also consider.
People also have made points about how the excess of simply carbohydrates, like high fructose corn syrup, and palm oil as a preservative in highly processed american foods, and food deserts, are contributing factors to why americans tend to be super fat. This is true. The other side of this coin also tends to be that american civic infrastructure doesn't tend to keep you as active as perhaps other countries might, so there are less opportunities to burn calories without making a kind of committed lifestyle choice centered around that.
In any case, I do find it really, sad, and funny also, that people tend to treat obesity as a kind of personal moral failing, rather than treating it like any other kind of public health problem, or epidemic. Reminds me of how they treated HIV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_music
Seems like your question contains the answer that you seek
That'd be fuckin awesome though, imagine the chaos you could just ambiently cause, especially if you made it out of like, bulletproof glass and concrete, and maybe included some self-cleaning mechanism, or set the camera back from the glass a ways, so people couldn't obfuscate the camera or the image. Could be the move, could be the play.
Is it actually not profitable or is this one of those tax writeoff bullshit things where it makes them money in some indirect way
I've read through this whole thread, and I still haven't really come to any solid conclusions on it. I'm skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that's also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they're both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I've heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.
Is "the blockchain" just like some nerd shit that's for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it's all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.
Do we consider the text to be the words on the screen or the ideas within the text itself? As a kind of reaction to a current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if the core idea of this text is thought up by someone every couple days at least, if only in passing. As long as the conditions which brought this meme about in the first place are sustained, it basically can't die. I'd say, in that sense, this meme could only be considered successful if it doesn't get replicated forever, it could only be successful if it dies.
You know generally I'm against the death penalty and I'm all up and down threads like these advocating for that not to be the case, because, you know, people get raised in certain environments, we can't really know whether or not someone's really committed a crime sometimes, blanket death penalty is bad, yadda yadda ya. You know, consistency in principles.
but fuck me man this lady needs to be crushed by a big rock or something
I mean I'd probably change my answer depending on the phrasing of the question here.
If you mean like, classical liberalism, which includes both laissez-faire capitalism and interventionism, you'd probably find quite a lot of conservatives at this point who would define their economic ideology (if they even have any) as belonging to that kind of realm of thought, at least with laissez-faire. That shit's pretty old, we've been through like multiple cycles of that, both globally, and domestically in america, and calling for a regression to a period when your specific breed of liberalism was in place is pretty possible. Which would be kind of lumped under conservative thought, despite the window dressing of like, wanting to just kind of, hedge your bets, maintain the status quo, and "conserve" things, and even the branding of "this is the way things really are, so we need to conserve the real reality", it's mostly actively regressive horseshit.
So, that's to say, you could both be a liberal and a conservative at the same time, if you're going based on the like, actual political definitions of things. I get the sense you're more trying to use the term "liberal" to mean "progressive", or probably more accurately "socially progressive". If you want a reason why I'm making this kind of stupid semantic distinction, it's because I think it's important to distinguish liberalism, and neoliberalism, right, which refer to economic freedom, from other more actually socially progressive ideologies. I'll get to that later. In any case, it's pretty much part of the intrinsic nature of the ideology that, being okay with gay people, at the least, is going to be more chill than not wanting gay people to exist. The same for trans people, the homeless, racial minorities, neurodivergent people, whatever.
Socially progressive values are also kind of default, I think, in a vacuum (which hardly anything is), whereas nutter conservative ideology is something you have to be more actively radicalized into. If you don't give a shit about gay people, you're probably also fine with them just like, going about life and existing. You might also be fine with their oppression, but you're not actively hindering things, necessarily. You have to be actively radicalized and convinced they're bad, though, in order to call for them to be like, killed, or barred from marriage, or whatever.
You would have to more actively want gay people to have rights, to care about them more in a positive way, and actively oppose their oppression more, in order to like, actually push for things. It's a more active position, basically, to be actually socially progressive, or actually progressive. It necessitates caring. I think despite it just being on the surface more nice as in ideology, which helps prevent people from being like, actively hateful, I think it's probably also sadly the case that a lot of people who would otherwise pretend to be socially progressive don't actually give two shits about what happens or doesn't happen, and are just mindlessly occupying what they see as kind of a default position at the time.
If you go back to like the 2000's, lots of people who are otherwise pretty "progressive" nowadays would've been pretty turbo homophobic and transphobic. That's not really a slight against their character, right, we're all products of our environment, but they're just occupying kind of whatever position they think is acceptable to the mainstream.
Put even more simply, they kind of, understand that one side is right and one is wrong, but since they don't really understand the underlying reasoning behind either side, they're just jumping onto whatever they get better vibes from. That used to be some more reactionary stuff, because we were kind of in both a more apathetic and callous cultural era where "not caring" was seen as cool and offering a better vibe, and we were seen as being kind of in a "post-history", "post-racial" world, where if you were offended by racism, that was your fault, because we ended racism, and now the only real racism is you thinking racism is real, man hits bong. Just sort of like, the idea of racism as existing in a purely cultural state, just as a remnant, a cultural artifact relic which we need to move past culturally, but doesn't affect the "real world" in any way. Those ideologies were kind of appealing to a mostly white mainstream cultural population, who could pretty easily just walk around, and make edgy jokes, and pretend still that everything's gonna be okay because they haven't encountered a housing market crash and the consolidation of all of the wealth in a fraction of the population and a once in a century pandemic partially accelerated by huge misinformation campaigns. Basically, because the mainstream cultural consciousness, mostly controlled by white people, was still insulated from the worst of the worst consequences, and because they were still getting treats.
We still had a white suburban middle class, basically. We still do, but we used to, too.
Now though, people see being socially progressive as having a better vibe. Probably this is because we're on the long end of the economy being shit, and everyone having realized that collectively burning your children's futures in order to further white supremacy isn't a sustainable thing long term and just fucks you over, probably it's also because the internet has made it easier for marginalized voices to occupy more space in the cultural consciousness, whereas before they would've been screened by industry gatekeepers. Probably it's also because conservative nutters collectively lost their fucking minds and kind of went mask off with trump and gamergate shit, partially as a reaction to obama just being like, black, but also those other factors I've named.
Probably it's because the middle class that you used to see in all those 90's movies, like fight club and office space, got automated away, outsourced, or otherwise traded for a bunch of IT and internet developers, which can mostly take their place as part of the managerial class. We go from cubicles in high rises, to open floor plan offices in mid-rises, to work-share rental spaces in low-rises, to work-from-home setups, and the amount of people allowed treats from their overlords narrows in total population because you simply don't need as many. The amount of people who are actively fooled by corporate propaganda and bootstraps mentalities also narrows with the proliferation of the internet and with the lack of people who are now "in" on this middle class lifestyle, so your immediate social group is more likely to have people who you know are chilling but are also struggling a lot financially.
yeah I think that's all I got as far as this one goes.
I think the main smartphone market is kind of like the market for cars. The only people that can afford to buy them, can afford to keep up heavy consumer traffic, are the ones who are convinced they need to swap to the top of the line model with some sort of trade-in payment plan, where they want every new trendy thing, and every piece of bullshit technology that's not going to last even to the next flagship model. Basically, stupid people who are rich and are insecure about it. I'm certainly vulnerable to that to, just as I'm vulnerable to the unbearable lag on even just like a 6 year old phone, which should really not be that old, and then security updates and support are always a concern, I suppose. I think maybe the solution, individually, might just be to root my phone, or install some linux alternative operating system, cause I don't wanna keep up with this bullshit anymore. I'm trapped in a world of large 19:9 and 21:9 smartphones, unusable with one hand, and with screen space that's useless 90% of the time. I'm stuck without aux ports, and without any physical style keyboard, no nothin. I also want stuff like the DS stylus port and the flip camera they had on the zenfone 7, that shit is cool.
Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz's death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can't use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven't had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn't gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there's a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.
Treatment was less bad in Cuba iirc but still included sending people to go work on sugar plantations, which is pretty back-breaking and horrifying labor. I mean, horrifying to the point that the Spanish colonial state were willing to force their slaves to do it, you know?
Luckily this isn't an issue anymore as cuba has somewhat recently liberalized their constitution and legislated free medical care for trans people and decriminalized homosexuality, probably in no small part due to the "thaw" that Obama put in place (probably one of his small wins), opening them up for better tourism and money, that trump then reversed and Biden has maintained.
But shhh, you didn't hear any that from me, Cuba's only allowed to be evil.
What did it look like in person?
You jest, but this is literally how some 4chan "culture" was conceived, how they take ground. They just kind of, passively associate otherwise innocuous things with their in group, such as, getting a bowl cut, wearing a hawaiian shirt, drinking milk, using the OK symbol. Having a shaved head, using image macros of a frog from a somewhat decent indie comic, stuff like that. Then, over time, people notice these symbols, begin to associate them with the group, and then the in-group can use the out-group's "ridiculous" reaction as internal propaganda, in order to make their opposition appear ridiculous, and appeal more to moderates who just see the surface level aesthetics of some people getting mad and some people goofing off with something innocuous. This is a legitimate political tactic that has been used and abused quite thoroughly. Generally, though, yes, you would want to use something more innocuous and stupid, rather than something blatantly disagreeable, like kicking puppies.
I thought this was kind of an old meme by now? I seem to remember it being reported on in english media by the late 2010's, like 2018/2019, and the half-life of memes is pretty bad anyways + I would assume english media would get around to these things somewhat after they'd been spent anyways.
My bad, I was thinking of "躺平", lying flat, as mentioned in the article.
In any case I think there's definitely like, an element of this reporting that is, you know, relatively obvious in the amount of bias. You might compare this to, say, if china reported on like, growing incel movements, or something, as evidenced by the spread of andrew tate. Or, maybe better, the quiet quitting movement. They're not technically incorrect, and those are pretty significant problems, but it's also, you know, there's a reason why they're choosing to report on that, and not like. I dunno, something else. Say, toxic work culture. Sigma male grindsets. The total inverse, you will rarely see reported on by, you know, the fucking wall street journal. I have a skepticism for the motives of the media, is basically all I'm saying. I agree with the memes though the chinese government and chinese society et large kind of blows chunks, similarly faulted as is most of modern society broadly.
alaska also has some kind of UBI because of their oil stuff, I'm not sure they slot as easily into political partisanship as most other states
God I hate how our options are between shit and shit like every time. I just want RC cola internet, instead of pepsi and coke, is that too much to ask? I want kirkland signature internet, that's what I want.
Bring it back as an HTPC like the peeps are saying, low-ball it on the price like 500 bucks or less, maybe even take a hit on it or just a hit on the profit margins, pre-install all the stuff people might need, and then blam, you've guaranteed that most people will be casual users who want a lower-end computer and a smart TV/console replacement, and not higher tier hobbyists who want a more powerful machine. Confining your audience to that specific market share basically guarantees they won't take advantage of the lower or negative margins on the hardware itself, and will probably buy some amount of steam games. They're also using a device in your ecosystem now but idk what you do as far as that goes to make a good profit while not being a scumbag
What does it mean when a middle aged man stars at you in public? Or, is starring at you? That sounds like some kind of situation in which you could probably call the cops.
buh-buh-buh but what about when I refer to mechanical engineering! what about when I need to adjust my cam timing! oh no!
I dunno, I would broadly agree and I think that it's probably not a good thing to be calling people, but I do have two complaints I would like to file with the official board that governs this sort of thing. Neither of them relate to the word's banned usage, however. Of course, it's still gonna be a little weird.
One is that I like -tard as a suffix, I think it has a kind of satisfying mouthfeel in pronunciation, I think potentially we need some more words that use it, and I don't think that as a kind of, like, workaround, or way to say the slur more. I kind of wish the suffix was dissociated from the slur, so this was more possible. The only other word I can think of that does this is mustard, which apparently arrived at a similar pronunciation through a different etymological route. I dunno, I find it to be a kind of like, inherently hilarious word, or satisfying word to say. Unusual, maybe, maybe like an unusual morpheme pairing. Maybe I have some level of just like unprocessed shitheadery though, that's very possible. I also kind of wish there was a way that actually worked to de-escalate the weight of a slur, to rob it of it's weight. Obviously, taking it back doesn't do much, because it's just going to be subject to the same in-ground out-ground dynamic, a la the n-word, right. It's okay if gay people call each other or themselves the f-slur, it's not okay if some straight guy walks in and does it. More positive associations might work but then, you know, doubtful that would work in the first place, and also you'd probably not see a lot of people wanting to take the L and push it on that one because everyone would hate them for it, both the people insulted and those who would use it as a insult.
Also, I don't like this kind of mentality more broadly of "oh you gotta be more creative when you insult people.". Some people are so boring and uninterestingly fucked, that they aren't worth the creativity you expend upon insulting them. I think it just kind of shadows the problem here. No, you don't want to say the word because it denigrates an entire group of people when you use it in an insulting manner. There's not really anything there about creativity, or lack thereof, that makes it a moral problem. Sometimes you do need a low-rent insult, it should just be one that isn't a slur. Call someone a shitheel, or something, it's easier than this, there are plenty to choose from.
Okay, thirdly, I think there's also a broader, and interesting question here, of, how an insult being based on like, unchangeable characteristics makes it more mean or more of a slur, right. But then that sort of, leaves out things we might consider as being changeable, like, say, body weight, which I would also say is a dick move, to insult someone on the basis of their weight, or to constantly bring it up, or anything like that. On the other hand, insulting someone on the basis of their eye color is maybe like, very antiquated, still potentially mean, and potentially very mean in like, maybe india? But I dunno so much if it would be considered a slur, really, as much as just kind of a very weird thing to bring up. Insulting someone on the curliness of their hair, maybe, but then that could be seen as a proxy for other things, just like most traits. It's hard to do this with something too obvious because most of them have been historically associated with like, eugenics and shit like that. Maybe if you were to insult someone based on how big their feet are or something, that might be a more socially acceptable or lighthearted insult, even if it's still mean.
We also have, like, technically all characteristics are unchangeable, if we live in a deterministic universe, right? Insulting someone's intelligence, even if they don't have autism or down syndrome or what have you, is still insulting a deterministic aspect of their character, which was sort of unavoidable for them to stumble into. If you insult someone for even, their choice of boots, right, you are just insulting a characteristic about them which was ultimately inevitable, the result of many dominoes falling into place. I think perhaps when we attempt to understand the purpose of insulting someone, we give it this guise of free will and agency which I think ultimately makes it more mean than it would otherwise be. It robs it of its whimsy.
We view insults as some sort of like, vehicle for tough love, vehicle for change, perhaps, or we view it as maybe righteous, because you're insulting someone on something they can change and by implication I think, should change. I think we have to be honest, though. Insults are not for the people who are being insulted. They are for the people saying them, they have always been. If that's the case, it doesn't even need to be really related to the person you're insulting at all, or even necessarily directed at them. It doesn't need to be such a mean thing, if it's just for you. And if it is just for you, then I think it's more valuable to do that assessment and figure out why you're actually doing it, instead of just like, giving into mindless frustration and calling someone a mean name, like a child.
I’d churn my own butter
vile, never heard it said this way before, I'm stealing this for personal use
this website has defo been infiltrated by right-wing groups
I mean it was kind of inevitable on lemmy.world, right? An ostensibly centrist instance that kind of tries to brand itself as the "mainstream" socially acceptable lemmy instance. It was basically liberal from the start, you know? Appealing to users flooding in from the reddit exodus. The more explicitly leftist influenced things are going to act more, you know, liberal with the banning out of self-preservation, and so are inevitably going to kind of like, paradoxically, cordon themselves off into little, I mean, basically echo chambers, so they're not going to appeal to a kind of broader audience as much.
It's all kind of inevitable from the structure of the site, I think.
So a couple narratives, right. One is that they're just gonna blow all their generational wealth on nothing and blah blah blah fuck off, and then those that do have generational wealth are just gonna get it eaten up by government inheritance taxes, and maybe debt collectors, who are less sympathetic, because fuck debt and specifically people looking to wring old people for all their worth. Scum, lowest of the low, should be lined up and pelted with. Maybe small coins? Pocket change? Could be kind of ironic.
At the same time, little weird that people will make a big stink about medicare and social security going underwater, and then not want to pay taxes on inheritance, because they're entitled to it. That shit doesn't track, really. They could advocate for less spending on the military, sure, but if the conception of the economy is that it just kind of works like how a house balances debt (it doesn't), then paying debts should be good, no? Weird double standard in western culture, still. Everyone hates usury, but simultaneously conceives of "the economy" as working through it, and "the economy" as being, if not good, then incredibly important and worth protecting at all costs. Point is, the common conception of how the economy works is flawed, and then some people have an idea of how it should work, but, in any case, the ire should be drawn with that, rather than with "the boomers". Attacking "the boomers" is weird. It's treating a symptom, not the cause.
Second, also a weird note, is that "the boomers", monolithically, are holding onto their jobs, or something. Certainly, a good proportion, and probably the majority that are still holding out, are doing so because of a lack of alternative, and despite how good it may feel, it's probably not moral to blame someone for, say, being an alcoholic in their 20's and 30's, and say they don't deserve to retire on that basis. Kind of scummy. A good amount of boomers face that situation, and face worse situations where they aren't even at fault for their positions, really. Any racial minority, really, including some we now consider to be white.
Then, a small proportion are refusing to retire because they're just at the top of the company. Board executives, big decision making guys. Unfortunately for the rest of us, we will never get their positions. If they retire, will their job be taken by some millenial? Will it be taken by someone in Gen X? Would it even matter, or would the position inherently be both corrupting, and magnetic to the corruptible and corrupt? Probably the latter, probably it wouldn't matter who it went to, because it's just part of a larger power structure and whoever gets hired is going to be in further service to said power structure, as it's self-reinforcing.
Also, this shit is never true. ohhhhh no social security is going away because the boomers are retiring! nooo! you should be able to invest your retirement into a private account on the basis that the government's social security and retirement plans are going belly up because of all the boomers! nooo! this shit has been spinning for like 40 years, do not believe the hype.
I've known about this for a while and it's just been mundane to me. It never struck me how stupid it is until now.
Just buy the bungee corded one with the pull string that they make, that's probably better anyways.
How are you hurt by alarms? Noise, high voltage, the fear of the things they indicate, or something else? legitimately curious, never heard of this phobia before