This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
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@kky:
Contributions for the week of June 23, 2025
@kky:
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
The website is a user-friendly proxy for youtube - if it has trouble loading the video, there's a link to the youtube page (or just edit the url).
You may have read things like Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA, but what about a hand tool with no electronics, just a few materials, large tolerances, and a simple assembly process? The same problem of manufacturing engineering being exported for greater integration with manufacturing labor applies to that, too - according to this, American "tool and die" capabilities for small-scale manufacturing are gutted. (I suspect the this video overstates the problem, because the biggest obstacle came when the non-manufacturing engineer with a small budget wanted to contract out a specific need - molds for plastic injection molding, which the molder would have sourced from the PRC - and two other engineers lent their expertise for two different ways of manufacturing plastic injection molds, and he found a mold-maker, after he needed to change the material of a part, but it's still a big deal that there aren't more American vendors advertising these capabilities.) And the video didn't even touch the materials supply chain...
(The completed grill scrubber was priced at $75 and the initial batch sold out within hours, in case you were wondering.)
If you haven't read things like that Forbes series, you might not fully appreciate that it's very easy to have a false perception of what the manufacturing capabilities of other countries are, due to selection bias in exports; there's often a wide variety in the quality of goods produced in a given country and only a narrow range of quality that's economical for you to import. One famous example is the brand images of German cars in America, which only imports expensive German cars. Less famously, there's been a secular trend of American imports of Japanese musical instruments going from the bottom to the top of the Japanese (followed by other Asian countries') production ranges and many American musicians assume each decade's imports were a representative sample. But, since manufacturing labels reflect final assembly, increasingly complicated supply chains are mostly invisible to the consumer. It'd be interesting to know what this partnership would have done differently, if they had expanded their searches to Mexican and Canadian suppliers as an acceptable alternative to American suppliers (as a larger-scale business intent on "friend/near-shoring" would), but the value of purism vs general applicability is a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" type thing.
As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.
(Hopefully that's enough of a conversation-starter, without crossing into CW!)