BahRamYou
3d ago
well, i don't have any group of friends so... guess I'm doomed to misery lol.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Yeah that first case is what frustrates me so much about the modern internet. it's all ephemeral, designed to prevent being google searched. I guess that's good for a quick private chat, but it's really annoying when you just want to ask a frequently asked question.
Seems like you gotta have friends to make friends... everything is like a job search now.
BahRamYou
3d ago
How do you use discord?
I don't need, like, a literal user's guide. I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?
I grew up with AIM and online chat rooms, so i'm not a stranger to this sort of thing. But discord just seems so hectic and overwhelming. It's, well, discord in a literal sense.
Every channel I join, starts with this huge list of rules that I have to agree before I can even see anything. Then there's usually a host of hidden channels that all require separate hidden handshakes to enter. It's policed by mods who seem to take their jobs very seriously. Then there's so many different users, all spamming things at each other, and so many different notifications. It's literally impossible for me to read everything even from just one discord channel, let alone if I'm in multiple.
Bad experiences that I've had:
- had been chatting with people on there for a while. Tried to set up a dinner to finally meet offline at an event. It got too hectic and we never managed to find each other.
- had been chatting for a while with a different small group. We had our own subchannel led by a mod. The mod apparently had some hiddend drama with the admin (I have no idea what), got banned, and our whole group was kicked out. We all lost contact.
- Went to a newly created channel where there was only 1 other regular user. We chatted for a bit about random stuff, then got warned by a mod for being "offtopic" and moved to separate rooms. We were literally the only people there.
- in general just a flood of notifications and messages that I find incredibly distracting. I can't keep it open if I need to do anything else. I have no idea how some people manage to just sit on there all day and respond to everything.
BahRamYou
5d ago
I remember back in the boom years of online poker before it got banned in the US, a number of people did things like that. People who weren't good enough to make money playing in a normal way would play just enough to clear the bonuses that sites gave to new players. They called it "bonus grinding" or "bonus whoring." The main caveat, I think, is that it's an incredibly soulless, boring way to make money. It still requires a certain amount of mental effort, and without even the fig leaf of pretending like you're doing something beneficial to society. So most people got bored of doing it, and started to play for real, sometimes losing back the money they earned from the bonus.
BahRamYou
20d ago
I think most of the students are left-leaning even before they enter the university, they just don't express it so strongly. But yes, some indoctrination is clearly taking place. But it's more from student clubs and off-campus organizations than from the classes. Also probably pressure from dudes trying to impress women to get laid, and women are usually more left-leaning than men.
BahRamYou
20d ago
In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.
This is such a funny sentence. It feels like it belongs in the 1960s, when I can imagine a stuffy old-fashioned college professor being shocked by dyed hair and piercings.
Nowdays... well, first it's not very shocking. Second, the students who have that kind of fashion are almost all liberal, sharing the same politics as the faculty. Many of the faculty probably had those fashions when they were younger (or still have them). And the school's admissions policies actively select for those kinds of kids via their vague "personality" rating, which rewards people for personal demonstration of radical leftist politics. Which is to say, it rewards them for having the right fashion, and for a college, that means counterculture punk shit.
BahRamYou
26d ago
Cool, thanks. That's the first time I've ever heard of the European Broadcasting Union.
Seems like the US is also a member!
BahRamYou
26d ago
What's the reasoning behind this? Did they just decide that it's good business to keep expanding the contest year after year? Is it eventually going to turn into a worldwide contest?
BahRamYou
27d ago
Do you get an even bigger discount if you hold them in your arms using no bags at all? I'm guessing not, but I feel like you should since that's even more environmentally friendly than the reusable bags.
I feel like the "type of person who is happy to use a reusable bag and make small talk with the cashier" and "type of person who rules-lawyers these policies to save a few cents" are just fundamentally different types of people who will never understand each other.
BahRamYou
28d ago
That would actually be cool if they really did it. Imagine if a city 400 years ago had set up a project like this and they were still going at it, generation after generation. The Notre Dame cathedral took almost 200 years to finish, but this would put even that to shame.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think this is the inevitable result of making college the default path, where most people feel that they need a college degree for the job market even if they have no interest in being there. And the colleges are happy to serve as a diploma mill.
A long time ago I worked as a math tutor for my college, working with freshman who were struggling wtih basic math. And it was pretty clear that most of them had no interest in learning math, they just wanted me to do their homework for them so they could pass the class. I tried to teach them if I could but... it's a lot easier to just do the homework yourself than to teach someone else. So I was basically serving as a "living LLM" in that case.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Why is that for people like you and @Rov_Scam, every single war is WW2? There isn't a single other war in history that we could take lessons from?
I would argue that WW2 was actually highly unusual. Very few wars have a fully militarized society bent on large-scale invasion and genocide. A more normal outcome is to fight for a short while, then give up a small slice of land while glaring at each other until their desendants forget about it after a few hundred years.
I'd argue that the better analogy here is the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia had been fighting the cold for for decades, mostly "just" through mass conscription and spending, but occasionally going hot also. At the start it was sort of even, but by the end they were obviously, massively outmatched by NATO. Meanwhile their economy was in freefall. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and thankfully ended it, mostly peacefully. But hardliners like Putin and wanted to keep fighting forever to hold onto every last scrap of territory no matter the cost. So ironically you're thinking more like Putin.
There's also the small problem that if Ukraine somehow did win this and took back the Donbass and Crimea... those areas are mostly filled with ethnic Russians who only speak Russian and are more loyal to Russia. So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I feel like buying it for your 4 young kids is a bit different from buying it for yourself as a 40-yr-old though...
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Seems like a recipe to massively increasing the deficit even further. Everyone loves spending, nobody likes taxes. That's the one thing both parties agree on.
At this point I just feel horrified for the Ukrainians. They're stuck in a war they can't win, led by a "president" with no elections, and a universal draft that just keeps getting lower and lower in age. Their men are not allowed to leave the country since they're all property of the state. People talk about how this war is a pyrric victory for Russia, but I think the early success was also a pyrric victory for Ukraine, since it tricked them into thinking that if they just stay committed enough they'd be able to win. Now Zelensky and the generals feel like they can't possibly give up any land for peace, so they'll fight to the bitter end.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
How do people track all this stuff? Are there anonymous polls of cardinals? I thought it was supposed to be secret
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think on redit and similar sites, people look to ttans as a gender and political identity. On 4chan, people are just into it as a weird sex fetish. And 4channers are very tolerant of weird sex fetishes. (Arguably too tolerant)
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I want to chime in and say that, while you're not wrong for some people, that's not always the problem. For me in my 20s, living in a midsize American city, I felt plenty safe riding public transit. The real problem was it was just so damn inconvenient. Riding a bike was faster, especially if i needed a transfer. And of course it totally shut down at night.
But i do appreciate how bad the safety is in some places.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
If anything, its better! I've never heard Walz be this willing to tell it straight.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
It seems like a lot of your criticism is just that it has a lot of old people? Which, yeah, not nearly as many young people as it once did. In part because the birth rate dropped, but also in part because they just live a long time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
SEA and Africa is where the "youth" energy is at these days. Especially Africa... I've never been there though.
Does the parents/self-esteem thing work for women too? I feel like it works for men, since men are so heirarchical and fighting for dominance. But I feel like women are more accepting that their daughter/mother is of different status. I dunno, that's my lazy pop psychology.
RE: Japan- most of the things you criticize are things I like about it! I feel like most of the rest of the world is accelerating into the same generic slop: apps for everything, no unique culture, bad english, generic "world" food, etc. Japan is a country that figured out a great way to live in the 80s/90s and just kinda stuck with it. It's like the shire at the end of Lord of the Rings reacted to Saruman and just said "Nope! We don't care about your high-tech economy, we'll just stick with our happy traditional life, thanks."
Also, for what its worth, I found them extremely stylish in fashion/food/music many other ways. I sometimes feel embarassed of how poorly dressed my fellow white people are in Tokyo.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Yeah, I'd agree with all of this. In general the larger boards are faster and more meme-ey, while the smaller boards are slower and more thoughtful. Don't expect long essays, but you can still get some thoughtful responses. Find a subject you like, find a thread you like (popular subjects have a regular thread that gets re-created over and over, with the same people and culture). Find one person you like and just talk to them. It's like a big, crazy party where everyone is talking at once, but that doesn't mean all the people there are the same.
That sounds like "the best way to use it is to not use it at all." But yeah I'll try adding more mutes.
More options
Context Copy link