FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
No bio...
User ID: 157
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
14hr ago
So what does that leave him with, if he intends to run for the big prize? Pick a different African-American woman as VP to make sure he locks in the black vote? Can you suggest any likely names if Kamala is out of the running?
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
14hr ago
But we can filter out posts like FarNearEverywhere's OP
On, so far as I can tell, the grounds that it was too short. I didn't include links, I was not going "can you believe what they did?" and it was not "boo, outgroup". That leaves me with "Had I padded it out with a few paragraphs of fluff, I could have asked the same questions and gotten a pass". If I'm wrong, correct me.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
19hr ago
Hmmm - I am getting definite "we have always been at war with Eastasia" vibes here, because I do have the feeling that there was this precise debate over a ban or modding or something and it was "we don't police tone, don't be silly, we're not going to ban someone just for the way they phrased something unless they were deliberately offensive".
Or maybe I'm just old and stupid and slowly sliding into dementia.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
19hr ago
I get banned for being a single-issue poster and riding a hobbyhorse (see Amadan), I get banned for not being a single-issue poster (cjet79 here because I didn't do an essay on Californian politics), I get recommended for quality contributions - I have no idea what will be approved and what won't 😁
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
19hr ago
Shared a link, asked some basic questions, and basically said "discuss". Had it done so, or attempted to do so I might not have banned.
Since I got the banhammer, let me get this much clear - no links were shared. Go back and read it, I didn't link to anything. I said I just heard the news and wanted to know what would happen next. You're in your rights to hit me for that, but don't say I did something I didn't do.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
19hr ago
I can't see that happening, as pointed out it's a step backwards for her. Had she still been AG or some other position but not VP, sure. It's a plum seat and lifetime appointment. But not now she's First Female and First African/Indian-American VP and maybe hoping to go on for First Female and First Indian-American President.
Newsom as VP? I dunno. I suppose the ticket for 2028, depending on whether Biden wins the second term, could be Harris/Newsom but is that a dream team or a nightmare ticket?
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
19hr ago
I think, and this is not being a jerk (thanks Ammie), that it would be helpful to have some definition of what should go where. No more bare links (but I didn't include a link). So - suitable question for the Sunday post? Okay, but it does seem to have triggered some culture warring (not my intention) so bounce it back to here?
Friday fun thread - only fun, jokey, non-serious stuff? Gotcha.
Wellness Wednesday - health and related matters? Gotcha.
Now we get to "what is long enough not to be modded as bad faith/low-effort, but not too long to be modded as ChatGPT bait/unserious trolling?" and believe you me, Ammie Lambie, I'd certainly appreciate a model answer on that one.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
19hr ago
Okay, yeah, that's not like my buttons. I was imagining that if you're used to hitting one, and they're side-by-side and pretty similar, it'd be easy to hit the wrong one, but it does look like "accidentally on purpose" now.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1d ago
Bowman's claim to have confused an alarm system and a door release is not especially likely,
Happened to me when I was going for a job interview in an unfamiliar place and I was just waved through with "push the button to open the door". Two buttons side-by-side and I wasn't sure which, and pushed the wrong one 😕 (If you're interested, it didn't affect my chances, because "oh everybody gets that wrong").
But if he is pushing that door release every day, then yes, this does sound like an excuse.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1d ago
We do tone police around here.
Is this a new thing for here, because I nearly am certain that was not over on the old Motte? I have a vague recollection of previous mod confrontations where the line was "we police content, not tone".
Though sarcasm was an exception to that: first it was "no we never ban for sarcasm alone", then it was "of course we ban for sarcasm".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1d ago
Seeing as how I seem to have kicked all this off, albeit unintentionally, this is why I miss the bare links repository. I wasn't sure where to post this, I didn't think the Sunday small questions was correct (I have now been instructed on that) and I honestly didn't have twenty yards of opinion about this. I saw the news that Senator Feinstein had died, I remembered debate about her and Nancy Pelosi and other old politicians and how they should retire in good time so that their successors could be selected and ready to take over (see the furore over Ruth Bader Ginsberg not retiring, which left Trump select a conservative replacement for her), and I wondered what was going to happen next - special election or appointment of a candidate by the governor or what? And if so, who was the likely pick - someone liberal but not progressive, in her footsteps, or someone more to the left?
Now had I known that cjet was going to moderate strictly on word count, I'd have included all the above. But I didn't, so I asked the question I genuinely wanted to know the answer to, briefly, because I was not expecting an entire row to blow up about it. I asked it on here because you lot are informed about American politics and generally have good, interesting views even if A is taking one side and B is taking another.
Somebody invent a time machine so I can go back and stop myself asking anything more innocuous than "very seasonable for the time of year, ain't it?"
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1d ago
Thanks, this is the kind of information I was looking for.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1d ago
Thanks for the advice, I'll keep it in mind! Next time I want to know "so what is this vanilla versus chocolate ice cream debate, anyway?" I'll make sure to couch it in the history of ice cream, the founding of American ice cream shops, and the global diversity of flavours for ten paragraphs before putting the query 😀
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
2d ago
It's probably true to the Holmes novels, but I haven't read them.
It's true to a version of Holmes character, but House is much more of an asshole about things. Holmes is very smart, at the start not very sympathetic to human failings, and quite prepared to break the law in some instances (that's where House's burgling and breaking into patient's houses comes from). Most of it came from the first novel, "A Study in Scarlet", and the character was softened a little as Conan Doyle developed them:
As we made our way to the hospital after leaving the Holborn, Stamford gave me a few more particulars about the gentleman whom I proposed to take as a fellow-lodger.
“You mustn’t blame me if you don’t get on with him,” he said; “I know nothing more of him than I have learned from meeting him occasionally in the laboratory. You proposed this arrangement, so you must not hold me responsible.”
“If we don’t get on it will be easy to part company,” I answered. “It seems to me, Stamford,” I added, looking hard at my companion, “that you have some reason for washing your hands of the matter. Is this fellow’s temper so formidable, or what is it? Don’t be mealy-mouthed about it.”
“It is not easy to express the inexpressible,” he answered with a laugh. “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes — it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.”
“Very right too.”
“Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.”
“Beating the subjects!”
“Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. I saw him at it with my own eyes.”
“And yet you say he is not a medical student?”
“No. Heaven knows what the objects of his studies are. But here we are, and you must form your own impressions about him.”
But he is also able to be polite and even sympathetic to clients, and is mostly brusque to the rich and important who think they can just order him around. He doesn't have a chip on his shoulder about the world. BBC Sherlock upped the arrogance (for the younger version of Holmes which he was) and made him a bit more of an asshole than the Conan Doyle version, and House was just out-and-out arrogant and unpleasant, even with the excuse of the constant pain he was in.
Just saw news of Dianne Feinstein's death. So does this mean an election to fill her vacant seat? How soon? Likely candidates? Replaced by a more progressive (more woke) or a more liberal (not woke) Democrat? Thoughts and opinions on this?
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
6d ago
Sure, but if I'm in a gathering of people wealthy enough to have real genuine Patek Phillipe watches, I'm not going to be wearing a fake (if I can only afford a fake, the only way I'm in that room is as a servant of some kind).
If I'm among people who buy and wear and use fake brands, I don't care and neither do they so long as the item is good enough for use.
The problem in both cases is the signalling: I am rich enough to afford the real thing. If you are too gauche and nouveau riche for group A, they will shun you for other reasons than "that's a fake"; even if it's genuine, the 'wrong' brand or 'he/she is plainly trying to show off' will be enough to have fun made of you. Think of mocking rappers for suddenly deciding to drink Hennessy, or how Burberry became a down-market brand by catering to chavs. Or the crassness of the 'purchase for investment, lock it away so it stays unseen' of the Saudi prince who bought the Salvator Mundi(and indeed the crassness of rushing to establish it as a genuine Leonardo so it could be sold off for $$$$$$).
For group B, it's the same shunning for showing off, except in this case it's "he/she thinks they're better than us".
There's a narrow band where "I'm rich enough now with my newly-minted wealth to afford the real thing" is appreciated and a source of emulation, and I think that's where the NFT art falls. I don't care about real or fake, except insofar as appreciating real craftsmanship or real artistic merit and beauty (I'm never going to be impressed by "see how rich I am? see? see?") and so the status games don't matter to me.
So I think both the authentic old money set and the 'can only afford fakes' set would both laugh at the "see my authentic NFT token proving my authentic ownership" set trying to boast of their money and status. Does anybody think the oil-rich princelings of the Gulf States are arbiters elegantiaes or rather tasteless playboy yahoos squandering fortunes on hookers and blow? 'Dude look at my 200 real genuine NFTs' 'yeah, your highness (what a maroon, does he really think splashing cash around equals taste?)'.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
7d ago
No one would ever display something they don't own the NFT for, because everyone would point and laugh at them.
But people do display reproductions of art pieces they like, but could never afford the original. Museums make a tidy sum off selling everything from key chains up that are plastered with popular art works - think how many times you've seen the Raphael angels on something.
I suppose people could club together and purchase a stake in a new valuable art piece, and get the right to display it with the NFT showing they own a piece of it, not like the people who can't afford to do so but can only afford prints or copies - the way syndicates that own racehorses do.
People wear fake brands now, and don't care about them being authentic. I could see fake NFTs for your fake Rolex becoming A Thing.
Specifically in the Talmud we read we read that agriculture is the lowest profession and that selling merchandise is better than working the land.
Which just sounds like the Hindu caste system, very broadly, where it's the literate priestly class putting their caste at the top of the pecking order and then those who till the land or engage in work around animals, waste, dead bodies, etc. are put at the very bottom of the social pyramid. This isn't a purely and solely Jewish notion.
In the ideal (as opposed to actual) social system in the Vedic era, the ranks are:
Brahmins: Vedic scholars, priests or teachers. Kshatriyas: Rulers, administrators or warriors. Vaishyas: Agriculturalists, farmers or merchants. Shudras: Artisans, laborers or servants.
Manusmriti assigns cattle rearing as Vaishya occupation but historical evidence shows that Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Shudras also owned and reared cattle and that cattle-wealth was mainstay of their households. Ramnarayan Rawat, a professor of History and specialising in social exclusion in the Indian subcontinent, states that 19th century British records show that Chamars, listed as untouchables, also owned land and cattle and were active agriculturalists. The emperors of Kosala and the prince of Kasi are other examples.
Cows being sacred, farming/dairy herdsmen as occupation would be higher-ranked in India. For the Jewish position, since there weren't sacred animals but were impure ones - and the question of who was raising pigs or keeping pigs at the time - then people who were probably herding non-kosher animals as well as kosher ones would naturally be an occupation giving rise to the attitude "it's better to be a trader than a farmer".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
7d ago
Dunno if this is Culture War or not, but I could really use some Instruction for the Bewildered on this.
So NFTs are a bubble that has finally burst, surprising nobody (or at least, nobody seems to be willing to admit publicly they believed the hype). They were the Tulip Mania of our day.
Or maybe they're not, at least if you have the right ones. Who knows, certainly not me, that's why I'm asking for explanations.
I couldn't understand just exactly what was meant to be so wonderful about them, and the common reason seemed to be "they're not fungible", which left me where it found me.
Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here? You can buy a share of some (generally terrible) image, but you won't own it, the original creator will, and many others can also own a share of it, but because it's "blockchain" this somehow makes it vastly valuable?
At least Jack's magic beans really did grow into a giant vine where he eventually obtained treasure, but this sort of thing bewilders me as to what the hell is going on.
Yeah, that's the problem. Because that approach does lead to the "not my job, not my problem" attitude with staff, where a small amount of extra effort could avoid something becoming a major problem later on, but eh why should I care, the boss doesn't, I'm just gonna do my hours and not a finger's worth of extra effort.
And so customers go "they're all equally shitty, which one is cheapest?" and for cost-cutting, employers go the "it's a minimal job for minimal staff" and the outcomes are what we've all experienced: hanging on the phone trying to get the options from the automated menu instead of talking to a real person; if you do get a real person, they're working off a script in an overseas call centre and can't help you even if they wanted to; they don't want to, because everyone knows call-centre work is shitty and this is only something they're doing until they can get something better; help lines aren't helpful, and the degradation in quality continues so long as people will put up with it because it's not worth shifting from service provider A to service provider B since they all use the same kind of cost-cutting measures.
But automation and AI will make it all better, so even the minimal people will be out of jobs to be replaced by the Helpful Friendly ChatBot! Except I don't expect AI to be exempt from the "it's a minimal job, cut expenses as much as possible, this may be crappy but it's good enough" attitude, either.
I've seen the jokes about the American DMV and I don't know what they are like in reality, but that's all part of the "minimal job for minimal people" attitude and how it corrodes any sense of wanting to do something to help people. I've had low-level public-facing public service jobs where it would have been easy to go "not my job, not my problem" and leave people hanging, versus putting in a bit more effort to try and help them solve their problem and tell them what to do and how to navigate the bureaucracy, even though that wasn't formally part of the job.
But if that is not wanted, and indeed punished, by "I don't care who I hire so long as they can turn up sober and speak English" attitudes to 'it's a job any minimally competent person can do and doesn't need good workers because if they're any good they're going to leave for something higher up and better paid' positions, then bored, indifferent and even actively aggressive clerks who shut the window just as your position in the queue moves up to it are what you're going to get. "Oh, I could have stayed open five more minutes beyond my official closing time and taken that form, but now you're going to have to wait another two hours in line? Not my job, not my problem".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
9d ago
Kendi didn't do a good enough job spreading the lucre around, so his subordinates turned on him, hoping to win some points for taking down the toxic cis-male boss while they're at it.
Part of my lack of sympathy for BU is that this was so very plainly a 'woke' endeavour, and a lot of the young professionally aggrieved BIPOC sixteen versions of minority along all the spectra types, particularly but not confined to academics, think they shouldn't have to do anything. Reparations, man. It's not my job to educate you. I'm so tired of explaining things to white people. Emotional labour.
They felt they should be given a nice title, a fat salary, and a plum job and have to do nothing more than repeat the talking points about "everything is the fault of systemic racism". The boss expecting them to do real work (even if it was him dropping his own work on top of them, a separate issue) wasn't supposed to happen.
It's happened before with vegan queer restaurants/other worker-owned places of employment where the lovely theories about doing it all for the oppressed minority and the people own the fruits of their labour soon run into the realities of "if you're running a restaurant, somebody has to cook and clean and wait tables and guess what, it's a lot of work" and then it all crashes and burns amidst bitter recriminations about "you didn't pay us enough, so we went on strike, so you had to close down, and now we're condemning you for putting us out of a job even though we were protesting the job in the first place".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
9d ago
Instead of directly determining a person under eighteen's ability to consent by whom they wish to governed, all are deemed incapable of it because of an involuntary characteristic (age).
When the person under eighteen is paying all the bills for this house and keeping it up and running and solving their own problems, then the person under eighteen can get a say in who runs the place, otherwise I'm your mom and this is my house, my rules.
(Sorry, couldn't resist).
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
9d ago
Any minimally competent person can do the task.
Here is where I sigh heavily and type out a reply more in sorrow than in anger.
I've worked a lot in those kinds of "all you need is a warm body" jobs. And then bosses wonder why the fuck their customers are annoyed and leaving shitty reviews.
Because even for "what the hell do I care who I hire, all I want is a trained monkey to take names and rattle off the prepared script" roles, you do actually need a teeny bit more than "can stand upright unassisted and speak English".
The other day at work I had to engage with the customer service hotline of the bank where we do business, and it soon became apparent that they'd outsourced from the natives here to someplace else. Presumably because it would be cheaper and "what the hell do we care who we hire for these minimal roles".
And it was not a happy experience, lemme tell you. Not the fault of the people on the other end of the line, who were doing their best but had plainly just been dumped with "yeah this is the script" and no support, but the attitude of the higher-ups responsible for the decisions on outsourcing, customer service, shaving off expenses for wages, etc.
It took three phone calls to get a minor issue sorted out, that ordinarily would have taken just one.
And that is why the saying "pay peanuts and get monkeys" came into being. If your attitude to public-facing/customer-facing jobs is "this isn't important, it's just something any minimally competent person can do", then that is what you will get: minimal competence. Which is not enough. If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!
And how do you get people willing to go the extra step? For a start, don't display that you think this is a step above not being employable at all, that you don't give a shit about the job or the people who do it, and that you consider it so minimal, you have no respect for the people doing it.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
10d ago
You have to feel for BU here
Hmmm - reaching deep down inside myself and.... no.
They knew what they were getting, and they got it, and it got them. No sympathy.
Just goes to show how interpretations differ. I was going on "we only ban for egregious insult and bad faith" but then that got caught up in "why did you ban this, it might be heated but it's not insulting" and a lot of to-and-fro over what the mods considered bad tone and what the posters thought, with views all over the place.
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