JulianRota
1yr ago
I want to double-down / confirm the comment about working conditions and the ability to do things. I've worked at some Large Bureaucratic Organizations. I've seen too many times as an Individual Contributor where I or a colleague of mine comes up with a nice idea to make something work better or be cheaper or something, tried to get it done, and it gets stonewalled at the management level because the real decisions are made 5 layers up from you and there's no way to get any idea up to them through all the layers of middle management in a way they'll actually care about.
Instead, most of the project proposals that come down from on high are for stuff that people at the ground level can see is clearly unworkable, but it gets pushed anyways. When it proceeds to go nowhere, as predicted, whoever pushed it can dummy up a powerpoint that makes it look like it went great, which never actually gets checked, so they get bonuses and promotions anyways.
After a while working in a place like that, it can feel like a huge deal where a good idea at your level gets a quick "Okay, do it, here's the money", and the really dumb ideas get ruthlessly shut down. You might put up with and excuse a lot to be allowed to work at your full potential on something that's actually awesome instead of being a bureaucratic drone putting forth 10% on something completely pointless.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't think I could use a ChromeOS device as my only PC either. But I've been surprised that the list of things I want to do on a primary PC that I can't do on it is pretty short. Web browsing is nice of course, but so is programming in any language I've used, messing with Docker images and K8s admin, most CLI and Linux tools work fine, etc.
The $300-range practical devices can be nice, but personally, I'm too turned off by the low quality screens and performance compromises. I got a somewhat pricier one with a nice screen and pretty decent performance. But at least there are plenty of options at all levels of performance and quality now.
The combo of first-party desktop environment with officially supported everything and best-in-class security, plus an officially supported full Linux environment where everything works, is pretty competitive in the current laptop market.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think you have to start by deciding on the OS.
If you want Windows, you have a bazillion options. Windows 10 is pretty decent IMO, though I don't have much experience with 11.
If you want MacOS, then your options are obviously constrained to Apple hardware, where the choices are pretty easy. I don't think you really need to be a part of Apple's online ecosystem, even though they highly encourage it. The hardware is certainly nice, though it isn't cheap.
If you want Linux, then you probably should check carefully for good hardware compatibility before you spend money on anything, as near as I can tell, good-quality drivers are still extremely hit or miss, especially with regard to webcams, microphones, wifi, bluetooth, video cards, efficiency and battery life, etc.
I often speak up for ChromeOS on these things - I use it for my primary personal laptop. Not many people think of it as their first choice, but it can do everything you mentioned just fine, and runs quite well if you buy decent spec hardware. Local OS security is top-notch, and there's a built-in and officially supported Linux that runs command line and X Windows apps. Google is probably tracking you, but at least they're the only ones.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't think they're consciously doing it, as in literally giving money directly to Nazi groups. I do think they're effectively doing it by things like signal-boosting irrelevant Nazis through calling them out and giving them a much wider audience, organizing industry-wide cancelling of anyone who opposes them, which promotes the idea that Jews run everything, and then calling the idea that Jews run everything a "baseless conspiracy theory", accusing people of anti-Semitism and then accepting payoffs from them, etc. All of these are things they can tell themselves are supporting their cause, but effectively do the opposite.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've done LSD. It was a curious experience, put me in an unusual mindset - I somehow got the impression that, as dedicated Christians say, God has a plan. It felt like a sense of peace, like there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, because everything was already going to happen in accordance with the plan of a force much more powerful than any of us. But that's pretty much it though, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary at all or feel compelled to do anything I wouldn't otherwise do.
My take is that it can be a fun experience if you're open to and interested in that sort of thing. But I'm highly skeptical that it's likely to cause any long-term change in your personality, positive or negative.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Usually, at least at the prosecutor's level, if not the actual beat officers, this seems to work the opposite way. If you're an upstanding citizen CCing in full compliance with the actual published law, then you get the book thrown at you - full charges, highest bail they can get, max punishment, etc. If you're a career criminal on the way to commit another armed robbery or gang hit, then you get charges dropped lightened to where you can be released immediately.
JulianRota
1yr ago
When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them. Well, here's us starting to slide down that slope. Make up any rule you want, call it a "public health order", and just maybe it will stand and actually be enforced.
I really hope this doesn't stand, because it will only accelerate us towards a regime of government executives actually ruling by decree without regard to the Constitution. And what'll happen if a Red team executive in a Red state copies the pattern, maybe doing something like closing down all gay bars and other meeting places as a "public health order" to stop Monkeypox or Aids or something.
JulianRota
1yr ago
There's that, and it also appears that he's assuming the energy extracted comes directly and exclusively from the Earth's rotation, rather than from that as well as the Moon's orbit. But the quoted point is probably the more important one - it seems intuitively implausible even before I read the article that the amount of energy the human race uses is anywhere near the same order of magnitude as what is associated with the Earth's rotation.
Either way, I also have no confidence that any mainstream media source is capable of evaluating the claim with appropriate skepticism and performing, or even getting someone more qualified to perform, basic checking for major holes in the idea rather than jumping on what would be an attention-getting headline.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That's probably a better description yeah.
The bum / not a bum perception IMO is based on behavior as much as appearance. Even before they really do anything, you can often just tell that they move differently. Most normal people out in the world are actively doing something, or appear to be relaxing or waiting for someone or something. Bums just seem to have a kind of restlessness and not knowing what to do to them.
They also seem to have a way of asking for things in excessively flowery language. Or with long explanations of whatever ridiculous situation they are supposedly in.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Two problems:
Pedophiles are out there, one of their common hobbies is collecting huge amounts of kiddie porn. We think this is bad, so we spend effort investigating it and jailing people we find processing it or producing it. When we find collectors, we lock them in jail for a while and probably mark them on a sex offender registry.
Moderating big social media sites is a headache. People post huge amounts of kiddie porn and gore and other such things, and they all employ moderators to review reported content. Many of those moderators end up mentally disturbed due to viewing huge amounts of this stuff in the course of their job. Many complain about needing therapy, never being the same again, etc.
Obvious and possibly stupid solution:
When we find people collecting kiddie porn, we make them be social media moderators (of that particular type). They shouldn't mind seeing the kiddie porn since they like it. We let them keep anything they find in their private collection as long as they never share it, in return they work at checking whether reported social media posts really are or aren't kiddie porn.
What could possibly go wrong?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't know if there's a specific trigger (a towel seems like a pretty silly one), but there does seem to be a thing where you're willing to make significant effort to help people who you know personally or observe to be suffering from certain types of issues, while also completely ignoring the plight of anyone you don't know or who is suffering through other issues.
The unkempt bum lying on the street demanding money with a opiate-induced need in his eyes gets ignored. The lost but cleanly dressed stranger gets (correct) directions. You might cover an acquaintance's share of the check without a thought.
I dunno about housework. If somebody's house is messier than usual, I don't really care much. I guess they're a bit lazy about cleaning. If somebody's house is a little too clean, then it seems like they either hire cleaners, or spend much more time than usual cleaning, which is a little odd.
JulianRota
1yr ago
IMO, VPNs are good for hiding your traffic and evading blocks from people or organizations that are very close to you, such as family, building, employer, ISP, etc. Still not great - it's better to avoid those types of monitored connections entirely if possible; VPN is just a workaround for when it can't be otherwise avoided. They're also good for corporate/hosting stuff - if you want to set up an intranet somewhere for a group of servers to talk to each other while blocking all outside traffic, and then access them remotely. If you don't do any of that or don't know what it is, don't worry about it.
VPNs are also very cheap to operate and very profitable to run, so lots of companies get started up to run them and spam ads and sponsorships all over the place. It's a nice feel-good talisman for people who are worried about security, but mostly doesn't help much.
Forgot to mention mobile, which is indeed a tough nut to crack to have actual privacy along with the functionality that people expect. Apple and Google both track the shit out of everything on proper devices. There are alternative de-googled Android ROMs you can load, but they're mostly not very good and painful or impossible to get most of the apps you want. Banking/finance apps, mainstream social media apps, Uber and food ordering apps, etc may refuse to run on devices that aren't fully locked down stock devices.
Ideally, we wouldn't use Youtube at all. That can be rather limiting though. Viable alternatives may include creating a new Google account just for it that you only use on devices you watch on. Not sure if you can do that on mobile though. I think there might be alternative mobile youtube apps that don't use the device's main Google account, but I haven't checked that in a while. You could also download everything you want to watch with youtube-dl and send the files around manually, but most people consider that a headache.
Similarly the best you can do with Discord is probably to limit the accounts you connect to your Discord account and the devices you use it on. I've also heard that Discord desktop and mobile apps are very spy-happy, you can limit data collection better by using the web browser version of Discord only. You might need a new account though, since they probably already know everything about your old one, and will probably remember the links even if you remove them now.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure I've read about "Rich Men North of Richmond" on here at least 5 times. I know there's a lot to read on here - Main CWR thread is very long and needs multiple loads of more comments by halfway into the week, plus all of the alternate threads. I don't do a great job of keeping up myself. But you can't really complain about not getting enough info from here if you're missing it that many times. I don't think we're ever going to be the place to get a bunch of low-effort hot-takes on whatever the current thing is.
I suppose this place isn't necessarily the best way to get all news on everything. But the majority of what any news source reports is either useless garbage or intentionally biased and unrepresentative in order to manipulate your opinions. I think we do a pretty good job of covering everything actually important that happens eventually and providing fairly high-quality takes on it from multiple perspectives.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't think VPNs are a great solution to any of that.
If you want less tracking from the tech majors, it's probably more effective to get adblock and/or pihole and block all traffic to them. After voluntarily switching away from their services of course. Being on a VPN while logged into their accounts and/or still allowing every website that integrates with them to send traffic to them doesn't accomplish anything. And being on a VPN while blocking all traffic to them also doesn't accomplish anything.
For torrents, I've tended to think it's better to use only private trackers locally and use remote seedboxes for any "public" torrents that might be tracked or detected. Why VPN all traffic to and from your home PC just to hide your torrents from your ISP badly (they will still know you're using a lot of upstream bandwidth in patterns typical of torrent servers, if they actually care enough to check), when for a similar price, you can set up a proper seedbox that's always online and your ISP will never know about at all?
JulianRota
1yr ago
What are your goals from it, who do you want privacy from?
I'm pretty skeptical on the usefulness of VPNs. Nothing is going to be faster than your bare connection of course. If you want privacy from your parents, local ISP, employer, etc, then any of them will do. If you want privacy from your government, then use Tor from a freshly imaged disposable laptop, and then pray to God because even that probably isn't good enough.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've had rental property before. A few notes:
The economics of it are a little tricky and rather different than buying as a personal home. You have to know all of, what you can actually buy the property for, what kind of financing you can get, and what you can actually rent it for, and balance them to make it actually profitable. Specifically, it's not to your benefit to make rental property too nice. In most markets, rent that tenants will actually pay is mostly based on location and bedroom count, most updates and amenities won't get you anything in higher rent. Being truly broken down or a dump won't rent, but it's not to your benefit to buy or make a property significantly nicer than the average rental in the market you're targeting.
You need to be familiar with the landlord-tenant laws in your jurisdiction. Know what's involved in evicting somebody, what obligations you have for security deposits, and any other requirements that might be in place.
You may or may not want a realtor for the property purchase, but you'll need one for the rental. You need somebody who knows how and where to advertise to tenants, screen tenants, and set up rental contracts. You definitely need a standard, good-quality contract, and you definitely need to screen, as a bad tenant can seriously wreck your finances, especially if eviction is difficult in your jurisdiction.
There will be some management work too. You need to know who to call when things break down, and it helps a lot if you are personally handy enough to deal with minor issues without hiring more contractors. Plan on needing to take time off during business hours to meet contractors or delivery people at least once a year. If you can't do it yourself due to your own work obligations or being too far away, you need somebody else who is local and reliably available on call to handle that sort of thing.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Here's a few good articles with some more details:
https://newrepublic.com/article/60919/enlightened-despot
This is a 2007 essay by American judge Richard A. Posner describing how unusual the way the Israeli courts have expanded their own authority is, though it's a bit vague on specific cases and exactly how they worked.
https://hashiloach.org.il/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%A7%D7%98%D7%99%D7%91%D7%99%D7%96%D7%9D-%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%98%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%A4%D7%9B%D7%94/
This is a (long) article in Hebrew (Google Translate seems to work pretty well for it) by Daniel Friedman, a professor at the Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, that goes over the concepts and types of judicial activism and cites a bunch of specific cases to document the rise of "radical" activism, which he defines as directly contradicting legislation rather than interpreting how it is to be applied in situations that it doesn't specifically cover. Strangely, I can't tell the exact date of publication - it seems to be pretty recent but predating the latest reform controversy, I'm guessing around 2020-2021 by the dates of the cites and the single comment.
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%91%D7%92%22%D7%A5_%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A8_%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%93_%D7%A9%D7%A8_%D7%94%D7%91%D7%99%D7%98%D7%97%D7%95%D7%9F
This is a Wikipedia article about a specific ruling in 2007 where the court basically tells the military what tactics to use to protect a school from incoming rockets. The "Judgements of the High Court" section linked appears to have articles on the details of a number of the other significant cases as well.
JulianRota
1yr ago
It's been posted a few times. I'm not a big fan. It's okay I guess, but it feels whiny and weepy to me. The Irish war songs referenced in a sibling comment are mostly boastful and cheery, which I find more enjoyable, even if they're rather generous with the truth about how well Irish Republican forces actually performed.
JulianRota
1yr ago
What I've done is open everything as tabs. Normally I don't close them until I finish reading them completely. But I tend to not start or stop halfway through on things that just aren't that interesting. So what I do is, when the tab count starts to seem a little high or crowded, I go delete tabs that I haven't gotten around to reading in a while. No saving or backing up anywhere.
It does feel a bit uncomfortable to have to be like, yeah I'm probably never actually going to read that, let's delete it. But better to get it over with at once than shuffle those articles around a bunch of other lists that I'll probably also never actually catch up with for months longer and have to deal with more copies later. I reason that if it's actually that important, I'll come across it again later. Otherwise, they never come up in my mind again after that initial discomfort.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That touches on what seems weird about the "but children" etc arguments to this. In real life, infants and small children probably try to do something that would be lethal or extremely dangerous like 20 times a day every single day. If we're now in the business of giving them quirky polls with life-or-death consequences and they're not able to be guided or advised at all, they're probably going to be dead of something or other pretty soon, if not on the first one then by the fifth or tenth.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Well I'm not in charge here or anything, but I don't think the mods/admins would mind as long as such threads abided by the same rules as the rest of the board. I might follow along myself - I'm a urban dweller right now, about the opposite, but I do find myself interested in such lifestyles.
There does seem to me to be some meat to the idea that we're meant to thrive in more connected communities. That's probably a good topic for discussion in the main thread, or one of the alternates, or something. I do sometimes find the main thread a bit fast-paced for my tastes for actually participating.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.
Well yeah, but it's a bit much to expect them to solve every problem in the world at once. They're only trying to fight a war against the most powerful empire in the world at the time with a pretty marginal amount of manpower, territory, and level of economic strength.
They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.
Also having effectively no say about their own laws and governance. If the law you live under permits slavery and you have no right to change it, then maybe achieving the right to set laws at all is a bit higher priority.
What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.
Exactly what I said in my first post in this thread:
A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.
Instead, it was one of a number of issues that was compromised on in order to form a coalition strong enough to win the war for independence. Perhaps even the most significant one. Nevertheless, what they "founded the country on" was what they united in wanting to change about the current system, not what they were not politically and economically able to change yet.
In contrast, I would say it's reasonably accurate to describe the Confederate cause in the American Civil War as actually founded on white supremacy, because they did explicitly secede because of Slavery and directly related issues. There were some other issues there too, but they were pretty clearly secondary and likely some were compromised on in order fight a large-scale war.
That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.
Do you have a source for that? I'm not a huge expert on the history of abolitionism in the British political system or anything, but the most authoritative-seeming source that I found, at the British Library, specifically cites the success of the American Revolution and the ideals upon which it was fought as inspiring the first organized anti-slavery groups:
But these stirrings did not as yet represent a coherent movement. That was to come in the years immediately following the American Revolution (1776–1783). It is no coincidence, for instance, that the first organised anti-slavery society in Britain, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), was founded in May 1787, taking its inspiration from events on the other side of the Atlantic, where the American Revolution had witnessed the first tentative steps to abolish slavery and the slave trade, mainly in Northern colonies (now states) such as Pennsylvania and New York.
Interestingly, the same source also cites both the USA and the British Empire ending the Atlantic Slave Trade at about the same time:
Capitalising on this shift in the geopolitical situation, abolitionists started to chip away at the legal provisions that protected the slave trade. This occurred first through the Foreign Slave Trade Act (1806), which prohibited British slave traders from operating in territories belonging to foreign powers, and then the Slave Trade Abolition Act of March 1807, which abolished Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade once and for all. It was a momentous decision and one that was also a personal triumph for Wilberforce, as well as the members of the SEAST. But it is worth emphasising that this unfolding drama was set in motion by events in the Caribbean. The final push towards 1807 was also made easier by the knowledge that the USA was about to abolish its own international slave trade, as set out under the terms of the US Constitution.
Which had been set in the US Constitution by those same founders decades prior. Kind of seems like they're leading the way there.
It is the case that the British completely abolished slavery in their remaining colonies first. Though it's anyone's guess exactly whether or how that would have happened if the American colonies had remained under their control. They didn't seem to mind buying American cotton, largely grown by slaves, up to the Union blockade in the American Civil War.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I have also found it surprisingly difficult to find details about the cases that people who have issues with court overreach are complaining the most about. Presumably the actual rulings and legal documents are in Hebrew. I've put requests for details out to a few of the people who have talked about this, I'll follow up if I hear anything good back.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That’s a fantastic point about norms around not dropping casually by people’s houses. I’ve spent a ton of energy trying to encourage my local friends to do exactly that, but the norms of not imposing seem very deeply engrained.
In my experience, it helps this sort of thing to have everybody living physically close by and to have some kind of well-maintained sign that says your current status is "I'm away / sleeping / want some quiet time, so don't bother me" versus "I'm here and open for anyone to drop by and chat". I'm thinking of living in college dorms, a bunch of smallish personal rooms on a common hallway, people would leave their doors propped open to say "visitors welcome" or closed to say "leave me alone right now".
My first thought is, define "sorta friends". At least in my book, "friends" is people I already talk to and get together with regularly and would be perfectly normal to ask to get together with. This feels more like this is a person who you see once in a while at work or school or something but don't talk/message with 1 on 1 regularly and have never done anything together. That's more of a loose acquaintance in my book.
A bit of a long-winded way to say that it seems like you're trying to jump too big of a gap with this message. Going from basically no direct communications to an overly fawning and formal date request is 90% chance going to seriously weird her out. If you don't already have extremely flirtatious contact in some other medium, you need to start much more casually. Something along the lines of, hey [name], want to come get [a drink / lunch / dinner / a movie / whatever is your kind of thing], or invite her to some group event that you're going to. Or send a short joke or meme or something to get a conversation started, and if there's actually a fun and active interaction, do the previous. If you actually get together, things just kind of go or don't go based on how your interaction feels, the formality of calling it a date seems out of place, and like it's trying to force her into a some kind of framework where she'll be pushed or obligated to do something she doesn't want to do.
The turn-off of fawningness is pretty hard for guys to really get. Guys don't tend to understand that until they've become successful enough at some job or hobby or something to have people fawning over them. It feels pretty weird, and it doesn't make you respect the person doing it. At best, you see them as an assistant or apprentice or something of that level. It almost tempts you to take advantage of them and abuse them a little, even if you weren't inclined to do that sort of thing. All of this is basically the complete opposite of what women are actually attracted to.
On the explicit "not a big deal", see the Frank definitely doesn't diddle kids video. That's a way over-exaggerated version, but the basic idea holds - the more time and words you spend talking about how you aren't or don't want to do something that your context implies you're going to do, the more people will disbelieve you. I understand that you're saying that because you're earnest and over-thinking things and actually mean it, but that's not how most readers, especially women, will interpret it. You communicate that it's not a big deal by writing the first part like it actually isn't a big deal, not by explicitly saying it isn't a big deal. Both of your paragraphs actually communicate that it's a super big deal to you.
I've always tended to over-think things myself as well. I've found it a good rule of thumb to chop out 3/4 of everything I write. It's probably worth a try for you sometime - write a message how you normally would, then spend some more time chopping out 3/4 of it by taking out everything that you may reasonably assume your reader already knows or understands.
But all of that said, this is all pretty normal issues to have for young guys learning how to interact with women. You're not a bad person or anything, there's just a lot of stuff to learn that seems odd and counter-intuitive at first, and is probably the complete opposite of everything you've ever been told by whatever authority figures you've trusted. You probably didn't have much of a relationship with her in the first place, and it's a tall order to build that over text when you haven't already done so in person, so you haven't really lost much. Just forget about this message entirely and don't try too hard to talk to her if you happen to run into her again anytime soon.
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