MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17hr ago
I think to be a “nerd” in the past required a commitment that served as an effective barrier to entry that allowed the social misfits the ability to build a culture around weird stuff that doesn’t really work anymore. To be an anime fan before Crunchyroll required learning to stream from the web, likely learning Japanese to dub or sub them for the community if not simply to watch the show itself. If you wanted to be a super fan of a show, you had to find that trivia and memorize it. That doesn’t exist now because nerd media and hobbies are normal now and Nerds in the old school sense are too weird to be tolerated by the normies that now dominate those things.
I don’t count most fandoms as nerdy in the 21st century as truly nerdy. It’s mainstream now and trying to compare the fandoms of the 21st century to nerd culture from the 1990s. A niche interest naturally changes upon entering the mainstream.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18hr ago
It’s not a bad game, but it’s mostly a network thing for business people that caught on with aspirational people because rich business people play it. The reason the rich like it is because the high cost of entry (equipment, greens fees, cart rentals) tend to keep plebs away. And because it takes several hours to play a game, you can use it to do business deals in private without having to worry too much about people you don’t want in on those deals finding out about it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
19hr ago
I think it’s usually better in the case of bad habits to jump ahead before the point of having to figure out if you’re one of the ones that won’t have a major problem simply because digging out from a problem is orders of magnitude harder than stopping before it happens. An alcoholic is compulsively looking for his drink and will look for excuses to get away with drinking. Someone with a bad habit still has control.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
21hr ago
I think it’s got a lot to do with how liberals like to take advantage of meta spaces that people use to talk about stuff. Most conservatives I know have almost no interest in the meta game of their hobby unless they have a specific question. A gamer looking for help in a game or wanting better gear for their sport pops in, asks the question and leaves. So the people who sit around talking about the activities all day would tend to be liberals and thus be better equipped to enforce their wills on the hobby or at least the hobby meta game.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22hr ago
Part of the problem with using GDP and U3 unemployment numbers is that it really doesn’t capture the truth of the economy. If you’re not rich enough to be upper class, the economy isn’t all that great for you. Grocery and gas prices have gone up by a lot since 2020, the pay that you take home hasn’t kept pace. We have a crisis in the housing market where most people under 40 have no chance of buying a house (which for most people is the only way to build generational wealth), a student loan crisis in which has people pay 20% of their salary for decades for a college degree that isn’t necessarily worth it, and so if you’re in a position where you need to get on the economic ladder, it’s a lot harder to get started.
The vibesession isn’t really vibes. It’s an anomaly in the data collection which doesn’t capture the economy of the prole classes who are really struggling to maintain what used to be a reasonable lifestyle. I think the gap between the reported measurements and the real economy are deliberate attempts to hide a bad economy from the public.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1d ago
I’ve noticed the same. It’s memes all the way down. I think a lot of it is down to a couple of things: decline in literacy and numeracy (because our schools no longer care if students can read or do math at grade level), shrinking attention spans, and the always online nature of the post 1990s generations.
I suspect the always present nature of the internet has flattened culture by quite a lot because of the nature of culture and idea generation. Ideas are always thought up in isolation, by either a single individual or a small group of people. The small group has an idea — a technology, a new take on art, a new concept, a solution to a social problem, etc. — and then develops this new idea in mostly private until it reaches a point where it can be shown to the world. But because the internet is always on and in everyone’s pockets, the idea is never completed before it’s shouted to the world. In politics, these are hot takes and memes. It’s pretty easy to see once you start paying attention to it, but almost none of the political discourse is about politics it’s about appearances. Kamala is stiff on stage. Trump sounds angry a lot. Or sometimes it’s about the horse race aspect— how a certain person is doing in the polls, whether or not a certain turn of phrase helps or hurts at the polls. These things are easy to talk about with little information. They don’t even really require thought. Just start posting image macros and hot takes. And because the internet moves fast, it’s probably better not to waste time developing a viewpoint because by the time you’re done, the moment will be over.
Second, attention spans are pretty much at goldfish level. Nobody wants to read the articles, and if they do, those articles need to be short and quick reads. A five page article or half hour podcast seems to be about the limit for most people, and it helps if the article is funny and the podcast host has a jokey style. A book or long form article on a single topic especially, if done in a serious way, will be dead on arrival. Nobody wants a tome on political topics, make it short and snappy. And it’s actually impossible to have a real discussion about politics because any take longer that “boo other team” is too long. And because a real understanding of an issue in politics requires a lot of time to learn, most people can’t or won’t do that. So all that’s left is trying to win voters by having spicy memes and clever phrasing in their one-liners.
Third is the schools. We’ve had problems for decades in teaching science and math. Schools are glorified daycares with disruptive behavior being the norm rather than the exception. Teachers are often blamed for not being able to handle disruptive students, while the administrators basically refuse to punish students who disrupt classes. Kids know this so why should they bother sitting around learning boring math when they can talk in class, or play games on their phones? The end result is a population that can barely function in life. You simply cannot understand anything in science and technology without a firm grasp of mathematics. And most people don’t. You can’t understand anything else if you can’t read at high levels. And most people function at a sixth grade level in reading. At such low levels of education, understanding even the simplest political issues (not personalities, issues) becomes almost impossible. If you want to understand a topic like the war in Ukraine, reading headlines about the war isn’t going to give you much insight. The region has a long history that includes the pre-Soviet era, the USSR, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, expansion of NATO (despite promises not to), the color revolution, etc. it’s not something you can understand by performative renaming of Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv, or by referring to Russians as orcs. If you want to understand abortion then you not only need to know biology, but the statistics of who is having abortions, when and why. This requires statistics and basic scientific knowledge.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
But I think that’s exactly how to defend the institution. The issue isn’t the shooting and the debate about the shooting, the issue is an attempt to discredit the institution by dragging an incident to the public square completely without context and using it to heavily imply that cops make a sport of this kind of thing. I think defending the institution requires making exactly that point. We, as the general public, have no background for understanding this. Even the participants are unknown. This woman might have a long history of attacking people. This might be a neighborhood full of drug users and dealers. There might have been things happening before the recording started.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I think most of the interest is just how weird the election cycle is. Most people aren’t actually interested in politics, they’re interested in political drama. Ask these women to name five policies they actually want and who’s advocating for that policy, and 9/10 people couldn’t do that. They like politics when it’s juicy and nobody knows what’s going to happen next. It’s almost a soap opera at this point. And women tend to eat that up.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I think on the other side that democrats spend so much time getting permission to actually do things that they mostly end up running out their own clock and doing nothing until after they’re losing seats in congress. The end result is that they get very little of their own agenda done and mostly end up being babysitters until the GOP wins. I think we could have lots of nice things — universal healthcare, working on the student loan crisis, affordable housing, better public transportation, fixing education, you name it. Instead they don’t and so nothing happens.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I haven’t personally seen any articles rewritten. Do you have any links
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
Honestly that’s a bad question. I don’t think the court of public opinion is the place to try these kinds of issues. Most people don’t have the background to even begin to assess whether or not it’s a “good shoot” or not. So allowing the institution to be dragged before the court of public opinion to score political points is not going to do good, and in fact erodes the credibility and legitimacy of that institution. There’s no gain to be made for police to be judged by Monday Quarterbacks who have no understanding of the work involved and can sit around in air conditioned homes and offices playing the videos and debating what the officers who had mere seconds to decide on their actions and carry them out in a situation full of unknowns.
I think review boards are a better bet. They would know what the risks are, what the procedures are, and any other factors influencing the event. They could actually talk to the officers and dispatch and get a much firmer grasp of the entire situation. The best civilians can do is “they shouldn’t have done that” based on movies, tv shows, and political commentary.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I’m on board with this. It’s a problem for all kinds of reform projects— you don’t know what that job is like and want to reform it based on silly ideas from academia that only work on people who behave in statistically correct ways.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I don’t think, “record everything so we can do a post-event follow-up” is an obscure thing. Virtually every form of decision making or security insists on keeping logs and records of everything that’s going on. I could go to any IT department in any company in the country and there will be logs of everything done on the servers. But somehow people protecting Trump just sort of forgot something that every company and police department drills into new hires. At some point “I didn’t think about recording data or keeping it,” seems less like an explanation and more like an excuse.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
Maybe related to Moneypenny.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I was with friends when it happened and someone got an alert on the phone when it did. It had a kind of meme vibe to it. It was like “Trump survived and assassination attempt, brief looking at the news followed by — so anyway — and back to previous conversations.” 2024 is already so weird, we all just seem to roll with whatever happens at this point. I used to have bingo cards as a joke, next year I’m making an actual bingo card.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I think honestly people do learn from being persecuted. If they didn’t we’d never have gotten to this point. The very public cancellations will have some impact if they continue for longer, just like the Budlight thing is having an impact. I’ve noted a decline in public companies making overtly political statements since then. A lot of Pride related merchandising has declined. Companies are somewhat less vocal about DEI since the backlash against that.
What seems to work is targeted cancellations over a long enough time and having mere apologies not being enough.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
Nothing gets me more suspicious of an official account of a high profile event than “oops our recording don’t exist.” I don’t know enough to comment about the reports of multiple gunshots from multiple locations, and how to tell what is and isn’t the USSS firing back. But it seems like even if it’s not policy, there’s really so much to be gained and so little to lose in forensics investigations by having those recordings that not having them at all would be a red flag that there is something on those records that they don’t want the public to know.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
If you were assaulted at gunpoint, and I posted on Facebook the next day that I’m “very sad the shooter missed,” would you feel threatened by this?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
I’m not convinced that every instance of Autocracy is pure unadulterated evil. There are great emperors in history. The emperor of Japan managed to turn a backward medieval civilization into a state able to go toe to toe with world powers. Peter the Great built Russia into a civilization. Augustus Caesar brought peace to Rome. There were great rulers in China as well.
The vast majority end up bad. But at the same time, democracy has done some bad things as well. Democracy nuked Hiroshima. Democracy installed Hitler. Democracy dumped metric tons of Napalm over Vietnam.
I don’t think, at the end of the day, the exact form of the government matters nearly as much as the character and intelligence of the people running the government. No society run by the kinds of people our current democracy is putting in power is going to do well simply because they’re not the kinds of people capable of leadership, integrity and intellectual agility. Do you honestly believe that Biden or Trump are capable of modernizing American systems to the needs of the 21st century and the challenges of AI? I’m not convinced either one can set up a router without help. I don’t think they’re that intellectually curious (even before Biden’s debate performance).
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
This one includes an implied threat of violence. I don’t think it’s that hard to follow. Most companies already covered this in their “zero tolerance for violence and threats” policy.
I also don’t think I’m defending politics at work. This was her own private page, and to my knowledge she wasn’t going around talking about politics to everyone who walked up to her area. On the clock, I would expect anyone checking people out to stick to business and not harass people with political opinions.
Just to be clear. My policy in a perfect world would be that employees opinions posted on their own social media on their own devices on their own time are none of my business unless they promote or condone violence. The only exception would be public roles (media or marketing directors, C-suite, paid actors) or people making hiring decisions directly related to the political opinions they’re giving.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
If the person she posted about wasn’t famous in any way, would you still see it as “just an opinion?” If she saw news about a drunk uncle getting robbed at gun point and said “so sad the shooter missed,” it’s hard to see this as anything other than wanting them dead. And I think in either case, the same thing — businesses are perfectly free to have policies that forbid violence or threats of violence.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I think it depends. For a political opinion, unless that opinion in some way affects your ability to do your actual job or you’re the public face of your company, I think not only should it not get you fired but it should be protected with the same sort of rules that religion gets — you shouldn’t be able to fire liberals or conservatives for simply stating something you disagree with, much like you can’t fire a Muslim for being a Muslim. If it’s an opinion like “woman can’t do X” and people who do X are direct reports, you hire people to do X, or serve clients who do X, that’s a different thing, it’s affecting your ability to do your job. Likewise if you’re doing marketing for a company or are in some public facing role for the company, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to protect its image by firing a person who’s going to make them look bad.
Having said all that “too bad the shooter missed” isn’t political, it’s condoning violence. I don’t think she’d get the same response if she’d have just said “I don’t like Trump.” That’s not why she got fired. She wanted Trump dead, that’s why she got fired. It’s a different opinion.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7d ago
I agree that our competence probably hasn’t declined that much. But our systems are much more integrated with a lot more single points of failure. I doubt that bad updates were ever that unusual. But it wasn’t quite the same as it would have been in 1990 when there were dozens of different OS and virus software combinations and so on. One company doing one update would have only affected the few companies that had the wrong combination of systems that got a bad update. Now the combination of cloudflare and Windows is common enough that one bad update takes out thousands of computers in thousands of companies.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8d ago
I’m of the option that violence is an absolute last resort, and I don’t think it should be celebrated. Furthermore, I’m also looking at this from a threat and liability perspective for my own business. There are all kinds of things that if I know about them and don’t take charge of the situation, I’m endangering myself, my employees, my clients, and the business itself. People who celebrate recent violence against any individual is exactly that.
And to me that calculation has very little to do with Trump. It has to do with a person who sees revenge killing as a solution to problems. I’d feel much the same, as I said originally, if she’d made similar statements about an ex, a family member, or a stranger I think it would be a cause for concern because there is some risk that a person thinking in this way might get mad at a client or vender or another employee and bring a weapon to deal with the problem. Adding in the liability of not having it be a cardinal rule that violence and threats of violence will not be tolerated in any form, it’s an easy decision that has nothing to do with the political class, Trump, or any other political opinions. She can dislike Trump all she wants. But that’s not the same thing as saying that Trump deserves to be murdered.
The Olympic Games have gotten worse every iteration. The coverage is so bad that it’s nearly unwatchable. The coverage barely bothers with competition and has been steadily replacing the sports with ever longer and more maudlin stories about how the poor athlete had to overcome so much to even make the team. Most of the opening ceremony coverage thus far has been various celebrities, none of whom have anything to do with the Olympics and many of whom are no even remotely athletes.
I think honestly the only reason I’m in is to catch the obscure sports that most people don’t care about when they put them on minor cable networks or YouTube or something. Fencing is fun to watch and doesn’t get enough ratings to warrent ruining with biographies instead of showing the matches.
More options
Context Copy link