pigeonburger
1yr ago
If your social media...and hell...maybe your social experience tells you that FwB relationships are very normal, maybe in that case you think that maybe that's LESS intrusive than asking someone out on a date. I can easily see how someone would think this. Again, I still think that's bad advice, and a dumb thing to do.
Yes, I think it's very easy to get the impression FwB relationships are common and normal from the media too. Not just social media. And maybe for some groups of people outside of my filter bubble they are. But OP fucked up by jumping in without understanding the dynamics by which these relationships happen. The name isn't helping: FwB implies it is an "upgraded" friendship (friendship + sex), whereas to my understanding they're more "downgraded" dating (dating - romance and commitment). While the difference between those two definitions seems academical as the resulting status is pretty much the same, there is a meaningful difference in that it changes completely the direction you approach them from.
The main issue is that the left have been successfully propagandized to that they need both socialized medicine and UBI, and the right has been succesfully propagandized to that they need neither, ensuring no one on either side notices here that a better, perhaps the best, solution is spending as much money as is currently spent on the safety net on UBI instead, being in the process more generous in general to recipients (less money being lost in administrative matters) while at least partly preserving market incentives.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Yeah, maybe the person you're responding to is in the tech bubble, but "non-tech-primary organization" are a vast majority of the economy. It's not just industries with a reputation for being conservative with IT: the vast majority of businesses that aren't specifically high-tech and front line of IT sector (ie, not FAANG) are still struggling to manage the move from on-premise virtualisation to SaaS or IaaS, like 2 or 3 "paradigms" back from what we're told IT is about now, and that's WITH the boost the pandemic gave to those modernisation efforts. They are nowhere near orchestration, PaaS and infrastructure as code, if they could even envision a benefit from those.
And I think it bears repeating, it's not just IT-conservative industries like banking, hospitals, etc... It's every non-tech-startup small business. It's farms. It's almost every company at any scale that works with industrial machinery, warehouses, etc...
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Having read it, as far as I could see it doesn't use motte-and-bailey arguments, it highlights a real problem (large caritative funds are free money for a class of professional managers to invest in whatever their own pet causes are, uncoupled from any requirement of being efficient, and sometimes clearly against the intentions of individuals who provided the initial capital). The problem with the article imo is how blunt and unsophisticated the author's solution is, pretty much "just ban them". I haven't read anything else on this blog or from this author so perhaps he does not care about setting dark precedents and preserving liberalism. To those of us who do, a more elegant solution to aligning incentives and ensuring such entities either don't spring up or aren't hijacked, perhaps a more social than political solution, would be a lot more palatable.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
While I could be mistaken and it could just be a trick played on me by my filter bubble, I believe this:
The author also believes that younger generations have been trained to expect diversity in entertainment and recoil when it is not present.
is an illusion cast on us to make it seem as if it is fait accompli, so we do not resist it. My impession is that young generations, save a loud activist minority, do not care about this and would rather consume entertainment that prioritise quality over "activism" when both are on offer, which is why it seems like an imperative for people pushing this illusion that all remnants of past quality entertainment must be "remade" and tainted with activism, as its mere presence next to its modern counterparts shade it entirely. This is where I believe we differ, they must destroy the past not because they've won, but because they fear its presence will break the spell they've put on us.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Could be indirectly. Maybe the settlement pushed Fox to ask their hosts to tighten their belt and/or the leash they're kept on and that didn't sit well with Carlson.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
Pain is: a prompt for corrective action, a learning opportunity, or pointless and should be moved on from... Pain is never: an excuse to inflict misery on others, a way to increase your status, an indication of your worth as a human being...
A kid who learns this would in my opinon be well equipped to deal with life.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
Fishing. I haven't been in years, I desperately yearn for it.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
It's a shame because Reddit largely killed the standalone forum for non-ossified communities. For the passively apolitical majority, those who are okay with simply ignoring the politics or are used to hearing it as background noise and don't think there's anything weird with it, it's a Schelling point for conversations on any topic.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
Recently my gaming obsession has been submarine warfare simulators. They are the best games to play to quickly grow a sense of what you're saying; submarine warfare is nothing but developing a sense of how confident you can be with limited and potentially unreliable information in an adversarial environment. Possibly the purest distillation of that insight.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
I'm sure the conservatives would all love to conquer the institutions, they're mostly wary that yet another "ally" savvy to the ways of the institutions will turn out to be an infiltrator who will betray them when the stakes get high enough. Many would rather bet on the boisterous man who makes himself an enemy of institutions at every turn. He might not be the best to convert institutions, but perhaps he will succeed at razing them or culling them (he hasn't so far, but there's also a much longer record of conservatives betraying their base).
pigeonburger
10mo ago
we exist to get beat
Would correct that to "we exist to get bought".
There's the stigma that Canadian companies cannot compete in a mature international industry so if one happens to be an early innovator, it'll take a foreign company buying them up to allow them to reach their proper potential. It also doesn't help that Canada, outside of Quebec, is pretty much the perfect example of an anti-nationalist country. An anti-nationalist country doesn't nurture its companies in the local market until they're able to fend off for themselves on the international market to make us proud. We'll either send them off to get slaughtered too early, or keep them on as a little protected local pet until the international market comes knocking.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
Sierra's Fast Attack is abandonware, has a decent tutorial and goes pretty far as far as cold war submarine simulations go. It should be easy to find a version packaged for Dosbox.
The current most complete cold war submarine (amongst other platforms) simulator is the opaque and aging "Dangerous Waters". It's very in-depth, and but it takes a long time to reach a point where you can have fun with it. And it's not free (though it's often cheap).
Two other popular cold war submarine games are the old Red Storm Rising and Cold Waters, though they wouldn't really be considered simulators, at least not hard simulators. They abstract away the information gathering game to a single number. They make submarine warfare to be more about dodging torpedoes like in the movies. The first one is abandonware and the second one is fairly recent (and often on sale).
WWII-era sims are possibly an easier way into submarine simulators. They are also about data gathering, but less intensely so. The Silent Hunter series is the main one; starting with 3 in particular they're worth looking at, though they're not abandonware. I hear good things about Aces of the Deep but haven't tried it yet. Not abandonware either.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
Outside of the obvious problems with it (Harrison Ford's age and following up on a train wreck of a movie that bifurcated the lore in a detrimental direction), Indiana Jones can't be remade or followed up on succesfully because Indiana Jones is a throwback to pulp adventure stories/comic books almost no one remembers now. I think the last thing to succesfully tap into nostagia for that that was The Mummy in... 1999. Now, Indiana Jones IS the reference. There's only so much you can achieve by referencing two/three beloved movies (opinions are mixed on #2).
This is a broader problem with remake/sequel culture, succesful pop culture franchises were built by drawing heavily from preceding pop culture but in a new way; a remix. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back built a franchise through heavy inspiration from pulp sci-fi and samurai(/western) movies; mix them together, you get Star Wars. Return of the Jedi and more strongly the sequel trilogy's inspiration is... Star Wars. No significant additional inspiration was added to it, they just remixed a remix. Nothing new is created, they're just diluting the original signal. Of course, the fans would probably be disappointed if they did anything else; the prequel trilogy was mostly rejected because it was different. (Rejecting it because it wasn't very good is fine; rejecting it because it doesn't feel like Star Wars is a case of "careful what you wish for" that we can all appreciate in hindsight with the sequel trilogy).
So anyway, sorry for the meandering post to come to the shocking conclusion that remake and belated sequels are creatively bankrupt, but I just had to take the opportunity reflecting on the new Indiana Jones movie to work through why it is creatively bankrupt.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
When I last saw pictures of him promoting the movie he looked as if he regretted not managing to kill himself in his last plane accident.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Yes, I think it's fairly obvious they do, but they don't want to do it with their money, they want to do it with the common pot. And they get pushback because there's people suffering close to the bottom who work hard, floating just above the line where a safety net would need to catch them, who really could use the money they're forced to put into the common pot, who wonder why they shouldn't keep their money instead especially when they see others not working as much as they do being entitled to equal or more of it.
And as a result, the elites feel annoyed because they believe (and I think they truly do) that if everyone just shut up and paid taxes and didn't try to resist their plans, everyone could have a strong safety net and if they have to enact policies that explicitely fuck over the red tribers they'll see the necessity of a strong safety net, and they'll stop resisting.
So in general, they believe they have to soften up people a bit to accept ideas like UBI.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Gonna try to steelman the X rebranding here.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
Moving to X could be a very powerful move because specifically of it's weak branding. At this point in time, I think most americans and people who are deep into the american sphere either currently hate or have at some point hated Twitter. Right-wingers because it's been banning them hard under the previous management, mainstream progressivesbecause it stopped banning right wingers under current management. Nazis because it doesn't let them post aggressive slurs at people. Communists because it's a corporation owned by a billionaire. Libertarians because they respond to government requests. Greens because I don't know, computers use electricity. Centrists because everyone is yelling politically charged polarizing content at them on it.
Not only sunsetting the brand, but making the branding less salient can be a smart move. Seeing X branding when clicking on a link to a post somewhere doesn't remind me immediately "oh yeah, its twitter, fuck twitter!" like it used to. And in time, X being so generic might avoid having such strong emotions associated with it; it's more likely to be a liability for the company.
Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
Indeed, as others have pointed out, this mindset is at the heart of Stoïcism. It's also fairly close to Taoism.
What Stoïcism instructs is what to direct your will at: yourself. If you think that you have some influence over the DA, even just as a private citizen voting and writing letters to other people, then consider doing that. Or shape yourself into someone who would become a DA that would achieve the outcomes that you consider optimal. Make yourself into a better person and a better world will flow from that. The world is what it is; it can be improved if the people in it are improved, but the only one you can ultimately control is yourself. "But this DA is bad and is encouraging more bad people to do bad things!" Good is virtue, bad is vice. And virtue and vice can only be truly known from the inside. If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA? And your view that these charges should be brought up against these criminals, it's important that you observe your own thinking to understand if that's truly driven by wisdom, a virtue, or by a vice (in that case I think most would see wrath as a vice). Broadly: worry about yourself. Your soul, your actions, your reasoning.
And couching things in emotional terms, is a sure way to lessen your power of reasoning, to lessen the quality of your very soul. You see it everywhere; the originally well-meaning extremists that believe that because they see what they consider an injustice, it gives them licence to cause similar injury to others. Or single issue political/social crusaders who become blind to unintended consequences because they see one thing as "bad".
I've had similar experiences to you, for me the difficulty has been piercing through the veil of expertise of the priesthood. If you sit them and debunk a specific thing, they'll still hold the belief because "If the truth was so plainly different surely all those elite journalists wouldn't believe a falsehood! There must be some more complexity to it that you don't know or understand..."
I feel like in a lot of cases, it's because people have an unconscious understanding that if they let one thing through to show them "yes, the news achors absolutely would tell you easily debunked falsehoods" (and note, this applies to the priesthoods of any political team) it'll all come crashing and they'll be cast out into the intellectual wilderness as we here mostly are; and sadly I have to admit it's a place many people are not equipped to face mentally and emotionally.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Restaurants in East Asia, or restaurants of East Asian cuisine abroad?
Here in the west if a restaurant has a giant menu it's usually a bad sign because it means nothing's really good. But I think for East Asian cuisine restaurants abroad, they feel kind of forced to serve a few (often westernized to hell) "staples" of asian food else people complain. Like I see a lot of korean or vietnamese restaurants serving sushi because people just don't know or don't care. Thaï restaurants will be forced to serve general tso's chicken, all noodle restaurants will be forced to serve pad thai, etc...
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Well, that's specifically what I was talking about too!
If you're in a large city with a big East Asian population with some effort you can usually find the small places that exist to cater to that community instead of "the locals" and they will usually have smaller menus and much better food. But serving Chinese in particular is a tough one because China is big and its cuisine hasn't homogenized the way Japan's did for instance, and Canadians have no idea what Chinese people eat. It's probably simpler for the restaurants to just go with what their customers expect to see on the menu: every single variation of noodles/rice/dumpling/soup with chicken/pork/beef/shrimp, overly sweet sauces that is general tso's flavored, lemon flavored, peanut flavored, fish sauce flavored... rather than have to explain to confused Canadian who felt adventurous enough to go a chinese restaurant, but not THAT adventurous, that she might actually enjoy the braised tendon or the chicken feet.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Yes. It's not a waste of energy to understand his actions in the sense that if you have to make a decision on his actions, like voting for or against him in an election, you need to act wisely and justly. But it doesn't really matter to YOU whether it was driven by vice or vertue, I was simply pointing out that you can't really tell whether something outside of yourself is good or bad; you can't know all outcomes, and you can't know other people's internal thoughts. All you can really know is your own.
Now this is one of the parts where Stocism tends to lose some people, but Stoics, like most ancient virtue ethics philosophers, consider that ethics are simple and innate. When we're close to nature, we do not need to be taught that being rash, cowardly, mean and violent is bad, it "feels" innately bad. Likewise being wise, bold, nice, and calm feels good. The Crusader or the Jihadist who commit large scale murder are doing so because instead of focusing on themselves and their actions, they focus on the world, which they see as "evil". And trying to correct the world directly blinds you to your own actions. If instead of focussing on whether the world or other people are good or evil, he were to think "is my conduct virtuous?" as he's about to massacre an innocent, he would likely come to a different conclusion. You can commit an awful lot of evil when trying to improve the world, that you wouldn't be committing if you were trying to improve yourself.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Of course these duties are much less grand than making the perfect society. You just have to be a good whatever it is you are. Neighbor, husband, mother, worker, student, businessman, beggar; it doesn't really matter what or who you are, but you have to play the cards you have as well as you can. Only because to not do it is a waste.
That is quite important, yes. If you're in actor in the middle of a play and you think that the play sucks, you're not going to make it better if you start stealing lines from another actor because you think you can say them better than he can. That will only ruin the play even more. The only thing you can do to improve the play, is to play your own role as best you can.
While we're on the subject of Star Trek Voyager episodes with interesting allegories for race, there's Living Witness (which was directed by Tim Russ, the actor for Tuvok, even!). There's two alien races living on the same planet and Voyager's passage caused a war after which one of the races subjugated the other. Centuries have passed and relations between the two races have improved, but a copy of the Doctor wakes up and finds out that this relatively peaceful state of affair is based on a rather false retelling of the events where the race that won the war was belligerent and had Voyager kill the leader of the other race for them, when the doctor knows the subjugated race actually attacked Voyager unprovoked. The Doctor is stuck between leaving things as is, even if it's based on a lie, or pursuing the truth, which threatens the peace as some of the subjugating race always felt bad about the way they were cast as the villains and the subjugated race wants to clings to a view of history where they were blameless. Eventually it's settled on the truth. The whole episode has a feel of exasperation towards grievance politics.
Voyager got maligned for having some of the worst episodes (and the worst multi episode arcs) in Star Trek, but it had some great one-offs too. And it's funny to me how a show like Star Trek that's meant to be progressive can be "left behind" by an ideology that by design keeps moving.
I think that's probably what will keep the 90s special as far as nostalgia goes; it feels like if we could time travel back to the 90s, we could have our cake and eat it too. The differences between then and now are technically qualitative, but they don't feel like they are, and the advantages of pre-Internet age hadn't really faded away yet. We often focus on how kids used to play outside, but rainy, bad weather days were boring. Now, possibilities for entertainment don't change much despite the weather, but before video game consoles, you had to hope your parents were willing to drive to go rent a VHS, or before the VCR you had to hope something good was on TV, and before the TV, you were pretty much fucked if nothing good was on the radio, etc... In the 90s, you could have it all. If you wanted social media: BBSes, usenet, forums were there. If you wanted to speak to someone across the world, there were crude audio video chat platforms like CU-SeeMe. You could play tons of videogames of all kinds, if you were on a computer you could download them too. Of course, when we imagine ourselves in the 90s, we tend to imagine ourselves as early adopters, even though few people had computers and internet (and broadband internet). But yeah, the perks of the current years were mostly possible, even if few people took advantage of them, and the tradeoffs hadn't materialized yet.
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