rallycar-jepsen
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User ID: 694
To your last point, I'm a little bit hesitant about going into detail about my specific situation, but I made less than $35,000 last year working full time, and while this year is an anomaly, I probably won't break $15,000 this year.
If I were to land a position in the coming year that paid me $50,000/yr, which I'm hopeful about the prospect of pending an interview here soon, I'd consider that a substantial upgrade from any position I've ever had. I am 30.
I do consider it a major personal failing that I did not pursue a career track more optimized for income over the past decade. I've gotten in on the ground floor of about 4 different lines of work whose skill sets largely do not overlap. This was avoidable, I had the sense to know it the whole time. I have half of a BFA degree from ten years ago, which is almost as embarrassing as it would've been to pay for the whole BFA degree, and exactly as useful. I have several well-developed skills in lines of work that there's not really any good money in in the first place, and have spent many of the last few years committed to working at low wages for small to medium-sized local businesses that I knew very well from the beginning had no capacity for upward mobility or even guaranteed longterm solvency.
I'd say it's the central failure of my life, not to get too dramatic in the Friday Fun Thread. I get by alright, day to day, it could absolutely be worse, and I manage my expenses well enough, but there's certainly no room in my life for supporting a partner or a family the way I would want to be able to do at my age. I may be starting to wrench myself out of the bottom of the trough now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes me another decade to get where my peers are right now, assuming I ever do. I like to think of myself as a relatively capable and intelligent person, but the hard facts of my education choices, employment choices and resulting income over the last ten years could make a pretty solid case that I might actually be stupid.
I guess at least I don't gamble.
I had this same thing happen to me just now with a reply to a comment of mine in a different thread. It also appeared to have just turned 24h old when I got the notification for it, and I'm also almost certain I could not see it before that.
I think there's a lot of weight in just the fact that most internationally-visible Israelis (officials, reporters, etc) are fluent English speakers and often give press conferences in (pretty good) English. I expect the trifecta of "fluent in English", "white-appearing" and "culturally western/European-coded" is enough on its own to make the average American red-triber (maybe the average American in general?) start off somewhat sympathetic to you.
Incidentally, I learned just now (while double-checking my kneejerk "it seems like most Israelis speak decent English" assumption) that 20% of Israelis are fluent in Russian, and Russian is by a good margin the most popular non-official language spoken in Israel, not English. (Arabic and Hebrew are official.) Apparently that's entirely because of Jewish exodus from the USSR from the 1970s to the late 90s. Not being familiar with that demographic history, I don't even think I would've expected Russian to be in the top 10.
rallycar-jepsen
6mo ago
Your comment made me face the truth that while I don't have objections on principle to people calling for public monuments of general Lee to be torn down and removed, the mere thought of someone vandalizing or destroying a General Lee for political reasons pierces right into my classic-American-car-respecting soul.
rallycar-jepsen
6mo ago
Understood, I wasn't sure initially if you were saying that yes, these are white values, but they're obviously good instead of bad.
It's probably clear from my indecisive wording that I also don't really think of them as inherently western values any more than I think of them as white values, so I think we're actually totally on the same page here.
rallycar-jepsen
6mo ago
Yeah, learning about modern BLM type activists leaning into it was a little disheartening, even if not surprising. I think the song is worse off for the association. The circumstances that the hymn was written in were specific, but the lyrics themselves aren't. The imagery is of the liberation of the biblical Israelites from bondage in Egypt, like a lot of early black American spiritual music and poetry was.
I've been pretty checked out as far as the day-to-day happenings are concerned, and I don't know how the site looks for someone who has an account, but the thing I'm most curious about as an occasional clicker of links to Twitter is when (if at all) they're going to fully commit to the X branding and start getting "twitter" out of their urls. When will twitter.com redirect me to x.com, rather than vice-versa?
The rebrand only started being rolled out this summer, so we're really only a few months into it. I understand they're probably hesitant to break a whole internet's worth of twitter.com urls and embed systems, but you have to rip the band-aid off at some point, right? If it's not going to be Twitter anymore, at some point it has to not be Twitter anymore.
I didn't weigh in in the original thread, but I'll count myself as having been slightly surprised that the site didn't suffer more critical functionality loss after the possibly-overzealous initial mass layoffs. Some people I was paying attention to on the matter last year were really emphasizing how many critical roles they thought were being naively cast aside as unnecessary. I haven't had a Twitter account in years so I can't speak on the user experience during the transition, but presumably the lights are still on and the site still works, so I guess I'll give that W to Elon. An impression I had was that there were some significant number of people who were let go in the initial wave who ended up having their position offered back to them. There are plenty of people in my information sphere who seem happy to get a dunk in on Musk whenever they can, though, so that might not have been an honest and nuanced appraisal of the situation.
rallycar-jepsen
6mo ago
Interesting - YouTube's automatic closed caption translations did a very admirable job handling this video. Some terms and turns of phrase throw it off, but I definitely got the gist of 80%+ of the spoken information content here. More than I expected.
If someone had asked me before I'd read these posts about what I associated with the political cartoon meme of an octopus or kraken with its tentacles outstretched around some geographic area that represents unchecked, sprawling power and influence, I might've thought about depictions of a Jewish World Order somewhere down the line, sure, but I also strongly associate it with similar depictions of World Communism/Russia, British colonialism, even oil companies and other international business monopolies.
"Octopus political cartoon" as an image search returns a wide variety of illustrations, many much older than WWII, many much more recent that have to do with more recent issues. This article [ https://neverwasmag.com/2017/08/the-octopus-in-political-cartoons/ ] catalogues a few, many of them going back to the late 1800s. A couple are related to negative assertions about Jews or Jewish conspiracies, most aren't. It's just ... been a common visual trope for when you want to portray some entity as sprawling and overreaching for over a century. I think the first one I thought of personally was the Standard Oil cartoon from apparently 1904.
I could see it if the octopus plush was white-and-blue striped and had sprawling tentacles like the political cartoons. I can definitely imagine a theoretical, unambiguously antisemitic octopus plush. It's just interesting to slide all the way from "the sprawling octopus trope has been used in antisemitic propaganda" to "the sprawling octopus trope is antisemitic" and then to "any imagery featuring an octopus may be an antisemitic dogwhistle in the right context."
Personally I expect the views of a lot of people on the far left to have shifted about specifically, narrowly, Palestinian culture and its current capacity for peaceful statehood. I expect it to become somewhat less fashionable on the left to justify brutality by Palestinian militants against Israel and the general sympathy toward it among the Palestinian populace, even for people who consider Israel an obviously bad settler colonialist apartheid state on the wrong side of history.
Do I expect that shift to translate into a proportional priors update on related issues domestically? Not really. I think it's too easy to rationalize away as, no, that's them, that's unique, it's a regrettable but isolated case, the situation over here isn't like the situation over there, and the people we're talking about over here aren't like the people over there.
I'm an American thinking about the response from the American far left about American immigration policy and culture issues, though. The needle movement elsewhere on domestic issues may be more dramatic.
rallycar-jepsen
1yr ago
No new information to add here, just thanking you for the helpful response. I think I'm going to dive a little deeper into the world of photogrammetry.
rallycar-jepsen
1yr ago
Seconding 5434a at not understanding the sublimation bit, but a couple of weeks ago I was driving to work in the morning alone on a dark country road listening to '100 Years' by Five for Fighting (2003) and some flood gate just unlatched in my brain and I spent the remaining 15 minutes of my commute just absolutely emphatically sobbing, laughing, profoundly sad and terribly grateful to be alive, struck by the absurdity of the experience.
This was I think the third time this 19 year old #28 US Billboard Hot 100 Single soft rock ballad has flipped that exact switch for me while driving alone, over the course of the last probably 6 months. Always catches me on normal ass days.
rallycar-jepsen
1yr ago
It's actually reassuring that I'm not the only one confused about that! Not that I'm assigning any particular positive or negative valence to it ... they seem like a lively bunch ... I just wouldn't have guessed.
Does it have to do with us building the site out of their codebase or is the relationship an old one that I've just never noticed?
I just mean edge case in the sense of "statistically, most minority racial groups in the US do have a known country of origin to point to within three or four generations, but this one is not as simple as that."
Thinking about it again, there must also be some percentage of Mexican/Hispanic-identifying people in the western US who are descendants of people who were already living on the land that the US subsumed. I don't know what that percentage is - honestly I don't have a good grasp on the history of Central America in the 1600s-1900s, and I don't know when "Mexican" and later "Hispanic" as identity categories started eclipsing identification with the various indigenous people groups that the Mexican empire itself subsumed. I suppose it could be argued that any such person who identified as Mexican could still be sent back to Mexico, since Mexico still exists.
Of course then there's the case of all the other North American indigenous groups. I suppose you could forcibly rez everyone who's not already rezzed who meets a certain threshold of native ancestry and then demand all the reservations formally secede under threat of force, and then have a bunch of independent, very poor landlocked micronations dotted around your country's interior full of people who you don't like who don't have a very favorable opinion of you now either. That doesn't seem like the kind of simple logistical solution that this expulsion plan is supposed to be able to provide though.
Maybe you can airdrop them all into the Canadian wilderness and just say hey, close enough, take it or leave it.
In all seriousness, though, the problem I'm pointing at is that the population of the US can't be cleanly divided into "people who white nationalists want to share their country with" and "people who you can send back to where their grandfather was from".
At some point you do run into "well, okay, yes, your people have been here as long as my people have or even longer, but we still would rather like you to go away if you don't mind."
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