urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
23d ago
Really, really cringe things that associate elements of the American civic religion with Christianity are pretty dime-a-dozen in red tribe art, such as the most hilarious painting of all time: Jesus holding the Constitution of the United States while a Supreme Court Justice weeps.
It's exceptionally gauche to make such a piece of artwork of a living politician, but I'm sure it happens on the left too from time to time. That people invest this kind of hope in politicians is pretty ridiculous to me, but they do, and silly stuff like this results.
I think most people have generated a "what would I look like as a medieval X/what would Y look like as a Christian saint" image using AI, it's a fairly common pastime. Sharing it on social media is pretty ridiculous though.
Trump is pretty narcissistic, and this may be a symptom of that, but it's far from the most insane thing he's ever done and at this point the truth is that his supporters' support for him is something that's not amenable to anything that actually happens, and the hope that many on the left/center have that some scandal will destroy his popularity among his base just isn't going to happen. Even the Christians who were outraged by this still "back the mission."
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
23d ago
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Definitely getting in the field it was interesting to see how not-bleeding-edge a lot of corporate IT is, but also slightly comforting -- I often describe my own personality as the direct opposite of silicon valley: "move slowly and fix things." That's definitely the sort of thing I would put on a sticker.
The messy reality of maintenance/operations and the need to actually test things cautiously is a huge element of how I view computers; I've always related to them in an operations kind of a way and even in my youth I was only moderately interested in programming. It didn't seize me the way it often does other people. I'm not sure anyone dreams of being level 1 support, but I did dream a bit as a kid about being a sysadmin, especially once I got heavily into Linux which I've used on my desktop for about 10 years now.
That said, I do love automation, orchestration, and I suppose hyper-convergence, and I do use them extensively in my homelab. It's definitely a goal of mine to use those at some point in my career, and I know of some shops who use them. Perhaps time will bring them more into the mainstream of general IT, because IaC is awesome (and is genuinely something that use of AI makes significantly easier to learn).
I love teaching, and I've been told by people that I'm good at sitting down with someone and explaining things in a way they can understand. So the opportunity to share knowledge and help people learn/get people back to work/find a workaround or a fix that helps people move on with their day is very satisfying to me. I hate computers getting in my way as much as anyone, and it's great to get them out of people's way.
The lack of significance on the balance sheet is definitely the greatest area of trepidation for me as I look forward in my career, in the sense that I do have concern about layoffs/being unable to do the job properly because of limited buy-in from management.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
23d ago
Right, and what I'm saying is that being in the top 5% being regarded "not particularly impressive and just an OK result, specifically within the context of academic achievement" is blackpilling. I agree that's not impressive for the elite world, but no one's talking about the elite here. It is not a failure to not be part of the elite. The elite should not be the inherent frame through which we view the world, such that "he still could be [part of the elite] through other avenues" is the consolation prize, and not "he has many options for a non-elite but good life available." If being in the top 6-7% means you likely get a decent job, with some hedging there, that's pretty blackpilling as an idea. I guess it depends on what we mean by "decent"; and if "decent" is only somewhat achievable by this portion of the population, that's the starting point for social upheaval.
Again, it's not about whether specific professional areas are a good or bad fit -- and I agree law, investment banking or management consulting aren't -- it's about how we talk about people's achievement, and whether we have a world where people who aren't in the top 1-2% on any measure can expect to have a good life. Not an elite life, not a fantastic splendorous life, just a good life.
urquan
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24d ago
I wouldn’t say they’re killing it, just that there is a bit of opportunity. I don’t know how to compare.
To be clear, by IT I mean general office IT support/MSPs, I can’t tell you how programmers or infosec people are doing. This is not a very tech focused area, but there’s always a need for general IT services even in flyover country because every organization uses IT. Last I heard cybersecurity type positions were desperate to be filled, and the big issue was finding people actually qualified for those kinds of roles. But what I hear from cyber people around here is their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
24d ago
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
Where I am, IT seems to be doing fairly well. I know people who aren't spectacularly bright, but technically interested, who are doing well in entry-level IT and moving up into engineering positions. The hard part is getting your foot in the door, but once you do, there are opportunities available. They aren't always glamorous but they're real.
That said, success among young men in general is extremely bimodal, in ways that aren't necessarily correlated to socioeconomic background. I'd say half the zoomer or millennial men I know are unemployed or significantly underemployed, in a way that tracks mental health/functioning/grit/economic necessity more than it does raw intelligence or capability. Several are bankrolled partially or fully by the women in their lives, who have normal but not glamorous white-collar jobs that are generally higher-status or pay than what the men have. The ones who don't have a girlfriend are... pretty damn depressed, in the "repeatedly dropped out of college and lost touch with all their friends because they sleep 13 hours a day" way.
Young women have a distribution of success too, of course, but it seems to map most directly onto SES than it does individual factors. So I have a female friend whose mother was bipolar and is struggling to launch, but most of the college-educated ones are white-collar workers making median+ salaries, and it's the non-college-educated ones who seem to be stuck in the service sector.
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
In some ways I'm in the winning column, in some I'm in the not-so-good one. I don't have a lot of optimism for the future and I do feel like many of my early academic dreams died due to overcompetition and the marginalization of people like me in elite or semi-elite spaces. I suppose I'm just trying to hold on to what success I do have, but I have very little buy in for the system as it exists -- I just don't feel homicidal and find it morally outrageous that people do. Our problems are far, far more diffuse and our evils are far, far more banal than anything that would justify killing people over.
For the record, this is in a flyover state most coastal folks probably think of as a shithole. We have our problems but it's home.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
24d ago
You know, "being in the top 5-6% of educational achievement isn't good, this is insufficient" is a pretty blackpilling line of thought in itself. Imagine how screwed you'd be to be in the bottom 94%. That's almost everyone, and I guess we're just sweeping them under the rug and calling them bad dummy dumbs who don't count.
(This is independent of whether it is, or should be, sufficient to practice law or any other specific field. Law seems like a pretty horrible profession even in 'good times.')
This is where it gets interesting. I don't interact with a lot of engineers in my daily life outside of work. Most of my social group is blue collar (service industry, trades, retail), college faculty and staff, or retirees (musical connections). Someone has brought it up in every social interaction I've had in the last 24 hours, and in every case, the general sentiment was that it was a shame the guy didn't have better aim.
This is crazy to me — I’m pretty sure most of the people around me couldn’t name Altman even if asked. People use ChatGPT, sometimes Gemini, sometimes Claude, no one thinks this is going to lead to “AGI” (a term they’re unfamiliar with), and in general ai chat is viewed as very helpful and often better than a google search, ai art is viewed mildly skeptically mostly for “can we believe photo evidence now?” reasons rather than “we must save the poor artists from the horrific slop!” reasons, and most people probably couldn’t name a single major executive involved in AI.
I’m sure the blue tribers around here are angry in these ways, but the “these evil tech billionaires are destroying society!” isn’t something I hear often irl. There’s been a lot of discussion about the Iran war and some about the Epstein files, but AI doomerism or boosterism just… isn’t a thing. It’s a technology people use, no one expects it to radically reshape the world or end it, just disrupt things a bit in the same way the smartphone did.
I guess a lot of people really don’t like AI, but my family and friends, a very small sample size, like it and use the chat models a lot for everyday tasks. I guess there’s going to be some job disruption, but I suspect that’s more because executives believe AI can do more than it actually can. It’s a tool that’s useful as an adjunct to human judgment, and I wouldn’t trust this generation of AI with truly autonomous operation of any real sort.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
26d ago
As a zoomer, I'm more familiar with him via this quote than I am with his games. Though I have played a little bit of DOOM.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
29d ago
I think those are good things to think about, but it’s genuinely hard to give advice when all we know is generalities.
I don’t know what you mean by “meltdowns”, but sometimes people do have an extreme reaction to stress. How much of a dealbreaker that is depends on how serious the stress was — if your young child is brutally murdered and you writhe in fits of anguish, I don’t know that many people are going to say that’s unexpected. It depends on what the stress was, what the meltdown was, and exactly how that interfaces with your own emotional resilience. That was probably the topic of the couples’ counseling.
It’s highly common for men dating women to struggle with her emotional reactions to stress, because the way women deal with and externalize stress is just different from the way men tend to (but not always). Keeping up with the basics like engaging in active listening, supportive communication, and distinguishing venting from solutions-focused conversation is good. But you have to couple that with a sense of internal stability: often what women want from their man in an emotional crisis is a feeling of protection, reassurance, stability, and steadfastness. And knowing how to respectfully listen while guiding her away from the feeling of stress and towards that feeling of protection and reassurance is a very helpful relationship skill. You have to lead and stabilize without being domineering.
What does stand out to me in your description is that you live separately, and in fact an hour away — LDRs are always, always hard. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with emotional struggles, because one of the selling points of a relationship is that they’re a person who provides physical affection when you’re struggling.
We talk about women getting physical affection from their girlfriends, but it is extremely common, almost ubiquitous, for women to find being held and embraced by their man extremely calming and protective in a special way, for reasons we could write evopsych stories about until the cows come home. What I’ve found in relationships is that talking helps, but only to a point, and often finding a way to laugh, a distraction, a comforting presence, is more helpful to a partner in distress. So the struggle with your LDR may be that the most helpful element of a relationship is denied you most of the time, and that degrades things over time. Relationships are fundamentally about physical touch.
Do you video chat frequently? Sometimes just seeing your beau’s face, their smile, their eyes, can help you feel more connected. If you’re both part of the blue bubble master race, you can use SharePlay to do things like watch YouTube or short videos together, which might give you an opportunity to laugh together. That’s powerful.
But the most important thing you can do is work to make this LDR into a short-distance relationship. Getting yourselves closer together in whatever way you can is extremely important. A relationship where you can just be together, casually, without counting the minutes, is a massive quality of life increase.
Another thing that I see is that you talked only in generalities about your connection, your intimacy — what brought you two together? What drew you to her? What kinds of things do you do, when you’re in that fun and playful mood? When you’re together, what makes you inseparable? Being able to understand what you like about the relationship, and what’s unique about your bond compared to other bonds you’ve had, is absolutely essential to answering the question about whether you want to move forward with the relationship or not.
I hope this helps.
urquan
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30d ago
Ah, I read the OP again, we’re talking about politicians, not voters or commentators.
Perhaps this is just the right moment for electoral comeuppance, if you back a bad horse in politics you get taken down.
The GOP needs new blood that’s neither subservient to Trump nor wacko, but I guess grifters, wafflers, and “the Jews made me do it”-ers are what we get. If either party could stop being idiotic and start actually dealing with our domestic crises like adults, that would be great.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
30d ago
I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I could never have guessed that it was comprised because {reasons}
Is “I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I made a bad decision” not an option?
Confidence and support are still falling and that's despite the selection bias that people who change their minds don't always show up as mind changers, because they retcon it to begin with.
I voted for Trump because he promised no foreign interventionism and I thought Trump 1 was better than Biden, and have regretted it immensely. Unfortunately, there aren't many people who are willing to listen to this; strong Trump supporters hold this to be traitorous, and Democrats don't provide much of a runway for people who had reasons to support Trump but feel betrayed, because they were already on the bandwagon of anyone who voted for Trump is evil. Retconning your vote is basically the only pathway to being respected, so it's not surprising people are doing it. Trump is a phenomenon that has to be survived, because he has a stranglehold on his base. Hopefully the country survives.
That said, unfortunately the anti-war movement on the right has coalesced around antisemites and undesirables like Carlson and Owens, who oppose this war, like the local antisemites, because they believe Iran is a necessary counterweight to Israel which is the country they actually care about. I'm anti-war for reasons that rhyme with leftist views; I hate the American foreign policy apparatus, I believe it is a force for evil in the US, and I believe it does damage to the world while not aiding actual American interests. So it's frustrating to see that the right's anti-war impulses are being redirected into a shape that blames the problems of American foreign policy on THE JEWS!!! and not, for instance, the military-industrial complex, the blob, and the deep state.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
30d ago
I think Trump has been uniquely bad in terms of foreign policy by a pretty massive degree, and this is absolutely the worst time for the US to have bad foreign policy. And it's not even that he's got a strategy that he's competently carrying out but it's a bad policy, it's that he seems to not have a policy and yet is doing so many erratic things that damage US foreign relations that he might as well be taking a wrecking ball to the country. Jackson was pretty bad on domestic policy, but Trump is worse on foreign policy. At least Jackson actually had a military record behind him.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
I was just a standoffish kid that didn't pay attention to social queues
Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean cues, not queues.
But I did chuckle imagining young gattsuru just cutting in line with such frequency that clinicians decided he should be assessed for autism.
two or three questions involving a wooden puzzle cube stick in my mind that I've since learned were developmental disability tests
Oh, like the IQ test pattern blocks, or something else? The blocks I had to assemble in patterns were what I remember most about when I had to take an IQ test for gifted education when I was young -- I don't think I did so well on that part.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
Hm, interesting. I think for me, maybe for my dad, it's that the situation is structured and in public speaking you're given 'the floor' and people are socially expected to pay attention to you, or at least pretend. So it's an environment where you don't have to fight for airtime. I guess I also like it because it's a situation where you're permitted to monologue without interruption about a topic, which I always find enjoyable. Even if I have to improvise -- I enjoy improvising more than most people enjoy reading a prepared speech. It's like jazz.
But it's the back-and-forth and the fighting for airtime and the having to engage in real-time with ambiguous social dynamics that I find hard to deal with. It's difficult trying to figure out how to say something that's bland enough to not offend but interesting enough to achieve rapport, and then follow up, in real time, with a useful reply that continues that pace, with someone I don't know well.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.
The 8-Bit Guy is a youtuber I follow, he makes videos on retrocomputing. He got semi-cancelled a few years ago because he's a Texan gun guy who used to have an airsoft channel and once open-carried a rifle at a shopping mall (which is legal in Texas). But he's also a big EV guy, and he did a whole series of videos about adding a solar system to his house as an emergency backup, after the Texas grid blackout a few years ago caused his heating to die, a pipe to burst, and his house flooded.
He said he didn't like the "sell your electricity back to the grid" solar deployment mechanism, because that requires you to be on the grid and doesn't have the opportunity to run independently -- if the grid goes down, so does your solar, to avoid backfeeding in an outage. But apparently you can set up off-grid electricity as a backup if you install a specialized switch in your breaker that forces the grid connection off when your solar is on.
I guess it's like you said; libertarians and tech people are pro-renewables, but also pro-nuclear, and there's not much of a place in the Republican coalition for anything but fossil fuels.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
This makes me curious where your temperament lines up with the stereotype of your subfield.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
It feels much more natural and at home in the company of close family and friends. I've also strangely never had any problems speaking to large crowds or groups. I can do that with ease when others typically run away from the stage or podium.
That's fascinating -- me too. I hate smalltalk and I struggle to make connections with a stranger, but I love public speaking even if it makes me nervous. My father is the same way, he is a teaching professor and an extremely animated one, but also extremely introverted and hard to get to know.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
I'd quibble that I've been specifically tested and found not
Was it a concern at one point that led to evaluation?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
It's disagreeable town, with autism town being a bit of a side hustle.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
The fact that he's actually Bulgarian makes the professor's anger about it being a Communist uniform more explicable -- Bulgaria also suffered as part of the Eastern Bloc.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
Distressed students pointed the costume out to their principal, Joe Powers, but Powers explained to students the boy was dressed as a Communist-era East German soldier, Powers wrote Monday in a note to staff.
"I tried to explain the context and time period of the uniform to the students who spoke with me, but apparently the student who wore the uniform may have told people it was from the 1940s," Powers wrote.
A video of the male student goose stepping during a school Halloween parade — accompanied by a chorus of boos — has since made the rounds on social media.
On Thursday, in an email to parents, Powers acknowledged the situation should have been handled differently.
"As more information has come to light, including additional video of the incident and through conversations with our staff and students, we realize that this has greatly impacted our community and acknowledge that we should have handled the incident with greater care, and communicated more clearly with the school community about the nature of the incident," Powers said.
"Let me say clearly and plainly that what occurred caused harm to many of our students and staff who recognized this as an act of antisemitism. Let me also say clearly and plainly that intolerance, bigotry, and bias-based behaviors have no place in our school," Powers said.
Cassie Creswell, who has a child at Jones and is a former chair of the Local School Council, said Powers should have immediately made the student change out of the costume and called the student’s parents to have a serious discussion about the situation.
"I’m very concerned," Creswell said. "I have been tracking the rise in right-wing extremism in the suburbs for a while now, and this is a real thing, and it’s connection to actual physical violence is a real thing and to have the response from the school be what it was, it’s very disturbing."
Special support staff were scheduled to be at the school this week, and safe spaces would be made available "for students to process the harm they’ve experienced," Powers said in his email to parents.
This sounds like an onion article.
One the one hand, the student's parents were really dumb for letting him go to school dressed like this. On the other hand, the principal was really dumb for not realizing this was going to cause blowback, and not realizing that, since he was already embroiled in a dispute with the school board over him not being obsequiously leftist enough as per the article, this was going to be politically dangerous to him.
On one foot, Creswell sounds like she'd be fun at parties and probably gives out toothbrushes to kids on Halloween. On the other foot, I love that the principal was just autistically explaining to the students that this was a Communist soldier outfit, not a Nazi soldier outfit.
No, you haven't been harmed because a weird kid did a weird kid thing and you took offense to it. Grow up.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
But that isn't special
Well, try telling them that.
Even worse are the people who apparently have diagnosed (or suspected?) BPD, and then openly brag about it. Even on dating profiles.
Ah, the gifted kid paradox. Everything in the early years is easy, so you don't develop study skills and grit, and then when you face something actually tough it crushes you.
(Also, AMD networking skills are extremely important -- how are you going to succeed if you can't connect your Ryzen gaming beast to the internet for studying? :P)
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