BahRamYou
16hr ago
good advice, although to be fair i wasn't that serious about working there. It was a spur of the moment thought while I was hanging out at the bar.
BahRamYou
1d ago
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company
I actually did literally get a job as a dishwasher that way as a teenager. But it helped that, (a), someone else I knew worked there, so he had already vouched for me and told me how to ask and (b) the place itself was such a shitty job that no sane adult would want the job. They relied on teenagers to young to have any other options and, uh, recent ex-cons.
More recently I tried to get a bartending job this way. The bar was crazy busy, the staff was all obviously overworked and exhausted. I asked them if I could apply. They seemed open to the idea, but they were just shift workers, the actual manager and owner were nowhere on site. They took down my name and info, but never called me back. I have no idea what happened to my "application," it seemed just the same as an online app where you throw your app into the ether and it disappears without a trace.
I actually think people have plenty of grit. See: all the people hitting the gym every day, or training for marathons, or grinding out thousands online of hours to try and launch their streaming career. It's just that "grit" sucks, and the modern world makes everything so unpleasant and unnatural that it leaves people feeling confused and isolated. Most of us aren't cut out to be pushy telemarketers who will ignore all social cues and relentlessly press for what we want.
BahRamYou
5d ago
opportunity cost is a thing. also, was hoping for some more specific tips or advice instead of bland platitudes of encouragement. thanks though.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Has anyone here started a substack? I've been thinking of doing one, but having trouble getting started. I have a lot of ideas, but they're all over the place- I have no real niche where I can call myself an expert. And I don't have any following from twitter or whatever, this would be starting from scratch. I don't care about making money, but I would like people to actually read it and take me seriously.
Also my opinions are um... all over the place- both liberals and and alt-right would find something to get mad about. Is this even worth it? Or should I just write a diary?
BahRamYou
6d ago
We do have the Miss America Pageant, but very few people really care about that anymore. I think with modern communications and moving around, there just isn't as much jingoism between US states anymore.
We might be more interested in an intra-North America competition. Doing it between countries really amps up the jingoism, like the Olympics and World Cup. It would be fun to see the US go up against Cuba in a song contest. Not sure how you'd make it fair, though...
BahRamYou
6d ago
I'm sure some of that is just "what decade did you grow up in" but yeah, 2000s had some great advantages for the artistic potential of video games:
- advanced enough to handle 3d graphics easily
- still small enough to be done with a reasonably small team
- broadband internet available, but not required
- enough time to learn from past video games, but not locked in on DLC and other marketing addiction crap
- big-budget games were still willing to experiment and try new stuff
- mostly not concerned about wokeness
BahRamYou
6d ago
I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...
BahRamYou
6d ago
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
How does the voting work? Are their brackets and eliminations, or is it just one giant vote and winner-takes-all? Being "polarizing" can work when you're just one choice out of many, and the haters weren't going to vote for you anyway, and they're split between many other options, but it attracts a small number of hardcore fans.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Yeah it's a weird double-mission in the modern era. I guess it made more sense in the wild west days, when they were more like frontier super-policemen.
BahRamYou
7d ago
They're also quite good at their original mission: investigating and stamping out counterfeit money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_currency
an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes
BahRamYou
10d ago
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
BahRamYou
10d ago
As Kulak is fond of saying, the reason we don't have flying cars isn't that they haven't been invented, it's that they've been made illegal. They were commonly flown (and shot down) by teenagers in the 1910s.
what do you mean by this? A homemade airplane isn't the same as a flying car. I guess it could work if you live in a very rural, but the problem with airplanes is that you need a long runway both to takeoff and land, plus clear airspace. That makes them impractical for anyone living in a city. A flying car could theoretically fit in your garage, take off/land vertically, and fly carefully enough to avoid collisions in the sky.
BahRamYou
11d ago
Yeah. And sane as you, i submitted at the last minute. Probably could hace done better with more tine, but its hard to tell how much time i should sink into this pointless online mental masturbation.
BahRamYou
12d ago
most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do?
That's true, but you could also say the same about working a job. Most jobs, even well-paying ones, just aren't that interesting as far as self-actualization and giving meaning to your life. It's an existential struggle that we all face, in this modern age of atheism and material abundance. If she's chilling with her friends, at least that might provide some real community and social circle, compared to the career woman late at night, too tired to do anything except order takeout and watch TV.
BahRamYou
12d ago
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions.
It really is necessary, when we live in a society that puts so many contradictory constraints on us. I think that's why "autistic" and "creepy" have taken off so hard as insults lately- it labels a certain person who can't just "let it be," but consciously questions those unwritten social rules, which makes everyone else uncomfortable because it highlights the contradictions.
And things change in response. Like, maybe it was fine in the past to get an ".Mrs degree," as long as it wasn't made too explicit. But once you go around explicitly talking about it and make everyone aware of what's happening, they have to change their behavior to regain some plausible deniability.
BahRamYou
13d ago
Japan
It appears as though the value of the Yen is currently in free fall. I can't say I know enough economics to explain the causes or potential implications of this, but it seems concerning nonetheless.
Noahpinion had a good (paywalled) article about this: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-japan-having-a-currency-crisis
The gist of it was that they're stuck in a hard spot. Nobody wants Japanese bonds because their interest rates are so low. And they can't raise interest rates because they have so much government debt and also a fragile employment situation. Still, "freefall" is an exaggeration. It's low but not that low. They have options, including if necessary, currency controls (forbidding people from selling the currency).
My contraversial opinion is they could solve this through immigration. There are a lot of weebs/retirees/weirdos who would want to move and live in Japan, but can't get a visa. Just let us buy a golden visa and go buy one of the abandoned houses there.
BahRamYou
13d ago
I'm curious, has Google or any other company ever tried recruiting directly from Africa? It seems like there are some talented people in Africa, like Igbo Nigerians, who might be overlooked by the US.
BahRamYou
14d ago
Some of that, plus "mestizo" just kinda sounds bad in modern-day English. It's like (that scene)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=3HHRfuLVfls] from archer: "well what's the word for it? you freaked out when I said quadroon!"
BahRamYou
14d ago
That's true, it's technically an older term than Hispanic or Latino. Still, it feels more... uh, PC? As in, the only people I hear using it these days are extremely woke people. Plus like you said, it technically only covers Mexican-Americans. And it's just confusing- as a kid I thought it meant someone from Chicago.
BahRamYou
14d ago
Yeah... that does seem to be pretty much what I had in mind. Just need to add in the ability for a user to post and have the bots all interact with it and like it.
https://myshell.ai/ also seems to be working on this space.
BahRamYou
15d ago
So someone can be both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or even hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander!
So? You can also be white, black, and Asian all at once. They're not mutually exclusive categories.
BahRamYou
15d ago
I don't know how to take over an existent social media site. They uh, tend to have defenses against that sort of thing.
In theory we could create an infinite number of new social media sites, and present each one as if it was real and legit. Each one just has to lure in one sucker. Sort of like shitcoins in the crypto space.
BahRamYou
15d ago
I had a crazy idea recently. What if we took LLM AI and, uh, scaled it up? Make a social media platform where you are the star of the show. Just you, or maybe you plus a handful of friends, plus hundreds, thousands, or millions of AI chatbots who all adore you and want to worship you as a celebrity. Finally, every single person on Earth can be the most popular person on the planet!
I've read some of Saberhagen's books. And yeah, before it was "The Dark Forest Hypothesis" it was "The Berzerker Hypothesis" so he should get some credit for coming up with it first. But they're very silly space opera books, lots of action with basically no deep thinking. They're not meant to be taken too seriously, so I can see how people slept on the idea.
Still, as crazy as it sounds, there is a certain elegance to the idea- it solves the "it only takes one" problem. Like, maybe most aliens just don't want to expand, or don't want to build megastructures, or are using tech that is somehow hidden from us. That's all fine, but you'd think there'd be at least one similar to us so that we could detect it easily. But in the same light, maybe 99.99% of aliens are peaceful, but there's just that one group of assholes who built berzerker probes and wiped out everyone else (maybe including themselves).
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