domain:youtu.be
butts
21hr ago
a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples
Any chance you could drop a couple lines about him? It's an odd setup.
sockpuppet2
21hr ago
The strike-through is unintentional, due to me using the "approximately" symbol.
I don't know, but I'd default to guessing that post-penectomy phantom penis sensations are as persistent as any other post-amputation phantom sensation, absent a reason to think otherwise.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
21hr ago
I started writing a response with my own anecdotes several times, then decided not to, as I don't wish to provide too much identifying information.
Suffice to say I have experienced similar things. I definitely remember a time, pre-Great Awokening, when I had friends who were both right and left. Sometimes we had some pretty vicious arguments, but we usually patched things up afterwards. And my other friends on the left and right could at least conceive of being friendly with folks in the other tribe. Now, not so much.
That said, I saw the online precursors of the Great Awokening well before 2012. I was online way back before 9/11. I remember some leftists absolutely losing their shit over Bush (and telling me that my ability to be friends with Republicans made me a fascist sympathizer). I also remember conservatives on social media circa 2008 and 2012 absolutely losing their shit over Obama's election (and reelection), and angrily demanding that people defriend, shun, and even divorce any friends or family members who voted for him.
This is not to say that both sides do this equally (they definitely do not - I still have some right-wing friends, while I have lost liberal friends for having right-wing friends) but I definitely see accelerationism picking up steam on both sides.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
The second. I used to work for the Boy Scouts and he would come up during summers and run the business end of things at camp. He was originally from Pittsburgh and came up regularly to visit his parents so we'd all hang out. There's a whole extended friend group of people who worked there at one point or another, and a lot of us still see each other regularly. I haven't seen him in years, because the Principal job keeps him in NC year round and his parents hate his new wife and her parents hate him. But anyway, as I said in my above novel of a post, I don't get involved in other people's drama. I was friends with him and not his ex-wife, and though I agree he's the one who fucked up and she deserved better, I'm not taking sides. He's never done anything to me personally that pissed me off enough to cut him off completely, and if he called me right now to go out for beers I'd go. That being said, I was in North Carolina a few years back with an extra ticket to the ACC Championship game and I didn't call him to see if he wanted it, so there's that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21hr ago
I'm still skeptical of 'Musk cooked his brain with drugs' as a narrative. Have any of these commentators actually met the guy? Or are they familiar with him through media only? If we believed the media on Putin, he was supposed to have died of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer and maybe another dozen things by now. But this isn't so. Just because journalists don't like him, he isn't necessarily in ill health.
Plus you're forgetting the brain implants that let a guy play games while completely disabled, Neuralink is state-of-the-art albeit not a revolutionary breakthrough. What about the satellite network that kept Ukraine in the fight? What about nuking Kamala's election chances?
Roughly 1 major development per year is still pretty impressive! At the risk of sounding like a redditor 10 years ago, how is he not the modern Tony Stark? Ridiculously wealthy, unrealistically multi-domain, extremely controversial womanizer with outrageously grandiose dreams, extremely petty and lacking in wisdom, highly idealistic, plus significant but not obviously debilitating drug issues.
What kind of unrealistic standard requires one not to ever fail, or not fail several times in succession? Facebook's AI and VR programs have been failures yet they're successful. Google's past is littered with failures, they're infamous for making and abandoning products. But they're still successful. If the media was constantly constructing a 'Google is really fucked this time' narrative, then lots of people would believe it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
21hr ago
The New Job
We’re going on week three now, so while things remain inconclusive my impressions remain positive on the whole, so I’ll give it a go.
Starting with the good, the pay/benefits are quite decent, and life-changing compared to where I was at the service tech job. Working at the terminal I’ve been training at strikes me as unpleasant but doable with time. The terminal I’m going to be working at/have spent some time at is much easier to deal with, such that I dare speculate that this job won’t be that bad: occasionally annoying, tedious, and/or boring, yes, but not that bad. My boss is the sort who likes to leave early. This isn’t so much a good thing as indicative of the workload, but I’ve watched more Fox News in the last two weeks than in the last two years.
Neutral, dispatching in this context is a totally different exercise than dispatching a food delivery company. The theme is sort of the same, but it’s a different skillset, one that rewards long-term planning and resource management than sheer speed and/or clever route choices. Trucking is paperwork/regulation heavy and not all tanker trailers are the same. There will be a learning curve before I can do my job reflexively, but with time and practice I believe it to be an achievable task. The software they use makes the software I used to use look brilliant in comparison, but it can be learned.
Annoying/bad, onboarding has been a grind/exercise in helplessness. I’m assured that this is perfectly normal and that nobody expects me to contribute for another month or few, but we’re two weeks in and I still can’t log into the company intranet; allegedly this is an HR issue and IT has washed its hands of it (But I can’t put in a ticket with HR because that’s linked to the company intranet account that I don’t have/have access to.). I had to call IT just to get the login credentials to my company laptop/email address. My work-issued laptop does not have the dispatch software I’m expected to use installed on it (I don’t know, but I kind of expected to get an onboarding packet with all the usernames and passwords on a piece of paper and the laptop to come with a standardized image pre-installed with all the programs I’d need. I may be able to install the dispatch software from the vendor’s website if I have login credentials for that program but so far I don’t know if those exist or if that is possible.). I don’t even have a desk at my home terminal. I’ve spent the last two weeks watching people do stuff, but otherwise aside from assigned training videos have literally done nothing. I’m going a bit stir-crazy and, again, while I’m assured that things happening slowly is the expectation I can’t help but fear that I’m wasting time during which I need to actually be learning how to do my job and am going to wind up thrown into the fire and failing. My goal for the entire week was to get the dispatch software installed and acquire a working account for it and it’s looking like that’s going to be a failure given that I got no response to the ticket I sent yesterday and the guy who was supposed to be training me (but was in fact far too busy) also got no response to the ticket he sent. I’ve been told by other dispatchers at the big terminal that they’ve spent months waiting to get all the permissions they need and still don’t have them. Even higher ranking people don’t seem to have a useful answer as to how to get what I need done other than suggesting that I directly email somebody in the IT department that they know personally instead of submitting a ticket.
More importantly, what do I do with my life?
This is the first time I haven’t worked two jobs in three years, and while University to Go was an easy gig I put in more hours there than I’m going to here (It really does seem be to be in the 40-45hours a week range, roughly 8-4 M-F, whereas I worked 6-7 days a week at the old gig/gigs.), so I find myself with a bunch of free time that I’m not used to having. I’m currently working on catching up on personal maintenance backlogs (clean the car, clean the house, set up my plan to get out of debt), but that’s going to run out soon and then what? I’ve never been one of those enviable souls who enjoyed watching TV all that much, nor am I really into videogames. There’s only so much time Reddit, Youtube, and X can waste. I used to be an incorrigible barfly (This was easy when I didn’t have to be at work for University to Go until 11AM.), and admittedly have yet to case out all my town’s happy hours to see if one exists where people my age instead of 20+ years older than me actually go, but the signs haven’t been overly encouraging on that front (The place I used to work at is a nursing home/sausagefest during happy hour.) and 8-4 isn’t exactly compatible with late night drinking on work nights (and, frankly, mid-30s me isn’t as interested in closing down bars as I used to be; aggravating this, many/most of my friends have moved on from the college town I live in). I’m being a bit blithe or cynical here, but am I going to have to join a dating app just to find someone to hang out with?
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rethoric
I do not think that climate change is an x-risk. I do not even believe that climate change will necessarily flood big parts of the landmasses, likely we can handle a few meters of sea level rise the Netherlands way.
However, this is not the same as saying that it is not a big deal. The amount of population regions can feed will definitely change, and often for the worse.
Besides CO2, there are a few other arguments against ICEs. First, as long as fossil fuels are the lifeblood of transportation, the world will always be beholden to the few countries which are blessed with that resource. GWB's misadventure in Iraq was a consequence of that region having oil and thus being of strategic importance to the US and his buddies.
Then there are regional health effects of minor combustion products. I will totally grant you that ICEs have improved tremendously since the 1970s in that regard. Still, depending on where you live, my gut feeling is that these products might still make up a good fraction of a QALY for you. Even if you don't care personally, it should be apparent that society is caring more and more for these things over time. If you by a fancy new ICE car today, there is perhaps a 10% chance that you will not be allowed to drive it withing some European cities without retrofitting more exhaust cleaning in a decade.
Then you might believe that the gas prices will increase more than the electricity prices in the long run.
Also, while modern ICEs are marvels of technology which evolved to be very reliably over a century, the fact remains that fundamentally, they are complex machines. In principle, an EV could be a lot simpler. In practice, we don't know yet (apart from the battery requiring replacement at some point).
and secondly the choice to not pick a Tesla might have been justified by practicality, but let's be frank: it isn't. What it is is "Musk man bad".
Personally, I would not have bought either a Tesla or a high end German EV because I don't care for the status symbol aspect and want a car where I do not have to freak out about every minor dent. Other than that, of course people pick brands based on politics. If Apple's CEO made a statement defending Nethanyahu's operations in Gaza, of course Apple sales would plummet. If a fast-food chain sponsored a campaign to lower the age of consent to five years, they would find that most of their customers would take their business elsewhere. When Putin attacked Ukraine, Europe became a lot less interested in buying his gas, even though the gas had not changed at all.
Most tech CEOs know better than to get openly involved in partisan politics. Musk made the business decision that the goodwill of a Trump administration he had loudly backed before would be worth the hit to his brands, or at least better for him than a Harris administration he had stayed neutral about.
or else they have an accountability problem.
Only if you see pregnancy as a punishment for the crime of having sex they're "unfairly" trying to avoid.
No, I see it as an obvious direct consequence of their decisions. You're the one loading this completely-unobjectionable fact with emotional valence.
Crying that the natural consequence of one's decision is 'punishment' is childlike. And womanlike, I guess. As I said, they seem to have a problem with accountability.
ETA: Also, watch your quotation marks. I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
It means they serve mediocre wedding-at-a-country club dishes in a venue that has the ambience of a funeral home.
TitaniumButterfly
21hr ago
I mean, some people commit suicide, and if that's not choosing to self-destruct I don't know what is.
A lot of it, though, occurs to me as an adolescent exploration of boundaries.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21hr ago
I think there might be a Berkson's paradox going on.
Very possibly, but I feel like just saying that employs Berkson's paradox as a thought-terminating cliche, rather than as a careful consideration of the observed clustered phenomena. Which correlation do you suspect might be spurious?
When I suggested that Lana is not just a person, but a personality, I meant it. Her post on the suicide forum made her a particularly extreme example of the type, but I know many women, including members of my family, who very much fit the type, though they haven't imploded their lives to quite the same spectacular degree. Some stay married (but often publicly declare their bisexuality), some get neopronouns, some keep their hair a natural color... but the commitment to wide-band political leftism combined with a willingness to excommunicate dissenters from their lives makes a pretty consistent through-line. Those things seem pretty obviously connected with the clustered phenomena--political leftism incentivizes sex and gender exploration, for example, and willingness to excommunicate others can extend to an unpersuaded spouse. Sociology is hard, but I'm not sure it's so hard that I should be willing to accept "nothing ever happens" as a refutation of the observations in this thread.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I mean I think it’s true of most things. Obsession is a sign of a problem. Most people tend to find a balance between interests, hobbies and life. I think this is part of the impulse behind the JBP advice to “clean your room” before you take on the great issues of the world. If you’re unhealthy, you’ll get obsessed and it takes over everything else, and probably make things worse.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
21hr ago
Im not sure I understand the things remaining after strikethrough, or at least the justification for it. "one also wonders why phantom limb or cismale phantom penis sensation rates aren't either 0% or... half that of cismen." Why is the half expected? "Low rates of transmale post-mastectomy phantom breast sensation (1/3 or more in ciswomen) would be more significant." Was that number supposed to have a cite?
Ramachandran and McGeoch didn't include how long their MTF survey responders experienced phantom penis sensations
We also dont know how long cis males getting penectomy experience them - if it fades over time, then its presumably a different phenomenon from the pre-op trans version, and the similar number just coincidence.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
22hr ago
Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.
This sounds to me like something that happened in the 50s and 60s back when ~lifetime employment and "being a company man" were still possible. But I still think there's a weak form that survives. There's a sort of brotherhood of fathers that I've noticed in interviews, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Being a father shows that you've got a definite course plotted out in your life, that you know what you want, that you've got obligations to meet, and that you've got a certain level of resilience. You can append asterisks to all of those qualities because there are of course massive exceptions, but the odds are good. I definitely give fathers a few bonus points during interviews, and I'm closer to my colleagues who have kids.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
22hr ago
Yeah priests have been far, far more helpful to me in my personal life.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
22hr ago
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn.
I know one such quote, but the point there is different, illustrating his dynamic hylomorphism:
The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely different; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this constitutes the nature of the whole.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
22hr ago
I agree that there are people who must be contained for the benefit of others, that's not what I'm saying. It seemed as if @WhiningCoil was making the argument that all progressives are insane and need to be imprisoned or killed. Perhaps I read it wrong.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22hr ago
I'll bite. I have an EV, and it had nothing to do with virtue signalling (and being "green" was little more than an afterthought). I bought an EV because when I was looking for new cars, I tried them out and loved them. The torque, the smooth ride, the lack of vibrations, noise, or smell. I will probably never go back to ICE. The convenience of never having to go to a gas station or get an oil change again really is awesome.
It does of course come with some caveats: I was able to put a charger in my garage. Charging at home is the real game-changer for EVs. And I mostly only drive locally. @100ProofTollBooth is right that I wouldn't choose it for a "go explore remote mountain trails" car. (That said, modern EVs have a 300+ mile range, so it's not that easy to run out of battery without very poor planning.)
Also, I did not buy a Tesla, and again, not because I have Musk Derangement Syndrome. Teslas have the best software, generally, but other than that, a lot of EV makers beat them on comfort and performance (and I just don't like having everything be controlled by a tablet).
Corvos
22hr ago
nobody wants to self destruct
I think you’re wrong about this. Many people lean into their problems rather than out. Sometimes because - as cope - they convince themselves that they’re self destructing in order to live up to their ideals and then self-destruct harder to prove it. Sometimes because they sabotage themselves rather than risk failure with no excuse.
TitaniumButterfly
22hr ago
But he also isn't bitching about you on an anonymous forum for contrarian autists.
If there's a valid point here it's extraordinarily minor and this was a terrible way to make it. The post doesn't scan to me as even close to bitching.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
The genius of Musk was not to invent the electric car, there were EVs on the market before Tesla was a thing. The difference was that these cars were very clearly not performing as well as ICE cars given and more expensive.
By contrast, a Tesla is (I think) on par with high-end ICE cars in how much fun it is to drive. For example, if you wanted a car to impress women in 2014, I think you could do worse than a Tesla: not only is is as good a status symbol as a fancy German car, but you will also get bonus points with any woman worrying about climate change.
The fact that fancy German car makers now produce electric vehicles is mostly due to Tesla's success.
If a woman has sex, she might get pregnant. No one's forcing her -- outside of rape. So she either accepts the chance of getting pregnant or doesn't. That's a choice.
And I can promise you that the man in the situation isn't getting told "Golly that wasn't your fault, there's nothing you could have done, don't worry about the resulting human life, that would be asking too much." Because people understand that men, as adults, need to be held accountable.
Hieronymus
22hr ago
I had a somewhat different experience of the evangelical church growing up than you did, though I can see where you are coming from. I remain in the congregation where I grew up, a Baptist-adjacent Bible church in a blue state.
That tone has severely softened in recent years, as white Catholics have become the standard-bearers of the religious right in many ways, but there's a serious way in which the often harsh, but nevertheless informed critiques of more traditional forms of Christianity within historic Protestantism have been flanderized in evangelical circles to an absolute rejection of the Christianity of non-evangelical forms of faith -- indeed out of ignorance.
I’d say that our attitude toward Rome growing up was guarded, sometimes harsh, but not particularly uninformed; of course I have a deeper understanding of the critique as a middle-aged man than I did as a teenager, but that’s true of many things. We didn’t talk about the Eastern Orthodox much, but there weren’t a lot of them around. Our attitude toward middle- and even high-church Protestants was reasonably positive so long as they were strong on Scripture and held to sola fide.
I agree that the general evangelical attitude toward Rome is much less guarded today than it was. Opinions on Eastern Orthodoxy are pretty mixed, but the most common attitude is to regard them as eccentric Roman Catholics. (I will give you that this one is pretty uninformed.)
That said, evangelicalism has also been characterized by a firmer affirmation of conservative social doctrine than spiritual doctrine (I'm not saying spirituality isn't important to them -- I'm saying their emphasis, especially to people who grow distant, is often perceived to be culture war instead of spiritual development), and so leaving evangelicalism is often associated with leaving social conservatism.
I can’t speak to your experience, but in mine people who leave evangelical Christianity tend to move toward social liberalism first, then when this clashes with evangelical Christianity they abandon evangelicalism. It’s a commonplace that when a young man comes to his pastor and says, “I just can’t accept the truth of Christianity any longer,” the correct response is, “Who is she?” Also common today are people who want to accommodate their friends on LGBT issues and leave their evangelical churches when those hold fast to the biblical teaching.
To those leaving it may look like the church is prioritizing social issues over spiritual things. But striving after obedience to God’s will revealed in Scripture is fundamentally tied up in spiritual things. (“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and, “Faith without works is dead.”) You can be socially conservative without being an evangelical Christian, or a Christian at all, but it’s no coincidence that socially liberal churches also have a low view of the Bible.
(There is a smaller cohort that leaves evangelicalism directly for more liturgical churches. This is a different phenomenon, and most of them don’t think that evangelicals’ positions on social issues are too conservative.)
… and I'm simply reflecting on the market failure where the mainline Protestant churches that have already been there for a long time now aren't even considered as an option, and are themselves being out-competed by "woke evangelical" churches the same way the megachurch is out-competing the Bible church on the street corner!
I agree that this demand exists, but in my world it’s less than one might suppose. I expect that most “woke evangelical” churches will fade away in a generation or so as the children of their members abandon any connection to Christianity.
Alright so which one of those half dozen Chinese start-ups will the US government trust to launch its incredibly classified spy satellites?
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