• 108 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If reading is the only driver to voting preference

    Reading is a powerful tool because writing/publishing has a very low barrier to entry.

    By contrast, audio and video tend to carry incrementally higher cost for production/distribution.

    But you do still need peer groups with good politics to send you in the right direction. You can’t expect good politics to emerge ex nihilio across an entire population.



  • But in business you’re supposed to read emails to know what you’re supposed to do.

    So often I get a set of instructions that’s missing information, out of date, or deliberately misleading.

    I’m often on the line with support walking through the steps and saying “How did you get from D to E?” and then finding out there’s a second secret set of instructions only tech support has - possibly even a different website or application - that they don’t want to tell you about unless you’re talking to an agent for some reason.

    Menus have the descriptions of what you want to eat but no one reads them

    Sometimes. Often they do not. They also regularly use shorthand or code.

    My favorite is a series of red chili peppers next to a menu item. If I order the 1 pepper meal, am I going to be shitting blood for a weak? If I order the 5 pepper meal, are you going to White Guy Spicy it for the table because not everyone looks like they can handle it? It’s anyone’s guess. If I don’t explicitly see the words “peanut” or “shellfish”, am I confident it won’t have allergens?

    Why even have a waiter if you’re not allowed to ask these questions, anyway? Just make everything a vending machine.


  • Also a big fan of

    if you see a price list/menu/price tag or similar and you accidentally read it, better double check the price by asking “does this item cost what it says here”

    Because it happens when management has three different prices and five confusing “discount” offers scattered in line of sight. Is this 50% off or does that happen at the register or does it no longer apply? And you’ve got the same thing on the menu as a side and a meal, which one am I ordering, again?

    And

    “employees only” actually means “for adventurous customers”

    Oh, bathroom for employees only? At every location inside three city blocks? I guess I should just take a crap on the floor.






  • We still need some of us to be willing to clean up the shit to preserve the truth.

    People like this exist and you can find them. You just won’t have them advertised to you. Real journalism exists, but its speaks floating in a sea of disinformation.

    I can only be so upset a people for failing to find it. There but for the grace of God go I.

    I’m not sure I understand how your last sentiment relates

    A great deal of informed opinion and intelligently dissenting views have been actively suppressed at the educational, political, and industry levels.

    Whether you’re Cori Bush or Norm Finkelstein, you’re fighting and uphill battle just to be recognized.







  • The lesson is that people don’t have the time or attention to fact check, and frankly I think we should have known that.

    Why bother to fact check any one thing when it means hunting for the single edible chocolate in a pile of rabbit shit?

    You can’t even fucking Google an answer anymore, as the AI generated response is trained on all the bad data that’s bloated the system.

    Objective morality in terms of universal human rights and behavioral science can be integrated into a better regulated social media, for example. It just has to be more appealing somehow and easier to access. It also has to be sexy and come with some status, and other benefits.

    I would settle for it being a view that won’t get you expelled from a college campus, primaried out of an elected office, or purged from a high profile business position.




  • The early COVID pandemic response was largely voluntary, as people bunkered down out of terror. I knew a few people who caught the disease early on, during an international flight, and they were stuck overseas for months simply because the US didn’t want to let them back in.

    And the death toll for COVID wasn’t anywhere near the potential of an avian flu. We’re talking high double digits - 50% of the historical sampling holds. People only get to go to the super spreader rally once before they either get smart or stop mattering. And Trump’s a fucking hypochondriac, ffs. The anti-ax shit was far more a consequence of corporate media trying to bully people back to work than anything Trump personally believed. That’s half the joke of the #NeverTrump movement. Most of the shit they hated about Trump was the silver-lining break from neoconservative dogma.


  • Vladivostok is barely the closest populated Russian area.

    Its a major base of operations for the Russian Pacific fleet.

    Russia has the technologies and infrastructure for efficient resource extraction under extreme conditions

    Now, sure. And France has the technology and infrastructure to extract resources from the Mississippi delta region now. But the Alaska purchase was in 1867. Russians were still trying to secure territory on their own continent during this time. Repeated wars with Japan, the Ottomans, and with domestic insurgencies plagued the country through the 19th century.

    And Alaska was already being filibustered by western colonialists as far back as the early 1800s, necessitating a Treaty (the Russo-American Treaty of 1824) to settle an ongoing dispute over territory (The Oregon Boundary Dispute) that Russians had little capacity or real interest in prosecuting. Much like with the Louisiana Purchase, this was a token transfer intended to get some kind of compensation to relinquish a claim the Russians were poised to lose one way or another.