• 2 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • There were 2 things:

    1. Over time it became obvious the site was promoting mass market fluff over the unique content that made reddit what it used to be. In particular having r/all as a default sub and no option to remove it seemed particularly egregious. Seemed like an attempt to impose a monoculture on the user base, and I didn’t like that culture which was mostly images of tweets which is a trend I especially hate.
    2. The API pricing and going public was the last straw. I looked at reddit as a wikipedia-like place where information was shared freely, for whomever and even whatever wanted to see it. I even bought gold in my younger and more naive years. But if the officers were so keen on making profits for themselves on my shitposting, why am I not getting paid? Injecting greed ruined the whole thing.

  • Look into switching jobs. Unemployment is on the low end. People who switch jobs tend to make more money, and it’s easier to get a high-paying job when you have a job already because employers can’t help but think more highly of you if someone else is wiling to employ you.

    Depending on what you do a recruiter or staffing agency may help. What’s worked best for me is posting an updated linkedin profile with keywords that recuriters will look for that relate to buzzwords for your job. Remember recruiters are typically trained as salespeople and may not know much about your actual job, they just look for words. Put in that you’re looking for work (but only show it to recruiters) and see if anyone bites.



  • To be honest, I don’t think Trump has the attention span to do any more than hold a bunch of gloating rallies. Ironically his own immunity may end up working against his desire for revenge, as some justice department lawyers will push back until Trump gets distracted by a squirrel or a coloring book or something.

    That being said, I kinda dream of moving to Canada. Fun fact: the median Canadian wealth per capita is higher than in the US, meaning it may have a better claim to “land of opportunity” if we’re talking about ordinary people instead of the richest few. Plus the people really do seem to be nicer. The mosquitoes though…Canadian mosquitoes are no joke.



  • Anybody but Biden. Kamala seems to be the expected replacement, that works. If not her, pretty much anyone else. Trump is a terrible candidate. While he has experience in show business, he’s way past his prime and pretty much any person should be able to beat him in a debate at this point.

    I was actually recently thinking through people I’ve known and whether they could’ve done a better job debating Trump than Biden did. Generally any adult with a functioning mind would do better. Adults I’ve known with a HS education could’ve crushed Trump in that debate. I’m actually not sure if a homeless guy I once debated on the street regarding the meaning of pi would do better or worse than Biden, he seemed to be at about Trump’s level of sanity and if Trump won this last debate, well yeah even he’d do better than Biden. I can also think of some older teenage jocks I once knew, and while they were dumb as rocks their teenager swagger would’ve been more convincing than Biden’s rambling failed attempts to remember rote speeches.

    If I try to think of who is actually about at Biden’s level, I think of myself at the age of 13, when I had a presentation in front of the class on an issue and for some reason I was struck by that early teenager nervousness, and haltingly tried to give a presentation as the class tried failingly to hide their laughter at how terribly it was going. It was probably the most embarrassing day of my life. That’s Biden’s level right there, because he sounded just like me back then giving that presentation. So any person in their late teens or older with a full grasp on sanity should be a much better candidate than Biden.






  • There’s a lot of possibilities.

    My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

    Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

    Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.



  • I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

    I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.






  • The sheer fact that she was allowed to use a self hosted email server instead of a secure .mail.mil address means a whole bunch of people should have faced charges

    I gotta disagree on the facts with this one, I don’t like Hillary either but the attempt to make the email thing criminal was in legal terms, bullshit. I agree that she broke the law, but there’s civil law (that a court can order government officials to stop breaking, but you can’t be thrown in jail for) and criminal law (that you can be thrown in jail for). The private email server was the former, not the latter.

    This article around 8 paragraphs down goes through the specific criminal laws at issue, but the summary is these laws are clearly designed to punish actually stealing documents with the intent to conceal or distribute them (like say, if she took them to a private bathroom in Florida), not to dictate criminal penalties for an insecure email setup.

    The reality of what happened is the FBI is a very Republican part of government, Comey is himself a lifelong Republican, and no one got more hate from Republicans than Hillary Clinton. They wanted to prosecute very badly, they just couldn’t.