I guess there will never be a small phone made again. The large ones are worthless to me.
Fuck all of this.
Day: September 16, 2024, 6:23 PM
Red Authoritarianism
One of the reasons I wanted to move out of a red state is I kept being purged from the voter rolls. No explanation as to why.
As much as California government sucks, doubt that will happen to me here and doubt it would even if I were a Republican.
RTO Scam
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week.
This is just a stealth layoff. They do not give a fuck about actual RTO. This is targeted to make expensive people (top performers, most able to find another job) and women, the disabled, etc. quit. At least that is who will be most impacted by it.
It also hollows out the best people from the org, as mentioned, which will have consequences later. Has zero — absolutely zero — to do with productivity or any other excuse. This is just a method of conducting a layoff without the bad headlines (so they can blame the workers) and so they do not have to pay severance by forcing resignations.
Brainrot
Social media is poison and since women use social media a lot more than men, women are more poisoned by it. QED.
It doesn’t have a thing to do with the (non-existent) inherent terribleness of women, just the demographics of who has experienced more of the most mind-rotting “innovation” of the past few decades.
Not Content With the Content
I think I finally understand content warnings now. They aren’t effective at what they’re actually supposed to do. Studies show that pretty clearly.
Therefore, why they exist is, like many human things, for the purpose of signaling. Content and trigger warnings are used to convey that you are courteous enough to be concerned with the viewer’s sensitivities about something. They also communicate that you are embedded enough in a particular culture to know what its triggers and concerns in fact are.
Thus, they are used both for courtesy and to express status (these two are always closely related) and make a lot more sense to me from that sociological angle.
Resolve
It’s an odd idea that because some women get bothered sometimes in public by the worst 1% of serial-harassing men, that no one should talk to anyone in public ever.
We always seem to come up with the most dumbass and harmful solutions possible to problems that are in fact easily solvable.
Zip
What About Pizza Hut Are You The Most Nostalgic For?
That it was a treat, mainly. Something special. My immediate family was poor; we did not go to restaurants pretty much ever. Pizza Hut was something that was affordable and pretty good for a small town. It was one of the rare times I had food I actually enjoyed rather than just tolerated. When I knew I was going to get to go to Pizza Hut, I looked forward to it all week.
Their restaurants also used to be vastly better; they had salad bars, higher-quality food and better service.
And I personally always liked that they were very dimly-lit compared to other places. Made them feel kind of mysterious inside.
Linked
Starlink (and tech like it) provides so much obvious and apparent benefit that despite the valid complaints of astronomers, I think it’s worth it to make earth-based astronomy a bit worse.
In some ways, it’s like saying cities shouldn’t be built because you can’t see the stars anymore. The idea that progress makes everything roundly better always and immediately is quite a stupid one, when you think about it for a moment.
Days
Green Day’s SoFi Stadium show proves it’s officially a classic rock band now.
I never really cared for Green Day. I bought their second album, Kerplunk, sometime in 19921 and only listened to it once or twice. I believe I gave it to a friend a few weeks later. But the band has certainly stuck around, which befits our era of constantly-recycled and remixed nostalgia combined with culture becoming static.
It’s funny that Green Day’s first really popular song was about being bored, which is such a 1990s thing to do a song about. That’s what I mean exactly when I say that even the 1990s “pessimistic” songs seem optimistic in hindsight. “Oh, you’re so bored, all you can do is masturbate and lounge around all day, boohoo, so very sad.”
Seems like comedy now in retrospect.
CSN
I’ve also noticed that people have enormous difficulty understanding COL variance. It’s a bit mystifying. Of course you’re doing fine on your $60K a year in Crotch Shot, Nebraska. Houses are nearly free, hamburgers grow out of the dirt, and you can trade some empty Coke bottles for land. To show that I’m only exaggerating a little, here is a dead average house in York, NE. It’s $200K. In San Jose, that house would be $2 million. And if you don’t mind really living in the sticks (to most people in Silicon Valley, York would be the sticks) you can find a quite nice-looking place in Nebraska on nearly a third of an acre for $130K. Or you could buy 77 acres of land with a house and two outbuildings in Nebraska for $1.3 million. How much you reckon that’d set you back in San Jose?
There will be not-as-large but still quite notable variance in food pricing, gas costs, taxes, etc., between somewhere like York and San Jose. And people just have loads of trouble understanding anything about this.
Humans are more cognitively limited in the general case than we like to admit.
Sports betting is bad for America’s financial health. New data shows it.
Evidence of “snowball Earth” found in ancient rocks.
Artificial intelligence will affect 60 million US and Mexican jobs within the year.
Layoffs are proof that employees should reconsider priorities in life.
The Kids Who Didn’t Know Their Parents Were Russian Spies. So tragic.
Millions of seniors can’t afford their prescription medications.