Yeah there is a real trend in conservative culture (at least where I grew up) that fits right in with the rest of the anti-intellectualism. And it’s not taught explicitly but it permeates social interactions.

I’m trying to decide how to describe it… Basically, you look down on people who are trying to improve themselves.

Very much true in my specific limited experience.

I live in a nice little town here in the US, and I’m a well educated middle aged white guy. It’s safe to say that I get to see a pretty nice version of America even as horrible shit is happening all over the place.

I’ve gotten to spend a few weeks in Sweden of all places over the past few years. Plus I got to see the insides of some airports in other places luke Belgium and Germany.

There’s just something different in the air over there, in a good way. I thought of it as a kind of dignity that came from respect for others as well as oneself, but I like how you call it social cohesiveness.

I think some of the details around food and drink showed it best, and they make good examples because they apply to a mix of the general public.

The food itself is obviously much better over there. Even things like the hotel breakfast or the cafeteria at a workplace had a huge variety of fresh, real foods as opposed to ultraprocessed manufactured branded products.

But the dishes and utensils were some of the most interesting to me as an american. In places like an office cafe at work, or a local restaurant, or I think even an airport, they would have actual GLASSES, plates, and silverware. And on top of that, you would often return your dishes to the kitchen or even put them directly on to the dish washer rack waiting for you.

This breaks my american mind. Fragile non-disposable cups in a public place? Other than coffee mugs on people’s desks or restaurant glasses being dropped off and picked up with at your table, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that within these borders. If you could use glasses and silverware in public places here, I can’t decide what would happen first: somebody would get cut on one of the immediately broken glasses, or so much of the stuff would get stolen that they’d close it down.

I like to call out their bathrooms too. The way we do it over here is big men’s and women’s restrooms with next to no privacy (it’s one big room with flimsy floating dividers forming the toilet stalls) and stupid culture wars about who should and should not get their genitals inspected or whatever. Over there it’s just several individual doors, each with a small bathroom. Much better privacy, no fodder for the bigots, and much better utilization of the resources.

American here living in a car-only area.

I didn’t even raise an eyebrow at that previous comment. Sure most drivers are fine, but there are plenty of people who make me wonder what the hell combination of these issues (and others) is going on with them.

The most common example I get to see is the people speeding through the elementary school parking lot in their luxury SUVs. I especially love it when they start a phone call as they start driving, after they just finished standing around, collecting their kid, and walking back to the parking lot.

I don’t keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it’s always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.

I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.

I’m actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don’t stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function’s power/capacity, then I’ll probably go for it.

From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Alright fine, I can tolerate the little ✨AI ✨ sparkles in my M365 webpages a while longer if it means more kaboom at the end.

You just aren’t thinking like a billionaire, man. What you do is get the two people anyway, and still force the 70 hour work week.

Your job is not to find a reasonable steady state of operation. Your job is to exploit the resources before you (even the ones with emotions and families) to extract value for the shareholders in the most efficient way possible, before somebody even more evil and clever than you figures out a better way and we direct future fresh meat to his meat grinder instead of yours.

Your comment just made me realize I did a kind of GOG holiday sale shopping spree this year after having not done a steam holiday sale purchase in like a decade.

And the majority of it was having cheap easy drm-free access to some very good and very old games. Like yeah I know I have my ISO of the TIE Fighter collector’s cd-rom somewhere around here, but if I can permanently have legit drm-free access to all versions of the game for just a few dollars, then supporting the business enabling that is a no brainer.

So the space obsessed man-child generated his own stupid encyclopedia, and for this generous all-giving knowledge resource he chooses a stylized BLACK HOLE for the logo.

It feels like the nerd equivalent to that quote about how the anti-semite arguing in bad faith enjoys seeing others frustrated by their hypocrisy. Here lemme just find that pasta…

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Jean-Paul Sartre

As somebody who (1) loves the beauty of the natural world and (2) lives in the USA, I’m hearing that NZ might be a most excellent place to retire, or even move to earlier.

Yeah the “shopping around” aspect isn’t even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

Today the situation is flipped. It isn’t difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you’ll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

The problem is that right now the “good” prices are crazy.

I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.

I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.

And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.

I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.

I was just watching some informative stuff about jet engines the other day, so I appreciate what you’re saying even more than I normally would, lol.

Look at Sweden over here punching above its weight class!

(going strictly by population size)

impossible! I checked!

Oh I’m well aware, that’s why I threw in the part about needing to be utilized. Because even if the engineers are good with their finished product, some VP will eventually ask their director why the team’s output has dropped or why they have so many people for so little work.

I’m an engineer working on a new product right now. Fortunately we’re a small outfit with niche customers.

That’s one thing I love about FOSS, that the only stakeholders are the devs and the users. The goal is to make software that’s good at what it does.

When it comes to any tech company’s product, you not only have all the stakeholders that corrupt the end product, but you have giant teams of marketers, designers, engineers, and managers that need to constantly justify their existence and or be efficiently utilized at all times.

Honestly it’s like lesser version of enshittification, the tendency of commercial products to always be changing things.

Well, like any decent VR game there are settings to help with that. I’m pretty sure I used the teleportation movement the whole time even once I was used to it and didn’t get nauseated.

Getting used to it was a huge factor on its own. Back then, I had been playing so much VR that in the flying game Ultrawings (think pilotwings for VR) I worked my way up to where I was flying the stunt plane with full FOV and no anti-nausea measures enabled.

That whole article reads like he was a reasonably intelligent person who was born into a christian family. So he’s been conditioned to automatically see homosexuality as bad, and been educated in writing eloquent arguments to support his position, but he’s just aware enough to not take a stand and actually say what he thinks because that would get him in trouble.

Even just considering your snippet:

I’m pretty sure there are genetic dispositions towards different kinds of sexual behaviors and patterns—just as there are genetic dispositions towards such things as alcoholism, racism, elitism, etc.

This is just an opinion and the logic seems sensible. But why make the comparison to only negative traits and vices?

A genetic predisposition towards homosexuality does not make homosexuality a ‘good’ or a ‘right,’ or even ‘okay’ for some people.

Stating the obvious then referring to 3rd party opinions. Doesn’t seem to do much other than keep up the negative tone.

Just as with every other human behavior, a wider worldview must be used to judge the righteousness of a human action or behavior—including acting on homosexual tendencies.

Whoa, I agree! And using my view of the world and society at large I hereby judge that we need to lay the fuck off of people who act on their homosexual tendencies and focus on actual problems! I wonder if the author can say the same.

Also, I just want to point out and give a “fuck that” to the heavy focus on “choosing” and “acting” rather than simply existing. In my experience that is a very common step in the short process of dehumanizing somebody and mentally writing off their concerns and rights.

Dehumanizing somebody for a trait they were born with is obviously doable, but it is still a tougher sell for some people than dehumanizing a person for an intentional act. Even if that act didn’t hurt anybody or anything.

I’ll leave the whole train of thought of “how can you punish people for acting like the thing they were born as” as an exercise for the reader.

If there was one organization with the motive and resources to help develop an open phone hardware platform, Valve sure seems like a good contender.

C’mon Gabe, make a name for yourself in computer history. Secure a place in the history books next to Torvalds and Stallman rather than Gates/Jobs/Zuck types.

Make “steam compatible phone” become the new “IBM compatible PC”!