*Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past*, by J. Storrs Hall.
I mostly agree with Hall. Progs and such will find this crazy, of course. Supposedly, we’ve plucked all the low-hanging fruit. The reality is that we’ve not even tried. Imagine how much we could have achieved if the military budget were given over to science and engineering, and had been since 1945.
We’d have nanotech and starships by now. Possibly fusion. Probably much more that I can’t even imagine.
am i the only parent annoyed by how ridiculously convoluted a process it is to download attachments from Google Classroom? we live in a world of shitty products that everyone uses.
— Steve Randy Waldman (@interfluidity) September 8, 2020
For a while, around 2000-2004 or so, computers were actually getting easier to use while being more powerful. This all changed when advertising took over everything — and Google et al. became newfangled monopolies.
Since then, computers and related (smartphones, etc.) have gotten vastly more difficult to use while pretend convenience — backed by much propaganda — rules all. Now, actions that should be a click away take 10, or are just impossible, and every product is designed to addict, not to assist.
But we have no one to blame but ourselves; this is the world we’ve built.
Finally, someone has the right answer! I mean, other than me. Inflationary pressure leads to inflation! Who woulda thought?
TFW you realise that you've probably not cried in front of another person in about two decades.
— GeniesLoki (@GeniesLoki) April 20, 2020
Try four decades!
A friend once told me, "It's impossible for women to lose weight in their 40's."
I was 40 at the time & remember being devastated by this and the idea that I was stuck being in that body.
I turn 45 in two months.
When someone says you can't, prove them wrong. 💪 pic.twitter.com/bigWOgFkSI— SeizureSalad 🧠 (@KetoHiking) September 7, 2020
Good work. Doesn’t even look like the same person.
I was marveling the other day just how much one can modify one’s self without surgery or pharmacological intervention. I’ve been working out hard for two years and I don’t look like the same person either. My face and body have changed enormously.
On my worst days now I look better than on my best days three years ago. As I’ve observed before, the Fat Acceptance movement and the like is not afraid that they cannot change themselves — they are terrified of something far more daunting: that they can.
Hey — did learning math in school ever feel like *memorizing* things to you?
I never felt like I was memorizing things in a math class — yet *memorizing* seems to have been the experience of many people I talk to. Let's explore this.
— this exotic dialectic (@extruded_mind) August 31, 2020
I memorized entire books to be able to (barely) pass high school math, and thus high school itself. Memorization was all there was. Nothing was ever related to anything real or that we’d ever use anywhere, even potentially.
None of what this person suggests would work for me either, unfortunately. I have no absolutely no visual sense, every math problem as far as I can tell has nothing to do with any other, and I also cannot solve logic puzzles (have never solved even one successfully, ever, in my entire life).
So obvious I didn't even think of it: heterosexual dating norms are full of examples of male emotional labour – e.g. expecting men to approach women
(Also full of examples of female emotional labour, just different things)
https://t.co/DT59TBjpVo— GeniesLoki (@GeniesLoki) August 31, 2020
Yeah, framing frequent and sometimes brutal rejection as “not emotional labor” is completely absurd. Yet, as with violence, men are told just to accept it, deal with it, handle it, and if you don’t you’re not a real man.
And then the feminists say that “no one is OWED love/sex/social contact,” as if 90% of them hadn’t just spent the past six months going obviously and embarrassingly fucking bonkers due to lack of love/sex/social contact because of Covid. The whole idea that no one is owed those things is both trivially true and completely fucking irrelevant and a very harmful and inhuman way of thinking. Because no one is owed anything. Food. Water. A place to live. Trust me, the universe does not give a crap either way. Burn you and everyone you’ve ever loved and known up with a solar flare? Fine. Just another Tuesday.
This is, again, predatory neoliberal hyper-capitalism refracted through feminism, and it’s no prettier there than anywhere else. We owe each other more than telling three-time losers that they deserve their pain and isolation. Or at least, that’s the world we should be trying for but won’t.
Most people are doing the best they can.
I don’t give a fuck. That’s not good enough.
How we met: ‘I hitchhiked to Kathmandu and spent days searching for her.’
For today’s liberals, this relationship would be no good for these reasons:
Yep, totally evil.
Fucking hell.
German news: “could air conditioning in offices facilitate the spread of coronavirus?”
How are all these “experts” literally seven months behind anime avatar Twitter users.
Why is this all so absurd.
— Emily / aiju (@the_aiju) September 3, 2020
Because “experts” only state something when they have mounds of (still usually) iffy quantification to back them up, don’t understand systems nor the precautionary principle, and were educated poorly and taught only very linear thinking on toy problems, with with no comprehension of anything outside their minute area of study.
“Look at these people having a safe outlet during such difficult times. Let’s just make sure we scold them for that, and not use the power of visuals to inform people of the actual big risks of crowded, unventilated indoors.” ht @mauprieto pic.twitter.com/BF4K0baF63
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) September 7, 2020
The media, and its owners, wants people to be cowering inside, terrified. That’s what causes ad clicks and that’s what sells newspapers to old people.
By the way, if you live in an apartment its far more likely that you get Covid-19 sitting alone in your tiny shitbox via its crappy ventilation than you do outside at a beach or a state park. Our media is utter garbage.
The pandemic has brought the personal computer back to life, with help from Zoom.
It was always, always a lie that the PC was dead. But now people are figuring out you can’t get a fucking thing done on a tiny smartphone with a shitty keyboard. Smartphones are for consumption only, and aren’t even good at that.
Surprise, sur-fucking-prise.
What baffles me is that education costs increase over time instead of decrease.
Doesn’t information become more easily accessible?
We can literally download any book onto our phones or learn any software for free.
What are we paying more for.
— Dmitriy (@dmitriy14641) September 5, 2020
Credentials matter more when knoweldge is effectively free. So, when anyone can learn anything, knowledge itself must be devalued to preserve the power status quo — thus education must cost more, as it’s not education that’s being purchased but rather a signifier of being of the preferred social caste.
People who have been scared to literally even go outside for months are weird.
So many “scientific, educated” people rely on magical thinking, no different than the deplorables they so readily criticize.
If you can only Deadlift 500lbs after 10yrs training and someone else can dead 700lbs, it's not necessarily because;
1 they trained harder
2 they trained better
3 they know more— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) August 22, 2020
Genetics matter, as much as progressives hate to hear it (but secretly know it’s true), and the more you reach close to your potential, and other people’s potential in comparison, the more they matter.
I simply do not have the genetics to deadlift 700 pounds. No matter how much I train, I will never be able to do that. But I saw a guy on YouTube about my height and only slightly larger than me muscularly who was deadlifting 700 pounds fairly easily. The difference between us? He likely has a genotype that allowed for more coordinated muscle recruitment and stronger connective tissue in the right places.
No matter what the libs claim, genetics matter, and in more areas than they want to admit.