we used to have cheap headphones lying around everywhere. but @apple eliminated headphone ports and added more capable speakers, and bluetooth things are expensive or flaky or maybe not charged. so everyone ends up walking around with a speaker on it's annoying as fuck.

— Steve Randy Waldman (@interfluidity) December 4, 2020

I’ve noticed this, too. I ended up with a set of Airpods and they really do not work for me at all. I gave them a fair shot but their worst quality is that they fall out every two feet. If I stay perfectly still without moving my head even a little, they can stay in a while — maybe 10 minutes. But the moment I move at all they fall right out, no matter what position they are in or how hard I stuff them in my ears.

Who designed this product? I am glad I didn’t pay for these damn things. It seems like they are just designed to get lost.

I’m so confused by the fear women report of strangers (don’t walk at night alone, have pepper spray, etc.) but how statistically they’re in less danger from strangers than men are. What is going on? How did statistics get so divorced from perceived risk?

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) December 5, 2020

Those statistics aren’t very revealing, though, due to rational risk assessment and compensatory measures to minimize chances of attack undertaken by women.

Men take more risks than women, though, for various reasons. If you feel physically vulnerable as women often do (for good reason — they tend to be smaller and weaker than their attackers) you won’t walk down the dark alleyway or through the bad neighborhood. I will and have, including a neighborhood in Cairo where I wasn’t really sure I was going to walk out of it.

Also, women pay far less penalty for saying, “I’m scared” or demonstrating fear or timidity than men. Sometimes, they are even rewarded for it. Men never, never are — we pay high penalties for showing fear almost always.

Men are also more accustomed to violence, and are far less likely to be sexually assaulted or raped in a stranger encounter outside of prison. These both matter a lot too.

The Net Is Somehow Both Outdated and Prescient.

I liked that movie quite a lot. At the time, it proposed more than a few things that the average schmoe hadn’t even begun to consider. Now much of it, in a slightly-mutated and less dramatic form, is just everyday life.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Trump wanted to send everyone $1200 again but Pelosi refused because she was holding out for a president who believes in science so now she doesn’t support even the amount she said she supported because the working class can now eat Joe Biden’s belief in science instead of food https://t.co/yBOfZaGCn7

— Ben B (@GraduatedBen) December 4, 2020

Fuck the entire gerontocrat Dem establishment. Foul pieces of excrement, all of them.

While I very much get that somee things have to be experienced to be understood, there is something dehumanising in denying someone the attempt to walk in another's shoes, however imperfectly. https://t.co/VBYBTcYxtl

— L. Amber O'Hearn (@ambimorph) December 5, 2020

It’s such a very, very odd idea that you must be of a particular group to say anything at all about it. It’s a denial of our shared humanity and of empathy to conclude that only, say, a 32-year-old half-Pakistani woman can know anything about what it’s like to be a 32-year-old half Pakistani woman.

How did the left/liberals get so bad? Is it just their history of losing and ceding so much, some result of trauma?