Annoying

Updates Pending

Chill Annoying

I do think a lot of people simply don’t realize how much has changed, and how quickly.

What wasn’t even close to penciling out economically a decade ago is now a no-brainer. People don’t update very frequently.

Say v. Do

Chill Amusing, Annoying

This piece is, largely, full of terrible advice. The problem with it is that is a man parroting a woman’s bien pensant tall tales about what she believes about herself. Which, like what most people believe about themselves (men included), is largely false

There is a technique to talking to women which is far more effective. It is called: treat them like a fucking human being. Just actually talk to them. If you must, imagine that they are a man and then talk to them the way you would in that scenario.

Oh my fucking god that so does not work. That’s the quickest way to failure known, especially in any kind of dating or romantic context. Yes, yes, treat women human beings. But the problem here is that a woman is not a man. Treating her like one will lead to nothing but, well…nothing. Certainly no romantic spark if that’s what you’re looking for.

This is a version of listening to what women say rather than observing what they do. And those things do not match at all.

The article is either full of obvious platitudes or worthless drivel otherwise. Typical for “dating advice” of this type.

Trades

Chill Annoying, Rant

Natalia has the better view of this. It’s only transactional if you view it that way. But if I’m in a romantic relationship with someone, even if it’s short term, I certainly do have the expectation of sex being involved. Why would it not? And that’d be true even if she were paying for the trip. It’s absolutely insane the doofy crap people believe now.

It’s not that I just want the woman for her pussy (nor that she should just want me for my dick/wallet), but the point is that I could — and often do — go on the same trip with my platonic friends just as easily.

If the expectation is a non-platonic relationship, everything goes well but there is no sex, you’re damn right I’m going to be upset. And that’s not because it’s a transaction but because it’s like if I offered you some pie with whipped cream and I gave you an uncooked potato instead. You’re for sure gonna be miffed. And you should be. Same thing here. To Gen Z and associated other doltish clowns, everything is about power when it should be just about having fun.

Which they are against, firmly.

Maim

Chill Annoying, Evil

This is a good point. There are many parts of Oakland (and other cities) where the crime rate is effectively 100%. As in, if you go there you will be robbed, shot, stabbed, assaulted or worse. These aren’t conservative fantasies. They are real.

The liberals have really flubbed crime, the idea of having pleasant urban spaces, and how most normal people perceive danger. It really was a marvel how quickly they went from #MeToo to, “Let the vagrant have some assault as a treat. It helps with your racism. He’ll probably only maim one of your kids.”

And they wonder why they lose so often.

Failure Modes

Chill Annoying

About this thread, I know I am terrible but I don’t really care about people who can’t use computers. I mean, learn it or get left behind. It’s as simple as that.

Most of the stuff that the average mook has to do isn’t even that hard. They get confused when given even dead-simple directions like, “Click here.” Then they do not click the place for no known reason and act like it was the computer’s fault. Come on, you failed to do the simple and obvious thing the computer told you to do. Why?

Until I am forced to, though, I will never use passkeys as they are not as secure as advertised (or as the person who created this thread imagines them to be) and their two main purposes are vendor lock-in and surveillance.

If you don’t understand the very basics of computers after they’ve been common for more than 20 years, that’s on you. Get with the program or be left in the dust.

I have no sympathy.

Gen Bat

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Kat’s right. Places that once were explicitly designed to help people meet for romantic purposes got converted by feminists into, “NO ONE SHOULD TALK TO ANY WOMAN HERE IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL” spaces over the course of a couple of decades

I’m old enough to remember when many places and activities had either the implicit or often explicit (as in, it was in the actual marketing material) expectation that they were friendly to and often designed for both sexes to meet one another. However, PMC liberal women became so obsessed with keeping undesirable men away from them that these much-needed spaces were turned into yet another bomb-scarred gender battleground.

This extreme obsession is one that puzzles me, but I guess it was really important to them for some reason I fail to understand to this day.

DK Effect

Chill Annoying, Clowns

I hate this sort of know-nothing clownish crap. Medical practitioners absolutely should 100% be asking any female patient for this information always without exception no matter what as long as they are conscious. This is a quick attempt to check for:

1) Possible pregnancy. Many drugs can cause pregnancy complications and harm the fetus. Also lots of drugs can cause vastly different reactions when a woman is pregnant.

2) Anemia. Very common in women and very dangerous when conducting emergency medical treatment (and in general). No recent menses == very very high chance of anemia.

Anyone who does not ask an injured woman the last time she menstruated is engaged in actual fucking malpractice because if you get it wrong YOU HARM YOUR FUCKING PATIENT.

As for the poster, she is a goddamn idiot. It’s amazing people just post without knowing anything.

Down With the Lockness

Chill Annoying, Clowns

This disconnect is because leftists, liberals, Covidians and other associated clowns define lockdown as, “Armed thugs weld your door shut and arrest you if you leave the house.”

Everyone else has a better and more correct definition. Tell the kids who couldn’t go to school for two years and missed all their important life events that there was no lockdown. I know a woman whose daughter is still seething and enraged about that years later. Think she’ll vote for anyone who did that to her now that she’s an adult?

Lockdown wasn’t even that bad for us. We had a very pleasant place to live with a great view. And we actually like each other. But even with that, we didn’t eat out for 18 months. Many activities were restricted. Life was not normal at all. Just because there was no degrowther dream hard lockdown doesn’t mean a damn thing. It was still a bad time for everyone.

Powerbrain

Chill Annoying

When you realize how little actual thinking or brainpower it takes to be significantly smarter than average, it doesn’t leave you feeling so intelligent. The average is terrible. It’s kind of like to a dog, any person seems like a genius.

But there’s a lot more distance between me and someone like Norbert Wiener than the average dog is from the average person. I only seem intelligent because someone at the average is not quite smart enough to discern the difference between Norbert and me.

But unfortunately I have just enough brains to measure that difference, and it’s vast. Far, far more than between me and Joe or Jane Average.

Composing

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Sysadmins thrown into customer calls โ€“ how do you stay composed?

I’m composed by nature, but it’s easy. When you don’t know something (which is always, always gonna happen on customer calls), say: “I don’t know the answer to that, but will find out and get back to you.”

Easy. Super easy. And then research with the relevant team, FAQ or whatever and actually follow up.

A junior of mine was shadowing me on a customer call once and was flabbergasted that I said, “I don’t know” to half a dozen questions. However, when I’d tried letting her have a crack at answering on another customer call, she couldn’t handle it and threw out tons of fabricated and incorrect responses that I later had to walk back. Or she otherwise flubbed them.

This is infinitely worse than just saying, “I don’t know.”

Because trust me, customers are always going to come up with some wild-ass crap ain’t nobody ever thought of before.

It’s fine to research and answer later. I do it with nearly every customer call and I know a fucking lot about a lot.

Bent Wrong

Chill Annoying, Lying Liars

Scapegoating the Algorithm. Americaโ€™s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.

This is very badly wrong, and in a way that’s typical of those with a more empirical bent: it mistakes extremely limited experiments with constrained inputs for an entire sociocultural landscape and media environment and concludes there is no effect. It’s the typical failure mode of this type of surface “well, ackshually” type of analysis and it hits all the clichรฉs as if the author had a checklist to make it through.

The basic thesis is correct, which isn’t saying much. America’s epistemic problems do run deeper than social media. But pretending social media and even the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News had nothing at all to do with the disintegration of political alignment is, frankly, farcical.

I know that the empirical breed hates all anecdotes no matter their applicability, but everyone I know has had a relative or multiple relatives who was a relatively normal well-adjusted conservative or sometimes even a centrist Democrat who got exposed to social media, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or sometimes all three and who then went on to become some demented ultra-conservative rage-filled caricature of their former self. And that’s because it happened so very often. In this case, anecdotes reveal a lot in ways the pseudo-empirical sophistry above does not.

To elide a great deal I just do not care to write, what matters here is not some few months of posts on social media. Or exposure to Fox News. Or listening to Rush Limbaugh rant1 about “feminazis.” What is relevant is that there is a recursively self-reinforcing media environment that inveigles and then entraps those at the periphery in small, measured steps. One can see this with how the YouTube algorithm recommends increasingly unhinged right-wing content over time no matter what you view. The same is true of Facebook and other sites and how media ecosystems operate in general, particularly in the United States.

In short, the article is crap because the author does not understand his own sociocultural environment well enough to write about it cogently, nor how propaganda works and its actual function, nor how algorithms actually operate, nor what evidence here is or would be relevant. It is itself a propaganda piece intended to absolve media of blame while at the same time self-inculpating.

It’s worthless other than as a target to lampoon.

  1. Yes, I am aware that he is dead.