SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

FWIW, I know several developers at Epic who are happy with the job, the work/life balance, and have been there for years. OTOH, I know several people, too, who were project managers, and that's 110% true. Epic is big on academic performance. It wants people who can put their heads down and grind, without asking questions or sticking up for themselves.

Until they burn out...

Article 5 and Catch 22, which in this case would be formulated as, "They can do anything that we can't stop them from doing." One could make that argument, but who'd be listening?

Of course, I drive (I kind of have to because of the way our landscape is designed to mandate it), so I have to include myself in this. It's well-established by psychological research that drivers have very little empathy for other drivers, but especially little empathy for bicyclists and pedestrians, viewing them as less-than-human annoyances. Add in that driving in a city requires that one subject other people to the noise, the pollution, the danger, and the arrogation of space by one's vehicle, and you pretty much have to suppress any empathy for the people who live there, otherwise it'd be unbearable to do. That lack of empathy is textbook sociopathy, induced by the activity of driving. It just happens to be widely normalized, but we still see posts even here on Lemmy from new drivers who are struggling to suppress those thoughts.

Putting the shoe on and loudly announcing that it fits?

I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one's neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)

If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero "unfair" is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more ("losing"), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.

But what if it's just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn't notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it's fair

Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.

Getting trapped in a building with a mass shooter is something very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I face the danger of death by automobile at least twice a day, on my ride to work, and my ride home. More, if I go other places. It may seem not that bad because it's so normalized. Dying in or under the wheels of a car is something that happens to people every single day, and it barely rates a mention in the local news. Sometimes the victim doesn't get even get a name. By contrast, the stochastic nature of mass shootings makes them scary, like plane crashes or terrorist attacks, the natural order of things is upended. Death is death, though, and I wouldn't be less dead if it were a texting driver rather than a gunman.

And the texting driver is a whole hell a of a lot more likely. So, yes, it's entirely logical that I'm afraid of that. Not being able to understand and denying that fear is exactly the kind of car-induced sociopathy that I'm talking about.

Throwing insults is not a discussion, by the way.

You don't understand what fear is like?

They're not the same. This is privilege speaking, I know, but gun violence mostly occurs between people who know each other. I'm not in those circles or neighborhoods, so only the occasional mass shooting might affect me.

But cars? They're omnipresent. There's a steady stream of them in front of my home, so I can't avoid the danger. My life is threatened by cars every damn day, and my quality of life degraded by them. And you can't tell me that driving a car around a city is anything but sociopathic disregard for the well-being of others, because that's what it amounts to.

Cars as bad as guns? No, they're worse.

An automobile, at the end of the day, is a luxury item. A toy. Humanity existed for most of its history without cars, and even today, you can get to work or the grocery store without one. (Granted, often not easily, but that's only because we've made it difficult to get there any other way. But making it difficult was a deliberate policy choice designed to exclude poor people.) One could argue that the automobile is an anti-tool, as its use is making our lives materially worse (traffic violence, health impacts, pollution, ecosystem destruction, climate change, the burden on government and personal budgets), but that ignores a car's major function as a cultural identity marker, and for wealth signaling. We humans value that a lot. Consider, as but one common example, the enormous pickup truck used as a commuter vehicle, known as a pavement princess, bro-dozer, or gender-affirming vehicle.

In that way, they're exactly the same as firearms, which are most often today used as a cultural identity marker. (Often by the same people who drive a pavement princess, and in support of the same cultural identity.) Firearms are also also luxury toys in that people enjoy going to the firing range and blasting away hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment of it. But beyond that, the gun people have a pretty legit argument, too, that their firearms are tools used for hunting and self-defense. They are undeniably useful in certain contexts, and no substitute will do. One certainly wouldn't send mounted cavalry with sabers into war today.

I appreciate the gamer aesthetic when scientists need to buy gear with the power to run scientific calculations for relatively cheap. The RGB lights under the case windows bring a bit of pizzazz to the laboratory.

That's why electroconvulsive therapy uses pulses of about a millisecond. But, then, it's not actually turning the power off, ECT is more of a warm reset of consciousness.

Yes, mathematicians first encountered equations which could only be solved with complex numbers in the 16th century.

TL;DR: We can't hold them accountable for their crimes, because they might try to hold us accountable for the same crimes.

The Red Green Show

Easy-going comedy with minimal plot, mostly there to tie together an episode of shorter skits. Some Boomer humor, but not too cringe, I think.

One of the Big Lies that they repeated over and over throughout the election season was the one about the "border crisis," where allegedly criminals and rapists were flooding into the country across the southern border by the millions. They promised to round up and deport all of them, literally millions of people. You can see where the problem arose: Lies collided head-on with reality. There simply are not millions of migrants for ICE to round up. They don't exist. They never existed. It was all a lie.

Now, the regime has to appear like it's Doing Something(tm) by actually deporting people. Stephen Miller has even given ICE a quota of 3,000 deportations a day, and it's struggling. They have to make the numbers somehow, and the low-hanging fruit are the immigrants that they already have records on, and know about. ICE can just comb the immigration records, and go pick up people whom they know exactly where to find. Morality and logic have nothing to do with it, it's all about throwing the red meat of performative cruelty to their base, and intimidation to their political enemies.

Who set those rules? Is there standards body that promulgates them? I remember that social media emerged as a term to describe media on which the users provided the content, rather than traditional gatekeepers like newspapers and TV networks. Wikipedia agrees, using special jargon, distinguishing between monologic and dialogic media models.

Reddit is quintessential social media.

Sir Terry Pratchett tweeted his own meeting with Death.

I find it easy to switch back and forth between the two color combinations: If I assume that the scene is in full sun, then the dress looks blue and black. If I assume that it's in the shade, but with a brightly-lit background, then it looks white and gold.

It that's true, and we're afraid Iran might use them, then it seems like a bad idea to attack it.