First, they sent the missionaries. They built communities, facilities for the common good, and spoke of collaboration and mutual prosperity. They got so many of us to buy into their belief system as a result.
Then, they sent the conquistadors. They took what we had built under their guidance, and claimed we “weren’t using it” and it was rightfully theirs to begin with.
Two people can look at the same thing, but see completely different things. And the way that they see it seems completely obvious and unambiguous to them. To the point where it’s hard to understand how anyone could claim to see anything else.
Take that same dynamic and apply it to a very loosely-defined question with very specific emotionally-charged answers, and you’ve got… Well, basically, a blueprint for social media engagement.
Wait, isn’t this just what BuzzFeed turned into a whole business? Did we loop back around to 2010?
My mobile client doesn’t show downvotes, so I was surprised when I saw exactly how bad the stats on this post are. Like, I saw all the comments declaring it a wasteland, but… Holy shit.
I hope we develop a new form of media literacy to deal with this kind of stuff.
Name one famous example of a charismatic coup-attempting fascist getting locked up and rallying their supporters behind a manifesto referring to “their struggle”.
Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by...
Cuz it itches the part of our brain that looks for status-seeking behavior and labels people as inauthentic.
Being vegetarian places a degree of exclusivity onto your consumer habits, and in the Western capitalist lens, conspicuous consumption has a lot to do with how we communicate our status.
Being vegan stands in direct relationship to vegetarianism as being even more exclusive. This does two things:
It raises the stakes, because now the identity is even more exclusive because it’s more restrictive.
It creates a pattern, where it looks as if you’re saying “Oh yeah? Well, I’m even vegetarianer! Take that! Look how cool I am!”
Just that in and of itself puts vegans on the receiving end of a whole bunch of cognitive biases.
But wait, there’s more!
Because mass production never lets a social identity go to waste, major brands got on board with explicitly labeling things as vegan, which starts to make it seem like you’re trying to be cool but really just deepthroating the corporate cock to “buy your way to cool”.
And then came the trends of organic/non-GMO, local-first, artisanal, farm-to-table, etc. etc.
At the point where Wal-Mart has their own artisanal farm-to-table cheese brand, it starts to look (to our dumb pattern-matching brains) like vegans are just rubes falling for the most basic version of an obviously fake status-seeking game propped up by cynical brands preying on how desperate you are to look cool.
But wait, there’s even more!
Because, surprise – our brains never actually stop caring about status, even if we think we’re just trying to make rational, objective, moral choices. Picturing yourself as a rebel for being vegan, taking the sneers and the insults in stride because you know it’s the right choice for the planet… is appealing.
And that self-aggrandizing image is inseparable from actually doing the thing, because that’s just how our brains work. Even for the most pure-hearted among us, thinking we’re morally superior – especially in tangible ways that we get to physically play out on a daily basis – is intoxicating.
So the people who are chuckling about the inauthenticity are… kind of right. But this same dynamic exists for literally everything. So when you chuckle at the vegan, but then take a moment to consider which kind of bacon really speaks to who you are as a consumer, you’re playing the same game. It’s just one that far more people are invested into. So if anyone calls it silly, nobody takes that criticism seriously. Not like your organic local-first artisanal acai kale kombutcha.
…which I listened to, for the first time, as an attempt at bonding with my then-girlfriend/now-wife’s roommate. We had not gotten along up until then, because she was aggressively vegan and I ate a lot of fast food. But I found out she liked podcasts and I was really enjoying this one and there was a new episode I hadn’t heard yet! She really enjoyed it, until the guest talked about veganism as a form of status-seeking. That didn’t go well. I didn’t mind taking over her half of the lease though.
Job listing for back-end engineer at Arrowhead says:
Cloud Engineering: Utilize Azure services to build and optimize cloud-based backend components and make use of monitoring tools to track live performance.
Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution.
CEO said during the early day playercount woes:
It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers. It’s a matter of labour. We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.
They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks
A good back-end engineer is at least 100k. And a just-keep-the-lights-on crew is probably 3-4 of them.
FWIW: I also work in IT, on an IoT system that you might also assume has a “nonexistent” server cost. (I assure you, the cost exists.) I also used to work in game dev.
That said: Yeah, protesting by playing the game is a severely misguided notion.
Big teams are faster on straightaways. Small teams go through the corners better. Upgrading from a go-kart to a dragster may just send your project 200mph into a wall. Sometimes a go-kart is really what you need.
My Subaru has a similar setup, and there’s a feature for changing the max height of the tailgate. You might wanna see if the same thing exists for you.
Apple really skewed our idea of lifespans for electronics, didn’t they?
Apple’s a weird pick for this.
If you’re talking desktop/laptop hardware, I had a 2009 MBP running just fine as a personal server until a couple of years ago and would probably still be doing it except the battery turned into a spicy pillow and I wanted more performance anyway. And I’ve got a 2016 that’s going strong as a daily driver for personal projects.
If you’re talking phones, that’s even weirder. It’s pretty well known that Android users change phones more frequently. Which makes sense, cuz Android phones tend to get stuck on old major versions and stop getting security patches.
For instance if you got an iPhone 5s in 2013, running iOS 7, you could still be using that today on iOS 12, which received security patches as recently as 2023.
If you got a Galaxy S4 in 2013, you could update from Android 4 to 5, which stopped receiving security patches in 2017.
Fun fact: The Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. In many cases, they built the machines they would later destroy.
What they opposed was the ownership structure. The fact that they could be 30x more productive, yet be paid less than before because the required skill level was lower, and the working conditions were now dangerous and demeaning.
Yet when someone says “luddite” now, what do you think? A dummy who’s afraid of having cool stuff?
The article defines working one’s contract hours as a form of quitting, a contortion of fact that I have struggled to grasp since laying eyes on it.
It is asserted that employees are obliged to put in extra hours, do additional work and recalibrate their work-life balance for the “benefits” of social capital, “wellbeing” and career success.
I have a novel proposal. Pay employees in actual capital for the additional time they are expected to work.
Dispense with the relaxation classes on their lunch breaks and the sweet treats and the tokenistic attitude of management to the labour that drives their business.
Instead, resource staff sufficiently to complete work within business hours, respect the rights of staff to a fulfilling life not defined by their day jobs, and stop using gaslighting terms like “quiet quitting” for fulfilling the terms of their contract of employment.
This may seem radical to those managers who have been around the block, but KPIs (key performance indicators) don’t spend time with my loved ones nor do they put food on the table. – Yours, etc,
I figure it’s just how democracy has to work. Governance is too complicated to just set it and forget it every 2-4 years.
Even if you somehow elect an ideal candidate, you’re still going to disagree at some point during their term.
There are plenty of no-win scenarios, opportunities to trade a short-term loss for a long-term win, etc. where you might agree on goals but not tactics and you end up having to petition/protest them.
And that’s in the ideal case.
You might as well assume that whoever ends up in The Room Where It Happens, they’re going to sit down on the opposite side of the table from you — not next to you.
I guess that’s kinda cynical, but I really don’t mean it to be. I think it’s just a more healthy way to frame participatory democracy. Your job is not done at the ballot box. That’s just to set the parameters for the real work.
“Google is insidious. They’re really an advertising data-collection company, but people think they’re a tech service company. Their whole strategy is to provide stuff like Chrome for free so that lots of people use it and it becomes a de facto standard, and then they flip a switch and quietly mine all of that data.”
Lazy thinking is a feature, not a bug. We’re social animals. Collective ideation is more effective and calorie-efficient.
The idea of individual intelligence kinda flies in the face of our evolutionary history.
But the “great man” myth helps powerful people stay powerful, so in some ways peddling the importance of individual intelligence is also part of our evolutionary history.
You don’t give money to the bums
On a corner with a sign bleeding from their gums
Talking about you don’t support a crackhead?
What you think happens to the money from your taxes?
Shit, the Government’s an addict
With a billion dollar a week kill brown people habit
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT (www.tomshardware.com)
Arrest of journalist Olga Fedorova (Alex Kent, New York, May 8 2024) (kbin.earth)
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Judge finds Donald Trump in contempt for 10th time over gag order and threatens jail time (www.cnn.com)
[Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism?
Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by...
Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two (www.hindustantimes.com)
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world)
I really do want to know though (lemmy.world)
Like getting 9 women pregnant and expecting a baby in 1 month (sh.itjust.works)
A YouTuber let the Cybertruck close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well. (www.businessinsider.com)
If it works, don't question it. (lemmy.world)
After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat (www.theverge.com)
I’m in a park. The grass is being mown by a robot. (lemmy.world)
We thought the rider fell off or something and it was going to crash. Then it turned and kept mowing. Park Roomba!...
What kind of institutional gaslighting is this? (i.redd.it)
Aren't you? (midwest.social)
Time to unionize at Kohl's! (lemmy.world)
its true tho (lemmy.today)
Don't have to worry about the sun in the basement
Self-reflection is hot (lemmy.world)
Millionaire tries to prove becoming wealthy is easy by becoming homeless and making a million in a year - and of course fails miserably and quits, citing reality (www.dailymail.co.uk)
“Wait this shit sucks, nevermind.”...