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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Usually I say “don’t mistake incompetence for malice” because so often when people fuck up, they aren’t doing it to be mean but just because they’re stupid.

    In this case, though, you’re mistaking malice for incompetence. Everything Reagan fucked up was 100% intentional. I mean, punishing black people and poor people was basically a campaign promise.







  • Overconfident is an understatement. I remember people thinking that Trump was the end of the Republican party, some people actually said that the party would be forced to disband after their crushing defeat in 2016.

    Even many Democrats didn’t like Hillary, but the idea of Trump winning was outright laughable to many. I think that combination of “I don’t want to vote for her” and “there’s no way she can lose” left a lot of people at home twiddling their thumbs instead of going out to vote.


  • I keep arguing this and people don’t like it. The pain is necessary, we need people to be inconvenienced so they demand we solve the problem. Our greatest enemy is little stopgap solutions that kind of help people now at the cost of their future, like subsidizing oil to make gas prices cheaper.

    It really sucks that people who are already having a hard time, people who don’t have money or time, are going to be the first to feel the pain. There’s definitely things we can do to help, but we all know that at least America isn’t going to do those things. I just don’t see a better way. Kicking the can down the road isn’t going to help them either, it’s just going to put them in a worse spot later.


  • Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

    The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.



  • Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

    To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

    If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

    tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.



  • I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I think many of these people are bi, not closeted gay. Hear me out…

    • To a bi person, being gay is literally a choice. You could just ignore your desire for the same sex and probably be perfectly happy with the opposite sex. That explains why these people always frame it as a choice.

    • But, when you deny something about yourself, you make it more present in your life. It’s like being told to not think about breathing (sorry), suddenly your breathing is top of mind. This explains why it is such a present thing to them.

    • When you constantly fixate on something, because you’re trying not to, and it’s something you find sexy… Well, you’ve just fetishized it. Which explains why they can’t just occasionally look at some gay porn or whatever and be happy, they always eventually get caught doing something extra freaky.

    • Finally, when you deny it all your life and go through your midlife crisis and decide you can’t take it anymore, you realize you don’t have the skills or knowledge that people who weren’t bottling it up have. Which is why so many get caught with staff members or prostitutes.





  • I think the point is valid, but maybe not presented well. When the 40 hour work week was established, the understanding was that a single parent could work and earn enough for the family.

    Now, two earners are not just common they’re almost required. People are stressed, wondering how they’re supposed to juggle work and family and chores and all of the other things that need to get done and the answer is that they shouldn’t have to juggle so much.

    To be clear: women having the ability to work is undeniably a good thing. Women don’t have to be beholden to finding a good husband, they have options now, and workplaces have benefited from new perspectives. But it also got messed up by capitalism making it the default expectation… More people joined the workforce, but wages just sat still and ate up the gains.

    I’m not saying women should choose family over career, I’m saying that it should still be an option today for one parent to make enough for the family to live off of so that the other parent can help balance the workload of life better.