Pongalh
1yr ago
Tangential, but decaying infrastructure + rise in conspiracy theory is a terrible combination. The latter will be invoked to explain perfectly predictable outcomes from the former.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yea. Classical liberals like to float the "Baptists and bootleggers" thesis. Not everyone is secretly some kind of bootlegger. There are Baptists.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Right, the boom in and trendiness of dramatized true crime, which blends fiction and fashion with the facts, makes one more suspicious than ever. Netflix in particular seems to be running away with this genre.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Where are good statistics on the reversal of remote work? That still seems very much up in the air. Office vacancy is still high in the flagship coastal metros, though I hear offices are fuller in the heartland.
I've had uninterrupted remote work since March of 2020 (which included switching jobs) so at least for me it's all alive and well. Incredible life-changer in fact.
There are all kinds of ancillary voice assistant-ish stuff like voice to text, or text to voice, or doing voice driven commands in an Apple TV search (so incredibly superior to having to punch text with a button), or just setting reminders - as opposed to voice-driven shopping or games/trivia - so this is by no means a lost industry. Ambient computing and its contactless, labor-saving attributes is not going anywhere.
I worked with chatbots and voice assistants for about a 3-year period ending in 2018, but looks like I might have dodged a bullet long-term. In fact I worked on Bixby which everyone knew was dead in the water even before now. (Samsung attempted to have their own standalone device ala the Amazon Echo which was even more outlandish.)
Pongalh
1yr ago
This is a good point. The individually useful thing is the result of a kind of libertarian transactionalism that once learned is difficult to unlearn. You can posit a possibly naive but socially useful state of mind wrt politics before coming into contact with it.
But I'm too far gone now. I can't pretend like I didn't learn it.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yes. My girlfriend has voted like five times in San Francisco this year. She complains they have too many elections there, but keeps voting anyway.
I haven't voted since 2008.
Pongalh
2yr ago
There's a lot of Yarvin's POV running through these replies. That the profit motive is not actually running the show within for-profit companies. Rather a cadre of ideological actors who are not motivated by profit but purely power and status. It's difficult to wrap once head around when you consider the power and status is achieved by being profitable, or so you'd think.
There was an interesting point in Yarvin's discussion with Ben Burgis (via Thaddeus Russell), wherein he says Fox News, while a media company, is not really the media because it's actually interested in making a profit. The whole rest of the media, well that's actually Media, an ideological non-profit endeavor.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I've seen the left going gaga over Mastodon in response to Musk helming Twitter. Suppose it's a good time to be that company.
Pongalh
2yr ago
The iPhone people are the only ones that had a crack at that new and short-lived Elon Musk Twitter blue check thing. I think their blue checks remain though yes? That's an enduring iPhone-driven status thing.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I guess I'm saying that the suppression of that desire is as real as it's unleashing. So the prioritizing of the bad behavior/utterance as Real You is just pessimism in disguise. You can just as well focus on the part of you displayed when you're not drunk and say that's the authentic you and the authentic opinion.
Getting sober can reveal old thoughts as well, unmasking the desire, hidden all along deep down, to be a better person.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"Your culture sold to you..."
That's a sentiment that understands precisely where the woke are coming from, incidentally. Mentioning this because it comes up a whole hell of a lot in this forum.
Culture can belong to a whole people. "Cultural appropriation" is a real and troubling phenomenon.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I want to approach this from a somewhat different angle. The right echoing a lot of anti-globalization left talking points up until about 2010 seems to me to invoke the trope of "you want to be an individual, just like everyone else"" which has a superficially clever ring to it but is not very compelling.
Ask for immigrant communities maintaining their ways, the right is split. They like the conservatism but they don't like the lack of assimilation. Ideally, Republicans swingers in Florida would move a bit closer to where these first generation immigrants are at, lifestyle-wise, while all the immigrants would start speaking English anywhere native born Americans might hear them and also stop voting Democrat.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is not surprising. I haven't even looked at Coinbase or touched my Coinbase credit card in like half a year. In 2021 those things were very, very important to me. That was a banner year.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"Since when do we expect rappers to be articulate?"
I don't know. Rappers do truck in wordsmithery after all. The gift of gab is out front in that particular genre of music more than any other.
Pongalh
2yr ago
San Francisco news interviewed local business owners/workers in the vicinity of Twitter HQ who are excited about Musk's plan to bring people back in the office. They want that lunch and dinner/happy hour business that's been missing since 2020.
So the cruelty of laying off WFH Twitter people is somewhat offset by that.
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is interesting because it seems to turn the notion of the disenfranchised and down and out being most tempted by a potentially dangerous nationalist spirit on its head. Nay, it's employed professionals? In this case in tech.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I remember that as well. It was essentially secular population reductionists against often religious pro-natalism types.
The fashionability of Westerners telling people in the Global South to have fewer babies has diminished since then, weirdly putting progressives closer to Catholic conservatism stateside that hated the efforts of the United Nations etc.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah, I was reminded of the debate here regarding torture watching this Breaking Points video earlier, where torture comes up in the conversation with the implication that actually yea, it works. I think when that issue is not salient everyone falls back on "of course torture works." And introspection certainly tells me it does. The idea that it doesn't work was a weird 2000s era blip born of disliking George W Bush and company.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lS3vyB7gcNA (a little past 3:30 in)
Pongalh
2yr ago
I was living in San Francisco for the past few months (and may return in the new year) and when riding Bart in the odd hours I decided to just ditch the fair. I felt like a chump paying when so many others neglected to; and when the machines didn't work, and there was no one around to help. You just want to get the hell out of those rotten stations as quick as possible at ~midnight in any case.
So I saw how deterioration of norms can come after the bourgeois too. I never skipped fare before but this year was a tipping point.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Geoff Shullenberger and guest had a pretty good podcast on this recently which took a look at how movies once promoted a fashionable kind of conspiracy mindset (Slacker, JFK). Needless to say that is way, way out now.
She had another survey that looked at success of escorts by age and found younger more successful, which was apparently not particularly controversial.
But ageism isn't something that ever really caught on with current progressives. I still recall a prominent Babe.net (of Aziz Ansari bad date fame) defender trashing some critic by calling her old, without much pushback.
Your surprise at the reaction to this is why "radical centrism" is actually a thing now. Previously bland, no-shit-sherlock observational territory is becoming verboten.
More options
Context Copy link