"Uhhhh the economy is doing fine because my chart says so" Then your chart fuckin sucks, bro. Your data collection is shit, your data processing is shit, your entire methodology is shit.
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@anarchistkale
"Uhhhh the economy is doing fine because my chart says so" Then your chart fuckin sucks, bro. Your data collection is shit, your data processing is shit, your entire methodology is shit.
can we bring back the term "fair-weather friend" bc I feel like if fair-weather friends got called that more this whole argument about whether or not you should be there for your friends when it's inconvenient/at what point of personal inconvenience it's ok to bail on your friends would kinda fall apart bc like. we literally have a word for "friend who's only there when you don't need something from them" because the baseline expectation is that a friend should be there even when it sucks. like we used to make fun of people for bailing on their friends.
go onto any career-related subreddit and you’ll find someone making a post like “hey everyone! i’m considering going into this field, any advice for a newbie? :)” and all of the comments will be like “do NOT work in this field. i’m $200,000 in student loan debt. i get paid $0.15/hour and i work 80 hours a week. my manager and my coworkers all beat the shit out of me every wednesday.” and this is in literally any subreddit about work. i’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for this
So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"
Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.
Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.
It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.
It's rude.
This is what's so fucked up about "nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right".
The labor is already being done under capitalism. The laborers are already being underpaid under capitalism.
When you propose removing the greedy profiteers and paying the workers a reasonable wage, people call that "slavery" while they have no problem with the current system.
They're not even trying to make sense.
i have a suggestion
and from Cooldown, Sam's T-shirt! Whitney Moore from when she did Birdemic!
There’s this pattern with new tech businesses where they lure in new customers with a really cheap or free product and a bunch of investors pump money into it because it has a lot of users but the company is losing money because the product is too cheap or too free. In this scenario three things might happen.
1. The company goes under because it can’t keep tricking its investors forever (extremely common with most free or cheap startups)
2. The company is forced to turn into an advertising business to survive (early days Google, most social media sites, etc.)
3. The company drives out all other competition and then raises its prices once it’s the only viable option left and its customers are trapped with it (Amazon, uber, etc.)
Now here’s the thing I can’t figure out, which is what all of these AI companies are gonna turn out to be. Because investors are seemingly holding onto this AI thing very tightly, it’s unclear how they could be an advertising company unless they’re selling their products to advertisers who can already use their products for free, and they’re kind of filling an unnecessary niche. I mean, a lot of people clearly find value in AI chatbots even if I don’t like them, but is that enough value for them to be forced to pay for it? I don’t think so. I think for most people it’s like a novelty they can interact with and like every company has a large language model these days so if you start charging for it they can just move to Google or Microsoft’s AI which are large corporations that don’t need to charge extra for the use of their AI.
This is why a lot of people think we’re in an AI bubble and that the bubble’s gonna pop, taking half of the investment market with it. There’s just no way for these individual companies to become profitable in the long term unless they choose to be bought and become subsidiaries of larger companies, but those larger companies have the resources to just create their own LLMs so why would they? Not to mention all of the copyright issues.
The thing is though is that the bubble hasn’t popped yet. Which is weird. It’s pretty obvious to like a lot of people across a lot of industries including the finance industry that an AI large language model isn’t really profitable in isolation, especially if you get people used to using it for free.
It makes me wonder how long until the bubble bursts. It might deflate soon at the very least because currently they’re building more square footage of data centers than is physically needed for basically anything, including generative AI. A lot of communities are also protesting the building of these large data centers in their regions because they’re loud and they bother residents and scare off local wildlife and don’t even create a lot of jobs.
You really don’t need a lot of people to run a data center so once all of the data centers are built and the construction jobs dry up and they have more square footage than they can use there’s not gonna be a good economic impact from all of this and the noise pollution is gonna piss people off.
Anyways beyond even my personal moral reasons for not liking these companies, as someone that’s interested in economics and the numbers involved in business and finance I can’t help but look at all this and be baffled. It’s like a gold rush where the gold doesn’t exist and even the people selling the shovels seem like they’ve built their stores right next to a dam that’s about to break open.
if u call urself a misandrist I'm going to assume ur homophobic. I'm gonna assume that ur at the very least weird about trans women like me, that you're going to judge them based on how they pass, on how out they are, on what level of transition they are at. I'm gonna assume ur racist too. like. idk "misandry" very feels like the sorta "feminism" someone is really into when they're in high school and carefully making sure to never think about anything.
and do you believe yourself to be an unfailing arbiter of who that is? and is it truly all cishet men? do you hate men of color, if they are cishet? what about intersex men? why not just hate bigoted people? why find groups of people, groups big enough to undoubtedly contain marginalized people?
No matter what marginalised group a man belongs to he is still a member of a patriarchy and part of this sexist society
You would have gotten black men lynched back in the day and would have been proud of yourself for it, I just know.
Okay Murray/Gus potential romance is OUT Murray/Gus Bromance is IN! Outside of less smooching my thoughts have not changed I want them to be BFFs that stand the test of time with the addition that they both discuss what trees they want to climb when they can catch a break. And if that tree is Kattigan who might need to leave the city like NOW and could use a few more dogs and hot bruisers in his life.
you can believe victims about what they experienced and also not want to torch the lives of the people they've accused without proof. that is a space you can walk in and usually it's not even that hard. I say this as a survivor of domestic violence. "believe victims" doesn't mean get torches and pitchforks any more than "innocent until proven guilty" means victims are lying. please please learn this "believe victims" isn't about the perpetrators it's about the victims
i’m tired of babying grown women who let beauty standards control their entire life. stand up, grow up & get over yourself. enough. you aren’t perpetual victims. exercise the autonomy you refuse to acknowledge you have. you can choose to stop this circus anytime. grown ass fucking women acting like helpless victims to the patriarchy and then in the next breath going “COME WITH ME TO MY BOTOX APPOINTMENT😃” you are traitors and we will never make it out of the patriarchy if personal responsibility can’t be taken
like god fucking damn women for centuries fought to have financial and social independence, and we largely achieved that in most countries, just for modern women who have no idea what patriarchy used to do to us to turn around and go “i’m not the problem, blame men for saying i look prettier after a nose job” you have everything your foremothers hoped and dreamed for, all that autonomy won through blood and sweat, and you waste it offering your body up to the patriarchy because “social pressure” get the fuck over yourself and stop acting like you have no choice. absolutely pathetic
and whenever people criticize women who get cosmetic procedures done and who enslave themselves to beauty standards it’s always met with “it’s not their fault, it’s the patriarchy” and i find that to be such a circular, never ending blame game. yes fucking obviously it’s the true fault of the patriarchy but you can’t hold a system of social hierarchy accountable because the decisions individuals make constitute said system. and turning it into a chicken or the egg debate does nothing besides shift blame to something that cannot be reckoned with or addressed. stop blaming the patriarchy at large for the individual decisions of fully autonomous women
Springing off of my addiction post once more, I am also skeptical at best of 12-step programs, because their framework has just never remotely aligned with my actual experience.
The substance I was addicted to was heroin. While I was actively addicted, it absolutely came before everything else. My life shrank around it. I kept using despite very real, very obvious negative consequences. If you’re looking for something that fits the “compulsion + harm + loss of control” model, that was it.
But what’s always sat strangely with me is what happened when that context changed.
Once my abusive relationship ended and I was no longer in an environment where it was readily available, it was shockingly easy to stop. I’m not saying it was physically comfortable. My body was pretty pissed off for a while. But psychologically, it just didn’t have the same hold anymore. I wasn’t spending my days white-knuckling cravings or constantly thinking about it. It dropped out of my life in a way that, according to the 12-step model, is not really supposed to happen.
And that’s where my issue with that framework starts.
Because 12-step ideology tends to assume that if you have ever had that kind of relationship with one substance, it reveals something fundamental and permanent about you. That you now have a generalized “addictive nature” that will attach itself to other substances or behaviors if you’re not constantly managing it. That you are, in some essential way, always on the verge of transferring that pattern onto something else.
And that just hasn’t been true for me.
I was a near-daily cannabis user for years. When it started consistently making me feel physically uncomfortable instead of good, I stopped. No drawn-out battle, no existential crisis, just “this isn’t giving me what I liked about it anymore” and I moved on.
I drink occasionally, in social or celebratory contexts, and I genuinely find alcohol kind of boring outside of that. It doesn’t have much pull for me.
I tried gambling once, got annoyed at how tedious and overstimulating it felt, and left the casino in under an hour. I have not felt remotely compelled to revisit that experience.
I use the internet a lot, and I play a handful of video games, but I can also go on a camping trip with no signal and be completely fine, unless you want to try and find something pathological about nature photography, in which case you can blow it out your ass. If anything, I generally enjoy the change of pace. There’s no sense of panic or withdrawal or “I need to get back to my computer/consoles immediately.”
So when I hear the idea that addiction is this broad, transferable trait that will latch onto anything with quick reward or low friction, I just don’t see it reflected in my own life.
What does make sense, looking back, is context.
When I was using heroin, I was in an abusive relationship. My environment was unstable, stressful, and honestly pretty bleak. The substance didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It fit into a specific set of conditions where it functioned as relief, escape, and regulation.
When those conditions changed, the behavior changed with them.
That doesn’t mean there was no dependency. There obviously was. It doesn’t mean there were no consequences. There very much were. My grades suffered. I dropped out of college. I lost my apartment because staying out of withdrawal and numbing out from the abuse felt more important than paying rent.
But it does suggest that what we call “addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait that needs to be managed forever. Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.
When that’s the case, then a framework that assumes universality - “if this happened once, it will always be waiting to happen again, with anything” - is going to miss a lot of variation.
I’m not saying 12-step programs can’t help people. Clearly they can, or they likely wouldn’t exist in the way they do. But I do think they’re often treated as the model of addiction rather than a model that fits some people and not others, and when your experience doesn’t match that model, many people who swear by them will assume that you are misunderstanding yourself, in denial, or “not taking it seriously enough.” This paternalistic attitude only serves to make me even more skeptical of the framework.
For me, what mattered wasn’t declaring myself permanently “addictive” or treating every pleasurable behavior as a potential threat.
What mattered was getting out of the environment where that pattern made sense in the first place.
Rat Park, people. Stop forgetting about Rat Park.
My job is such fucking bullshit. I have to prepare these monthly reports for our suppliers, including actions we need from them. And today I'm going over last month's report with my manager to check with him if any of the actions from last month have actually been done, or if I need to keep them in for this month's report.
The answer was no, none of the actions have been done. And then for a couple of the really important ones, he says "You should probably send a separate email specifically about that, I don't think anyone actually reads these reports." My manager and I have a decent rapport, so I asked him point blank, "If that's the case, why do I keep preparing them every month?" And he straight up says to me, "Honestly I don't have a good answer for you, but you should keep sending them anyway."
I was so fucking incensed, but our rapport isn't good enough that I could get away with actually telling him off, so I just smiled and said okay. What the fuck, man, why am I wasting hours of my life every month working on these bullshit reports if no one even reads them? Corporate culture is such absolute rancid bullshit and I feel like it is strangling the life out of me with each passing day.
US General Strike
If you live in the United States, you should know that there's a pretty respectably large group planning a general strike in the US at the moment to demand various progressive policies and reforms in the country, including the abolition of ICE, ending financial/military support for Israel, the repeal of Citizens United, universal healthcare, and more.
A general strike is probably just about the only thing that the people of the US can realistically do to force their government to meaningfully change. Regular protests like those "No Kings" displays won't do fuck all, uncoordinated violence won't accomplish anything either, and some kind of mass revolutionary uprising is an impossible pipe dream.
But a strike? That's fucking with the money. They can't ignore that, and if it comes with a list of specific demands, there's a real chance at least some of those demands get met.
So if you're in the US, fucking sign up, and tell everyone you know about it. All the details you need to know are on their website. This is your best, maybe only, chance at saving your country. Here's the link: https://generalstrikeus.com
why so silent good messieurs
I’m SEVERELY disappointed this post didn’t include the eye witness statement of the mirror crash incident in question
people on here throw such a fit about people openly and specifically including men and men's issues in their fight for liberation, insist that actually it is vital feminist praxis to only ever engage with other human beings through the lens of "are you the Innocent Victim Gender or the Evil Rapist Gender", and then you look at a Black liberation group and
"Love Black Men: Boldly, intentionally, and without condition. This love calls us to confront and dismantle systems of oppression, patriarchy, and anti-black racism that equally devalue Black men’s lives, criminalize their presence and deny their full humanity. To love Black men is to make space for their healing, joy, complexity and vulnerability—not as a counterpoint to safety, dignity, or gender justice, but as essential to it. We call on ourselves and our communities to choose to build systems grounded in care, accountability, liberation and create spaces where Black men can thrive in love and be loved in return."
crazy. isn't it.