I feel like a water slapper sometimes in how pointless my job is
102The entire marketing industry
44The entire marketing industry is gross and needs to die.
But let's not act like it's pointless. Propaganda (advertising) works, and works well.
51
My job is basically to do things to the pixels on my screen in a way that the pixels on your screen do something interesting/helpful/valuable.
11Pixel Slapper.
4
I wonder if the ultra rich understand just how much genuine malice is directed at them.
People were cheering for the submarine to implode.
It really seems like the world is full of tinder, waiting for a spark.
97Nah. People get really pissed when they're REALLY hungry.
We're kept at a perfect balance, we can't afford top shelf stuff, but most people have enough to get by.
Sure, it feels like everyone is a medium-sized misadventure away from financial collapse, but still, we get by. We have Internet, shows to stream, cheap shitty fast food next door.
No one can be bothered to go outside to chop heads demanding to redistribute wealth.Especially considering that half the population has been talked into believing that by pulling your boot straps you can get as rich as Elon Musk, and Trump is literally Jesus.
There's no revolution incoming, just occasional angry tweets.
41Revolutions are most closely correlated with food insecurity, yes.
But in today's JIT economy, and the vulnerability of our supply chains, it's not hard to imagine a set of circumstances where suddenly a huge swath of the population suddenly not knowing where their next three meals are coming from.
2680% of Americans deal with precarity. Food precarity, rent precarity, job precarity, family precarity, health precarity.
So a lot of us are feeling the discontent.
But we lefties arent used to planning violent protest (say sabotage and mischief. We'd rather not actually kill anyone.)
One possibility is the right-wing doing some sparking. A group of militant extremist reactionaries might load up and massacre a venue to get the civil war started.
Or the government could pass some laws resulting in mass incarcerations of non-violent offenders (say abortion seekers or LGBT+). Once that starts turning into capital punishment of young women protests might turn into arson of police and state facilities. We saw a bit of this with Iran with the Mahsa Amini protests or in 2020 US with the George Floyd protests.
9
- 21
The choice of a game controller to steer the Titan was the least-sketchy and most-defensible design decision made in that case. As a tinkerer and maker myself, you want to invent the fewest number of new things when inventing a new thing. It just makes sense to focus on the central goal. The goal was build a sub (poorly it turns out), not invent a new way to translate button presses into motion. That’s a solved problem.
3
And the folks in the USA trying to make the rich richer have also hung their hat on arming the country. Interesting logic
16I mean that IS the point of don't tread on me.
7
I don't think they talk to average humans much so they don't have much idea.
9I've worked for a lot of super rich people over the years in high-end construction. Most (not all) of them are deeply un-self-aware and have no idea how they are seen by regular people because it would never occur to them to ever think about it. The lives of most people are like some strange and exotic foreign country that they're vaguely aware of but that they have no real interest in. They're aware of poverty as a concept, but that's as far as it goes; it's not something they actually understand or have any desire to understand or even think about.
A lot of this, I think, is somewhat deliberate in that it allows them to ignore how unjust their hoarding of wealth and resources is.
7
I'd think the sounds of random pond slapping would be more annoying than frogs, but I guess I'm not rich enough to have the correct opinion on this
35Midwife toads sound like a fire alarm when the battery is running down, get a bunch together and they're really fucking loud ... I imagine a bunch of frogs might be similar
9I mean you don't have to slap it like it has slept with your wife.
6Or you have yet to hear frogs during night.
5
Russia has been a horrible place to be a peasant for a long time. In most of Europe peasents gained a lot of freedoms after the black death. But in Russia peasents, or serfs as they were called, only suffered worse. The serfs in Russia couldn't even marry or move without the permission of their lord. The lord, or boyar as it was called locally, had pretty much full ownership over you. Russia pretty much enslaved their whole population until the mid 1800s. Complete disregard for the life of the commoner has been a constant theme of Russian life for a long time and it arguably continues to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia?wprov=sfla1 Some dark but enlightening reading about the historical situation of peasents in Russia. Peasents were de facto enslaved there for far longer than anywhere else in Europe. I can't imagine living through such a time. Dedicating your whole existence and work to serving some fat boyar who cares nothing about you. At any time you could get drafted for a deadly war which you probably are not going to be returning alive from. This arguably still happens there today.
33Anyone knows which book they're referring to? It sounds a bit like Chekhov.
32Dunno about Russian book but the same story is in Tale of Two Cities
‘You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and drove him. You know that it is among their Rights to keep us in their grounds all night, quieting the frogs, in order that their noble sleep may not be disturbed. They kept him out in the unwholesome mists at night, and ordered him back into his harness in the day.
Good book would recommend.
3"Bro, bro, remember that gun I mentioned earlier, bro?"
– Checkov, probably
3
Apparently in the time of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette had a play farm where servants would take, clean and replace chicken eggs under the hens so Marie Antoinette could gather them later. Many nobles in France had such play farms. The pond story reminds me of this tidbit.
We know the Qu'ils mangent de la brioche scandal was fabricated (though a lie used to turn opinions against the royal family). In truth it was the failure pf Church and King in the Estates-General to read the room and then the King's failed effort to escape France that sealed the Queen's fate in the Place de la Révolution.
Queen Marie Antoinette was by far not the worst of spoiled nobles, just in way over her head.
20Permanently Deleted
7tbf those frogs sound annoying af
-3
