tripletpeaks

It’s also a topic of scientific study with a century or more of literature.

It’s a little more complicated than what you wrote, but basically: yes.

[edit] Example study construction: pick some issue where there’s been a heavy propaganda push against it from one party, but a law they opposed passed anyway. Ideally, something like a tax increase, that can directly affect voters in a way they might reasonably be expected to understand and know about. Observe that the (say) tax hike affects not more than 2% of the population you’re studying. Survey. Observe that 35% or 40% of people say the new tax law increased their taxes, and very nearly all of them favor the party that opposed the hike and was claiming or implying it would affect more people than it did.

Repeat similar studies over a period of decades, always with familiar outcomes. Draw conclusions.

Separately, you can probe basic understanding of how our government & various policies or laws work. You’ll find half of everyone not knowing how marginal income tax rates work, that almost all the people who think our foreign aid spending is way too high believe it’s 10x, 20x, 30x higher than it actually is, et c. Generally speaking, voters hardly know how anything works, so of course they buy lies about it. That’s not me being shitty, it’s what the evidence overwhelmingly says is true. And this is far from an exhaustive treatment of alarming traits & behaviors of the electorate.

Things Red Team worries about:

1. If a democrat is elected, they will take all their guns (their campaign rhetoric keeps saying this will happen, but it continues being no part of democratic presidential campaign messaging, and hasn’t happened the times they warned it definitely would—this one’s fake)

2. Election security. But republicans keep getting into positions to investigate this and either not doing it (because they know it’s BS) or doing it and finding only a handful of mostly-accidental cases that don’t favor either party. Also fake.

3. Leftward shift around acceptance of non-standard sexual and social norms. This one’s real. Whether it’s a problem or just… fine and not worth worrying about? That’s another matter.

4. A bunch of totally wacky shit like litter boxes in classrooms. Fake.

5. Healthcare prices. Real! Democrats also worry about this.

6. Socialism. LOL we’re not remotely near it, very nearly nobody elected in the Democratic Party is left of center-right in most of the rest of our peer states, on economic issues and social safety nets and such. Fake issue.

7. Illegal immigrants increasing the crime rate (fake) and taking our jobs or driving down wages (true, with an asterisk that the effects are complicated, but sure, true) and bringing in drugs (you want citizen drug mules, they cross the border easier, or to just use shipping containers or cargo trucks entering the ordinary way with some greased palms as you can do crazy volume that way, this is fake)

8. Crime being out of control. Broadly, fake. (“But police stats could be…” yeah we have victimization surveys too, people study this and already thought of your objection. Again, fake)

9. Colleges being too liberal. Look at all that “fake” stuff above. Yeah gee I wonder why, dude. Real, but wholly self-inflicted.

10. Rampant fraud in social programs, by the people receiving the aid. This is extremely well-studied. Fake.

11. The budget deficit. Except Republicans are even worse for the budget than democrats, over the last 40 years. By, like, quite a bit. Mostly because they think tax cuts magically pay for themselves, plus Bush’s wars. They mocked the shit out of Gore for talking sense on this topic, and elected cut-taxes-and-spend Dubya. So. Real issue but they are extremely confused about who to vote for to improve it.

There are more but you get the idea. Yes, Fox News and Mark Levin and all them have convinced republicans the world is going to end if democrats win elections. But it’s largely based on completely made-up shit.

Left as an exercise for the reader to make a list for Democrats’ side. Nb how much of its worry about Republicans causing harm by trying to address the fake issues above. Probably most of it. And that’s a real thing that happens, to be worried about.

Formally telling us the nickname he prefers. The current name was set by Congress and they’d have to change it, so he’s not changing it, he’s putting his personal nickname for it in an EO.

Presumably he’ll also add the name to lots of signs and forms, wasting a bunch of money.

> For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.

Same here. Junior high and high school especially were the least-flexible, strictest environments I’ve ever been in, including in work life. People (teachers, relatives) telling me things like “this is the best part of your life” and “they have to be tough on you because the real world is so much harder still”—luckily I got a job early in high school and started to get the sense they might all be wildly wrong about that, then went to college and instead of being harder, it was like a fuckin’ vacation. So much more flexible, humane, and chill.

And yeah, 8 hours at school and 2+ hours of homework every night… in hindsight, I have to not think about it too hard or I’ll get angry. I could have learned more putting in literally 1/4 the time, and not been constantly stressed out to a degree I wouldn’t realize until later was extremely unhealthy.

Not just a huge waste of time, but caused harm it took me more than a decade to mostly get over. And I wasn’t even seriously bullied or anything! I was even somewhat popular!

This is the first I’m hearing of either of these products, or this company. If you’d asked me what a program named Dia was ten minutes ago, I’d have confidently replied that it’s an open source gui diagramming tool.

If I read their post correctly, they’re saying they wouldn’t mind rich people if money didn’t… do the stuff that money does. But it does, so they do.

Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.

I'm on it for the software + hardware combo. Take either away and I'd just get whatever cheap crap instead, and probably use my computers, phones, and tablets a lot less (wouldn't bother with a tablet at all, most likely).

FWIW my intro to computers was DOS and later Windows, and Linux was my daily driver for a little over a decade before I finally gave Macs a fair shot. My first three or so smartphones were Android, before I ever tried an iPhone.

Someone elsewhere on this page posted some details of the author's bio. They worked on Chrome/Blink for years. So of course they're upset Apple kept them from being the only browser anybody targets, and any crap they tried to push on us from being instantly adopted nearly everywhere. I'm sure that was frustrating, that they weren't able to capture the entire market, just nearly all of it.

Monopolies suck, but since regulators are asleep at the wheel and have been my entire (no longer brief) life, Apple's my chosen kaiju to fight the other kaiju on my behalf. Sure it might smash Tokyo sometimes, but the others are trying to smash Tokyo and then some, so, I wish it well (while also wishing we didn't have kaiju at all)

Like how you'd rather not have any giant monsters around, but when a really bad one shows up, you're glad Godzilla's there anyway.

The current situation is largely their fault. It was Chicago school jackasses who neutered antitrust enforcement in the '70s, which is why everything's now dominated by a very small number of mega-conglomerates.

The browser bit was also much, much snappier than anything else in common use, except maybe Opera. Including the Mozilla browser.

Performance took a giant hit some time in the 1.x series and never recovered, but before that, it was remarkably lightweight and snappy, so much so that normal people would notice.

I don’t suppose anything a bit less-serious is available to normies?

I have a iphone that died on vacation and was set to backup only on WiFi (I’ve since changed that setting, haha, whoops) and has a couple days of photos stuck on it that weren’t backed up. It boots and makes noise but the screen is dead. Uncertainty about how broken it is has kept me from paying the not-cheap cost to get a screen replacement, and I haven’t found a way to read its data over a cable without unlocking via the screen first (which doesn’t work, and its touch-sensing capacity also seems to be dead, so blind input doesn’t do it, or else I could probably unlock it with a couple tries and get it to connect to WiFi it already knows and do its backup, but it won’t do that without being unlocked)

It’s a technology that tends to generate output misrepresenting its own capabilities in dangerous ways. Among other things it may misrepresent.

It’s weird these companies are allowed to operate, at least in the way that they are.

It’s probably related to the fact that when they added “await” to JavaScript, it seemed to become the most popular keyword in the language overnight, just comical amounts of it in the average new JavaScript file in the wild.

I think the core error is marrying a communication tool for the people doing the work, to a reporting tool for people who aren’t doing the work.

Managers are all about that kind of automatic hyper-legibility (I’m skeptical about that being worth anything like the investment most companies put into it to begin with, but that’s another topic) but all it does is shove important communication into side-channels and make the ticket-tracker an extra chore, not a work aid.

Like if you’re often having to hound developers to update tickets (a thing in every single place I’ve worked) they clearly aren’t finding them a useful tool for themselves. You’ve wrecked that supposed use-case, it’s ruined.

It’s also the case that trying to serve both purposes, and in fact strongly favoring the PM + management use case, tends to make the UI for these things terrible for developers, contributing to their avoidance of them—the people who, ideally, would collectively be spending far more time in the tools than anyone else, are second-class citizens as far as those tools’ features and UX.

If I hadn’t pursued things that initially didn’t click for me, I’d be missing out on what are now my favorite… everything, really, and still stuck with some things that are by-comparison so bad that I can’t believe I ever liked them, at least not to the degree that I did.

Limit options. If the only, say, film options are five movies they’re resistant to watching, it’ll take very little time for them to break down and try one.

You do also have to restrict plausible substitutes, like if you do this with movies you need to either cut off or do a similar thing with video games.

Worst case, they don’t try the things you presented, but do go outside. Oh no, what a tragedy, lol.

It’s fine to like trash.

It’s best to be able to tell it’s trash, because if you can’t then it means you’re missing what you need to fully appreciate really good things, which is less than ideal.

But it’s totally fine to like it. Zero shame.

And it doesn’t make people bad who can’t tell the difference between trash and good stuff, they’ve just prioritized different (and, maybe, less, but who cares) stuff than you have. Though when they try to make recommendations it’s fair to totally ignore them. Even if you are looking for a particular kind of trash, you need a critic who can tell good from bad (but appreciates that even bad things have an audience) if you want a good hit-rate. And when those sorts start to opine that actually good things are bad (because they haven’t developed the ability to appreciate them) it’s fine to regard that behavior as boorish, because it is. It’s basically the inverse of snobbery, and yeah, it’s also shitty.