No ambiguity for anybody who cared enough to pay attention anyway!
It’s like the scorpion only stings while the frog is sleeping, and every morning the scorpion complains about how those damn hornets wearing DNC and BLM shirts came back and stung the frog that the scorpion loves so much. And despite the stings not even looking like hornets did it, the frog is unaware of the concept of confirmation bias and likes what he’s hearing so he just goes with it.
I mean, what’s one more normally-career-destroying crime spree that we investigate years after the fact and has no adverse effects on him?
And this didn’t even require a violent takeover like he thought was necessary last time. He was a far worse candidate this time and so much of the American public was eager to throw the power back into his hands, while a sizable chunk did not seem to think it was important enough to go vote against him.
Yeah, our daily stand ups are via Teams (international team too) and it works pretty smoothly.
One oddity I’ve noticed is that when working from home and on (fast) Wi-Fi, it will hang for a moment and say the connection has an issue, but then be fine for the rest of the call. When I’m in the office in don’t think I’ve seen it do that.
I keep a Teams tab and an Outlook tab opened in Firefox on Linux at work, and I feel like I have a better experience than most people using it on windows, which seems crazy.
We need a standard high school class that is some kind of intro to epistemology, how to study something scientifically, how to root out bias, and maybe even a little on logical fallacies.
How many high school grads are even aware of the concept of confirmation bias?
I fear we as a collective society are just so, so bad about knowing how to find the correct answer to something. Despite all the technology at our fingertips, so many people learn things the same way humans have for centuries: somebody I trust told me!
Is the memory of voters really so poor?
How are we supposed to avoid repeating the mistakes of history when the voting public can’t even remember why they scrambled to get out and vote for Biden 4 years ago?
I mean, if Harris lost to somebody like Romney or McCain, sure I could see that voters weren’t excited by the campaign plus the racism/sexism angle. But to just ignore how absolutely insane Trump was as President, and all the open messaging about how next time will be worse, never mind all the criminal and traitorous stuff… it’s insane.
Well the good news is that the probability of such a program happening has gone up.
The bad news is that you are disqualified if you have all your teeth or any kind of college degree.
Eh, I’m not interested in supporting them, but the code is free and open source. I’m using a client written by not-them, to connect to a server run by not-them, and reading federated content from dozens of other servers run by not-them.
I appreciate the reply. Thanks for the discussion!
Oh yeah I get that. The disbelief and disappointment are off the charts for me.
But to continue my train of thought, what’s worked well for my mental state is to give myself permission to focus on the small scale and those close to me rather than (justifiably) dwelling on the fucked up state of society at large.
So instead of worrying about whether society is worth saving, I worry about whether my own sanity is worth saving, and by extension whether it is worth trying to have a happy and fulfilling life. And that’s not just being selfish. It’s equivalent to putting on your own oxygen mask on an airplane before you help others. With my head on straight, I can help improve the lives of those around me, and that is not only worth it but feeds back into making my own life and mental state better.
And from time to time I also like to remind myself about how insane it is that we even exist, that clouds of matter formed billions of years ago in supernovae were able to coalesce and form self-aware brains. It just makes me more interested in learning about existence and the universe.
And when I point that attitude towards the fucked up things in society and the world, it certainly doesn’t make those things better. I think about how I am watching significant history being written, and I can at least be an engaged witness even if I can’t change the course of that history. Though I do try where I can, and of course vote accordingly.
When I have gone through this thought process lately, I’ve concluded that even if I plan my life in the most cold robotic way possible, my mental health and general well-being are at their best when I am compassionate towards those around me.
So first you must ask yourself what your true goal is. Do you want to “win” some shallow materialistic version of life? Or do you want to help others, or just be happy regardless of what it takes? Then that helps inform later decisions.
My automatic assumption has always been that saving everything, retiring early, and being a recluse was my path to a happy existence. It’s just what I felt I wanted to do. I bet I’m not alone there.
But then I had the great luck to have COVID come around and fuck up my career and finances in a few different ways. Now I’m stable again at work and my finances are a disaster, but I’ve waded through so much shit mentally that even though big retirement account balances feel great, that’s not what creates real joy, contentment, and even optimism.
…In my brain anyway. It’s like we all have slightly different owners manuals but we don’t get a copy of it and have to reverse-engineer it. In my case I had some things I cared about a lot get torn away, but I still had my family, and I realized that without that stuff that got taken away I was still the same person and was just fine. That definitely flipped a switch or two. Well, that and a grueling couple years dialing in medications, lol. Anything that helps!
It does feel about on-brand for this timeline that Trump of all leaders might get the credit for fixing* the Middle East problem.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug
Yep, I’ll typically use vim or nano for editing existing files, but when in just want to make a quick temporary note or fiddle with some plain text it’s the graphical one that came with the DE.
Is nothing sacred?
At least that’s one use case that Linux will always be awesome for - editing plain text without added bullshit (excepting any keyboard shortcuts you need to learn to save or exit, depending on your editor, lol).
And you can obviously do that on windows with any number of third party apps. But not having the basic clean text editor included in the base OS install just seems wrong.
A wise man once said, If you choose not to decide, You still have made a choice
also privileged people who think that a Trump presidency won’t affect them
I’m a privileged person who probably won’t be directly affected by another Trump presidency. Probably. Hopefully.
But anybody who genuinely holds that opinion, and doesn’t care what happens to everybody else, may as well just be a full-on trumper.
They care if THEIRS do, sure. Just not if others do. Or if theirs are forced into a sub-optimal life in order to make the the man’s life better.
As far as not blaming the scorpion, when you look at it from his perspective Trump is one of the most “successful” people on the planet according to the metrics that matter to him. His shitty behavior is rewarded and reinforced over and over again. Ugh.