Andor was a garbage show, and The Batman (Robert Pattison) was a garbage film. Both are lauded and deserve less than none of the praise they get
An opinion so strongly shared by a vast majority is worth being sceptic about.
This is how you get flat earthers.
No, the one saying “you’re all wrong” was the first person to say the world is round. Even a minority of one can be correct about something against all popular opinion.
Humanity cannot and will not change its practices fast enough to avoid running out of resources we keep ourselves dependent on because it’s “profitable.” We are a doomed species and won’t be around for very much longer. We are likely living in the flash of bright before the long dark. I don’t think the world my grandchildren live in will be remotely like the one we have now.
I’m perfectly fine hedging my bets and living life normally, but I think our longevity is an uncomfortable truth most people don’t want to face.
“Andor” is the best Star Wars series.
There’s no public debt crisis. People don’t understand how government debt works. One casualty of this is the slow green transition which will cost us dearly in the future.
There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. Labor is labor, specially if someone else has to do it even if you don’t want to.
We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don’t realize how much they are missing.
The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.
This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.
This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don’t actually deserve our collective attention.
And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.
Completely agree. Now my hot take for this thread:
If governments some time in the 90s had decided from the start to ban computer hardware from being sold with pre-installed software then we wouldn’t have this problem. If everyone had to install their own operating system from scratch, which like you say isn’t hard if it’s taught, it would have killed the mystery around computing and people would feel ownership over their computers and computing.
How to learn this? The way it’s taught is so people don’t know they don’t know. What are good starting resources?
I am not a professional educator, but in general I think it is worth to start with basic computer literacy: identifying parts of a PC, being able to explain their overall functions, difference between hardware and software, and what kinds of software a computer can run (firmwares, operating systems, user utilities etc.). This would also be a perfect time to develop practical skills, e.g. (assuming you are a normatively-abled person) learning to touch-type and perform basic electronics maintenance, like opening your machine up to clean it and replace old thermal compounds.
After that taking something like “Operating systems fundamentals” on Coursera would be a great way to go on.
It really depends on your goals, resources and personal traits, as well as how much time and energy you can spare, and how do you like to learn. You can sacrifice and old machine, boot Ubuntu and break it a bunch of times. You can learn how to use virtualization and try a new thing every evening. You can get into ricing and redesign your entire OS GUI to your liking. You can get a single-board computer like RaspberryPi and try out home automation.
The stock market should not exist. Investing in companies is fine, but we shouldn’t be able to buy our sell investment shares like a commodity.
All subsidies should not exist. They only alter the supply/demand in unnecessary and damaging ways. This must come with ending commodities trading like stock market investing.
Piracy equals culture preservation in an age of subscription services.
Death is fine and jail is mental torture. People with downs syndrome and similar are forced to live a tortured existence by people who think they’re good for subjective them to that.
Eating meat and dairy is not sustainable in terms of resources and greenhouse gases, and non-vegan environmentalists are clowns on the level of people flying private jets to climate conferences.
Onions taste gross and have no tangible benefit to cooking. Fight me.
Vegans oppose animal cruelty.
Vegetarians don’t, as the production of eggs, milk, etc is cruel.
Monogamy feels like an archaic social convention enforced by unhealthy possessive behaviors and jealousy
Your are assailed by many threats: the religious, the nihilists, the corporatists, the fascists, and the alleged “collectivists”. Extreme authoritarian “leftists”, A.K.A. “tankies” (i.e., apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Xi Jingping, etc.), are threats to a free, egalitarian, and open society, are just as violently authoritarian as their religious, corporatist, and fascist competitors, and should be treated with the contempt, distrust, and ridicule they deserve.
They claim to speak and fight for the proletariat, promising a new utopia, never before seen, once their revolution executes the last “class-traitor”. In practice, once they’re finished with “seizing the means of production”, they’ll never relinquish control and become the new ruling class.
They’ll assume the mantle of an enlightened elite post-revolutionary administration to guide the proletariat to their promised utopia of “each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. In practice, "the party leadership needs the most, because they’re obviously the most able” in reorganizing the economic and political structure of society. The utopia of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will never exist, only the dictatorship of the “revolutionary party”. Repression and execution await those who question their claims and decisions.
These supposed champions of labor are really harbingers of death - of the mind and the body. They claim to be the true authoritative “voice of the people”. Understand what they really are; power over everything and everyone, forever, is what they seek. They want you either as a true believer (a willing pawn) or dead, just like all of the other supposedly benevolent dictators who promised utopias throughout history.
They’re akin to the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the loudest voices in the revolution, usurpers of a righteous cause, but a bit “more equal” than everyone else after the farmer is done away with. Fortunately, the pigs, like the farmer, got their comeuppance in the end of the story. Make these pigs squeal.
