I like psychology because I have one and I can just sit and play with it and from doing that, I learn stuff.
Like I learned how high-profile bad behaviors are reliably tied to feelings of helplessness.
I learned how my astoundingly toxic (I mean that with all love dear) ex is more trapped than not. At the least, there is no good choice she can make today that would result in her being better tomorrow - or next year.
After 25yr I can climb into her head and she is so far down that road, I couldn't find my way back if I had A-Games every day.
I learned that people do because they can and don't because they can't. It simply is and being frustrated with it is silly.
Anyway, from that and life, I worked out that a sea change in character generally takes a decade, Glob willing and unrisen creeks.
What I have not worked out is this.
No one anywhere wants to clean their own house.
It's like entropy. It captures and dominates ~every human endeavor eventually. But I don't know why.
You can tweak away the new notepad entirely. It’s just an execution alias which you can deactivate. The win32 notepad will always be shipped with windows in two copies[0].
Unlike pennies, I use dimes enough that I would prefer they be kept around. Rounding prices to the nearest penny is OK. Rounding to the nearest quarter, less so.
We did it in Norway, many years ago. Buy a few apples and something that costs x.99, the sum is then y.53 or z.17 and it's rounded to a sum that can be paid with coins. End of story.
Over 30y I've learned that surveillance overreach by Govs never stops or even slows down. Only reporting by the press does.
I'm hoping that a historically overt, abusive administration will kick news orgs out of their default complacency - and that they'll take surveillance seriously again. For a time.
That said, I am sympathetic that mental bandwidth is a real issue ATM.
"Flood the zone" => The specific strategy put forth and now enacted by the current US admin in order to overwhelm the media's ability to cover issues and therefore by extension the ability for the public at large to keep themselves informed. It's a fundamental attack on one of the pillars of democracy. Mental bandwidth saturation is a feature here, not a bug.
Additionally, the gradual removal of personal privacy, and the normalization of it, is another attack on a democratic pillar.
It really does seem like structural cracks are widening rapidly. I too hope that our current realities cause a sort of 'wake up' to occur in the minds of those whom are too busy, deep in "my team" politics or otherwise not concerned about what's going on right now.
The media does plenty of shooting itself in their own feet though. There was tons of coverage of Jake Tapper's book taking time away from everything that is happening right now.
If it was such a big deal, why did they wait to publish it in a book about a guy who will never see elected office again? They do this a lot and it damages their credibility.
Also, the current guy is not exactly that sharp, or improving with age, either. But age seems to no longer be of interest to the press.
I’ve been wondering lately why they told us about “flood the zone” and published Project 2025. Is it because they don’t have regular communication with every person who is willing and able to employ these strategies, so they just communicate them in the open?
You need broad support and to recruit. It is hard to do those things while being highly secretive. Besides, who's going to read a 500 page book? They'll read parts, but all of it? Of course not. By just using parts it is easier to dismiss. People don't want it to be true in the first place, so it's easy to buy the lie.
The truth requires understanding a lot of moving parts.
The lie is simple. We hate complexity (and long comments ;)
Some people they'll never convince, but they don't matter because they'd resist no matter what was proposed.
I mean look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's a major logistical effort to invade a country. They amassed military forces all along the border. The whole time saying "nothing to worry about" and "if we were really going to invade we wouldn't be so obvious about it!" It was happening for months! (Starting in March!) Meanwhile lots of people, including news outlets, bought the lie. Everything was there plain as day, but it's easy to buy the lie. No one wanted to see war break out. Every day they didn't proved they were right too! Sure, plenty of people asserted that the attack would happen and time showed them correct. But that doesn't change how many misses there were nor did it actually stop the attack.[0] Being right didn't matter
But it's impossible to make an attack without telegraphing it. Same thing here.
[0] certainly all the military leaders responded appropriately. You don't take those risks, especially when so blatant. But that also doesn't mean they aren't going to lie through their teeth trying to prevent public panic. Not when there's the faintest of hopes that a war could be stopped before it happens. Again, you can see similarities
That is trivially true, but stop both-sides-ing it with false equivalency.
At this point, the major party in power is doing all they can to undermine democracy and strip-mine the country for their own benefit and that of their few multi-billionaire sponsors.
The other party is attempting to herd a broad coalition of people to maintain democracy.
Yes, it is imperfect, and the country has fallen often far short of perfection through it's entire history.
That is no reason to set the perfect as the enemy of the good. Simply declaring "every form of government is (or all parties are) awful" is a cop-out, and the logical conclusion of that is a complete power vacuum which leads only to the population being ruled by rival gangs & fiefdoms.
I'll happily stop both-sides-ing it when people stop emphasizing "the current administration" when it's not relevant to the topic. Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on. Or criticize both presidents equally. If you criticized Biden in his tenure it was still Trump's fault. Believe me, I tried. It's Logical nonsense.
No, you unconditionally need to stop both-siding. When you want to bring a broader issue in the spotlight, do bring the broader issue in the spot light. But when you feel you are inclined to throw in a bothsidism, which is a negative sum contribution to discourse, then the chance that you actually have an insight on the broader issue is quite small.
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on
As a bystander I can say on behalf of the ones that have been "othered" by means of political marketing, there is no guy. The pressing issue at play is the rule of law, separation of powers, due process, fair elections, and basic respect for human rights. If anyone feels they should continue to shout while waiving the merchandise of their favorite team, if anyone thinks this is the right moment to continue behaving like a spoiled hooligan, then they lose the aforementioned basic prerequisites of democracy, and with that, the democratic constitutional state.
Why would I hate Trump? He is a minor player. His role is to play the chaos actor, to divert attention. Just useful. For the people with real, material influence he is delivering.
The spell is broken if the press can stop wasting our mental bandwidth on the day to day distractions, and start to open themself to the big picture. And yes, doing a postmortem of how they got there is going to be an exercise in self-confrontation across the whole political spectrum.
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on. Or criticize both presidents equally.
So, your solution here is for people who think the current administration is particularly bad to either not complain or accept any whataboutisms you have?
Your ‘both administrations’ quip is a vacuous justification for the current administration’s actions. If this is the basis for your justification, then, regardless of the truth of your claim, you’d be inconsistent to then praise this specific administration for anything positive. Thus, outside of nihilist generalizations about the overall structure of the US, you can’t meaningfully contribute to this conversation. Without giving a positive justification for the administrations behavior, your contributions are ‘logical nonsense.’
I’d rather simply complain about the doublespeakers in office at the moment and say it is wrong to do so, and there is no ‘logical nonsense’ in that.
Is my reading of your comment accurate? If not please let us know.
"The party not in power also has been doing similar things(in regards to the article) if not worse over the past couple of decades but lets completely ignore that, not criticize them at all, don't even bring it up and blame only the current admin because...<party currently in power is baddd>"
I'm not the parent, but that seems like a pretty bad misread.
But to answer, you worry more about the guy waving a knife in your face than other people who have knives and may have waved them in your face in the past.
I'm curious what the worse one is. The Clipper Chip? Seems like a light pleasantry compared to what's happening now.
No. It is so inaccurate that you either have serious problems with reading comprehension or are being deliberately disingenuous in order to destroy the conversation as if your Red Team is right.
The GP comment was about both the specific "Flood The Zone" strategy promoted by an advisor to the current administration and the overall and absolutely unprecedented assault by this administration on democracy and the rule of law itself.
Yes, I made a reference to the historical fact that the ideals of American democracy have always been aspirational. That is NOT license to whataboutism or claims that "everyone does it".
In a democracy, all the branches of govt (exec, ligislative, judicial) and the institutions of society (press, industry, academy, finance, religion, sport, charity, orgs, etc.) are ALL independent, balance power throughout society, and work for its advancement as best they can.
Under authoritarianism or fascism, all those branches and institutions are coerced or corrupted to concentrate power and serve the executive.
Never in the history of this country has any administration even come within orders of magnitude of this regime's attempt to cut off democracy. They are abusing the power of the state to coerce an corrupt every single branch and institution they can, starting with the judiciary, lawyers, press, and academia.
If you have actually "won young", you should take your gift of time and freedom to learn some history. Particularly relevant are how democracies are converted to autocracies, and it did not just happen in Germany in the 1930s, it happened today in Russia (ya, short weak democracy, but it didn't have to go that way), Venezuela, Hungary, and more; and the current party in power is abdicating it's legislative responsibilities to try to make it happen here. You might think you are safe because of your privilege of wealth, but if they succeed in their efforts to kill the 14th amendment and Habeas Corpus, you are not. Again, history is a guide, and the bog-standard authoritarian playbook is being run in broad daylight and secret Signal chat groups.
>If WWI with a followup WWII reminder hasn't done it, not sure what will
It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had. But those were our grandparents (or great grandparents) now, and living memory has finally faded. Here's hoping it doesn't take another Passchendaele or Hiroshima to reignite it.
>It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had
And the mass buy-in resulted in the building of systems, creating of institutions and setting of precedents that were and are being used less than civic purposes. So unfortunately I'm not sure that's sustainable either.
The fact that institutions can be corrupt (or corrupted) doesn't invalidate the concept of an institution. Humans must coordinate their efforts to have widespread impact, and institutions are the de-facto way to coordinate effort: from marriage, the nuclear family, and extended families to local clubs, churches, companies, non-profits, and governments at various levels.
Ever since the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, it's been cool to "stick it to the man", which unfortunately translates to anti-institutionalism too often. Tearing things down never yields a positive result when no good institutions exist or are created to fill the vacuum.
Institutions and organizations ought not to be architected in a manner that makes them useful to the corrupt. This is the defining failure of 20th century western governments. They were so "all in" and had so much public support they shape shifted themselves into these things that are magnets for the corrupt and self serving (and arguably tempt their leaders to become those things).
Yes and no. Corrupt leaders corrupt institutions. But for large enough institutions, institutionalized corruption tends to transcend the corruption (or lack thereof) of its current leaders.
At that scale, it takes a lot of power, courage, and integrity for a leader to reform the institution. Power itself can be a corrupting influence when too much is vested onto a single person -- hence the necessity of integrity.
On the specific issue of internal surveillance and its abuses, that is laughable, given the way that accelerated after WWII, with no substantial attempt at checking it until some fairly limited reforms were adopted in the 1970s after the Nixon-era abuses, with those restrictions being fairly flagrantly ignored (and formally weakened) after 9/11.
One would think the Snowden Leaks was that moment, that was the moment I'll never forget personally. Basically most of what we thought were crazy conspiracy theories was confirmed by multiple independent journalist organizations to be true.
> During the [dot com] boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs.
This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away.
Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset.
It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that.
On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.
Not sure about you, but most smokers I'm aware of smoke way more frequently than anyone can reasonably have sex. There would probably be significant benefits to swapping the frequency of those habbits, but I'm afraid there might be some practical concerns.
A net positive birth rate is still concerning. 8.2 billion people is a lot. All of the world’s problems, from energy sourcing to food production to climate change become harder and harder as the population continues to grow.
It’s easy to be complacent in developed countries because birth rates have come way down, probably because of increased wealth and better education/opportunity for women and girls - but this is not yet the case in developing countries, and the nature of exponential growth is that if it exists anywhere locally, then it will eventually come to exist globally.
It really doesn’t help to cut aid programmes to places that are most in need of development.
The Club for Rome estimates that global population will peak at just below 9 billion by the middle of the century and then begin a sharp decline, ending at under 7 billion by 2100.
This is really bad if your country's pension and welfare system assumes a certain ratio of people will be in the labor force, relative to the number of old and retired people, as most developed countries do. A declining birth rate is much worse than a slightly positive birth rate.
Maybe time to fix the ponzi approach to pensions and welfare instead of continuing to assume unlimited population growth on a finite planet.
Edit: it’s not that I don’t believe the population projections showing a peak later in the century (although I think the Club of Rome one in particular is inaccurate), it’s that these projections are based on there being continued effort to bring birth rates down, hence now not being the time for complacency or defunding these efforts.
What approach would you take without getting rid of the concept of retirement entirely? If people live longer than they can work, they have to rely on the support of those who work in the old age - and the worse the radio of working people to retired people, the harder it is for the society.
The only thing that can work (which is also what is happening in practice) is to continually adjust the “pension & welfare” age upwards to achieve the necessary balance between working years and retirement years.
The upshot is that everyone will need to save more for retirement than they do currently, whether privately or via taxation.
Well, that's what seems to be happening at least in Germany where I am. Retirement age goes up, retirement benefits (inflation-adjustment) go down, contributions to pension system go up.
It's always a bit of political struggle of course with back and forth, but the general trend is just that.
Nobody likes paying more and getting less, and it’s perceived as some kind of societal decline, but it’s more like a correction. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the high birth rates in developed nations declined, roughly, in conjunction with the rise of welfare states. Both are ways, roughly, of providing for yourself in the future. Both are unsustainable in their current forms.
We are living in the age of peak entitlement, where we draw down on the finite fossil fuel reserves of the past while simultaneously drawing down on the earnings of our children in the future.
This is the same thing. Human lifespan can't extend indefinitely, so if you continually adjust retirement age upward, eventually you adjust it to a point that nobody ever lives long enough to retire.
Total time would include the time I wasn't at work and some of the time I was. My kids lived under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next.
My mom parented between zero and few hours a week. Both her time and mine were representative of our respective generations. The major difference was her time spent was unchanged since before history.
And sometime between her gen and mine, US childhood was mostly eradicated.
Enjoyment is a different thing than admiration. Folks who initially enjoyed Adams' work, later found they couldn't.
His work had become associated with his opinions and folks were unhappy with having his remarks return to their mind again and again. Losing his books stopped that cycle.
I've gotten rid of stuff that had negative associations for me. It was good for me.
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