totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Computer maintenance, too? Everyone (or at least most people) have one nowadays.

I think Hyman Rickover would spin up to flank speed in his grave. Instruction in applied and easily attainable (yet rapidly obsolescent) subjects at the cost of actual academics was something he railed against quite a lot.

[DDE]

"So who's your apothecary?"

"A homeopath!"

"And do you feel better?"

"Yes... but to a very 'homeopathic' degree..."

- The Exchange News, 1903

[Ryaja]

My grandpa is really sick right now, and it isn't looking great for him.

Update: he is doing better, it seems they found the right antibiotics for him.

Edited January 28 by Ryaja

[Selective Genius]

Our company sponsored a training trip for me and my batchmates at work to a big city. Overall it was a good experience, but one incident yesterday sort of soured it for me.

There were 8 guys and 7 girls in our group, we went to a BigS shopping mall which had lots of famous stores, nightclubs etc. We decided to visit a night club as we have never visited it beforehand. After reaching, we found out that entry for girls is free, entry for couples is free as well, but a guy has to pay a 1000 local currency to enter. Almost immediately, the 7 guys and 7 girls in the group formed into 'couples' for the free entry.  Can you guess who was the 1 guy left out?

Yeah, it was me. The worst part was that I was leading this 'expedition', I have been making sure that our stay in this city has been comfortable so far since I am the only one who speaks the language of that city, and all of those 7 girls immediately threw me under the bus at the first chance they got. And if any of those 7 guys had a conscience they would have spoken or acted differently.  Those 7 'couples' did not come back till 8 am the next morning.

Am I ugly? Am I fat? Am I stupid? Am I just broken and undesirable? I don't know, probably I am, if this is the extent people despise me.

On the flip side I ended up leaving that group to fend for themselves and bought myself a burger and did competitive go karting for the first time in my life (which I won). The desire to wreck the go kart along with myself was strong, but unfortunately the top speed was a mere 40 km/hr, and there were tyre barriers everywhere.

How do I cure myself?

[AstroWolfie]

1 hour ago, Selective Genius said:

Am I ugly? Am I fat? Am I stupid? Am I just broken and undesirable? I don't know, probably I am, if this is the extent people despise me.

My reaction to that information: 

 

Good on you for ditching them though. more later

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Selective Genius said:

Am I ugly? Am I fat? Am I stupid? Am I just broken and undesirable?

Probably not, but I think I know why you got assigned to corralling them, and it wasn't just the language.

[Nuke]

there are so many examples of human fertilizer in this world that i have a hard time feeling bad about myself. just look around, especially at the gutter slime humans you find in walmart,  then look at yourself, you will feel batter.

[GuessingEveryDay]

55 minutes ago, Nuke said:

there are so many examples of human fertilizer in this world that i have a hard time feeling bad about myself. just look around, especially at the gutter slime humans you find in walmart,  then look at yourself, you will feel batter.

Don't forget that Flat Earth exists.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

Don't forget that Flat Earth exists.

Well, excuse me.

Don't forget people who hate cats exist.

[SunlitZelkova]

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

human fertilizer

Today I learned this term, and I don't really understand why it is this way (I understand what it refers to, but not why "fertilizer." Is fertilizer dumb or something?).

[Superluminal Gremlin]

38 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Is fertilizer dumb or something?).

I think its because some fertilizers are made of animal waste. We use Chook poo for our garden because it is rich in good elements.

[AstroWolfie]

one thing i'm tired of is how monetized everything kids watch is. This is one of the problems that the iPad kids have. I was over by the Tech Interactive with some cousins of mine, showing them the cool space stuff, and we went to an In N Out by San Jose Int'l. Airport to get lunch and watch the planes, and while we were eating, this family of what looked like younger millennials or older gen z (I'm older gen z  also btw), with their kids, and the kid had their iPad FULL BLAST, with the audio being that of something you get from a pootis status meme without the pootis meme part and happy stock music. The video was worse. It was that weird blue monster pushing the lethal company guy into a giant blender, while an among us crewmate was shaking their rear at the screen. Now, we can say, "oh this is just their version of MLG memes and stuff" and it basically is, along with skibidi toilet and other stupid gmod humor, but the problem is how monetized it its. If you go to a (still-populated) mall now (I go for some decent hobby gaming stores) and look at the stuff that is on the toy booths in between the stores, all you see are weird knockoff plushies of the G-Man's head sticking out of a toilet or something. I remember going to the mall when I was about 4-7  years old or whatever age the average iPad kids are and going to real toy stores with actual toys, like LEGO and Nerf and stuff, with not too many knockoffs ever, even if it was window shopping/just looking. We didn't have Trollface action figures, Doge plushies, and other internet culture items marketed to us. This was because it wasn't seen as a valid market. Now, with internet shopping and iPad kids running rampant, they are more susceptible to buying things cause they were exposed too young to basically the entire world, before they were mature enough to make reasonable decisions. 

[Nuke]

current 3d printing project is new joystick grips for my joystick of doom (tm). i have a couple hat switch designs that i can print but i needed a couple 12mm buttons for the pinkly and thumb buttons. found some nice stainless steel buttons on ebay. then they made me train their ai to check out.  what ebay? when i want to give you money you shouldn't waste my time with puzzles. 

and dont say those puzzles are for security, especially considering you are training an ai to identify those photos, thus defeating the whole purpose.  its like every time you open a lock you help send an enterprising young individual to burglary school.  its certainly up there with 2 factor which is more about farming personal information that security.  if they really cared about security they would use ttop instead of sms. 

[DDE]

On 2/5/2024 at 10:29 PM, AstroWolfie said:

Now, with internet shopping and iPad kids running rampant, they are more susceptible to buying things cause they were exposed too young to basically the entire world, before they were mature enough to make reasonable decisions. 

I'm very skeptical of the "kids these days are just dumb" rhetoric, it keeps happening every generation.

The problem, I'd say, is that they're selling memories instead of toys. Modern marketing 101 is that you sell the experience, not the product... and experience has subsumed the product.

[AtomicTech]

On 2/4/2024 at 3:35 PM, GuessingEveryDay said:

Don't forget that Flat Earth exists.

Oh hey!

Long time no see!

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

I'm very skeptical of the "kids these days are just dumb" rhetoric, it keeps happening every generation.

The problem, I'd say, is that they're selling memories instead of toys. Modern marketing 101 is that you sell the experience, not the product... and experience has subsumed the product.

people born into different circumstances develop differently. that's pretty much all there is to it.

my grandma goes into how everyone is so computer dependent, how they cant make change when the system crashes. i didn't have the heart to tell her about all the changes to the tax code that require every transaction be logged in meticulous detail and they simply do not train their cashiers to do that because they expect 100% uptime. in her day it was all cash on the barrel and the irs was content with a more crude estimate, because tracking all that stuff would consume almost the entire work day. those cashiers could totally make change if their boss told them to. the problem is regulators expect everyone to be using technology. its a reason why the amish now carry cell phones to manage their furniture businesses, the irs is not happy with hand written receipts.

i once got paid a hundred dollars a minute to fix a computer system at a pawn shop, granted it took 5 minutes to restore the system, i just read the instructions. at the very same time i don't think i could do modern i.t. the systems are too complicated and there are too many of them.

Edited February 7 by Nuke

[TheSaint]

8 hours ago, DDE said:

I'm very skeptical of the "kids these days are just dumb" rhetoric, it keeps happening every generation.

The problem, I'd say, is that they're selling memories instead of toys. Modern marketing 101 is that you sell the experience, not the product... and experience has subsumed the product.

Oh, don't worry, kids today are dumb. My sixteen-year-old is going to college. He's Student-of-the-Year. He regularly comes home with stories along the lines of, "You won't believe what I had to explain to this guy today...." Not complicated stuff. Stuff his mom and I explained to him at home.

As far as marketing goes: Well, yeah. That's been true since marketing became a discipline back in the 50s. The problem we have today is that nobody is explaining to these kids what is being done to them. When I went through high school back in the 1980s, I had a teacher who sat us all down in our U.S. Government class and explained to us what propaganda was. He pulled out the movie projector and showed us Triumph of the Will, Battleship Potemkin, The Birth of a Nation. He sat us all down and explained how to sort propaganda out from fact. Today, everybody is being bombarded with propaganda. From governments. From corporations. There is hardly anything that is straight fact anymore. And nobody is telling kids how to sort it out anymore. They're just telling kids that the propaganda they like is fact.

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Oh, don't worry, kids today are dumb. My sixteen-year-old is going to college. He's Student-of-the-Year. He regularly comes home with stories along the lines of, "You won't believe what I had to explain to this guy today...." Not complicated stuff. Stuff his mom and I explained to him at home.

I did a little research about this, and I’m skeptical like @DDE.

It does appear IQ scores may be on the decline in the US. But low IQ scores don’t necessarily make one “dumb,” just as having a high IQ score doesn’t make you smart. So there isn’t really good data to support that claim, leaving us with anecdotes.

There’s also a question of what constitutes making one “dumb.” I think someone with good morals and helps out at the community center, but who can’t do long division and needs help remembering to shower is “smarter” than a cyber criminal who has a high IQ and is a master at programming, but extorts people and ruins their lives.

On the other hand, a single thread from r/Teachers says teachers from kindergarten to high school are having harder times teaching their kids and helping them succeed. But again, that’s anecdotal (and anonymous).

Lastly, another opinion of mine is that we are too biased to give an appropriate assessment of ourselves right now. People thought they were brilliant making their decisions in the post-World War I world, and 30 years later those very decisions showed, with hindsight, to have resulted in yet another disastrous war. Only time will tell if individual leaders of today and the society (also made up of individuals, young and old) of today supposed to hold them accountable were “smart” or “dumb.”

And one more thing. I can’t help but let my small amount of studies in anthropology influence me and call out these very biased assumptions of what is dumb and what is smart. If you plopped some of these kids who are supposedly dumb into an African tribal environment (equipped with knowledge of the language and required customs for survival) I'm sure they’d be as “smart” as any other tribesperson. Being smart comes in all shapes and sizes, not just the developed world’s mass produced made-for-consumers stereotype of what is smart. It’s not their fault for being born into a society that has clearly failed them.

In fact if kids today are dumb, that means their parents and other leaders responsible for educating and raising them and even dumber. It’s not the kids’ fault.

Unless we are proposing some physical factor in their supposed dumbness instead of things like education and other elements society, which I would be even more skeptical of.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

If you plopped some of these kids who are supposedly dumb into an African tribal environment (equipped with knowledge of the language and required customs for survival) I'm sure they’d be as “smart” as any other tribesperson.

One of the earliest Russian psychometric studies included Siberian then-tribesmen. Standard IQ tests returned "dumb as a pile of rocks" but the researchers readily dismissed their own methologies because clearly the people capable of land navigation in such an environment, maintaining a culture without writing and able to count hundreds of deer at a glance were not dumb - just incapable of the abstract thought favored by the technological civilization. They couldn't grasp the idea that 1 meter at Merchant A's is the same as 1 meter at Merchant B's.

A lot of current interracial grief comes from non-Westerners seeking to prove their non-inferiority by strictly Western-centric yardsticks, which is basically rigging the game against oneself, and leaves historical revisionism as the only avenue.

6 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Today, everybody is being bombarded with propaganda. From governments. From corporations. There is hardly anything that is straight fact anymore. And nobody is telling kids how to sort it out anymore. They're just telling kids that the propaganda they like is fact.

Current anti-propaganda efforts do tend to focus on censorship, mental hygiene, and crude vaccination through dishonest, hyperbolic representation of the opposing side. However, it seems that a significant segment of the population always assumed they're too smart to be roped in by "crude propaganda", therefore anyone they agree with is not a propagandist.

Ultimately, I think one of the smarter moves is defining propaganda as any information intended to sway the recipient. E.g. anti-drunk driving propaganda. This removes the stimulus to use it as a political pejorative, and the blinders that come with it.

Edited February 8 by DDE

[StrandedonEarth]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Unless we are proposing some physical factor in their supposed dumbness instead of things like education and other elements society, which I would be even more skeptical of.

Well, there’s a high probability of both environmental poisoning (lead/mercury being the obvious ones, but there can be more subtle ones) and nutritional deficiencies, especially micronutrients leading to reduced “smarts.”

 I’m currently reading “Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill” by Dr Udo,  which focuses on the lack of essential fatty acids in modern industrial diets, and how the trend of frying foods in oils generates unhealthy-to-the point-of-toxic trans fats. Modern cooking oils are highly processed to give them a near infinite shelf life, which strips them of healthy oils, especially EFAs which are degraded/spoiled by heat, air, and light. 

So yeah, they strip out all the healthy stuff and sell it back to us as supplements. Capitalism gone wild, as usual. 

[AstroWolfie]

I know we had to deal with this type of crap too, but this is just on another level. it's a frickin' cup kids.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12986617/Stanley-cup-popular-school-knockoff-bullying.html

23 hours ago, DDE said:

I'm very skeptical of the "kids these days are just dumb" rhetoric, it keeps happening every generation.

I agree with this, people will always do this. But, with the news article above, it's getting more stressful for kids these days, with that idea of "oh i need this to be cool", which is what kids back then had too, but now it's more charged, and with the Internet, kids can hide behind a mask and be anonymous with it, and can get away with it easier.

[Ryaja]

21 hours ago, AstroWolfie said:

I know we had to deal with this type of crap too, but this is just on another level. it's a frickin' cup kids.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12986617/Stanley-cup-popular-school-knockoff-bullying.html

I agree with this, people will always do this. But, with the news article above, it's getting more stressful for kids these days, with that idea of "oh i need this to be cool", which is what kids back then had too, but now it's more charged, and with the Internet, kids can hide behind a mask and be anonymous with it, and can get away with it easier.

As someone in highschool yes, everything is so charged now. If you get punched at school they literally tell you to not defend yourself because you might hurt the aggressor. Schools are also super politically charged, you can get suspended or even expelled for disagreeing with some of that stuff.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

12 hours ago, Ryaja said:

Schools are also super politically charged, you can get suspended or even expelled for disagreeing with some of that stuff.

Oh gosh, don't get that train started. It's not as bad in Australia, but it's probably still possible

 

Anyway, was listening to a Podcast where Adam Rozencwajc was the interviewee, and it cleared up this one problem that I didn't know how to solve for a long time. For those who don't know, Adam is part of a company called Goehring&Rozencwajc, which is an independent Natural Resources analysis company (I believe that is the role, at least). Recently, Adam went on a podcast with Peak Prosperity and talked about Oil. The key takeaway I  took was how the IEA, either willingly or otherwise, has lied about their forecasts on Oil and Energy consumption. Their reasoning is as follows;

- If technological advancements in the efficiency of energy use, then the overall usage of energy will decrease. 

However, this contradicts Jevon's paradox (According to Wikipedia, governments seem to have an implied history of ignoring this paradox), which is where resource use becomes more efficient, more is used, not less. Jevon's Paradox, then, is quite literally the EXACT opposite of what the IEA is saying. This answers my personal question of "Why does Peak Energy Demand just not make sense". After all, More people with more money = Buying more things, which requires energy.

I don't know I'm so shocked, after all, governments and governmental agencies lie all the time. Maybe it has to do with the sheer and utter importance of energy in the modern economy. But I don't know. I'm repeating what was said elsewhere. I'm not qualified to talk about this. 

 

[DDE]

7 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

I don't know I'm so shocked, after all, governments and governmental agencies lie all the time. Maybe it has to do with the sheer and utter importance of energy in the modern economy.

Quite literally

With cheap energy comes cheap steel, cheap cordite, and cheap TNT. And from those, comes the most coveted commodity of the today's world: the 152 or 155 mm artillery shell...

[DDE]

Never trust your marketers.

Never trust your SMMers.

Another victim to a sordid trend.

Spoiler