mozz

mozz, 10 days ago

The one I encountered with the best food by far had a little like 11-year-old daughter who would take orders and work the register when things got busy. Maybe it is child labor but I feel like all the kids in the family were getting a solid upbringing.

mozz, 10 days ago

I would poop in a different toilet

mozz, 10 days ago

Is there a chart that shows various countries that industrialized by different means (communism vs capitalism vs democratic socialism etc)? That seems like a little more accurate comparison, as opposed to comparing it to the global average, and saying the difference is definitely communism as opposed to industrialization.

Also, Communist China is the only country that has a specific drop in life expectancy that it shows up on the chart of global life expectancy and needs its own special label. I feel like stuff like that is pretty relevant too.

mozz, 10 days ago

49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power”

Nearly all of these statements are, I think, undeniable if you’re paying attention. I’m surprised the percentages are so low.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys.”

(Emphasis mine)

And that is exactly the point where the misinterpretation train leaves the station. The excitement generated by Bernie Sanders / Beto O’Rourke / etc seems to suggest otherwise.

If you wanted to check whether young voters feel that the right answer to that bleakness you asked them about is to give up on politics and let whatever happens happen, rather than to get involved and fix it, you could have asked them that directly. My observation is that they are voting and getting involved in protest movements a lot more so than other younger generations in the recent past, but it kinda sounds like you don’t want that to be true, so you asked them something different and then decided that they said something different than they did.

mozz, 10 days ago

actions, and policies

I see you are unacquainted with the American electorate, who think that Bernie Sanders is crazy and unrealistic and Trump is way more trustable on the economy than Biden.

mozz, 10 days ago

Only showing up to vote every four years, and assuming we won't slide into fascism because you pushed the right button, is silly. On that we agree.

Not using the power of the ballot box in addition to all the other much more difficult / impactful things which are required for real change is much, much worse. It's like, "Oh no the wrong people are in charge! This is very unfair. Better just give up and let them do whatever then."

mozz, 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

I would put something that’s only “funny” because we all agree Biden stole the election amirite, in a different category. It’s like racist jokes; I don’t think the supposed funniness of it makes it suddenly harmless.

mozz, 11 days ago

Give it time

The old school internet was fun because we were in charge. No one would put Peanut Butter Jelly Time or Look at My Horse on TV and let it play in its entirety. No one would print rotten.com on paper and sell it at the corner. For the first time ever in a lot of people's experience, you could publish and say whatever you wanted. Then the reality of hosting costs set in, and the government learned that the internet existed and decided what it needed was outlawed encryption, and long story short there was a long self selection process where only the assholes wound up in charge again.

But now it's coming back. I think everyone's a little bit shell shocked back to the Facebook way (e.g. screaming about the mods and how unfair, instead of starting their own instances / communities, e.g. bickering about what "the rules" need to be and when to put content warnings and whatnot). I think it'll equalize as the realpolitik of people generally running their own servers replaces the realpolitik of it being just a bunch of assholes running the servers and us being helpless and no escape from them.

I don't know exactly what culture it will equalize to, but I definitely feel like it will be a big step back towards the old internet. We just haven't gotten there yet.

mozz, 11 days ago

I think almost certainly that disinformation based on fake accounts simply posting memes or targeted viewpoints, hoping to send the message through sheer repetition, it still a lot more common than doctored factual information. (Not that that means that faked up disinformation isn't a problem - just saying I think it's still relatively rare as a vehicle for disinformation.)

Why would you even open yourself up to "see, the underlying citation for this thing they're saying is not true" when you might as well not even enter into the sphere of backing up what you're saying with facts, and just state your assertions as if they were facts, instead.

mozz, 11 days ago

I am sure there are many more people who are writing books than who are billionaires. His point was, how many are making a living at it as their primary career.

Did you read his breakdown? He made a pretty compelling case that that number is about 500.

mozz, 11 days ago

Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?

mozz, 11 days ago

Yeah. I mean the article could be right or wrong, although it seems to me at first glance to be plausible + relevant. But the number of people coming out to just purely jeer at the conclusions like "FUK U THERES PLENTY OF WRITERS THIS DUDE IS RONG, CITATION: MY DICK" -- no real attempt to disagree with anything he's saying other than that they don't like it -- is distressing to me.

mozz, 11 days ago

Just looking down the list of academy members and grabbing some at random I see:

• Claude Dagens, 84-year-old priest
• Dany Laferrière, working writer who lives in Miami
• Jean-Luc Marion, retired professor
• Andreï Makine, working writer
• Christian Jambet, philosopher, IDK what he does to pay the bills but his last published work was an essay in 2016

It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don't know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn't an argument that it isn't hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.

Again: The argument is not that writers don't exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don't know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance -- maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play -- but regardless of that if you didn't like that guy's fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.

mozz, 11 days ago

Yeah, I get that, I think that's probably more why it's provoking resistance; he phrased it deliberately provocatively and wound up excluding some avenues that still produce books and people making a living (like working as an academic / teacher and also doing writing). It just kinda irritated me like, hey, I can draw a really strong and surprising conclusion from this data, and people's reaction "that conclusion is surprising" -> "therefore is wrong" -> "no need to look further, I figured it out for you and corrected you, that was easy next pls"

mozz, 11 days ago

"Critiquing" is a pretty charitable description

mozz, 11 days ago

Come on, have another go! It's fun to critique things and tell people they are wrong; I wanted to have a turn.

mozz, 11 days ago

How many of those people are making more than $50k per year at it though?

It’s not “no true Scotsman” if there’s a defined dollar value that makes someone, so to speak, a Scotsman. I mean for all I know you are right and there are plenty who are supporting themselves doing it- but the point is not that writers don’t exist; it is that the number of them who are making a living without some other means of support is way smaller than it should be.

mozz, 11 days ago

Absolutely true. The propaganda that says "Everyone in government is crusty old white men and all equally the problem, it's not worth even trying to improve things, just be unproductively bitter and angry instead, while we're taking all your stuff"

Is very much of a piece with the propaganda says "All the poors and immigrants are the problem, it's not old white men in government, just be unproductively bitter and angry instead, while we're taking all your stuff." The target audience is just different.

And you know what? They both work real real fuckin' well. See, look all the problems.

mozz, 11 days ago

I was very very lucky in terms of getting a good education (both from my parents and from the schools I went to), and it was absolutely shocking to me when I first started doing political arguments with some people I'd known for quite a while and realized they had no idea how to think for themselves.

Like even the basics of, if source X says one thing and then later on in the same article says some incompatible thing, then that source is not the truth. Never mind about even comparing one day's statements to the next day's, or against real science or anything like that.

They just go with who's real confident and forceful in their presentation and sounds like they have firm authority over what's going on, and then they go all-in on believing whatever crazy shit that changes day to day that that person is saying. Like I say it was real shocking (and also, how if I tried to break down inconsistencies with what their source was saying, they'd just get confused and upset and disoriented, and ultimately reject what I was saying.)

mozz, 11 days ago

Goes well right alongside “bribing politicians is free speech” and “peace rallies are terrorism”

mozz, 11 days ago

When Steven Spielberg shot Jaws, the sea was changing all the time. If you look at that film one moment it’s choppy, one moment it’s flat. You don’t need to do that anymore.

See I take the opposite message away from this. The point is, it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be masterpiece cinema or accomplish the goal.

Great paintings can have brushstrokes. It doesn’t need to look photorealistic to what the thing looks like; in fact you could make the argument that’s counterproductive. Great video games have constrained mechanics; you can’t do everything “realistic,” and in fact the pursuit of hyper realism seems etc etc you get the point.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying what he’s saying, and he just means that the craft of movie making is now easier and we can eliminate some detail-focused bullshit that used to create logistical problems with shooting… but it sounds more to me like “and NOW we can sink millions of dollars into fuckin around with the background of the shots and that’ll finally fix what was wrong with Jaws and all the movies now will be better than Jaws as a result” which sounds like totally missing the point if that’s what he’s saying.

mozz, 10 days ago

And I’m saying consistency is not the goal. Was Jaws not immersive?

mozz, 10 days ago

“… I got better.”

mozz, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

(*) the money is payed in Russian Rubles

I want to say something sarcastic, but this is fuckin heartbreaking. You know their life expectancy, and quality of life up until the day they get fed into the grinder, is near 0. Think of the desperate hope that someone might have signing up for something like this, and then... the result.