This is really deep.

I also gotta say: I reserve more respect for anyone who changed their attitudes to something I admire than someone who always held them. Me? I’m pretty progressive. But it’s not like I can take credit. I share similar views to most people with my upbringing. Holding these beliefs is about impressive as a ball rolling down a hill.

Questioning your beliefs and going somewhere else? That’s an achievement.

Get ready, because this is kind of cheesy stuff, but these two pieces of sports advice, taken together, have guided me for years.

First: a mentor of mine who was a pool shark taught me that when you’re playing pool, there is always a best shot to take. Sometimes, when you’ve got no good options in front of you you want to just do nothing or quit. But no matter what, billiards offers a finite set of options of where to try and aim the cue, and if you rank them from best to worst, there is always a best. When you’re in a bad situation, you find it and you take the best option. Often, that’s either a harm reduction strategy, a long-shot that feels impossible, or a combo of both. But if you always do this you’ll usually suffer far less harm in the aggregate, and if you take enough long shots you’ll occasionally achieve a few incredibly improbable wins.

Second: A kayaking instructor taught me – and this I’m told is true in many similar sports – you go where your focus is, so to evade a problem, focus on the way past. If you see a rock, don’t stare it it, you’ll hit it. It doesn’t matter if your brain is thinking “I gotta go anywhere except that rock!” If you’re looking at, you’re heading into it. If you don’t want to hit the rock, instead you have to look at wherever it is you DO want to go. It takes a bit of practice, because your brain sees “rock!” more easily than “smooth water flowing between two rocks”. But that’s how you get down a river, and it’s also how you work through almost any other problems in life that are rushing at you: don’t focus ON them, focus on whatever is the preferred alternative. This is especially useful if the alternative is sort of a non-thing, like an empty gap between two problems. And it often is.

Taken together, you get the basic approach that has steered my problem solving throughout adulthood. And it really works.

Real

Holy shit, really?

That is Sony levels of stupid.

View from the Top.

I saw it when I was in my twenties with a friend because we (two mostly straight guys) thought we were going to see the latest silly Mike Myers movie. And then it turned out that he was barely in it! They just took all his scenes and put them in the trailer! The actual movie was a very dull romcom staring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy who I don’t remember being in the trailer at all.

When it ended, we walked out of the theater and just said to each other ‘What the hell was that?’.

Also, I think Shallow Hal kind of falls in this too. I don’t recall the trailer being great, but it had to be good enough that it got me to see that terrible movie.

Also, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I remember that The Cable Guy staring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick was the first time I saw a movie and realized that a trailer can be misleading. They deliberately promoted it like The Mask and Ace Ventura. I think I was like 12 when I saw it, and it creeped me way the fuck out.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually a better movie than people remember, but the misleading promotion was a great way to ensure the movie didn’t find its audience.

Please desist

I feel like a lot of people are missing the obvious conclusion that everyone involved here is awful.

Maduro? Brutal dictator. His domestic opposition? Violent fascists. His international opposition? Absolute war criminals.

It’s really sad. My primary opinion is that the US needs to leave Venezuela the fuck alone. If you want democracy in Venezuela, you can’t get it through sanctioning the population into starvation if they don’t vote the way Chevron tells them to. Did Maduro steal an election? Yes! But his opposition at home and abroad isn’t mad that it wasn’t fair: they’re mad because they think it’s bullshit for him to steal it after they stole it first!

Get the fuck out and let them actually decide what they want. The US is the clearly the greatest villain in a story with no obvious good guys.

It would explain a lot

Whew.

The thing about these incidents that I find most interesting is that they basically reveal a widely held suspicion among many people that these government contractors are over-crexentialed bullshit artists.

This just shows what we’ve all suspected: they’ve been cutting corners, claiming underserved authority, and making up shit for years. But now some folks are checking and reporting on it.

He apparently had a whole seminar on how he assess who he thinks most resembles the antichrist , and I have no idea if this is some sort of thought exercise or is he’s being literal.

The real added later of absurd irony is that if THE Jesus Christ returned to share his message of radically pious non violent service to the downtrodden, Thiel would call him the antichrist and demand for him to be tortured to death again.

The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

It does two key things in particular:

1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.

Thanks, these sound great.

Correct

Can you recommend any books, blogs, or podcasts to learn more?

Can you recommend any books, blogs, or podcasts to learn more?

This is clever.

I think to complete the concept, it needs to have an absurd feature that is supposed to justify connectivity, and a way to stop it from functioning when commanded.

How can a pan break? I guess the handle can fall off? So it has a solenoid that locks on the handle. The pan is sold as a subscription where they replace the pan part to keep it’s Teflon coating fresh. And if you mess with it or use it more than 20x the handle falls off.

China?

I consider myself pretty skeptical of American media, so if I’m wrong I welcome correction. But I assumed this wasn’t really disputed even among leftists.

Am I crazy for thinking both Koreas are puppet states that oppress their people?

Yeah, agree. Tables can be used standing or while sitting in the floor. Chairs are nice, but without tables a lot of stuff would happen at floor level anyway.

Definitely easier to get by without chairs.

This is an excellent shower thought.