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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • This all seems fine. But it seems, i don’t know, sort of small ball. Like, define the terms and do the work, but how does this matter? In this case the language has a broadly understood term: sex drive. But, we don’t say food drive or sleep drive. As a descriptivist, I start in a dubious position.

    I never thought sex drive meant I would die if I didn’t get laid, nobody thinks that. I never thought using the word drive meant that there was entitlement.

    If people are angry at Dr Nagoski for putting this idea out there, maybe she is hitting at SOMETHING that matters. Or, people are just angry at her for insisting this language matters at all. Hard to say I guess. I am pretty sure shitty people who do shitty things because they feel entitled to other peoples bodies, probably won’t become better if they use different words.

    I’m fairness, she explicitly downplays the importance of this idea at one point in the video saying it is the oldest and simplest piece of science in her book. Perhaps she is only belaboring it due to the reactions the idea receives.


  • Do you want to know why the dems didn’t stand behind rail workers? It’s actually pretty simple.

    Inflation is out of control, wages are increasing but not at rates that make ordinary workers feel secure. Supply chain issues from the pandemic are lingering and contributing to prices skyrocketing. A rail disruption would have exacerbated an issue that democrats already see as potentially existential.

    So what leverage did those workers have? Yes they could fuck up the lives of ordinary people by destroying our fragile supply chains. Yes they could trash the profits of the rail companies. Yes they could pressure democrats to push for a speedy resolution as the politics of this strike would have been a disaster for them. So they played there hand. Turns out dems needed trains running more than another labor win. So they turned their backs on them and still have run the most pro labor admin since FDR.

    Politics is messy and tough calls get made every day. Regarding AOC, she is smart, and probably learned in her first week that this shit is hard and there are a million ways to lose by winning. Playing the game strategically and having long term goals is not ideological. It’s just good governance.


  • I wonder what it would like if they rolled out the OG circa 1998 page-rank algorithm on todays web. What would that algorithm find if we ran it now? Would it be garbage or would it undercut all the SEO and find good stuff?

    I have a hunch that the current search is bad, not because they cannot do better, but because it is profitable for it to be this bad. The most powerful SEO tool is probably your checkbook.



  • It seems likely that every human culture has had some concept of gender and norms related to it. Those roles can be permissive or strictly enforced. They can match the expectations our culture gives us, or they can be surprising to us. Beside average size, and childbearing, there is unlimited flexibility in how a culture might define the roles and how they might enforce them.

    While it is a tempting thought, it seems unlikely that we, here and now, have somehow managed to create the absolute worst human culture in the millions of years we have been at this. I agree that we should be watchful of that pitfall. Western self loathing, is in itself another way of assuming that we must be the main characters in the human story.



  • My friends from HS and I are all still very close and hang out a few times a year. For the most part we are all doing quite well career and financial wise. The exception is my good friend who studied to be a music teacher. He is brilliant and hard working, but has had to hustle twice as hard as I have for half as much.

    For 20 yrs he has been paying on his loans for undergrad and a masters degree. He has had to take jobs in every corner of the country to try and get established. I saw him a few weeks ago and he announced that thanks to Uncle Joe, he was now student debt free.

    My wife and I might grumble a little when we start writing checks again in a few months but I feel a lot better knowing that more support is going out to those who truly need it.



  • Doesn’t seem like the author really offers any possible reasons for the rights reaction to responsible urban planning, so perhaps I will offer some.

    Conservatism isn’t solely a political philosophy that a person decides to adopt. There are personally traits that feed into a person’s susceptibility to right wing thought. People who have low openness tend to be conservative. To paraphrase Buckley, their brains wired up to tell them to stand athwart history and yell STOP.

    These people all grew up in a car centric world, where dad commuted in to the city from the suburbs and mom drove them to the school everyday. That, to them is the comfortable, natural order of things. Their psychology begs them to preserve that order at all costs.

    Even though that model of planning is really new, only going back about 70 or 80 yrs, to them it is the natural way. Any alternative looks like change and progress, which they are psychologically predisposed to be suspicious of. All change to them, can be reduced to something that is being taken away from them. Something that disrespects their forefathers.

    Not all change is good and some conservative thought is useful when a society is planning its future. But, it’s really dangerous when we have made mistakes.

    In our modern political landscape, there are charlatans like Peterson and Jones who know how to pick at their audience’s psychology and pull dollars out of it. They cynically use the fears of their audience and package up any “new” ideas as existential threats.

    The key when discussing progress with conservatives is to opening them up to the idea that we are going back. In this case specifically, 15min cities sounds scary but “returning to the urban planning ideas that motivated our great grandparents” might sound great. Same change different reaction.

    Conservative cruelty cannot be accepted or forgiven but the psychology that drives it must be understood and accounted for when developing communication strategies.


  • Beehaw isn’t Reddit and anyone who came here only to recreate their Reddit experience might not find a home. There is this razor thin line where a community is big enough to seem vital and active, but not so big it becomes a shithole. Surfing that edge is probably very hard and I appreciate you making the effort to do it.

    I have a lemmy.world account also and it’s fine, but beehaw feels like a new kind of experiment with this sort of internet community. It is good and valuable. Thanks!




  • Thanks for posting this, it might just have turned me around on goose a bit.

    One of the pitfalls of improv rock is ending up with 3-4 people setting up a groove so the guitarist can noodle for 20min. Honestly what I’ve listened to of goose, I kind of thought that was the whole thing.

    But you can hear in this piece that they are all listening well and even though it is essentially a 20min guitar solo, he is constantly playing off ideas from the keys and bass.

    Any other recommendations for goose stuff that strays even further from the “long solo” formula?


  • Piracy is just a fancy word for price sensitivity.

    Photoshop would not have the market dominance that it enjoys if college kids where not pirating it for a decade.

    My son knows how to model in blender because a 12 yr old cannot afford maya. In a generation blender will own the space. He will never use maya.

    Napster created a generation of music fans that put way more money into the industry than previous generations ever did.

    A certain amount of loss should be tolerable, because it is often the pathway to future growth. A pirated copy isn’t a lost sale, it’s your investment in the next generation of consumers